18 December 2002 - 12:32 p.m. This is the crash and I popped a soap-bubble clinging to a mirror. It's reflection popped almost simultaneously and I bit my lip again. I keep biting it as it swells--cycling like the spokes of a wagon wheel crushing exotic plants. One red should be enough for all but the most sensitive artist. Red is red and you can bleed it all you want, but I need gallons of green paint to replace my neighbors' paved-over lawn--to replant the garden--to own disappointment They scream at each other in an artificial language while the bird and the dog yelp for attention. There are cats--fluffy and smooth like toys. They pose like actresses from the twenties, poised in their self-confidence and defiance. The sun is a brand-new idea--a popsicle melting into a puddle of orange-flavored sugar-water that chihuahuas lap up before their owners yank them away thinking it's antifreeze or plasma. What I want just isn't in the refrigerator and i think I'm only gaining weight to reach critical mass, to sustain my own nuclear reaction, to burn like a sun for a billion years. I'm searching for the correct formula, for the self-sustaining balance while I fall forever, faced with eternal acceleration and the failure of philosophy. Darwin was close, but we must be descended from birds. Why else would so many people dream of flying? I wonder why none of us dream about supernovas. Despite the bloated, insane ramblings of Pat Roberts, we all have burned at millions of degrees. We have churned in the bellies of exploding stars, been spread across light-years in the silky threads of nebulae, and experienced metamorphoses beyond the dreams of tadpoles. We have already fulfilled the ambitions of alchemists and astronauts. And, no. We weren't created in a day. Our genesis is far more elegant. It is a link between what is and what we see, and we can only see a faded impression of the brilliance of the universe. But, dinosaurs are dancing around my family-tree in ballet slippers while the last blur of a sunset-cloud ignites fickle hydrogen and oxygen atoms--a bright, watery explosion quieted by evaporation and divine rays of light. The sun is an illuminated dandelion in agony, facing the last, dark seconds before enlightenment--a molten-glass starfish about to evolve--the freeze-frame photograph of a drop of orange juice striking the surface of its surrender. Molecules move in predictably random ways: perfect, microscopic flaws in an empty universe, until the temperature drops. And then: tsunami while photosynthesis mocks us as the only miracle. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are all you need. Mix them together the right way and call your reflection God--beg the echo for forgiveness. The shrinking puddle is everything: the memory of splashing, life, bubbles, the space between thoughts. And I can't help but think that I've missed it. (0) Comments?