We the people

...A dispatch from bewilderness

I liked to be invisible. I needed to be invisible much of the time. That can be called being a ghost, and for a long time, I was a freelance ghost. And then? I was a former freelance ghost.

Before the truck, I was an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of freelance writer. Morocco, mascara, Martha Stewart, Al Capone, mascarpone. After the truck, I wasn’t a writer. I couldn’t write. Now? I’m an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink kind of writer again, but it’s not the same “everything” or the same “kitchen” sink and I’m not the same writer with the same brain.

My mind moves around a lot. For example, from mascarpone to the scene where the Lion and Dorothy fall asleep in the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. It took two hours a day to apply the Lion’s makeup so he had to sip lunch through a straw.

There was also his tail. It was wagged back and forth by a stagehand with a fishing rod who was positioned above him. When film was digitized, the ruby red slippers became a ruby-er red and the Emerald City became way more emerald.

Then I think of the Declaration of Independence. Or a variation, which goes like this. We the People. We the people are suffering cognitive whiplash. Everything’s too fast, too vast, heightened. Scary, thorny, knotty, nuts. Like things we do are lifeboats or tugboats or life preservers. Intimations, inflammations, injections of fear or hope.