Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

I have no idea what this is. I found it when I was going through the notebooks, throwing out pages, and decided it was worth scanning.

Today I was trying to imagine some sort of use for him.

Him. See? Already I’m attached.

I was thinking it might be some way of choosing something, if each stalk’s end were a menu option.

Or something.

I also want to give the bottom cube a bunch of legs so that it runs around.

But that’s the problem with my Flash ideas, I always want to give each object a bunch of legs so that it can run around.

Birds in the snow: a trail of pepper.

Uncle Stephen stayed home on Sunday mornings.

I would go to church with grandmother, and Uncle Stephen and grandfather would lie on the couch and read the Sunday paper.

And watch whatever sports grandfather’s giant satellite dish could pull in from somewhere in the world.

This was when grandmother was when our church was reached by driving down the gravel roads deep into the Mississippi woods, the orange dust bursting up behind us and the gravel spattering the underside of the car.

“How come Uncle Stephen gets to stay home?”

Grandmother gripped the steering wheel and said, “Stephen has his own way with God.”

I looked out the window of the car and there was my favorite house.

A pile of mismatched boards and tar paper and car parts and a car with its hood up and a tree growing where the engine used to be.

We didn’t have any air conditioning and the shadows beneath the Kudzu seemed like a place I could hide for a very long time.

“When Stephen was your age,” grandmother said, “on a summer day like this, we were walking out of the church and he looked at the shade under the trees and do you know what he said?”

I did.

Every story we told until each was as dry as the roads.

“No.” I said. After my favorite house, there was nothing to see except the humped shapes of Kudzu and I always hoped that when we got to the church it would be covered and lost beneath the vines, but it never was.

“Stephen looked at the shade from the trees God put on this Earth and said, ‘It’s a good thing God gave us trees that make leaves in the summer when it’s hot, when we need the cool, and not in the winter, when we’d all freeze in the shade.’”

I nodded.

“When you can understand God like that, you can stay home too.”

The church, its white siding misted with the dust of the road, appeared around the curve of the road.

Other cars pulled up.

The families spilled out.

In case you don’t use a Combine in your daily work:

A Combine cuts and threshes a crop, all in one go.

A combination of functions, if you will. The peeling green of this one means it was a John Deere, and it ran on propane.

With this, my grandfather harvested soybeans, and perhaps other crops.

After it was put to pasture, when I was in the first grade or thereabouts, it became my spaceship.

In the summertimes it was dangerous because of the wasp nests, but there were so many gears and levers to pull.

Irrestible.

Somewhere I have a black and white photograph of its control panel.

Back when we still used it, grandfather let me steer the Combine, while I sat on his lap or stood on the metal platform that was the cab.

Combines are very large machines, and farm machinery has very responsive controls, you don’t want to be muscling the steering of your tractor all day, so even a four-year-old could turn the wheel.

It was in this machine that I played in the giant hopper of the Combine when it was filled with soybeans.

A Vegan version of the netted plastic ball playgrounds at fast food restaurants and dingy gaming pizza parlors.

Here is a link to Mitchell’s .org page of art and such.

Here is a link to Mitchell’s mySpace musical world.