Athenian Fish Stories

THE BIG ONES are always hard to land. But IF you’ve got the monads to try, sometimes…

Like the other night, my mind was sailing in choppy waters, and I hooked a giant involuted paradox that hauled me out into the middle of the mother of all brainstorms. As I grappled with a spatial numerical association of response codes, the real, live metaphor opened its mouth and started to swallow the bow. The stern heaved and the poop deck dropped out from under me.

I was being tossed about like a ragdoll and strained to hang on, trying desperately to invert and negate the behemoth’s tale. It was swallowing more and more of the ship and even began guzzling down its own tail. Struggling against the inevitable, composure fraying, my courage crumpling, terrified and screaming obscenities into the wind, I watched with bleary vison as one by one all my dearest were being drawn into its gapping maw. And now, in slow motion, I too was being forcefully inducted along with all
the rest! Hoping without reason, I jumped.

I splashed down in cold, dark waters and bobbed to the surface gasping and choking. Thrashing about to stay afloat, a colossal, rolling swell raised me up and up, higher, and higher. At the peak of the crest, and for the briefest of moments, in a strobe of lightning flashes, I saw the creature complete: a fierce-eyed, hyper-dimensional, scaly-skinned,
kraken of a self-swallowing beast.

THEN, (and this is the only way I can think to describe it) “I thought I saw an argument that proved I was the Pope.” Before I could look again, it winked out of existence. The emptiness created by the vanishing sucked in all my thoughts. Everything collapsed into that singularity, rebounding in a super-sonic tsunami that blew away all context and left me staring with my eyes closed, thinking of nothing. I floated out the night in that deep, silent, indigo sea of my ajna chakra.

When I woke in the morning, I wrote these lines,

Life is:
the dark nights and the storms that take you under…
…a wave that washes you ashore.