Burning Down the Clone Snowmen

I speak as though you could burn down the ornaments on the table. But we need ketchup as much as we need salt and pepper. And napkins!

Turn the philosopher kings to liquid and send them downstream.

Philosopher kings, like overturned buckets of rock salt and ice leftover from an attempt at making homemade ice cream, turned liquid.

Be careful about pouring that rock salt down the sink or ruining the homemade ice cream with it. Vanilla sucks when it's salty. Or don't be careful. To hell with the Clone Snowmen--just don't send them to the lowest bolgia of the Inferno where they would stay as fresh as Lucifer in his Sea of Ice.

Are you thinking Frosty whines too much in those Christmas cartoons?

But what if we could melt Plato's Clone Snowmen? Give Darth Vader fingerprints? What would our universe be without grim? Having melted, only your coal eyes and top hat remain?

Blow Out Your Candles

                          



















The hand with the lit match is beautiful, but as usual, the Clone Snowmen have replaced her. See how beautiful the hand is? I don't know if I should post this picture in black and white or color. You should feel the flame. The Clone Snowman replaced my Birthday Girl with a much less interesting creature in this odd Glass Menagerie.

For a second, I wanted you to think of the melancholy almost inherent to the work of Tennessee Williams--especially that line, "Blow out your candles." Then I don't want to think about Tennessee Williams. I want you to think about celebrity and film.

But then we're back to Tennessee Williams, who got it right: Hollywood stuck its projector through our collective imagination and directed us to worship at the altar of half-baked royalty, American style.

You see the Snowman in the picture? But he looks to be made of porcelain or metal. He's not melting though he might glow. Yes, yes, "Blow out your candles." This scene might turn to comedy.

The Goodness of Pie

Everything had the same everything for an everything. Everything's only--if everything could be noun-ed. Yes, the same everything. Everything depended on the everything in which everything, particularly "thingy" was pro-noun-ed.

Only a momentary set-back. Everything gave way to everything else.

At this point, I began to put together a guest list, which lead to the question of geometry. Really, why geometry, you might ask. If you're asking, that is. The perfect circle.

No, you might say. But this way was the way to the fish fry. I am not thinking about fish, but about her pie. In what universe might pi (pie) be one rather than three something, some irrational number? When does the mathematically irrational become rational? Hmmm. Her pie.

The picture. Yes, mother.

Time to Stop

Time to stop.

Time stop.


The question was time. Whether it was a relationship, a condition we made up for understanding ourselves or a condition independent of us. Hard to say.

Time was when there was dinner. Someone needed to tell her how good her pie was. And it was good pie. Delicious. But pie is usually dessert--at least in this neighborhood. Sure, there's meat pie, pizza pie, but I'm thinking apple, peach, pecan, even chocolate. I was talking about dinner.

But there was another problem. When the guests arrived, they had neither lived nor died. Indeed, their existence was odd. Was time a mode of existence to them? I had to ask being as I am a philosophical kind of person. Other people might say different. But time. Here it was. A picture.

Sure, you might say I have taken an obvious and easy way out here. Circuits around the sun? What about radioactive decay? Atomic clocks? But I don't have a picture. I do, however, have a picture of pie, a pie made of words. Eat these words. I would have to ask these guests about family. I don't even know that they need something to eat.