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An Elevator Door Opens


by John Olson


An elevator door opens. Out steps an abstraction dressed in handsprings. What this means is sensation, keen sensation, exquisite sensation, the language of fish and chips and dreams trickling puddles of reflection on Sunday mornings. The delicate noises of Cézanne's marvelous life.

Please somebody help me. I'm drowning in ovations. Or are they evasions? What I meant to say is that the salt in a Martian's ear is inherently lyrical. But I don't think you need me to tell you that. What was it you needed me for? Would you like me to tell you about pain? Pain is an indecent confusion that apparels us in lightning in the ancient gardens of the mind.

What a strange smell. Is that you? When one's nerves are birds the world begins spinning. And smelling. You know that smell when you open a can of tuna? That's the smell. It reminds me of fish and death and the merciless ambling of a black conviction spread by the paragraph of a dark, slow voice producing cleavage and oysters in a cocktail lounge somewhere in Alabama.

What's your favorite emotion? Mine is ripping the sky apart and standing on a star outside of time.

It is the job of the house to mingle itself with cracks.

My understanding of Seattle has expanded to include Tangiers. This makes everything vertiginous and wide. I've never been overly fond of horizontality. There are horses in me that want the wide open spaces of a piece of paper. Anguish is just the flip side of oblivion. There's a certain ooze that confirms this, and a stranger arriving in town whose eyes are evocations of pink. With a little spit and varnish he can be made to look like anybody, even Carl Sandburg.

It is the destiny of puppets to dangle from strings and climax in diphthongs. This is how I managed to arrive in Cincinnati just in time to rupture a scruple. I got tangled in my strings but when I discovered autonomy available in the G minor of a violin sonata by Franz Schubert I took full advantage and tripped lightly into an elevator that took me all the way to Point Hope, Alaska.

If all else fails, you can always rely on circumlocution. Some people call it bullshit. Me, I like to think of it as a random migration of thought trembling under a vast spectrum of improbability.

This is where the adjectives come in: gluttonous, exquisite, revitalizing, ebullient, jovial, carefree, playful, buoyant, and drastic. Everything The House of Destiny should be: open, aberrant, original, eccentric, bottomless, topless, immeasurable, peculiar, and odd.

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