XYZ

 

Alphabetization is a system of random organization.

Things that have nothing to do with each other are placed next to each other because of the spelling of their names. That is why I don’t alphabetize my books at home. Or if I do, they don’t stay that way when I read them again, because reading disturbs the order of things.

Alphabetization is helpful for filing documents, I guess, and filing documents is helpful when you need one of those documents. Some documents make it to the file folders and others go in a box with other documents and paper items that might have no use at all, and some documents don’t make it to the box and are on the floor in the pile of books and bank statements and letters and birthday cards and flyers from people running for Congress.

In my live/work bird’s nest, surrounded by paper and ink and paint and language and numbers and other materials, I fashion a meaning system in which to exist. Words and numbers are the stuff of our lives, stuff we own in common, because language is community property, but language is a cocoon, and thought is just a stage in our metamorphosis, numbering our days.

Some late afternoons I am visited by dread. I’m crashing, burned out, a zombie in a fog. I am afraid I wasted the day, and that I waste every day, and every week and year. I think about what I did this day, what I wrote or painted, who I talked to, what I read or watched. Did I invest the time wisely? Was I productive? Am I valid? Or am I wasting time?

I have existed for 67 years. Happy birthday, to me.

Excuse me, can you validate my existence?

Do you have your ticket?

My ticket?

Yes, you were supposed to get a ticket from the meaning machine when you arrived.

Hey, man. You don’t need THEM to validate your existence. You don’t need some machine to spit out a ticket for some cashier to validate when you check out. You’ve already paid everything you have. What is left to be valid? Is this system of validation itself valid? Who built the meaning machine that inhabits your soul? The idol that THEY built and named a god is a validation machine, man, and you don’t need it because you’re already valid simply because you exist and because you are the image of being.

But you try to validate your self to your self and it’s impossible because you forgot what the principals of validation are, what the rules are, and where the machine is that dispenses the ticket you yourself will punch, if you have time, before you check out.

Or you thought you were OK because you knew where the machine is and you got your ticket when you were supposed to get your ticket and even got it validated by someone authorized to do so and you confidently present it at the toll booth and the toll collector says,

I’m sorry. This ticket is void.

Your prophets are wrong, fundamentally wrong, their stories are wrong because they keep forgetting the central vision that lights the way, and ignoring

 

— but I’m interrupted by the phone before I finish constructing that thought.

This morning I watched two seagulls fly from the river over South 3rd Street, side by side, together toward the sunrise.

Life is worth it. The difficulty is that some lose it before they die, and can’t find it, and meanwhile, life goes on anyway. 

And so the psychonaut returns to our world bearing gifts of possibilities and imperatives, upending perspectives, happy to come down the holy mountain to just exist among the flat-landers again, but with the clear perception of one who has seen the whole Earth alive and swimming in the ocean of space.