A Panic Broadcast to Scarecrows

Don't make a drift decision. Make a conscious decision.

THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Levity of the mind is not a two way street. It’s replete with made up conspiracies, maxims, and mercenaries. The kind of mercenaries that wait for the bullet. The mind acts like cattle of the sun. It roams but never shows more than two degrees of anybody. The mind is like a snail who’s skidding out of control and laughing all the while. A joke with no punchline. A problem with no solution.

From inside a cardboard city, I neglect my perspective and digest a Venn diagram in the process of gerrymandering the essential functions of the job. We can’t do this retroactively, he says. His style is catch and release. Actual, factual, and very much terrestrial. It’s not my role to change your opinion, he continues. We’re surrounded by misbehaving minds and eternally youthful loaded numbers. Like spin doctors glued to images at the forefront who seek sex and sexualize seeking. Commercial interests drive what we see. And this idea we named life is nothing but an echo chamber; we hear what we want to hear.

A comedy of errors blow in the wind and my vision coughs. I sense the scarecrows around me fear crows. Their movements are lewd and depraved as if they were taken for wholesale. Using brail words, they ask me if history should be morally edifying. And with invective brush strokes, their straw hands paint corn rows on the cardboard closest to us. The members of a keystone species view their work and wonder if invalid minds still create valid experiences.

Revoke don’t blame, says the Venn diagram with eloquence. We’re selling stuff to ourselves. And it’s not your imagination that this stuff looks alike. It’s intentional. Lose your mind to find your life. See the human in everyone to see the human in yourself.

From somewhere in the back, a foreign concept culminates the idea of murder through its actions. The Venn diagram deviates from the path and falls to the ground. A scarecrow pronounces him dead for definitional purposes. The minds around me fish for words but the foreign concept sanitizes our thoughts. We became something we were never supposed to be, it says. Consume the love and love to consume.

I fall through the cracks and land in a whale carcass descending to the bottom of an ocean. Five pioneers of thought flick the digital dust off their bolo ties and sip on second-hand depression. I watch with curiosity as they interrogate a plant of old pedigree. Hooked up to a lie detector, the green alien claims to be obsessed with the unspecific. It shrugs off pictures of grandfather clocks and birds flipping coins. It yawns at pictures of cathedrals and coins flipping birds. The pioneers of thought reveal a picture with emotional significance and the plant’s mood changes. What does it really mean, it asks. We hit the ocean floor like a sentence shifting focus.

I meander through Hellenistic bristles in the whale’s mouth looking for depth and a full story. A zoonotic researcher pulls me out of the dead mammal bit by bit like I’m made of straw. She shields me from a school of news reporters whose scandalous rhetoric look like fins. I’m going beyond the call of duty to investigate whale flu, she explains to the flashes of aquatic cameras. When we see a pattern over and over again it starts to get woven into the fabric of our ideology. A wide swath of the group flounder questions toward her. Do you care? Are you aware? Do you mind? What are you hoping to find? I crawl through the lens of a camera and climb out of a television set somewhere in the backwaters of the cardboard city.

I’m supposed to remember that I’m supposed to forget. The Venn diagram was the excuse to pull the trigger but there’s more to focus on. Meanwhile, I’ll send best wishes your way. A scarecrow hands me a container of yogurt and offers some levity to my mind. What happened to those who conquered the known world, he says. I wait for a punchline that never comes.

WE NOW RETURN TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAM

© 2017 Gaston Villanueva

Author's Note

Starting from square one again but looking to improve.

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Featured Review

Rana

Gaston, that's a pensive swirl of messages with themes of mindful living, the prevalent easy surrender to exploitation, done in really splendid choice of words and analogies. Well, truth can have a shade of pessimism sometimes. I like the contrasting characters of the Venn diagram and the scarecrow, the 'actual-factual' vs the deceptive, and these lines:
"The Venn diagram deviates from the path and falls to the ground. A scare crow pronounces him dead for definitional purposes."
"We became something we were never supposed to be, it says."
The fall through the cracks, vistas of the pioneers with the sincere plant, the ocean floor encounters and escape, an amazing surreal experience it was, this visit to the cardboard city of interesting peculiar citizens. :)