the habit of being

We look on them as animals in cages, but no, they are just part of the machine. The new motor parts float up above as skiers ready to jump off and fall. (They’d seek out only my skull as apposed to the endless concrete ground around us.) The molten aluminum pours, the red fire shows through the cracks, the robotic arm reaches around the corner. Count them off- one million dollars, two million dollars, three. Little chips of metal all over the ground. The noise. “It’s 110 degrees in here in the summer.” And they just stand there in their places like odd relations of the robots, wearing their regulation safety glasses and neon orange earplugs on a string. Do they even feel their arms moving after an hour or so?

I wonder if perhaps they feel like part of something larger than themselves. Maybe this is what it would take to make me fear a God, this reduction of Self into one minute process, one action. Over and over and over again. You aren’t needed for your intelligence or your strength or your drive or your heart. How humbling it must be. Are they pure? Is this start, attach, stop, send, start, attach akin to ceaseless prayer? Does the supposed effect come about from the intention of repetition or the repetition itself?

Once I told her I just couldn’t gasp the idea of sitting in a tree for years and years just to get into the Guinness Book of Records. I said maybe such things were justifiable if they were carried out for some great spiritual purpose, but no reason below that was worth the waste of life. And do you know what she said to me? She said that for those people getting into the Guinness Book of Records was a more spiritual thing than I could ever dream of experiencing. And I knew she was right.

Outside, cast-off earplugs speckle the ground like poppies.

. . .

I am beginning to show signs of getting-betterness, yet I still sound like an adolescent boy, and my eyebrows are still leaden on occasion. As the cavity tenses I’m reminded that this slime inside won’t just evaporate over night. I’m thinking it’ll take at least three more days for me to capture my heat of vaporization.