WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

 Courtesy of MLusk of Weather Records

The Opposite of Neurotic Sublimation : Ok Oh and Nondisambiguated Casuistry

He wakes, consciousness flooding like a beaten egg filling the cracks between spinach.  But it isn't consciousness really.  He was just conscious in his dream.  But that consciousness, that newly old consciousness is being covered up by this new goop.  He tries hard to hold on to the old.  He wants to remember what it felt like to be there, to remember it if only for the marginality of a trivial anecdote, the precise proceedings. Oh what a story this will be, he thinks.  He is not lucky.  His son has conveniently wandered into his room and started to crawl into bed with him. The fine-tuned process of retracing the steps disrupted and the egg is starting to bake, congealing into a gooey sediment.  This troubles him.  He doesn't have a deep store of anecdotes. For instance, he knows nearly no anecdotes about humorously troubling studies in probability and he knows very well that retelling an intelligently amusing anecdote makes the reteller seem intelligently amusing.  Retelling a dream is very different, but there is a mystery there everyone loves to indulge.  And mysterious is almost as good as intelligent.  Better sometimes.

He steps on the train.  He pulls a slender book out of his wife's bag.  He is surrounded by what he would describe as attractive women.  He reads his book, thinks of something, pulls out his notebook and jots down the something in nearly illegible script.  The train is bouncy, the illegible script is to be expected.  He thinks to himself that waking life is quite different from dreaming life, but is in fact quite similar to the process between waking up dreaming.  It seems to him, on that train, as he putters along during his day, a million things happen to him that he instantly forgets.  An overheard conversation, a smell, a look of reproach.  These things subject, in full waking breath, to that same foggy albumen of the previous morning.

He looks down.  He cannot tell whether it is the name of the book or simply the chapter, but one of the pretty girls reads a page with a discreet header The American Way of Idiocy.