Fragments From Floyd

Muddle

My desk is a mess, a metaphor for life. Not a dangerous mess. Even a mess containing some element of logic in its entropic piles and stacks--chaos arranged in horizontal and vertical planned disorder. But I look at the genuine simulated woodgrain surface of this particle-board desk and realize: not much of its surface is visible. Not much of my creativity is visible under the stack of small engines that need fixin' or cussin'; under the gutters that mock me with the every thrice-daily gully-washer knowing that I can't reach some of them to clean them out--they drool and spit and spatter the new mulch onto the side of the white house as they overflow, full to the top with maple whirlygigs. Clutter comes, too, from the things I've said YES to--not begrudgingly, but now better understanding that for everything you do, there will be things you don't do, given this awful limitation of mortality we wear over out bones. Only one thing at one time. What a pity.

Here lie three books opened and clipped to certain pages-- that talks about Photoshop sharpening; Bald Eagles come Back from the Brink; an Orion article open under the others now for two weeks, subtitled: Can a sense of place help the peace-making process? Interlaced are financial statements enumerating our net worthlessness; bank accounts reconciled or not; two clipboards, both down to the last of their college-ruled yellow pages fully scrawled with a few notes and many doodles of the tao and infinity symbols and a place where I recorded a speaker's score for uh's, um's and er's. Ninety three, all totaled, in a 45 minute presentation. Not a record, but honorable, er, mention.

The stratification on Old Olduvai, my sad desk, mounts up as high as the monitor that sprouts little sticky notes, some tiny pastel ticklers waving from the edge of the screen, and many phosphor-boxes that pop up just in time to the sound of an alarm call (currently a wav file "Bridge to Captain Kirk! that calls me from the Holodeck). There are to-do lists in three places in the imaginary dimensions of Computer-land, each list a different manifestation of the misassumption that if I could only get organized by way of the perfectly-bulleted list, I would thus gain control over this universal tendency for things and events to fall apart.

I think maybe I need an administrative assistant, some large plastic trash bags, and a few more hours hanging out with Charles Darwin on the Beagle. Man, that Holodeck is a great excuse to avoid reconciling the bank account!