I wandered the forgotten
corners of foreclosed yards, where
rabbit pellets whiten in the sun, and I saw a vision of these things:
The
formal names of every individual crack in every for-lease parking lot, named as lovingly
and thoughtfully as a mother naming her own precious children.
Book
length descriptions of every telephone pole. Poles that tower unnoticed along squalid strip-malls and stand unappreciated along crowded, fume-spewing highways.
The
forgotten inhabitants of abandoned Burger King Parking Lots - each parking lot weed, indexed and
numbered and registered in the timeless database of unimportant things.
Alas! The
cast off ends of zip ties languishing unclaimed in the dusty gravel of convenience store construction sites. No more! Each zip tie is
unique, and each has a name and history, written in marble, illuminated at all
times, and revered as heroes by all!
A map of every track of every wheel of every absconded shopping cart. Records of the tracks in the dirt at the crumbled ends of sidewalks in dilapidated, half empty commercial districts. The details of the voyages of every cart that ever buoyed
the worldly goods in plastic bags belonging to homeless, mumbling men. The maps, detailed inventories of those belongings, and biographies of the men who pushed those shopping carts are stamped into plates of gold and launched into space to represent mankind.
A
caligraphy scroll of the lost forgotten thoughts of slack-jawed, Kool-Aid
stained children with plastic toy guns before the time of the Internet. The
thoughts they had when they had thousand-mile stares with visions of
half-imagined, unseen, unnamed idealized cities. All dreamt while standing
motionless at the end of driveways on summer afternoons.
The
indexed surnames of every individual pine needle from every discarded Christmas
tree in 1972. Where is that list? Does it exist? It does now.
A ledger of the exact
moment of the fifteenth rotation of every tricycle wheel in Bangladesh.
A coffee
table book of every piece of school kid's artwork ever created, one picture per page, and the name
and weight of every hand silhouette turkey ever made.
Every
stick that was ever an imaginary weapon in the mind of a child at play (playing cops-n-robbers or playing WAR), displayed in a
museum. A separate, full length motion picture (directed by Ken Burns and narrated by Morgan Freeman) about every pretend
battle each stick was involved in, and a three volume hardback compendium about
all the pretend wars and battles. A museum dedicated to these sticks, and a separate room in that museum dedicated exclusively to each stick and an
artist's rendition (acrylic on canvas) of what the weapon looked like in the child's mind.
The tenth text sent on every Tuesday in Taiwan, each carved into an individual marble monolith planted twenty feet deep beneath the dark side of the surface of the moon.
The first, middle and last name of every blade of fescue grass that has ever existed, their dates of birth/death, their political leanings, a brief biography and a photo, and a serialized commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint for each one.
The secret dream of every hog slaughtered for its meat throughout all of history. An oil painting of each dream on a 72" x 24" canvas. The individual name of each bristle of each brush used to paint those pictures. A play by play description of every brushstroke, given by Joe Buck and Bob Costas, at the renovated Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, where all of the homeless men from East St. Louise (1963-1992) will paint those pictures before a packed crowd of delirious spectators, and each artist is paid one-million one dollar bills for their troubles.
The serial numbers of each of the dollars mentioned above, in numerical order, each written in Roman Numerals on a single grain of rice.
