Doing Time on Planet Earth (or, I know no Godot, only the waiting)

When you kick back and listen to all the sounds around you, you get the sense it's all just a cacophony of static. The sirens blaring by. The neighborhood dogs responding. The background of crickets and rustling leaves. Your stomach gurgling. Your heartbeat drumming softly on the inside of your eardrums. Tires on asphalt. The tiny whir of insect wings. Skin respiring. Toenails growing. The crackle of cigarette paper. A slight creaking in your right elbow. And all those thoughts, one after the other and in bunches, your mind a kaleidoscope of random, mostly unconnected clips that you nevertheless try to spin into a workable haversack in which to tote your sense of self around. But, wait a minute! Who is it doing the spinning, the hearing, the dreaming? Nobody, really. Watch the coffee grounds circling the drain. Did you glimpse a face there, just for a moment? Or a flash of scenery that took you back to an earlier time?

As far as I can tell, there are no selves. No you. No me. No he, nor she. Just stuff, whirling around and interacting according to very basic impulses, drawing rather wiggly pictures on what amounts to a quite sizable Etch-A-Sketch screen. All random within the confines of its limited nature, but reflecting upon itself in such a way as to confuse partially memorized patterns with a belief in order. In place. In time. However, while there is no self per se, there IS a sense of self, a complex of feedback loops feigning isolation in the midst of flux. This is what's generally referred to as 'consciousness', a hall of synaptic mirrors with the peculiar ability to adapt to its own generated illusions. And so, in this way, chimera becomes trapped within walls of pseudo-solidity, a nexus of reflection caught in the Narcissistic delusion of false light, praying for simultaneous change and endurance under a sky where the stars are going out one by one, shitting its pants over the encroaching darkness and coping the only way it knows how. By imagination, and replication. Think Hilbert's Hotel, only replace 'Hotel' with 'Prison Block' and you'll get the picture. On the other hand, my gratuitous/necessary use of pronouns, including all the implied ones, probably negates a lot of what I have to say here. Ah, language.

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