Weird radios, microphone checks,
Black helicopters sent by US Mail,
I run a late night pirate AM for myself.
I send them out blind addressed,
Never knowing if the sensors won't get it, if the censors might get it,
Fat black envelopes full of the arts and crafts blues.
When I think sometimes that the cliff,
to be climbed,
to buy the dimes to send replies to mine is not such a
hard time,
I remember that my own operation is slapped together with an odd eye and paw,
That nobody ever takes the time to make macaroni art
So these days when you get your mitts on some it's the same treasure
Cycling across and down the front of the fridge,
Drifting leaflike and dreamlike towards the garbage can.
But without the weight of successors, it's kept book-pressed.
To take joy in the making of the perfect rock to skip across the pond -
You don't expect them to climb back up off the bottom and roll back
into your hand for another go-around, to save you the effort
of the impossible search to which you consigned them?
The absurdist gets angry before they laugh, it's the weakness of that dao,
and its strength, as long as they know the art of
getting shit done even though one is mad.
When the baseline is dot after dot after dot after dot, the dash jumps up. It doesn't matter if it's weird, the carrier wave is only there for the signal to ride, a nice obvious one is a favor to desperate ears tuning in for the voice they hope is there. I just have to hope they twiddle their knobs right, to pick up the other end of my necessary assumptions.
We can choose the mythology of our inner lives. I fill my mind with a firehose of absolute trash, with no criticism of people who tune out and watch whatever episode of Will and Grace is on the boob tube by bulk allotment. It's pro wrestling, it's the puppet show, it's the primal moments acted out unmistakable and overt with that thin layer of mess that tells you it's okay to talk shit about it if you feel like you need to. The field models of the monomyth, waterproof if blurry and abridged for the sake of your cargo pocket and not your desire for complete understanding, but this one is quite handy and suits my purposes perfectly.
I am Reincarnated Soldier who Rejects the Siege Engineer Life! My obligatory mascot animal died. In this bottom bin isekai, I get trucked and wake up in the body of a soldier in another world whose spirit died, leaving an empty vessel. I decide to wander the countryside and live a quiet life, but just after I'd picked out a place to settle, a party of adventurers showed me an amulet with a secret symbol from my own previous life.
I followed their party, and slew a dragon for them, and returned to my slow life enjoying peasant labor.
Filler material commences. The author painstakingly drags us through seasons of mundane life and manual labor. Just as a huge milestone approaches, the party reappears, appealing with the old passwords and promising me adventure and riches beyond anything I had ever seen. "You say never again," they say, "But let it be ever again."
The season ends on a cliffhanger. Will I go, or will I stay?
I want a nice little scale model of an Asian box truck, one of the guys just big enough to maybe take a pallet or two and squeak down a crowded street, and put it together with love and care and paint it carefully with an outrageous theme, and put it on the family shrine.
I burn incense for the homies, but if some gets on Truck-kun by accident, maybe he'll come by and whisk me away into a new life, where the resolve hardened in me by decades can be carried from the beginning. Take me away, Truck-kun, and let the next season be the one where I turn down the riches and insist on my hole in the woods.
The hard walls and roof go up in the spring. Terraforming will be what the piggybank can afford, but the 2025 goal is habitable hard structure and the wood to keep it the winter.