At various regrettable points in the timeline, reality is eaten in its entirely by unreality.

It is a temporary phenomenon (in much the same way that people themselves are), but its consequences are grim, and in most cases it cannot be avoided.

On manic brush,
the paint, the paint!
And then on grain and filament—
the sweaty arms, frenetic to create—
a stroke, a stroke, a stroke, a stroke!
Backing, backing
and the endless rush—
cover, cover, cover all!
Mania to fill the minutes,
labor’s pains to fill the hours,
the job thus smaller
and smaller again—
alabaster creeping thus—
into the cracks, the veins, the knots—
across the wooden universe!
Across every surface of the room—
a stroke, a stroke, a stroke, a stroke!
To what shocking end
has this sleight of fate
been conjured up here yet again—
feet caught at angles now acute,
and back against the dampened wall—
each drop a means, a craven tool
to cover every surface save—
the corner—
the corner!
Catastrophic, bare!
Its laughing amoral in the creeping dusk!

I am a compulsive reviser. A fan of perfection. I hate getting things “slightly wrong” when I feel, just a bit down the road, as if they could be better.

That’s bad.

One of the things I’m trying to learn in life is how to one-and-done. To do, then to accept that it is done, and move on, even if it could have been better. Everything does not have to be perfect. And trying to make everything perfect is a way of never letting anything be what it is.

It’s a way to drive yourself and everyone around you absolutely nuts.

Sometimes the perfect isn’t just “the enemy of the good,” it is in fact a roving predator that devours everything in its path. And what the perfect is really made of, of course, is fear.

There is nothing more beautiful than the halo of light cast on a dewey window in the middle of the night by a lone street lamp. The world is a kind of endless ecstatic vision, amazing and touching, if you open your eyes. Little things hold incredible beauty that can’t be captured in words or on film. They are the things that are the greatest loss when you die—you are no longer able to embrace the tiny miracles of physics and happenstance that speak to the gossamer, subterranean order of the universe.

Oh yes, order is beauty. It is the only beautiful thing. Happily, there is so much of it that if you learn to pay attention, you’ll never exhaust the little visions of beauty that multiply everywhere around you.