A brief history of dissipation.

Wherever one may find discontent, confusion, bile..... or conversely, where one may find contentment and ease, one might brook to say to himself that he has found something of the human spirit, something of the thing which makes one like Mike, in fact, Mike.

At the edge of the light, in the midst of cool darkness or even in the grice of the very swelter, there might be, as long as one is conscious of it, that is, that it very well is, and in being, conscious of surroundings and things, and yet another entire world in mind that looks oddly, unsettling so, similar to our own, that into which we were born and someday kaput, beneath the Holy firmament, and all.

Six starving women had a wager, amongst themselves, something to keep their minds occupied, that they would, some of them, at least, survive the winter season, and it was something that gave them an unction to awaken in the morning, see who had died during the night, who was left, alternating blessings and curses and so forth, the impetus towards immolation and all that, the taking of various sins and misgivings of others upon oneself.

Fighting amongst themselves for Hunt Brothers' Pizza and stuff, and going to sleep with the newspaper as a blanket, their stockings still on, for warmth, of course, and holding to that very thing, in their minds, that essence of life, like some kind of icicle that they had pulled from some cavern, the very monk cell of their inner-being, hanging onto that sickle as if it were the very thing that proved, a pookah, a totem, an idol, maybe.

Unto the practice of virtue, why, their was only marking time between dissipations and various bathroom functions, and it was something of a thing, any of that, and the tunnel vision of time beginning, at the edge of consciousness to take a blurry patter of a kind of most distinct indistinct marking of the thing, cases held open and people held in abeyance continually as if life itself were an indistinct, unmarked sort of thing, like an interstate highway without mile markers, an ice cream sandwich without the little holes in the cookie breading and stuff.

A stick, dangling in the air from the hand of an old-timer.  We cannot mark the beginning or end of the stick, neither end as it were, as if those would form the curly brackets of a set, because its that distinctly indistinct thing that blurs somewhere in between time and perception, therefore having neither a particular beginning or end, but may have perceptible points in betwixt and between, and time itself, and to an extent perception, nested sets, infinities being larger or smaller than other imaginary unimaginable expanses of infinity.

And the old timer, indolently, drowsily, whittling on the stick.