Regulations

And we were backcountry regulators.
Slipping down hills and crossing ravines.
Drinking beer in off-course outcroppings.
Boots and cameras on trails we just made up.
Changing things by our passing,
taking nothing but the image.
Not far enough from civilization to take much pride,
but distant in aspect and attitude
as soon as the trees block the day.
Nothing to regulate, nowhere important to be.
And I hope it's always that way, now and again.

Some Kind of Paranoia

There was definitely a bird in the car.

He'd sat down on the seat, closed the door, blasted the AC and turned up the music. Twice he'd hit send on a phone call that wasn't really important, and yet now—Now.—he was hearing the sound of it. Chirping. A pleading little chirp that meant a tiny, hungry little son of a bitch.

It repeated. He wasn't crazy.

Slightly applying pressure to the brake, he cocked his head and listened. It was quiet. Was it aware of his own awareness? Somehow had he acquired a prescient avian stowaway? Feeling the subtle vibrations of electron flow in the cortex of his brain and transliterating them into the demonic language of flying dinosaur descendants?

The car coasted to a stop as the light dangled, crimson above the intersection. Deep below the cushions of the passenger seat, the malevolence was thrumming. He moved his hand cautiously to the volume knob, dimming the little comfort he received from pretending it had been the music he had heard. Often enough auditory hallucination caused him to believe his phone was ringing, or his roommate had returned home.

The final inches between him and complete insanity might have been just that easily traversed. Now he was hearing birds. That was all.

Even with the music subsumed by the thrush of the air conditioner, he heard it again. He pulled the tenuous hand back from the volume knob. Why would such a stupid, unlikable, noisy creature—truly the vermin of the skies—crawl between the glass of his window and the rubber of his door frame? Hadn't he carefully eyed the gap he left as he entered the store? No man could have gotten a hand farther in than the elbow, but now he was playing host to wings and spidery, three-towed legs.

The fan needed to be silenced. The flick of a hand, jumping to the knob and back with a surge of adrenaline, accomplished the task handily. The road sounds were all that remained; white noise punctuated with rude horns and cell phone yammer. Sounds so unlike the greedy blip of hungry sparrow lungs that even his own addled mind could scarcely confuse the two.

Just as he was sure he was safe... just as the imposing sun had begun to cook the soft golden hairs on his forearms... just as he was reaching to reapply some greatly sought after temperature control, there was something. A sound.

It could have been anything. A slightly over-stressed shock. A different sort of traction causing one tire to slip. Someone having an orgasm, somewhere. The likely answers outnumbered the absurd, but still only the one had any purchase in the slippery footing of his mind.

Bird.

The one lucky stroke was the impending approach of home. With care and practiced grace, he slid the car into the spot, too tense to heave the sigh of relief that sang in his thoughts. Surely the bird had heard it anyway, though, master of mind reading that it was.

Would opening the door summon it from its hiding place? The thing about birds that kept him up most nights (and woke him with a start on all others) was the furious faceful of of feathers and hollow bones that would surely result from an encounter with one. The courage he sought to open the far door evaded him. Without a hooked implement to pull open the handle, he would need to reach fully across the passenger seat, grip and pull, exposing important internal organs to puncture, ravage and birdsong. He leaned farther away and trusted in his ability to duck and roll from the car.

If a stuntman could do it at speed, surely at a standstill it would be hardly a task at all.

It was brief, unpleasant and heartracingly intense, but resulted in no injuries—beak inflicted or otherwise. Peering up from cover in the wheelwell, he observed no interlopers. He reached up and tenderly rolled the window down, leaving a likely escape hatch for the creature. A dead bird in his Kia would be almost less pleasant that a live one.

His notebook, shopping bags and sunglasses he left in the seat across from him. They would remain unmolested without him, and would not be ruined by the bonechillingly cold blast of CO2 he planned to cleanse that compartment with in the morning. Something told him a fire extinguisher was the natural enemy of most suburban birds.

Finding Walls in the Dark

I feel like the boundaries must be somewhat supple. The perimeter between thought and action might not be so narrow. In fact, I wonder some times if there are actually great banks of foggy unknowns. Exclaves and counter-exclaves. The syrupy delay between reflex and cognition muddles what seems a genuine distinction. Am I a Cartesian point in space with will and knowledge—the hand on the controls that rules an armada of cells, organs, systems? Or is this self just a coalescent phenomenon of parallel forces? It could be like an egosphere of swirling impulses, instincts and chemical complexity that protects the frail machinery which animates me.

But even that delay—the jump your mind makes to explain actions done in haste and without planning—can be ruled by the slower forces. Practice. Almost as determinedly as the sharpening of a blade, you stand toes-to-the-line throwing ten thousand free throws until the flick of the wrist, the estimation of distance and the leap that drives all the precision and power of your body behind the ball becomes autonomic. You are the programmer of that machinery. It must be honed like that blade. Each slow hissing pull over the stone sets the grain of your muscle memory. Every gently flicker tightens the alignment. It guarantees appropriate reaction.

Exclaves and counter-exclaves. Supple boundaries. Am I the one who throws that jab around his guard in the split second his cover drops? The speed at which my mind reacts to such stimulus gives us a clear picture that it isn't so. I turn the flashbulb images of an ungentle memory into a likely story. But if it was the creeping, controlling programmer of my slower cognition that ordered the hours of practice and honed the blade of my reactions, then can I not take credit for it? Even if it happens outside of conscious prompting in that instant.

I say it falls within my egosphere. It is bound within the phenomena which make my body. My sphere of influence. Still, though, there are ripples in the surrounding forces. If the conditioned swing of the bat is me, as is the reflexive release of the arrow, then so to must the fluid leap of the thoroughbred over a barrier be within that sphere of the rider. Train a body. Master a tool. Control an animal. Teach a human.

You see the trend. The line has to be drawn. Drawn with fog banks and exclaves, perhaps. If you draw the lines right, you can increase the size of your “self” to the ends of the universe. Actions caused by solar flares and passing comets and birthing stars can be as integral to “me” as are my blood, flesh and thoughts. When I go out into the world to find myself, am I already and always there? Or is the flush of the tides, the hold of the earth's molten core and the constant bombardment of cosmic rays so overwhelming that this tiny seed of “me,” fighting to control a body of mud and light has no hope of causing anything?

I'm driving at a point of contending to change the world. I'm fluffing up my ego, and remembering there's nothing I cannot control if I possess a certain lofty sense of grandeur. Through actions properly ruled by thought, I can change your life and mine. Or I can worry in the late hours that I am slipping into sleep, and that maybe this time the illusion of control won't return. That these last dreams may tear asunder the egosphere I inhabit. I'm struggling to uhold the former, though the clutch of the latter is constant companion these days.

So good night and best wishes. And supple boundaries to you all.