Archive for July, 2008

Hold on to the silver wire suspended from a cloud. It carries you to a steaming cave where silent watchers wait in the shadows. In the center is the mouth of a tunnel lined with shining stones. Descend to the source of heat and light.

Survivors of a natural disaster that leaves them homeless, a family builds a house around a monumental sycamore. The great trunk grows up through a central hole in each floor and the limbs extend through the walls and out the windows. It’s a treehouse inside out. Then Grampa, furtive in his old brown suit and Stetson, hides something at the roots. He puts a bundle wrapped in an old dishtowel in the back of a basement cupboard, a mysterious stash that spontaneously combusts and spreads flames up the branches.

Your leg is covered with bleeding sores and insect bites. You try to wash off the blood in the very narrow bathroom of a house you have just moved into. But the space is so constricted it’s awkward just to turn around. Still, the room is quite long, like a hallway, and at the far end there is a small desk and an elegant bentwood chair at a window. It might be a cozy place to work as long as nobody needs to use the toilet.

Fiddle with vintage automobile dashboard cigarette lighters, and wonder if they can be converted to cigarette holders by punching a hole through the middle. Clean up the backyard except for the soggy slab of corrugated cardboard that you leave for later. The birds seem to be eating it anyway.

Always driving, driving, driving
Over the bridge around up and down
Across through wrong way back

The original pre-Steamboat Willie incarnation of Mickey Mouse was created not by Walt Disney, but by Albert Einstein! However, the talented German preferred to let his cartoon animation work go uncredited out of concern that it would detract from his career as a theoretical physicist. Later Disney would offer a coded thank you to the genius by way of the Donald Duck spin-off character, the absent-minded professor Ludwig von Drake.

In the 1950s when Einstein was as famous for being Einstein as for E=MC2, he visited Disney Land in Anaheim and hinted at his covert creation by donning mouse ears and doing a little jig on the bridge in front of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, a performance captured in an amateur 16mm film taken by one of Einstein’s nephews, either Huey or Dewey.

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