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MID-LATITUDE DEPRESSIONS
BY BRYSON NEWHART
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To move a mountain, you might punch it. Or try to get a friend to help, telling him to call the shots. You might convince it that the two of you grew up together. Read its palm and call it a bastard. Throw water balloons at it.

Once I altered a man's life script and sent him into a deep shame spiral. I wanted to experience enchantment, a fantastic sense of change in the air. Every sign was present and accounted for. Nature's goodness to a fucking tee. It was a revolution in something unthinkable.

I got into a wrestling match with someone that I didn't feel like looking at, but was happy to slam into the ground and bury deeper. Underground I saw us flying through the caves on a snowmobile. Both of us had high fevers, so it didn't sound too insane.

When a warm one of these approaches a cold one, and creates an occluded one, expect cloudy days. Your watery grin might defy the earth. Watch as pure guilt pours out.

Beneath the bridge, water, and possibly some cars on another bridge spanning a lake of suns, and the buildings that blink on and off as the people come and go between them, dragging their lives like scarves, flapping through the air like scarves.

What is important about moving and motion, and people moving and in motion, is the sound that they make. Imagine an auditory standoff. You are this little guy running around, and someone is looking at you, and your friend is trying to shoot at you, and the weather shoots in from the side, blowing you away with its breath.

Two girls talking. "It is cute the way he always falls down. We found him asleep in a corner. Last night he came to watch TV with us. He repeated every line that was said."

The sound of exhaustion from brakes. Killing motion and the things that emote. To be good at humiliation.

For a while I was into noises shortly followed by a moment of deafness. I pushed through crowds and read lips. In an effort to live large, and become fat, as in more worthwhile, I took to eating. If you offered me food I would eat it.

On nice days I would find myself running down the street with cold urine dripping down my leg. I collected fans in the summer, which served as pets. They had a whisper mode and an adjustable tilt. They would oscillate. I kept them in a cage and would transport them to a party.

On the fall of an afternoon, windows give birth to interiors. A girl on a bike rides high into the leaves. In a display window, two men in leather jackets with pumpkins for heads, hands tucked into their pockets. Around the corner, the miniature plastic men in hardhats. A wall composed of interlocking hands. "Men working" says a sign.

At intervals along a track, a woman skirrs in pursuit of an exit. A breeze when the train arrives. A suffering need to say something that you can't make out because it's still too dark to breathe the vapors.

You may do this. Choose a small town anywhere, a place you have never been. This is your target town. Go there during holidays and try to look expectant on the platform. Watch as the train rolls out.

In the end we designed a test, a really graceful test, a real sweet read. And we said: why let it stand in the way of improving your child's face?

We had a partnership of shapes, she and I. She rounded out the circles. I snoozed. We triangulated the edges of squares.

Because emergency rooms are turning away the ambulances, you may need to imply some urgency. Exhibit stress and apply your critical skills. Personally I am willing to cut off my toes and keep them on ice. Last week I was hemorrhaging for several hours on the telephone. The choke point came when I realized that I wasn't even talking.

Instead of sleeping in the fireplace, we set the whole house on fire, drifting to the clouds in a smoke screen.

Americans safeguard their children with waffles. They've been doing it for one hundred years. Each morning they leave in a snowstorm. They return with fresh waffles.

With the Neptune stain brain and its fuzzy-logic adjustment, its out-of-balance control, it's like the dirt never happened. It might help to talk about your body and its manifold cuteness. Your hands were like birds, so you flapped them. I asked you to make a nest.

These days you cannot always get what you want seeking out a river of ideas, the mouth of which may or may not drain backwards, tributarily, into birth pools that spill, never getting started, in plashes upon your needs.

Once a woman threatened to bludgeon me with a flexible affordable way to have a future filled with fondness and cash. I allowed her to break my arms as I waved them about in the dark. I pretended to shake out a blanket.

To proceed along the drift of some forgotten sunless place in which kettledrums scratch up a rhythm, imagine columns of smoke and bereavement as I emerge in my insomnia suit; as I sit upon my wooden highchair, singing about the clocks. "The time has come!" I sing. In the shadows is a giant ape whose sensibilities are easily offended by buttery splinters of sound. On his face, an expression of contentment.

It used to be that I could easily coax all the pasta into the pot by prodding it with a wooden spoon; nowadays the pieces jump out, begging for further attention. It's half baked before I get it in the boil.

In conclusion, why can't it sometimes be about the shopping mall and the things that they sell there, the small plastic Statues of Liberty that they sell there? Because I might woof one into my stomach? That is just what level I will stoop to? All this is already forgotten.

[Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/midlatitude.html

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LET IT BE WIDELY KNOWN THAT

a lovely young site called reinventingtheworld.com
recently posted a story entitled the handshake
by the eyeshot editor & on that same site,
there are two stories by today's
contributor Bryson Newhart:
one here & one there