![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/manmademonster_still.jpg?resize=500%2C400&ssl=1\" "\\"Still")
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[Image: still from <\/em>Man Made Monster<\/a> (1941).]<\/em><\/p>\n From whiskey river<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark, (Pablo Neruda, from “Walking Around” [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n …and<\/a>:<\/p>\n You’ve heard “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are some useful spinoffs: Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t believe everything you tell yourself. And most especially, don’t believe everything you feel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Rev. O. M. Bastet [source unknown<\/em>])<\/p>\n …and<\/a>:<\/p>\n As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Ayya Khema [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n 9773 Comanche Ave.<\/strong><\/p>\n In color photographs, my childhood house looks squeezed from the grooved tip of a pastry tube. The sky, too, is pastel. Children roller skate Six or seven years old, I stand on the front porch, I sit in the backyard (this picture’s black-and-white), Half a century later, I barely recognize it foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted (David Trinidad [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n The best day of my life — my rebirthday, so to speak — was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head<\/em>.<\/p>\n It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in thee world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.<\/p>\n What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking…<\/p>\n It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything — room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (D.E. Harding, from “On Having No Head” [source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n Asking for Directions<\/strong><\/p>\n We could have been mistaken for a married couple
\nvacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
\ndownward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
\nabsorbing and thinking, eating each day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nfresh as an uncut sheet cake—
\npale yellow buttercream, ribbons of white trim<\/p>\n
\nWhose dream was this confection?
\nThis suburb of identical, pillow-mint homes?<\/p>\n
\ndown the new sidewalk. Fathers stake young trees.
\nMothers plan baby showers and Tupperware parties.
\nThe Avon Lady treks door to door.<\/p>\n
\nhand on the decorative cast-iron trellis that frames it,
\nsquinting in California sunlight,
\nstriped short-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck.<\/p>\n
\nmy Flintstones playset spread out on the grass.
\nI arrange each plastic character, each dinosaur,
\neach palm tree and round “granite” house.<\/p>\n
\nwhen I search the address on Google Maps
\nand, via “Street view,” find myself face to face—<\/p>\n
\na drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits
\none of the windows. I can almost see what’s inside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nriding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago
\nthat last time we were together. I remember
\nlooking out the window and praising the beauty
\nof the ordinary: the in-between places, the world
\nwith its back turned to us, the small neglected
\nstations of our history. I slept across your
\nchest and stomach without asking permission
\nbecause they were the last hours. There was
\na smell to the sheepskin lining of your new
\nChinese vest that I didn’t recognize. I felt
\nit deliberately. I woke early and asked you
\nto come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,
\nand I said we only had one hour and you came.
\nWe didn’t say much after that. In the station,
\nyou took your things and handed me the vest,
\nthen left as we had planned. So you would have
\nten minutes to meet your family and leave.
\nI stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion
\nand the absoluteness of the end, so still I was
\naware of myself breathing. I put on the vest
\nand my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you
\nthrough the dirty window standing outside looking
\nup at me. We looked at each other without any
\nexpression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.
\nThat moment is what I will tell of as proof
\nthat you loved me permanently. After that I was
\na woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker
\nwhich direction to walk to find a taxi.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n