Amorphous as the passage of all things by then was, amorphousness too
pulled its own weight in the task of bolstering the structure-starved background
and foreground and middle distance that persisted in their intersections
with the matrices of moment and short day and long night. At last, I thought
to myself: a morphology as odorless as the natural gas and holy ghost
that burn through tradition faster than you can say Sixth Extinction without
failure of pronunciation. In medias pandemic I dreamt of an oval
of shade under a kratom tree. Conditions that were then present prevented
me from getting there from where I was but as always I stuck it to those conditions
with the superweapons known to the initiated as vows and cycles that cascade
into the various waste treatment centers underlying reality. I whistled and clapped
my trite little march all the way to the end of the questionnaire designed to mine
my sense of how things were starting to shake out. It was June. It was December.
And from both angles I could see the snowy hair of a wizard falling from
a felted cap, the iron-rich bloodfalls gushing from the glaciers of Dimension X
into a deadly combination of plain sight and perfect camouflage. Everywhere
fresh framework for the remainder of agonies and growths sprung up
like gentian and brainstem orchids. Cesium and pathogens glittered in the sunlight
that spent its time between hurricanes giving rise to its very own internet of
resentments. Meanwhile from my wounds quarter teaspoons of blood had flowed
like stupid little vignettes. Old souls mated in fragments of protected wilderness.
Synergy aspired to a state of maximum synergization. Spicy pelican wings
were added to the lunch menu. A tetrahedron of hot air fit perfectly into the A-frame
lake house I couldn’t occupy by any stretch of the imagination and the saliva vault’s
combination lock resisted my educated guesses so I passed the time finishing
the announcement I promised myself I would make the old fashioned way.
Five hundred words of boilerplate caveata contextualizing my stalemates later
I was staring into space and it was at this point that I decided to just go for it
and become completely attached to reality, a human forever chemical
bioaccumulating in the fabric of the world’s tiresome interconsultation dynamic
between people and their precious information. What hadn’t changed was that I was 
life at home in fat. Fat was my Ararat and the sensations of déjà vu that I had 
been fabricating all along and mixing in with the potshards and the beads were 
helping to paint a picture of where I still was. Most afternoons played out that way 
for me. The ones that didn’t, well, their orthopraxy of disengagement was a kind                                  
of ASMR that made my pet peeves tingle pleasurably. Evenings I scrubbed my effing 
soul of its exif and lifted up rocks in search of clues and as I lay scrolling drops 
of cortisol pooled like aquavit into a long and erudite introduction at the bottom 
of the crater that the calendar in those days became when the sun went down. 
I wasn’t a young person with a vision. I wasn’t an older person with a vision
either but what I might have learned while gazing sidelong at the planet’s dickprint
was that everything that happens results in everything that comes after that 
and so the secret of protointerrelatedness came to be revealed. I saw that someday 
I would be up there wearing the vanishing point better, ahead of the curve’s most 
radical visions: someday when the age of gamification and searchability was over 
and existence’s beguiling legislation had finally culminated in a better proof 
of concept than this lousy one. Yes if things were different things would be different 
but let us indulge for more than the customary moment in speculation beyond 
that tautology I said to the patterns lined up in front of me on the table like cow tools. 
I knew how to use them or at least it was one of those moments when I thought 
I did but hadn’t begun the work yet, hadn’t set the collapse of that specific 
Jacob’s Ladder into motion yet, and was very busy cutting my endeavors the slack 
they needed to play a small part in leaving their arguments with me better off 
than we found them. It was April and October then and in a way I could appreciate 
their shared spectacle of order that strived to obscure chaos pitifully. 
There were no leaves on the trees so in that absence of sugar, dopamine and salt 
constituted the cosmic background radiation fizzing senselessly in my head 
like a dream about infographics. I planned a trip to the caves near Lake Tahoe 
that I hoped would introduce healthy glitches into the paradigm which had by 
that point fouled into contrition and oversharing. But of course there wasn’t a plane 
to board, and stalking the radar stains of the hurricane season clicked satisfyingly 
into place as another in a series of sensible alternatives. I made a pentagram 
out of glowsticks on the patio. I made a model saltbox home out of glowsticks 
on the roof. I discovered how the universe formed the septum ring that hangs now 
over your trumpet’s mouthpiece, and I wondered about those gathering places 
on your face where titanium has come to rest mid-migration on its way to where 
exactly? Where would it go next? I endeavored to make of this at least partial 
sense, because partial sense is made of, what, carbon lattice? The elemental timeline 
sample I had been saving until I stepped on it was embedded in the heel of my foot 
like a panic button. Certainly I thought there must be a sequence of events 
that excludes no event. No missile metaphor is complete without a platform 
and no panic button functions without power so after a long walk on the pitchblende 
beach of hypochondria I underwent redefinition, read the Flemish mystics, 
and made of mistakes and embarrassments doubts and watched their permutations 
disappear over the water as day became, the way it always does, night. Frost formed. 
There will come a time when this thread has exhausted famous oddities, I warned 
myself for the millionth time, when cosmic horror reduced to a culmination beyond 
heat death will be the last riff running through the last river valley. Before that though 
there are hooks from pop songs to pluck on the Golden Lyre of Ur to remind ourselves 
that we too sound timeless when redshifted, we too are tropical systems that tie dye 
the high Arctic with new reflective mush. Are we though? But before that I have 
to follow the wide fjords to their terminuses and the wide nostrils to their sinuses
and the polished policies to their focus groups and the happy trails to their, well, 
to their trailheads, silly. But before that I’m going to give night terror therapy another 
shot because my antipodes have fallen out of touch with the taste buds that line 
my skeleton again. I take a few little baby hits of input when I get up and then turn on 
the strobe light I got special for when my morning self-hypnosis peaks as projected 
and in the distance of the day, and as a reminder that’s around 9 PM, I can see dawn 
on the horizon false, an illusion, zodiacal light they appropriately call it, and all is actually 
star-free darkness and night, but I can see by it. See by it and more importantly use it 
to dream in epilogues whenever I want and to be in a waking fugue state 
of preproduction whenever I want. Or is it postproduction? Which one is easier again? 
The age-old conundrum: time-ordered product versus time-honored tradition. 
In February the science communicators, those old salts, were on TV speaking eloquently 
about how the tropical storm’s rhetorical flourishes will go on ignoring our policy 
of diplomatic overture first, computer simulation second and only as a last resort. 
Their words felt like the last resort on the last island still calling itself, as if it 
meant something, equatorial. Their faces floated in front of volcanoes erupting on 
other planets, in front of giant clouds even stranger than those I’ve taken pictures of 
with my phone, but I could see through all that movie magic to the gray box in which 
they were being filmed and I listened to their soft-spoken and rational portents 
as if they were DMT entities so I could walk away from the experience holding 
the cremains of truth in my mittens like a Palm d’Or. And in fact the lesson there 
was to not tire of finding new pupils in everywhere I looked. Everywhere I looked: 
aqua vitae of input, ichor of input, sea elephant milk of input, Madeira wine of input, 
cloud grease of input, ambrosia of input, codeine suppository of input. I’m telling
you in those days input was crashing through the rose window like a fresh brick, it was
under my feet and over my head and all around me like quaking aspen, and it 
was posing the classic thought experiment with a new twist. If you put a cat 
in a box with some poison: I hate this story already. But at any rate life went on
and we continued to break the wishbones and conceal the results from our guests,
forcing them to guess not only what my wish was but also yours, just in case.
Kudzu grew over the months I haven’t mentioned yet and hid them from view, over 
the monoliths that appeared and disappeared in various Bermuda Parallelograms
around the world and hid these shifts in existence from view. Kudzu grew over 
the pillars of the Kosciuszko Bridge and the Tower of Jericho and hid them from view.
Kudzu grew over the Church of the Subgenius and I forgot about it. Kudzu grew
over the potential to add the word vatic to any construction and hid that potential
from view. Thought spirals evolved into thought donuts which evolved into thought
doughlotuses. I tried to summon up every memory I’ve ever had ever and I watched
them bubble up out of the cadaverous permafrost like episodes of Murder, She Wrote
that you can turn off before the end and sleep well after, the mind preoccupied
with other more pressing matters. Red Rocks, Arcosanti, Skinwalker Ranch. Dryad blood
amber in which out-of-place artifacts were trapped. A Ryan McGinley photograph
from the 80’s. The proving ground and lyceum hall that any of my selections would
ultimately have become, no matter how remote or obscure. Clearly I was thinking
about getting away from it all before having to run the universe’s looming
background check, which admittedly I was nervous about. I knew it was nervous too
that I would have no choice but to reject it, to find it without candidacy, to find
its atrocities legible in the spectroscopy. I knew the universe was sweating black
holes every second because it knew what it had done. And I knew it would
come anyway, that it would smile at me, that it would tell me its commute from
creation was a breeze. And you know what? Maybe in the spirit of so many who
have come before me I’ll give it a chance after all. But first: self-trepanation therapy.
When the first tiny hole is made in my skull the first thing to come out is the voiceover
from Le Jetee. You see always I am on the hunt for epigraphs that I can lower into place
and release, and always on the run from montages that in their circumspection 
remind me of character flaws that rhyme with hiatus, of all the things we do instead 
and all the places we end up instead. Second, clotted hearsay.  That it was said 
that one rare gem was made of petrified lynx urine. That it was said that hypergliders 
circled the Earth looking for intelligence. That it was said that the Priroda Module 
from the Mir space station had crash-landed in quicksand. The first session changes 
everything. Out came six novels: Rendezvous With What, Invasion of the What, 
Attack of the What, Voyage to What, It Came From What, and The Stars Are What. 
I was on the famous command decks again, I was explaining that we came in peace, 
I was turning away politely when you peed a little bit in the control room sink. 
I was explaining the way science fiction loves a made-up word – as if any word wasn’t. 
A good one is miab, message in a bottle, a kind of interstellar shipping container. 
Even a time capsule is a kind of marketplace. The way science fiction loves a made-up 
city – as if these cities haven’t suffered their fair share of thought experiments. 
Atlantis, New Malibu, San Junipero, The Sprawl, The Line, Pleasantville, Dictionopolis.
The estrangements that had patterned the previous five lifetimes were being retold 
in a way that better reflected the kind of noise cancellation I believed my newfound 
woolgathering was entitled to. Now they could come live in my phalanstery if they 
promised to never arrive but paid their part of the overhead that would ensure 
that the website, at least, stayed up as evidence of the concept. A single grass root 
against the sun setting over Domino Park represented the linden tree of the future 
waking up in a good mood. All that over-abreaction and delayed abreaction was over 
and I could take the targeted ads for Occam’s Manscaper and larpy ecotourism trips 
with a grain of salt from deep in the Earth where microplastics fear to tread. 
I was free to face with courage the gangplank of the ark of the lectern, the ark 
of the music stand, the ark of the aux cord, the ark of the breakout room, the ark 
of the reckoning, the arks of the vault and the crypt and the false book, the ark 
of the false alarm, the ark of the tell tale heart, the ark of the chambers of the heart, 
the ark of the sacred coffee shop vestibule, the ark of the divine cavity, the ark 
of the torque-measuring wind tunnel, the ark of the lonely secret bathroom, the ark 
of the hollows, the arks of the nook and the alcove and the niche and the cranny, the ark 
of the geodesic dome, the ark of the kelp pneumatocyst, the ark of the abandoned 
group chat. I bleached my hair and taught my students about foreshadowing. 
Can the symbolic be attained, I wondered, by a labor of aggregation alone? I found 
fragments of dry ice on the sidewalk, was on the plains of Mars for a moment, 
brought them home and made them scream with kitchen utensils, my dry ice music 
noise project. From the look on my face when I was taking a selfie I could see 
the many chapters of the year mixed in with my features and they looked like clusters 
of bunkers where time had seen fit to site a little Vivos xPoint right there where 
people looked when I was talking. When I saw the back of my hand I didn’t know 
what I was looking at, so clean had been the break in continuity. 
When I was memorizing the knots in the wood paneling in the bathroom 
on New Year’s Eve, to which I had spirited myself to sneak-eat some comments 
that had gathered under the stairs like panko, I withdrew the spoon from my inside 
pocket and the only thing separating it from my gushing blood was, as usual, 
the moment of hesitation that always ushers me into the glories that are resolutions 
honored. But they never are, are they? I mean really honored? Meanwhile January,
the month named after Janus, dragged its two faces and two asses along 
at a cetacean-level rate of peristalsis, and the little racing rabbit hearts inside every 
single one of its so-called days beat like Alcubierre Drives revving up, ready 
to bury the notion of spacetime once and for all under the juniper tree 
with the plastic crushed-in T-Rex head I found in a free box on Devoe Street. 
Of course there were times when I managed to come up for oxygen and argon 
and whatever the hell else because luckily there is not only one way that things are. 
Occasionally the prolapsed Crusoeism I imagined was distinct from the other 
kind that I read about heralded brief personal renaissances during which 
I rediscovered things like logic and exposition. You know, substances that
don’t supply the body with actual oblivion but provide it with oblivion support,
fossil frosting on the petrified forest’s understory of birthday cakes. I was in denial 
about how many weeks had in their facts gone by, about how my free trial 
was about to expire, about how true the untitled document’s harp rings compared 
to those I’ve furnished with designations, about how no offer no matter how ignorable 
ever lasts very long. And then I wasn’t. By April I meant May and by May 
my recurring nightmare about a Canadarm that reached out to me menacingly 
from space had given up on recurrence and moved on to be being something I’d have 
to go back into my journal to remember and that’s great. Hurricanes
spawning all over The Weather Channel and the asteroid Apophis hurtling 
toward my bald spot were members of a Dionysian cult of Trauma reveling nightly 
in the glades of my—I’m just going to say it—of my mind, okay? It had become 
possible to leave the house inside when I left, the high rise when I left, the McMansion 
when I left. I let logic slip away like in a dream reduced to an off-season ferry service 
between neurons, and even though my body continued to come ropes of adrenaline 
into my bloodstream during night terrors, I had discontinued utilizing induced defecation 
syncope as a means of pursuing the pleroma I could still sense was out there 
with my name on it. But then every month rolled around in the dirt from which 
I couldn’t avert my eyes. “Regret is the time-traveler’s energy bar,” writes James 
Gleik, but don’t worry, I’m sure he was only kidding because everybody knows that 
regret is the time-traveler’s act of self-care. Where I ended up after my own travels 
was the starting point that led back to a time when it could be said I was newly 
in possession of nothing, but eager to hatch my pathologies and get the ball rolling 
toward all the places in which I would temporarily feel the emotional version 
of involvement. The idea of general direction is meaningless in a predetermined 
universe which makes the idea of direct route sort of complicated. “The temperature 
drops to rise to snowability,” writes James Schuyler in The Crystal Lithium 
as if warmth and cold were exotic dimensions like the tenth and eleventh, 
influencing the dimensions we definitely know are here…I believe the word 
is enigmatically. Undisentanglably? What is my crystal is a question I’ve asked 
myself before, but until now I’ve been withholding the whirl I owe every it. 
For example, what is the crystal yttrium besides silvery, a transition metal, 
a rare earth, an atom with thirty-nine protons that appears in many living things 
without serving any apparent biological purpose? Besides something I can
get behind? A constituent of YInMn Blue, a science paint cousin to Vantablack? 
An ingredient in synthetic garnets and superconductors, which sort of rhyme? 
What is the crustal yttrium versus the bodilyyttrium? I wonder if it’s possible 
to ensure that this distinction has a haptics commensurate with what it is okay to know 
about ourselves. Probably not. “Find in your practice an immersive rite,” write the editors 
of Fundamentals of Psychokinetic Teledildonics, Fourth Edition, which stopped me 
from thinking so much about what wasn’t up there amongst the stars as the saying goes, 
but which didn’t stop me from thinking about what what was up there was up to, above 
the dirt and the lithium and the yttrium and the energy bars and the tropical storms
and the panko and the arks and the infographics and the input and especially the
cow tools. I had something new: an idea. Two, actually. The first was that from
then on whenever I was unsure of what to lead with, I’d lead with an aleph.
All that idea needed was for someone to invent an aleph reader, and I knew it
wouldn’t be me. Second: up in the night sky of wherever would make this utterance
unmistakably grave in its undertaking the little white flags of the Milky Way
almost persuade me that the universe is filled with patterns. Still I wear this
deserted and notificationless coast like a loincloth around my Journey to the Center
of the Store and time’s chronic plagiarism of the periodizations it wishes
it could be will never be exposed for what it really is when it actually matters
but much later when it’s too late and we’re all dead and buried hearts at ease in better
places whose physics, differing so much from these Earthly ones, could never 
give rise to such foibles much less hold them together long enough to evolve drama,
in-house polemics, and the other arts commensal to foibles. I didn’t look up
but I imagined what it would be like to look up someday at that great rim of minutiae,
at the impenetrable metafiction at the heart of fatigue. Hadn’t I spent a year talking
about different scenarios? All kinds of scenarios? Each of the universe’s Ten Scenarios? 
I wanted points. I wanted rewards. I wanted pentacles and swords. I wanted a future
that had waste management centaurs stewarding everyone’s Hidden Valley Ranch, 
a past that had seen hindsight bias and foresight bias abolished in the spirit of earlier 
and more complicated times when mammoth tartare was fresh and not frozen 
like it is now. I wanted a pilgrimage to the land where dirt is browner and to sport 
the tiara of creation, the mantle of creation, the bob of creation, the fade of creation, 
the bangs of creation, the skullet of creation, the pattern baldness of creation, 
the straw of creation, the flower of creation, the feather of creation. 
I wanted a pilgrimage to the land where every word waits its turn to be made 
into an Akira-like monstrosity by something that churns an awful lot like capital 
before hasing and beening the days still inexplicably remaining at the bottom 
of its retirement crater so I could either rehabilitate that land or destroy it. Every crater 
has its rim around a rosy and ring world concept art around a world already
ruined. Every crater has dust that settles like white people. Every crater has its 
deepest point and geometry to thank for that. What if, before I ever managed 
to embark on such a journey, they found my skeleton draped over the deckchair 
like an infinity scarf sprawling like pothos along a floating shelf or with the hands 
still gripping the rowing machine handlebars as if even in my final moments 
I was picturing water and traveling backwards