potatoes and poetry

What he thought was his fairy godmother sent to grant him splendid wishes and great fortune turned out to be just a potato of the ordinary variety with very little wish granting authority. Still, he got a good haircut out of the whole deal.  The haircut turned out to make his friends jealous who were then mean to him causing him to stay home alone a lot. Staying home alone a lot got him really depressed and he found himself writing very bad and gloomy poetry but he thought it was rather good poetry.  So did many pretentious and self-absorbed college kids who mistook themselves as experienced and enlightened because of the big words they were learning and the self-referential conversations they had in classrooms and among themselves.  They used some of those big words to describe his poetry in attempts to compliment him but when they said things like “vacuous” and “mellifluous” he didn’t know what they were talking about and he didn’t realize that the college kids didn’t either so he just nodded and said thanks.  The college kids’ parents were very impressed with his polite demeanor and the fact that he seemed to know what their kids were talking about so they encouraged their kids to spend more time with him.  The more time he spent with them, the more pressure he felt to write poetry and he continued to produce more and more bad poetry.  The continual pressure from the college kids who were becoming increasingly annoying eventually got to him and he began to miss his old friends and he began to write nostalgic poetry that the college kids did not find cool at all and so they stopped being friends with him. He began to stay home and be alone a lot again but since he was so tired of the college kids, being home alone was comforting and he didn’t get depressed at all.  It gave him time to think and he thought back to that potato and how disappointed he was that it wasn’t his fairy godmother but then he thought some more and was quite amazed by the potato because as he carefully reviewed his experience, he realized it was actually quite an amazing potato.  

mind fur

The old woman looked at the little boy and said in a knowing tone, “the mind is a mysterious badger” and disappeared in a puff of smoke as wrinkly as the old woman.  The little boy had no idea what she was talking about but thought about her words long after.  He concluded that she might have been meaning to draw similarities between the mind’s thirst for knowledge and the badger’s omnivorous appetite and willingness to burrow through anything, even holes in the ground, in order to get a morsel of food.  He thought that his mind was also willing to burrow through anything to get answers to questions or make new discoveries.  He thought about a badger’s fur and wondered if there was a mind fur similar to badger fur and concluded that there was but was unsure of what mind fur might actually be.  He only knew it existed and this ability to know something without proof, he further concluded, must be the mystery the old woman referred to.  The little boy was amazed at this aspect of the nature of reality and badgers and set off on a journey to discover actual evidence of mind fur and to study it and learn its purpose.  His journey took him throughout the world as he thoroughly searched and searched for mind fur.  One day, exhausted from the intensity of his inquisition, he laid down in the grass and ran his fingers through the blades feeling their texture and tickle against his skin and touching the tips of the blades to feel their gentle prick.  He began to feel a familiar sensation coursing through his fingers into hands and through his arms.  He realized it was the feeling of thoughts forming and traveling and informing his body of the new information they carried.  He was astonished that his hand would generate thoughts when he knew that thoughts were the providence of the mind, not the hand or limbs.  He looked closely at his hand as it laid there in the grass and realized that thought stimulators were crawling up the blades of grass and into his fingers causing his hand to generate the thoughts that were now traveling through the entirety of his body.  In the instant he saw this, he knew that he had found the mind fur he had been seeking and he was astonished that it was simply the grass that grew on the earth and that the grass was not just the grass everyone thought it was but rather it was so much more.  It occurred to him that where there was mind fur there must be a mind and he realized that just below the grass he way laying on, there was a mind and that the mind was in all actuality the size of the earth and that the earth was not just a gigantic planet but that it was in fact a gigantic mind as well.  As the thought stimulators continued to crawl through his fingers and generate thoughts, he savored everything that he was thinking of and all the things he was learning and all the additional questions that began to stack up in his mind, where ever that was. 

two nickels

I remember when a nickel meant something. My father used to walk to work and home again just to save a nickel each way. Ten cents a day. I imagine the walk home was longer than on the way in since his work was the hard labor type of work. My mom would tell him to take the bus instead of walking the half hour there and then another half hour home, sometimes in the rain. He would often just say it was worth it to save the money even if it was only a little.  Sundays back then were exciting to me, although, I’m ashamed to admit it wasn’t because it was my dad’s only day off and it wasn’t because of the time he would spend with me. It was because just about every Sunday I got have a root beer. My dad would take me on his regular Sunday trip to the same place where he would buy one beer for himself and a root beer for me. I always sat by him as we drank our drinks but we didn’t talk much. He was quiet and so was I as I didn’t have much experience talking with grown-ups on my own. I never thought much of the sixty cents he would leave to pay for our drinks until years after our ritual had run its course and unceremoniously ended. I really don’t know if my dad needed to save those two nickels a day just so we could have our Sunday drinks but I do know things were scarce. Food was rationed, clothes were mended and luxuries were nonexistent except for one root beer and one beer each week.  Maybe when my dad told my mom it was worth it, maybe he wasn’t referring to money or even the drinks.  And now, despite my heartache for all the things I never said to him as we sat there side by side so many Sundays, I pour over as many details as I can from those moments together and hope it really was worth it for him.  

little creatures

The creatures were never meant to exist but that didn’t matter once he saw them breathe life.  He was just trying to grow stuff and wondered what would happen if he threw a little bit of this and a little bit of that in. Before he went to bed he threw in three red lentils and never thought anything of it again until he got home from work the next day. The lentils seemed to have grown little leg like appendages and were crawling around. He pulled them out and placed them on the table for closer observation. He looked closely and had it not been for what seemed like their intention to avoid his probing fingers, he would never had suspected anything. He looked closer and could see they had small mouths that would gulp for air as they leaned back on what he assumed were their hind leg. Then he realized that maybe they weren’t gulping for air but were hungry for food. The only thing he could think of were bread crumbs. He pulled some out of an old bag and crumbled one into little bits near by the red lentil creatures. They didn’t seem to understand that the crumbs were an offering of food so he started to nudge one over in the direction of the crumbs but he nudged a little too firmly and partially squished the red lentil creature causing about a third or more of its innards to squish over the table top and on his finger. Given that the red lentil creature was the size of a red lentil, a third of innards weren’t much but he could see that the innards consisted of little organs and a biological tissue like substance. It surprised him because he assumed its innards would have simply been lentil mush but the presence of small organs and biological tissue suggested something much more alive than he originally imagined. He looked at the partially smooshed red lentil creature and saw that it seemed to be writhing in pain from having been partially smooshed. His heart immediately sank and he instinctually thought he should put it out of its misery. Without thinking further, he fully smooshed the creature out of existence.  All that was left was a smear of those small organs and more biological tissues. The other two creatures seemed to notice what happened and moved over towards the smear that had been their friend. They seemed to look at the smear and then look up him. Other than their primitive mouths, they didn’t have any facial features but still he could recognize the look of sadness and disappointment on whatever it was they had instead of faces. Their gaze indicted him of his crime. He didn’t mean to do it but nonetheless it happened and he couldn’t rescue his heart from murky pond of guilt it had sunk in even if the night before these creatures had been nothing more that red lentils. 

the pen is mightier than the terrorist