The measurements of So near and yet So far turn out to be
about 4 blocks long and 5 months wide,
and that right there my friends is pure belletrism
soul poetics.

Today I bought that effing doorknob, but mostly I bought groceries, basic things like eggs, and crazy new things to try like clarified butter and tortillas made out of thinly sliced jicama. There’s gonna be a big batch of homemade hummus mixed up here and you can count on that much.

Out beyond the blender the situation necessarily declarifies. I know nothing. I have dreams, hopes, prayers. I write instructions in my head for theoretical electricians.

Listen now buddy, the primary system is this solar panel right here. Your job is to hook me up to the grid like any good normal homeowner, but that whole big grid is only the backup system, see? Before my new home sips a single watt from the system, there’ll be this charge controller wired up in front of their meter, and it will suck down the rays first, and only take electricity from them when there isn’t enough left being generated here onsite. Can you do that for me? Good. Let’s do that for me. I have some money laying around here somewhere.

I write irreverent eulogies for people I love who are sick or will be someday.

I write the songs that make the whole world sing … well, the whole noir world that isn’t manilow.

Most of it never gets put down in print. I go over what I said and what I should have said, to clerks and prospective colleagues, and only tiny shreds of it make it to this page.

I say: This world is both; this world is ID checks and 10K electric bills, but it is also the prickly pear growing next to the purple flower and the bees and butterflies so happy about it.

It’s like Gervais says. For thirteen billion years there was a universe without a me. Then somehow I got sixty, seventy, eighty maybe to go about the woodland checking out the snow-hung cherries. And what did I do with that little miracle sliver? I wasted it mostly, like an average god damn fool.

But at times like these, in days like this, I remember and I don’t waste and that’s as good as I or any of us will ever be.

Checkout time always comes too soon, and for thirteen billion more years after it, there will once again be a universe untroubled by any notion of a Vairtere.

It’s so unfair! But still, the odds that I would ever have the sliver at all … astronomically against me. It’s so lucky.

It’s unfair, but it’s the most incredible luck, at the same time.

You’re a sly one, God. Or whoever or whatever.

Salute.