Thoreau on the "now", and myself examine the ever new meeting place of the future and the past.

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."

The nicked notch swatch stirring rod of time, that great axial protuberance, knitting along the fabric of all, intermeshing such things as the idle philosopher, the taxidermist, an Instagram influencer, and the odd newsman, here and there.  I too have stood at that nexus, future ahead and past squarely behind, and the great needle scraping along at 78 rpm.

I remember once, sitting in 87 degrees, the bird screaming less than 24 inches from my elbow, and a giant Motorola console player going with an instrumental long play on the wrong speed.  With no vocals, I had not a reference to know it was at the wrong speed, and it made rather Hawaiian sounds seem rather pop foppish; it traversed the breadth of time and thought between Chet Atkins and Herman's Hermits.

The bird was sociable, and at varying times and circumstances, it was difficult to tell if he went about in complaint or conversation.

"You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.  I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate."

"To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself!"

To be intelligent and circumspect, to learn from the past.  To be free, to untether from the past.  If I could at once focus my time and energy on the turkey oak in the corner of the lot, and that which, I was a fluster with a lizard crawling in my pants leg.

It wasn't the charming Geico lizard, either.

There was kind of a nexus there at the pivoting point of now, right now, and you could feel, as it were, the folding of something like a newspaper, even after the bird died.  I didn't go about like Thoreau, asking strangers if they had seen him; but there were veritably people I could have asked.

I was under a friends car, looking from the front suspension, ball joints, constant velocity joints, MacPherson struts, and all, towards the rear stabilizer, fuel tank, catalytic converter and all that.  It was more suspect than circumspect I thought, and I was being identified about, as it were, I was some sort of fugitive, that too, after being referred to as a Mexican expatriate: it was but to take it all in, as if I were an engine expelling love and light, or hate and bad jokes, when I had been served a diet of sin consciousness.

There had been fish tacos, I suppose, was a time and place, a cratering or something, a lady in yellow, and all.  State Troopers.  As Fahreed says, "a friendship with no limits".

"Sometimes I think I should get on my bike and go."  Trading the Schwinn for a Huffy, the road gear, for mountains, or a self-contained electronic universe for an uncomfortable facsimile of both the real and the imagined.

The Scatterverse.

And the proprietary concern, "keep them turning the pages", as of the popular novelist, but I can afford to tell my ending early, and write long scenes of love and warm bathwater, perhaps.  "I could tell you all, up front", but you can walk with my too, as the tale elapses, not unlike the elapsing of life of rather average length.

"It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it."