April 3, 2020

Yesterday, I saw a bee die mid-air and plunge into the dirt with a dull plip. Today, I extracted a splinter from my middle finger that turned out to be one of my eyelashes. The fragility continues.

It was April Fool’s Day on the 1st, but I forgot to punk anyone, so I’m April’s fool this year. I know someone with a Deathsgiving on the 1st, the anniversary of their father’s death, that is. It’s a rough slot to get; every year she expects her Dad to jump out of the bushes and prank himself back into her life. Psych!

Bill Withers died today, and I’m sad about it. I watched an old performance of his on YouTube wherein he sings “Grandma’s Hands,” prefacing it by explaining that it was about a woman “who wasn’t very sexy at all.” After watching my roommate Bean Curd and his lover Bus shop for online clothes, I think we should write more songs about people who aren’t very sexy at all, and employ more fashion models with gnarled hands and malignant liver spots — if she looks good in that floor-length polyester camouflage cardigan, then you’ll be knocking them dead as soon as you cough up those debit card digits!

I meditated for 45 minutes yesterday, and I can say with absolute confidence that the metaphor of being a fly on the wall can be actualized by playing dead in the living room. A few people asked what I was doing, but I refused to interact or open my eyes, so they simply started sitting on and around me, sparking joints and having private conversations that they would not have had they considered me to be a living being, fly or otherwise. When I opened my eyes and lurched back into existence, I felt the universe willing me to pick up all the dog shit in the back yard, and I did not resist the call.

I started reading the I Ching yesterday, also known The Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese divination text that reaches back nearly three millennia. It inspired me to dive into Tai Chi again, the slow dancing martial art that old Chinese people do in the park, so I am going to clean up the yard and make it a Tai Chi sanctuary free of distraction and tiny turds.

I have only learned the first two hexagrams of the I Ching, the complementary forces of the Receptive and the Creative, the passive female-maternal yin of the Earth and the active male-paternal yang of the Heavens which are not opposites but necessary compliments comprising a unified whole. I have no idea what any of it means yet, but answers are abundant if they can be furthered to succeed and persevere in the form of a heavenly potential reified on Earth. That last part didn’t make much sense to me, but maybe it will someday, my sweet, sweet nerds. For now, I hold fast that anything that hints of wisdom is worth a good sniff or two, even if it’s just the potpourri sandstorming off of your grandma’s dusty hands.