Did Lumpy Oatmeal Kill Shock G?

I'm no gastrointestinologist but I do have serious concerns about fluidity, viscosity, the gummier elements of one's morning fiber intake and the like. I'm just saying the science is still out.

I was listening to Too Short and watering the garden, going down the list of Oakland rappers and naturally Digital Underground came up. Lemon trees, avocados, cherry tomatoes on their vines drooping into a late summer jellylike goop, lavender, scrabbly succulents and every one of these plants needed someone to figure out how to cultivate it, to dance with it, to pass that knowledge onto the next gardener, and the next door neighbor whose name is something like Chucky or Bucky or Frank came out and we introduced ourselves and I said it’s my job to water things now, I’m living in this house for a few months while they’re in Italy and he says yeah that’s a lot of work, they’re very particular about these things and I say I don’t mind and he adjusts a ceramic statue of I’m not sure but might be the Virgin and he says okay take care let me know if you need anything and he disappears but I know he’s still back there somewhere, the way the light falls and the steep gradient these yards are on, it all takes some practice to know what you’re looking at. Add to that the street’s on an angle so even though the Bay is over that way West is actually that way, kinda, and I don’t know how to trap the cross breeze just yet on these hot September days we keep having. 

All of this is going on and in the meantime Too Short is going on about some insane shit happening in an imaginary club somewhere and I’m laughing out loud, maybe too loud, and I become self conscious about it and for the first time I’m relieved that the house on the other side of this one is abandoned, just sheets of wood and asbestos and rooms full of rats and ghosts and rat ghosts, but I’m not worried about what rat ghosts think of me so I don’t feel the need to cover up or to practice modesty in any severe sense, and that’s a kind of freedom you don’t always have when you live in cities. And what do I know of the customs around here anyway.

I’m at this coffee shop on MacArthur after walking under an overpass caked with pigeon shit and the noise from 580 and the horns of impatient drivers still in my head and ticking my blood pressure up and I ask another guy waiting if he’s a local and he says, sure, local enough, and I ask him if there’s a pedestrian bridge over the freeway nearby and he looks perplexed and he says there’s a dam that way and that way and over up there by what’s that college? Mills, I say, and he says yeah but that’s about it. Damn I say I wonder if I hallucinated that then I pick up my hot coffee I’d ordered iced and step out onto the sidewalk and look up the street and up there a few blocks ahead is the bridge I’m looking for.

These themes are universal. I’m not saying that’s what this is about but I think it’s worth asking questions. You have to think critically, y’know? Just because a flame burns your finger doesn’t mean the flame caused the pain. Some old British philosopher said that but I think he was mainly just trolling everyone. Like I used to have this bit when I worked in a bar where we’d set up an elaborate display of shot glasses with pint glasses over them and pose it like a brainteaser: without touching either glass how can you drink what’s inside them? It was always Malort too, to make it worse. There was no answer, at least not in a practical sense. Some of the servers and regulars would puzzle over this for days and come back with elaborate diagrams, whole notebooks and napkins filled with eldritch runes and badly remembered versions of the quadratic formula and finally I’d take pity on them and say, gently, it’s actually pretty simple. Then leave them to agonize over it for a few more hours. Finally at the end of the night when we were all crocked I’d make the big reveal: the answer is you have to change the laws of physics. The players rarely left satisfied.

Cause and effect and inference and how to manipulate the way we make patterns. This is important stuff. Probably the most important tool of our species. Predators need to be able to recognize regularities versus irregularities, migration paths, routines, in order to get their fill of protein so they can go back to being lazy until it’s time to hunt again. These instincts seem not to go away very easily, and they linger in our politics and our art and in the way we do business with each other. Whole factions of our civilization have rejected these instincts completely, dedicating themselves to harm reduction, all while the apex assholes try to convince the rest of us that it's noble and virtuous to have to scramble and stab your way to your supper.

I picked the remaining tomatoes, the ones that aren’t too goopy, and placed them in a bowl, pleased with the peaceful choices I’ve made versus the other ones. Fantasizing about order and regularity. And there’s this whole idea that to tie things together you have to come up with a clever callback and I’m just, I’m just not going to do that. Comedy is entropy.