Greg Lyons--Writing #3

“Hey, do you want to play catch?” Jeremy asked throwing a baseball to himself in his frontyard. Of course Jeremy didn't really want that child to come over and ruin his fun. He asked in jest; what child, what five year old child, would take up an offer so simple, so trivial, so ridiculous that even he must know it was a polite gesture, something done that his parents referred to as politics, and who likes politics but the old people, but the people who spend nights stuck on history channels they call News, the people who complain about their jobs and how it's his fault, how it's the fault of the children that they must work and be gone the whole day, as if it was I or him that asked to be born, that asked to have parents, a body, a sister, an older sister breathing down his neck for every little thing he does wrong, has done wrong, in some kind of oozing conglomerate of conspiracy that is meant only to pressure, to suffocate, to bear down as if in some hierarchal fashion determined by mere chronology; that is to say, determined by mere fate and chance and non-choice; God, if you will, if I will, if he wills because it is will, it is some external force much like skin that wraps him into this existence merely to be eaten; no, to be made like a burrito, a taco, a man and then eaten, as if a plant that eats its own seed; a carnivore never stopping always moving forward linearly like Pac-man and graphs and evolution—how convenient that during man's evolution from primate they stood up allowing the old people to plot the points of a man's height (and who is this man? This man that symbolizes us all in indifferent symbology?) in a y=mx+b fashion because it is for sure able to be plotted as a graph rising upwards much like the sun rising always up, and the north hemisphere on the Earth as always up, pretending that Earth actually has an orientation, actually contains a North and our galaxy then becomes oriented to the Earth; Jupiter's red spot is on its southern hemisphere because Earth has a north, and thus, of course, orients our Milky Way Galaxy—what does that mean anyway? Milky Way?--and consequently the complete and entire universe; so advanced we are to have evolved from the thought mankind treasured that the sun revolved around the planet! but now the universe is oriented around our planet; the planets designed under our skies as the maps of the past have been designed under another's skies and then projected because there is no other explanation for North America being West and Asia being East, no other explanation for Australia being south and Europe being North, no other explanation but exercise; power of the past stealing the present with every second and every letter spoken until there is no other second and no other letter to speak than the ones that have not been stolen by the past, as if by reduction and decimation the future becomes not assembled, not made, but left, leftover, as our dinner scraps, as the nails still twirling around the cardboard box that used to hold the cabinet we just built because we didn't need them; how telling of a saying: didn't need; and now we are left with what is not needed, pretending there is something we still need like a ball, like a thought, like to listen; if such things were needed, then they must be used and if they are used, then there is no future for them; therefore what we need, what I need, what he needs is always here and there, but never comes with us to the future, never has a future, but always, will always, has to, must, be nails in the cabinet of our past used and holding us upright, making us usable, but what use is a Star forever unreachable, a star already dead but its light still traceable, still observable, still existing in our skies almost as if the light itself becomes a memory realized, a thought realized, distinguishable, understood, and dead; because it is dead; we will never know the Star and any orientation we give it on our maps will be but imagined because how can you align the unknowable with the knowable, assuming (my dad would always say assuming makes an Ass out of U) there is a difference, and it is a measurable distance, like a yard. “Sure,” the child responded. “Alright, you'll need a mitt.”