A friend told me in a dream a little girl turned to him and said, what if human life isn’t linear? I’ve thought about it every day now, for two weeks. In Chicago the thought is heavy, deafening, deadening, but here, in California it seems to fill the horizon.
To look at the ocean in modern times is to suspend disbelief. To believe in finitude against all evidence.
The beach is scattered with drowned delicacies. Finger-thick strands of seaweed, piled up like sticky pasta. A single swollen cacti limb. Ragged spiky things. At low tide the beach is flat and wide and I decide to run with my eyes closed and see if I still exist. Being and nothingness. I say this as I breathe.
As I’m running on the beach a man throws a football over my head and it turns into a seagull and flies away. That’s what it looks like, at least, but I guess it doesn’t matter whether it happened or it didn’t.
Nietzsche said, the universe is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things
I write this down one day in Introduction to Existentialism.
Nietzsche’s madman says, “who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?”
As I’m leaving the beach I see something strange. A man on a skateboard is being towed up the hill by a motorized wheelchair. The man on the skateboard has a baby slung under one arm, like a football, and the man in the wheelchair has a long white beard and a Chihuahua puppy in his lap and as I pass the young man, and the old man, and the baby and the dog they all turn to me and laugh. Or that’s what I thought would happen, but it didn’t.
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