What It Is and Isn't

It's all sorted, controlled.  It's all imagined, considered.  It's all straight lines.  Or circles or parabolas or something inside a box.  It's a level playing field, a work in progress, a labor of love, the bottom line, transparency.  It's hitting the ground running, biting the bullet, stepping up to the plate, ringing off the hook.  It's the one I want sent into outer space never to return:  location, location, location.  It's crisp and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.  It's colors that pop, the wow factor.  It's plasma TVs.  It flows when it's supposed to and it flows when it isn't supposed to.  It's harping on disaster, on feeling victimized.  It's something we've educated ourselves for and hash out in long phone conversations.  It's the conflict/resolution story-line built into our national DNA.  It's I win, you lose.  Or the other way around.  It's the vocabulary of battles, confrontations.  Battleground states.  Battling cancer.  And such programs as Yard Crashers, Baggage Battles, Design Wars, and When Vacations Attack.

What it isn't is putting my finger on a map and going there.  It isn't suddenly taking a taxi out to JFK and getting on the next plane, no matter where it goes.  It isn't taking the first five ingredients in the refrigerator and concocting a quiche.  It isn't getting up at 2 A.M. and walking beside the West River.  It isn't getting out my paints and slopping through a whole tablet of expensive French paper.  It isn't remembering everything I've ever learned or all the places I've ever been or all the people I've ever known.

Whatever it is, it can chip down imagination as if it were a piece of sculpture that begins with a quarried slab and ends up dust.  It's thinking that if I do such and such, I will achieve such and such.  Yet tipping it, I can see light angling off an edge.