Yesterday I saw a guy on a bicycle get hit by a car. Squealing brakes, the metal-laced thump of car on bike and body, the clatter-thud of bike and body on pavement. The bicyclist bounded up to his feet and pogoed around in an extreme version of a toe-stub dance, rotating the shoulder that had taken the brunt of the hit from the pavement. This is always the first instinct. Nothing has changed. I’m OK. I’m OK.
I have spent all morning looking at this baseball card from my long gone youth. I spent parts of the past weekend, too, and even several sessions of varying lengths over the past year. My life is absurd. Again and again I have returned to this card, which appears to have been rendered by the general employment of the crude techniques of card doctoring usually reserved for uniform and cap. The whole world is doctored, from the strangely lifeless flesh to the impossibly white buck teeth to the lifeless taxonomy eyes to the hazy green and brown beyond. The days come and go. The blank canvas beneath it all, the silence, abides.
Cardboard Gods 