120518 google maps can pinpoint down to every millimeter inside everyone’s body and everything else. all these people sitting here in the airport looking into their devices are voluntarily plugging into the matrix. what’s the alternative? scribe vs writer. scribe is like mailman. in service of others. routine is a part of it. “creation” is incidental or accidental or not required because personal; of interest to others only indirectly, to the extent that it imbues you the servant with an efficacious affect. whose stories you listen to and think about and inscribe is like your route. to some extent you get to choose your route. don’t shame yourself for writing down your thoughts. after all, what else could you write down? you’re not obligated to have “invented” them, though. they come from anywhere. they move through you. they’re “merely” the mail you’re delivering--at once of utmost importance and beneath your notice. you handle the envelopes and packages (with care, of course); the contents are none of your business--except inasmuch as your overarching awareness imbues you with an efficacious humility. you can’t impregnate yourself. it might be nothing. it might be an advertisement. it might be a retirement check. it might be a love letter. it might be a post card saying, “there are still swans in lucerne, but not as many as when you were here.” the good news is, you don’t have to try to evaluate the relative importance. either all of it is important or else none of it is. remember that internet piece that took random people’s impromptu memory sketches of what a bicycle looks like, and then got designers and fabricators to make prototypes based on the sketches? the results were unrideable of course. surely even the most skilled fabricator of stories could do no better with a character. take the most dynamic, multidimensional fictional character you can find, and bring it, magically or scientifically, to life--it will be just as lopsided and ludicrous as those discombobulated bikes. this army of drooling stump-legged detectives, these pants-shitting gangsters, these doltish doctors and brittle facades of children laughing jaggedly like chickens before dissolving grotesquely, these pieces of paper cut out in humanoid shapes, with garish crayon faces--these are us--detritus--morsels of oily jetsam waiting to be scooped out of this flying seed pod by the claw of the most primitive possible monster, who, by virtue of being real, has powers beyond our imagination, including the power, worthy of no second thought to him, to peel back the sticky layer of our atmosphere and reveal us squirming and writhing atop the layer of earth beneath, for that’s where we reside, as limited in dimensional scope as beetles making squiggly tracks between the bark and trunk--but those beetles, by virtue of being real, are infinitely more complex than we, we whose parts are partly fit together, whose organs are but a vague suggestion, whose faces are icons and whose thoughts are but a hand wave.