091118 someone just went to the bathroom i can’t even look at the computer screen it’s one of those old models that you crank and i crankt it too hard. i crankt it too hard. jared peach said he only likes to take HAND WRITTEN notes and it’s my job, nay it’s my DUTY to ask him why. Jared peach also almost failed my class last year or maybe he DID fail it actually. AH. Well. Stops pacing. Looks up. Wire rimmed glasses. I’m a busy busy man. The man has the bearing of a neatly organized pantry. He wears his underwear on the outside, but not for a rebellion or a fashion statement or a joke or an attempt to be a super hero. It’s just because he didn’t have time and his eyes were still groggy but he by god had something to do and so he got up and did it. He IS a super hero. I mean of course, not one that does any damn good, of course. But a super hero nonetheless. DID YOU KNOW THAT Is THE MOST COMMON KIND OF SUPER HERO? Dear god I’m tired. Or maybe that should be: Dear God, I’m tired. Love, The super scrippy rat-whiskered man in apartment three. He can sweep up his bare wood floors after midnight. He can make a cup of licorice tea for a small girl. He can ask people he doesn’t even know the most oddly intimate and yet inconsequential questions. He is, what shall we call him, the kind of superhero that exists everywhere. Look, he begins, pacing again. It’s like beach glass. Where do you find beach glass? Quite often in the SAND (he often talks to himself, but there’s a good reason for that. Socrates was here). But then he thinks about it for an INSTANT with his super hero skills and realizes that not only do you often NOT find it in the sand (sometimes it’s in pebbles and sometimes in crushed up zebra mussel shells and hell, if you want to get extended metaphor about it, I mean HONESTLY, not just the just-so (is there a better word for that? Because it’s a concept you need all too often in this fake personal narrative mythology world) kind, sometimes you find it in a glass jar up on somebody’s shelf, filtering the oily light of someone’s kitchen into a syruppy blend of green, white, brown, and flecks of red, orange, and the occasional startling BLUE, as blue as a young girl’s delight when she takes the first sip of tea and her eyes light up), and not only that but talking about BEACH GLASS could come off as a little bit precious, a little bit cat-postery, you know? And so he backtracks, pacing past the olive green of the 1970’s-era stove and refrigerator, and says, OK, think about pebbles. Dutifully (if you existed), you think about pebbles. Our super hero is aware that your vision of pebbles that you’ve conjured on demand is probably—I mean, HAS to be, doesn’t it? Isn’t it just GUARANTEED to be completely different from his? Even if it’s the same? He draws rapidly a Venn diagram in one corner of his mind and then lets it fade away like the tail of a shooting star, so beautiful, so ephemeral, so pointless, and so important. But that’s OK, because in a way that’s just another iteration or hologram or microcosm or fractional dimension of the very POINT HE’S TRYING TO MAKE. He admits it. He does occasionally engage in the barbarous sweaty practice of MAKING POINTS sometimes. We all have our kryptonite, n’est-ce pas? So if you’re thinking about pebbles you might be able to recall that sometimes there are astonishing ones. As you’re walking down along the arcade, and the moon is an astonishing pebble in the sky, and your feet crunch along at the moist edge of where the waves don’t go past, except when sometimes they do and then they soak your tennies and you go Oh! because it’s so cold, and you and your best friend laugh and are young and amazed. And some of the pebbles are brilliant. Some of them are shot through with hot pink audacious quartz. Some of them have lived a lifetime of purple before you even tried to open your puppy kitten eyes. Some of them are red like chewed up cinnamon gum. Some of them have a HOLE THAT GOES ALL THE WAY THROUGH AND YET SOMEHOW THEY SURVIVE to tell stories of dinosaurs and sorrow. Some are black as a mirror full of stars. Some CAME FROM FUCKING OUTER SPACE, I MEAN CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE. Some of them are so chromatically astonishing it’s all you can do to keep your eyes open in awestruck primate gobsmackery as you turn them over and over in your pudgy palm, wondering suddenly about everything you didn’t even know was there to wonder about before. Are those the super heroes? the small girl asks. Well, maybe. But maybe not see that’s the funny thing. The most common type of super hero is the most common type of pebble. Lets look at one of these guys, shall we? It’s often pale tan or rough gray. It sits there and gets stepped on, day after day, without being picked up. It gets brushed aside in the endless quest for beach glass. It’s homely. Even lonely, even though there are billions of others almost just like it. It’s squat, rounded but not perfectly, angular but not startlingly. It’s had a good tumble over the millenia but who cares. It’s just, I mean, it’s just a pebble. You wouldn’t pick it up and put it in your pocket on your way back to the car. You might pick it up in a whole handful though, and hurl them at the moon, and listen to the machine-gun strafing of tiny splishes as they all bombard the water at once. And then patiently begin the eons-long wait until they’re once again washed up on the shore to do nothing and to be nothing. That’s who most of us are. Is there a redemptive moral to this story? Why is that dull blonde pebble a super hero? Well, you get to answer that, he cops out. That’s today’s assignment. You find out, and you tell me why. And we’ll discuss. You can write on paper, you can type, you can trace the words in the sand with your finger, but hurry. The tide is coming in. And will wash your words away. That’s the truth, write it down and watch it wash away, that’s the urgent truth of the most common kind of super hero in the world. The kettle’s whistling, I gotta go. He says and wipes his glasses with a squint at the light bulb and half a smile. He’s a kind man. You don’t mind coming here.