The Jagged Edge: North of Midnight.

 

"We have a lot of ground to cover, Cousin Mike."

"I'm gonna hold my hand out like a claw, and you lean down and choke yourself on it."

Late to come to, but not late to realizations, but maybe late to milestones, but not late to propensities, proclivities, and the orientation towards recognizing that eternity was folding-in on itself, slowly, and the Godhead saw it all together, at once: past, present and future.  It wasn't like he and Sister-Woman saw everyone as either all babies or all long-dead corpsicles, corpiscules, but combobulations, amalgamations of each form they would take in the so many seconds of their lives, millions or billions, or in the case of the few, reproduce digitally without worms in their eyes.

"He made that record run in the Orange Bowl or the Rose Bowl...."

"I bet it was the Punch Bowl..."

"It was the Cotton Bowl, Sister-Woman."

We have flown his brother from the old country, at his expense, to be with his brother on this very august and especial day, forspecial and splendiferous, the universe smelling the difference, and for once, the dogs and the cats standing in agreement, and the dish had not run away with the spoon--not today--or yesterday--but there was a prodigious Ragged Edge, and a Jagged Edge, and the two ontologies pointing threateningly, and the ground already humming the dirge, and the such and so forth: we have flown his brother from the old country.

And I was awake, and novelizing.  Novelizing a fiction, that is, it flowing out of my skull onto the paper, and me looking at it, a doctor Frankenstein auditing his own monster, and the little with the flower, and all, tossing her over into the water and all, and me, half-satisfied as the sun rose, half in a preset dirth of stuff, and bringing that off like the Wonderbread, a novel of no worth, but so much for sale are, too, of no worth, and of less substance.

Such that indeed, a rejection is a marking of sufficient differentiation as to merit pride.

I walked, in loafers, across Plaquemines, the boardwalk and all, at the big mudhole, and all that, hoping it would be drained to make a golf course, though I didn't play golf--it was kind of a way of cursing the wealthy into irrelevance and distraction.  I used my debit card to rent an electric bicycle, and journey a tick further, where the yards were bigger, and some not so nice, and there were more and more unfenced animals; by the time of the fourth Dollar General, I knew I had a belly full of America, and South Alabama.

Incompetence threatened us with its own pretendings at worthiness, and the markedly corrupt at buttered biscuits and hurled childhood taunts; I was sufficiently indifferent, by the time of the third or fourth Dollar General, to ignore politics that wasn't politics, the business news that was only politics, and the reciting of party lines by people made to write their own material, but failing badly at it.