FENCES IN THE HEAD

What does it mean, bottom line, to be from a country? Even more bottomly, what does it mean to be from a planet? Wherever you were born, wherever you grew up - your “home” country - is but an atom on a mote on this dust-speck in the cosmos we designate by a primal breathsound "erth," our only home so far, excluding asteroid transport to our fledgling lifeless planet of enzyme building blocks, at which timepoint we anyway had no opinion as to the all of it all. Ultimately, though, because of us and our inner horizons, that dust-speck holds profound meaning for the entire cosmos, even if we are alone.

For my small part, while I’m here and moving around I try not to be misguided or feel controlled by passports, visas, borders, boundaries etc., which are after all virtual fences designed to keep others out, which would be bad enough in a happy society (the hopeful fruit of evolution), but even worse, in our currently diverse societies they’re often serving to keep us in.

Whether we know it or not, or even think about it, we transcend territory by an infinite range, yet still we have fences and borders. We abstract them into the skies and into the sea and earth, as well as in the South and North Poles, and beyond even those dimensions we carry ancient, locally built stone fences in our heads.

Seems impossibly distant, but one day, one day...

some days 

taking out the trash 

is victory

I CALL MY LEG A LAMBORGHINI 

Anyone with any sense would rather have a good leg than a Lamborghini, if one were to ask such a silly question. To the rehab staff, I call my challenged leg ‘my Lamborghini,’ not to impugn the streamlined beauty of the Lambo, but because legs need a little flattery now and then, a little incentive to get moving more gracefully and stylishly than a sub-par leg such as mine is at the moment, lazing in its new milieu. I need more class down there.

When I call my leg a Lamborghini, the limb evidences a certain flair upon at last lurching into movement; it wears a new hint of grace, because a leg of any reasonable age and sensibility knows what a Lamborghini is, and begins to show distinct, though distant, signs of Astaire. Things are improving. This is the proper approach to managing a leg I believe, on the basis of limited subjective experience, which is basically all one ever gets.

Of course I do not mean to compare legs and Lamborghinis in any real way; Lamborghinis may be fast on certain roads and race tracks, but only there. I can go up my stairs in 30 seconds or into the pantry for some donuts right this moment; that is the proper domain of legs: living space at large. Lamborghinis, being strictly limited in range, are unfairly diminished by this comparison.

Just because I with my quad cane can walk rings around a Lamborghini, which can only sit rumbling throatily by the roadside while I totter into the greater world at will, we should not mock the Lambo, it can reach 60 in 3 seconds, if you insist on doing pointless things; waste is the lap of luxury, after all. There’s no waste in a leg, nor any need for luxury. 

Just a touch of style.