Ceremonial Ceramic

Sitting on the concrete futon. Watching accelerators. Feeling the crowd. Back in my hometown, cigars and cigarettes, trucks and SUVs, racecars and teenage drivers.

There's much to be said about not saying much. Avoiding versions of "to be." Asking what got me here and made me me. Who made me? Who's been made?

Hot dogs and hamburgers. Stadium seats and caramel-coloured sodas. 3/8ths of a mile in 15 seconds or so, around and around, bumping and scraping, pushing and smashing. Yellow light. Caution. Restarts and passes.

I was born not far from the smell of accelerant. Intoxicating. Invigorating. Inhabiting my bones. My DNA an engine for engines.

Joyce's "Dubliners" and Agee's scruffy little city. Me and the Model City. Infinitely shaken and shook, chasing the tail of Moebius, that side of Reedy Creek, men and women and their flying machines storming barns and looping reservoirs, flights by the pound long before Pal's made people LEAN in their business machinations.

Faces covered with soot and rubber marbles. Seven years of silence giving us the itch. Vines and bird droppings. Parking spaces and spaces for parking.

Two spots, two arenas. Local and international. FBS winners and UARA stars. Up in smoke and up in the air.

Fly from one to the other, one a parade of cars, another a band on parade T-ing up for the team, topping the rocky start for the season with a tiger-whipping.

J.C. (no, not that one), nearly perfect, whose mother thinks he IS a saint, hitting on all cylinders, like they say (but not like Larry's son setting records in the other K-town), putting up numbers that'll soon have agents calling secretly and offering their services. Stack the line and the missives and missiles permissively fly.

G.J. and other scout hunters grab the fruit flies, turf-tapping their way 'round the West-pressed bodies in disarray.

All's quiet on the front. A far-off refrain of "Mr.Grinch" frets the frets, $200 big ones riding hopes of fading, flickering images on the wall, grainy, grim tidings of humming bugs past Stewart's patrician, Shakespearean, Dickensian tale, or Scott's Georgian performance a farthing too pinched.

How do you stop protests? You feed the hungry. No, take that back. You stuff their mouths until their plump pusses purr with content of feline ferocity. Catnip and scratching posts and balls of yarn to keep them occupied, while you stuff your pockets with their debtors' credit card interest rates. Get them all in houses with mortgages not too heavy to break their backs but heavy enough to strap them to job-seeking occupations for office occupiers, manufacturing offshored and labored laws loosely-fitting the clothesmaking clothesless. Equalising capitalism for the masses. Those who hold a bag of coins in their hands rarely hold protest signs.

Don't ask for much and you don't get mulch. Words are not ovens and text not a scythe.

Joke about dying and die about joking. Laugh at prosperity and prosper at posterity. Give away all you've got so you can give away more. The more you give, the more you receive. The more you live in the moment, the more the moment lives in you.

The race to the moon is on but the Moon's not racing to you. In the meantime, plenty of races hold my attention while I hold yours - racecars and football and basketball - on track for winners all around. All aboard!