ABSOLUTES

97. ABSOLUTES:

I’ve learned the signatures of time and all its fine oases the places where sunlight hangs and the others where water and land meet where stories intermingle with facts and truths and even where lies go home to roost and every story with its untoward line towards meeting places off and weeks at a time lost and eight months IN FACT off and the only person standing up is the one who came too late but what could the chances be of only having ONE excess person it’s almost astronomical the odds and then did I hear him say what did I hear him say it was something about the absolutes of value and constitutions but what are the limits of anything I find myself asking myself and it reminds me of the idea I used to have as I’d listen to school science teachers and the like start talking about the MOON how its main problems are those of absolutes in that one side is always dark and the other side is always light one side facing earth always and the other side never facing earth and one side being too cold and the other being too hot by extremes and even if all or any of that was false information or the made up folderol of stupid school-teaching I always thought nonetheless why there had to be only extremes why since if the moon itself was round there were not gradual areas where these things happened where the extremes of hot and cold would be bearable for some hundreds of miles where instead of black or white light there had to be an area where GRADUALLY the two extremes met and everything was lit gray - a most acceptable alternative I thought not unlike a grave but passably acceptable November or December day here on this fair globe itself - but none of these ideas were ever broached so for whatever reason I guess none of that ever became part of the overall patter of the day -TOO BAD ! - maybe but in any case all these years later apparently with all the secrets we’ve learned about things and travels to distant places no one yet says a word about whatever is a version of ‘absolute’ today instead we just seem to run back and forth back and forth blustering and threatening and then destroying whatever good there can be but part of that always is the problem of ‘absolutes’ again and as much as I even hate to say it I’m absolutely sure there’s too much of everything right now just too much but nonetheless like some drawing-room patter between cigar’d heads and martini’d hands there no forward progress ever to be made as people only talk to other versions of themselves until that silk-worm fantasy of the mad-man with an exploding bomb plops right smack-dab into the middle of that room and things go POW! as things absolutely are wont to do…