Not ElderGroot

Figure 1. Blend #21. For the others in the Stay-At-Home Pandemic Bestiary, check out http://www.earthwidemoth.com/blog/gallery/.

Age unknown. Sitting in a chair and thinking wooden thoughts. This, another in the bestiary, Blend #21.

Thinking, for example, about why should Saturday of Memorial Day weekend include a haggling phone call about writing program textbooks. Writing program thinking.

Thinking about how grieving nearly 100,000 COVID-19 fatalities is a big part of the grief–abstract and weighty–but then too there is the grieving in witnessing unimaginable callousness, an audacious and raging (and fear-driven) defiance of basic human consideration, such that social distancing can transform once-meaningful, once-recognizable designations like “uncle” or “brother” and turn them inside out, unrecognizable in values distortions. Some kind of loss is this. Some kind. What kind thinking.

Thinking chocolate is a fine treat. And spicy chocolate, finer. Chocolate thinking.

Thinking about planting more lavender tomorrow. Only, will it take and will it hold or is the soil not sandy enough, is it too dense and wet, maybe. Reverdier thinking.

Thinking about the message on the Everything Blacksburg Facebook Group, about the warning of embankment crumble near Narrows, Va., and about how US-460, eastbound, essential to the Ypsilanti-to-Blacksburg return route, may be temporarily closed. Erosion thinking. Blocked route thinking.

Thinking about deixis and the sly capacities of “temporarily.” Temporal thinking.

Thinking about how licorice spice tea becomes even more comforting, year by year, somehow. Anise thinking.

Again to imagefigure, thinking “I am not Groot. I am not Groot not at all.” Guardians of the Galaxy counter-thinking.

Thinking what kind of mandala, or is it a coronavirus model, lurks outside the window like that? Thinking, too, about Billy, the neighbor kid who in Parkville, Mo., at that townhouse we rented, used to peek into the basement window where Ph. and I were in a large, empty room, playing sockball soccer, full speed into sideways-tipped laundry basket goals, about how that had to’ve been 1999. Windowpeeper thinking.

Thinking planned and scheduled obsolescence is only getting tiresomer. Hear me, Apple. iPhone update fatigue thinking.