The Watchmaker’s Code

Them all be askin' thet ol' question, "Wut 'n tarnation's agoin' on heah?" Maybe you do it with a Southern type of phrasing or mebe ya don't. It's all in the colah, the scheme o' things.

So now I'm sittin' heah, tryin' ta think of some sort of feelin' I might be having. Maybe I'm having feelings. I get those sometimes. This is the sturdy talkin' of reglar folk, some a 'em my own kin. Now, there is a certain feeling that sometimes comes up in a sort of surprise attack, a kablewie of a kablam, more like a focus or a lexicon than the sun. Ya see, it wants to be known, but like how ya sometimes see that somethin' out the corner o' yer eye, but then ya go n look an there ain't nothin' there but the same thing in the corner o' yer eye but just in a different place? Ya never can seem to quite git up on what that somethin' is cuz ya can't just look at it, ya know. So anyway, that's kinda like what the feelin' I been tryin' to get at is. It's a lot like that and then it's also not anything like it. It's both. Or neither, but it is something or it must be or I wouldn't know anything about it, I could just switch tense and voicing to well darn nigh any ol' thang now cou'n't I? Yes I could! Yes I could! (in the interest of my reader, I would like to add this stage direction: this last should be enthusiastically rendered in the speaker's finest, most ridiculous baby/puppy voice)

Ok, now that I've got you this far, I would like to insert the secret part of the test, in which, instead of just providing the testing free of charge yet in the guise of nonsense, I will now begin to extract my toll from you in the form of tedium of message. That is, I would like to be revealing an important secret and therefore, I am, in fact, doing so, but I don't really believe I'm doing it, thereby negating the service in the usual cloud of doubt seasoned with regret for learning to ever read, so it would seem to be another scoreless inning. The pitching was great, but all you can say to the casual hearker on the corner is the score, which at this point, is still nil/nil, but there is some hope still in the upper bleachers where they have been drinking for six innings now and are liking the prospects of the home team despite the futility of the batsmen. You know the game is not going to end in a tie. You know there is no writing without a message. You know that there are always pieces of the author and the reader mingling in a rare space called "this moment" and that if you could just go back to when you had the answer but before you decided again to forget because it was raining ever so hard and then theah was this great roarin' of the hailstones strikin' the roof n everthing n it was so loud and it was like there was this opening, an apology from the sky which had been trying all day to reach me while I was so tumbling along in the great cloud and racket, the leaving and the coming and the feeling, the one I was just talking about, it just takes me. It just takes me and I go. And I have all the other feelings, but the one I can't seem to know other than around it or by the named feeling's edges as a description of where they are superseded by the unnamed one. It's a lot like everything, maybe it is. I want to feel it more than the others. It's love but it's way more and it's hate but it's way different, it's fear but it's a part of the whole like ice and it's empathy without knowing anything at all. There you go, rascal, horsethief, there you go off across the landscape of my sight to the nether reaches of the far corner where the red lives in its great Jupiter's eye that you know is there but can't see without science and technology and a few courses in basic operation of the human condition (site TBD). My mind wants to know why it can't know you. My stomach just keeps laughing.