April 19th, 2022

A Mooney Has Been Loosed Upon The World Of Literature

Sometimes I wonder if I made him up, as if he were a figment of my imagination. Like a conjuring out of complacency in order to bring a little chaos into my world. He is my shadow come to life tugging at my side trying to tell me something, pointing me in a certain direction. Fingers crossed behind his back.

There is no ill-intent in his actions, though he is still a madman loosed from the mind of a bent god all the same. He is a rock in my shoe. He is an unexpected visitor who arrives unannounced and catches me flat-footed every time. Mooney is. And there’s nothing to be done about it.

It snowed on Sunday. The white flakes came down unexpectedly in the afternoon and I watched from my window as the white things fell gracefully like thoughts that dissipate in a slow fading way. Natural phenomena that happens without our actions to give it warrant. And I let my thoughts fall gracefully, too, as I stared out the window watching the white things form incongruently to the warm space I contained. Each one a mystery. Connected. Isolated. It’s own. Though somehow related to the last in some way.

It started with the snow as an observation. Then the grace of it became Gusto and I realized how a bird in hand is worth two in the bush became an idiom. How the odds are against us in that endeavor. The impossibility of trying to catch two rabbits at the same time. It can’t be done. Then I thought of Omaha, how I’d come to this place. What I’ve come to love about it. Like the snow drifting white down my window and onto the eaves of houses across the streets, the buildings, boulevards and history of the place. The people.

I thought about what LaRue told me, how this isn’t a place to come in swinging ones metaphorical dick around from out of town because the people just don’t care whether you’re from New York or Paris or San Tropez.

This place is small and connected and everyone in it already is and there’s no reason to force your way in to make a point. They don’t care. The best way to go about it is to stay in your lane, make waves ripple outward from your center. Connect in an authentic way.

From this thought came the complexities of life itself. What is contained within a moment. Of everything, all the time. The biology of existence. The chemical make-up of it. The neurology. The combination of history and religion and science. Right now as I write this. There’s so much it could make your head spin just thinking about it. Mine did. It whirled around up there it a maddening way. And in it came some clarity about how maddening it all is, how we’re supposed act, how we’re supposed to just know how to treat each other and ourselves, how we’re expected to know our own boundaries and what that means, about Cancel Culture (the offended’s volatile reaction without grace), how everyone has to tip-toe around all the time out of fear for being ousted, omitted, erased. I thought about the A-symmetry of Pro Choice.

I thought about memory and the amygdala and I thought about the deep history of our evolution and the mind a thing evolving yet rooted by survival, that which underlines all action, all choice.

Everything layered to fit our scripts. A way to interact with the world. React to it. So much of what we do not know is innate. Habitual. Pervasive. Making the unknown the only constant. Imperfection Nature’s perfect prescription. You me us them we. Broken, bent and belligerent.

I expect this won’t go over well for some. And that’s the way it goes. Some things aren’t meant for everyone. Like Mooney.

Over the last few months I’ve been receiving many more of his unsolicited packages. No name. No return mailing address. Just my information scrawled in a haphazard scribbling of black sharpie on a brown box. The box itself looks to be made from a larger box cutdown and wrapped in an excess of packing tape. Inside each box is another book of the same sort as before. Each one growing in size according to its number. More pages added as the number climbs. So, too, do the words, accordingly. Number four is four inches by four inches with four pages and only uses four-lettered words. Five six seven eight made in the same manner. Nine and ten respectively. The concept continues through the work.

The books arrive with no instruction. No reason. Nothing but a mooneyism textured in a literary sort of way. I’ve given this collection the name Mooney’s 1-2-10!. Something I think he’d appreciate, all things considering. Maybe he doesn’t give a damn. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I like to think it does though. That something does. In this madness all I can do is maintain some semblance of self.

I am a fractured passenger acting according to his Nature.

That goes for you as well. And Mooney, too.