it was a howling success from their point of view and one of them is going to write it up for a doctor magazine

 

from a musty binder labeled “things he thought about in the shower on weird sundays”

In elementary school there were two basic things that you did with paperwork

first one was to sign your name

second one was to read the instructions

sometimes the instructions included a reminder about the first thing

these were talking points for teachers, to remember the two things

and also just like bedrock cultural values for a society

largely communicated through paperwork

or paperwork equivalents

like talking or movies

at the time(s) and for quite a while after

i was nearly vain re my fluency with these commands

just not fucking up was a skill

but somewhere along this celestial railroad

i started to hover slightly above comprehension

studies show

we read shapes or zoom to guesswork in understanding

blahblah satisfying science that explains the human condition

i’m doing it right now

the instructions get more complicated they get whorled into a dough

then it gets baked and eaten

and digested and crapped

and scattered and clouded

trying to blame the world for my problem here again

anyway what my original starting point

in the shower today

was that i forgot to read instructions because they became invisible

and i am medium sure that was what was supposed to happen