anthropologist in the field

Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabla rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabla rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.

All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.

So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.