beatitude with attitude

 

Those dreams where you discover you can fly.

Maybe they are memory traces of your first steps, after many falls, propelling you through space, over land, just like Them, the people who took care of you.

They carried you and now you can carry your self, you are weightless and free, and even better you are the center of Their attention and They are cheering and happy because you no longer need Them.

I’m kidding. Soon you are demanding to be carried or demanding to be put down.

First steps in learning to speak. 

Names for Them, like Mama and Dada, Betty my sister, and Poo Poo Head — a stuffed cloth dog with a plastic face and nipple nose.

 

I sing “Love me tender, love me true, tweet tweet” to the parakeet as I poke at him with a pencil.

Don’t poke Perky! They shout.

I’m LOVING Perky!

Do you see Sputnik? They ask.

Yes!

What does it look like?

It looks like this, I say, blinking my eyes.

They teach me how to draw a face. It’s easy. A circle and two dots and a curved line and a U for the nose. Two more dots for nostrils. There is a face.

I am drawing a face as I have for countless times and maybe I’m getting bored as I’m drawing the U turn and I make a sudden detour and I’m free. This line can go any where, it can turn any way and it goes for a stroll of twists and turns around the page because I am absolutely free within the borders of the page. It’s great to be an artist because you are absolutely free.

Those dreams where you discover you can fly and then you don’t know where to go and you wake up.

The brain is searching for a mind.

The brain in the skull above my shoulders is like a bowl of meat on a table, my mind is thinking 

— but a bowl of ground beef doesn’t have such thoughts, says my brain. 

Yes, the meat in the bowl is full of life,

but I refuse to liken that bacterial life to my own living thought as it searches for itself in a page of a notebook, in the unique infinite seminal point of the Bic, or in an electronic document. 

A virus is not alive They say, as a new one

colonizes the planet. They labor to domesticate it, teaching it to adapt to us as we adapt to it, both of us evolving in this labor. The labor of evolution. The virus is teaching us. It brings information. It doesn’t want to kill us. It doesn’t want our extinction. It needs us and wants to use our bodies, to reproduce, mutate, until it becomes, if not a member of the family, a frequent visitor. 

The virus wanted to be our neighbor. It wanted to be everybody’s neighbor.

The virus is not sentient, they say. The virus doesn’t want anything. 

The human breath travels around the world, whirlwind of breath overturning our lives. The virus moved into the global neighborhood and started making demands. Some people say everyone is going to get it eventually. I haven’t had it yet. I’m thrice jabbed, so it probably won’t kill me. 

I’m OK where I am. I am fortunate I’m an artist and absolutely free —within certain borders. I’m OK right now and for that I’m grateful, but it’s gratitude with an attitude.

Those dreams when I can fly. Where do I want to go today?