Work sent me to San Diego. I did a lot of puking, hating my skin and presenting research skills half outside my body. My last day there I finally felt limber and walked around the city, eating acai bowls and telling the map lady in my fancy phone, “Library.”

WALK PAST AVIAN SURVEILLANCE.

WIDEN EYES AT POST OFFICE.

ROUND THE CORNER TO GREATNESS.

BYPASS LIFT.

SLIDE LEFT TO STAIRWELL.

SWOON RIGHT.

FLOAT FORWARD.

SWOON LEFT.

LEARN.

THRILL.

FAINT.

Rob liked his Lucha Libre mask.

Joe was skeptical of his gift,

but pleasantly surprised!

Mom scandalized yuletide by gifting Greg a reindeer part.

But she made up for it with the punching nun:

Have some (ma)lingering names yet on your holiday list? Why, there’s a sale going on! In our special Holiday Pack, get a copy of You Are Not Dead and a set of magnetic Fridge Words for a mere $15, shipping included!

Don’t want to invest that much in your tolerated one? Forget the candy canes and switches—what could be more perfect to stuff a stocking than Fridge Words? Buy buy buy!

Ghost bike at 6th and Highland, Austin, TX.

Part dare, part dream camping in Texas on Halloween? aw what the hell, yes please. Money where my mouth is. Mouth where my mind won’t leave.

I see things in things, not deliberately, faces in rocks and animals in boulders, conversation observation recognition bias till I think I’m going bonkers and the universe is a tease. Laughing at and with me. Serendipity, synchronicity, I don’t seek patterns, they find me, and I still contend I don’t believe in anything, or maybe just that things—things in things—they don’t happen for a reason.

But I still like them. They’re still amazing.

We see lizards and coots and vultures, a heron and a snake and a tower of turtles. Long shadows leaping off our tanning shoulders, we talk to dead trees as we trace their bodies and don’t get me started on stars. Arthur has the app that does the stars for you, cartoon constellations and pithy descriptions as we hold his phone against the night.

We don’t use it for long. In the olden days, the things in things were gods, and you could only see them with shared imagination, faith—if not in them, then that a great story’s coming—and your finger for the moon, pointing in the sky.

Stars are in space, not plotted on a plane, so in any other place, perspective would shift and all of the pictures would change. I found this unsettling when I was a child. Not so much that perception is reality but that truth has no authority, no real stability, objective agreement or balance—or at least that was the pressing possibility. Premises built over rabbitholes attached to wormholes lashed to trust you’ll feel better about all of this eventually. See and seek the wisdom of quicksand and weak knees.

Seven billion fingers for the moon, now, kid and the crazy thing is, we could rearrange the firmament, add or subtract, expand or collapse, and we’d still come up with comparable narrative—warriors and creatures and witches, songs and feasts for birth and death, how to march and how to dance, fear and love and play.

We would see the same thing in the thing. The Hero with a Thousand Rock Star Faces, again and again.

We worried we wouldn’t have much to say. What kind of people are we, anyway?

In nearby tourist-town Fredericksburg we buy some walking-around beer and marvel. Someone makes their living making objects out of animal parts, antler-handle cheese knives and canes crammed in rattlesnake skins. The animatronic garlic head will lure you in. The gag shop huckster, drive you away. The busty Hip Dingo, what can I say? I love local off-color.

Halloween night we hunt teenage trick-or-treaters in the van, pulling up close like we’ll pull them in, and just before they mess their half-assed costumes, I announce we have candy. They cheer like it’s a movie.

Jolly Ranchers for everyone! Murder for none!

We are so much fun.

Arthur did improv with deer. I mapped the whole landscape till he saw the polar bear. We had plenty to say, and pleasant silence too. Though hard to tell, we’re easy to listen to, spinning old stories and making up more and speculating, animated, whether the grizzled guitarist singing Hurt on the quaint restaurant patio, channeling more Cash than Reznor, would say crown of thorns or crown of shit. The man said shit and totally owned it.

We might have been the only ones to notice it—to realize there was something to look for in a moment, hopeful for surprise but careful to be open to propriety, sanctity, disappointment just-in-case.

We probably missed other things.

That’s okay.

When I fetched a pad from the corpse of a prickly pear to better examine decay, I got stung.

You’re not supposed to pick them up. Look but don’t touch. Imagine, be curious, but don’t really reach out, you can dodge the big needles well enough. All of that obvious, dangerous sharp. But the rest is laced with tiny invisible teeth you won’t feel bite, you won’t even bleed, but they’ll find their way in. They’ll burn.

I think we turned invisible,

but I can’t be sure. What kinda notion or emotion, grand mal abstraction I want to ask for meaning then insist I’ve no interest in any such thing in a thing I can’t help but see and not see what’s right not in front of me.

Three years later, Target sells it for $12:

Flattering? Infuriating? Am I really smart or really stupid, both or neither or nothing?

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS.

Many prominent artists are my age, or just a little older, sharing shared experience, scripting old scars, so I devour for narrative, no doubt about it, but mostly for the trapdoors,

down to the tightrolls.