How do you do it, Mister Millipede? Right legs, then left? One at a time? No need to bother, just a simple question, really. Pure curiosity.

It's the underside of things. Rocks are watching from the inside out, a million eyes blink open when we turn our backs for an instant, waiting for us to make sense, waiting for the explanations we speak aloud to ourselves. The inanimate world cares about all our goings-on; it just lacks the means to let us know. Or to intervene.

Everything that has been done has been done for a reason, however much one stares slantwise at those reasons in the rear-view mirror. Those attitudes, those platitudes, they're so last month, honestly. What were you thinking. You were thinking, weren't you?

Conversations converge to a point, modalities fluctuate and give up the ghost, Spirit runs amok in the world and forgets itself. Tomorrow we'll go outside and dig out the pumpkins and try to remember the meanings of the carvings in their sides. The atmosphere is thickening, memory is hardening into history.

I have meant it all, every word of it, put my words in front of me and I'll sign the confession, see, yes, I deny nothing, nothing. Truth is a matter of convergence in the limit, and like the microscopic demon I must sometimes take action and sometimes fall silent. When the prevailing winds are blowing from cold to hot, this is the time to listen, to pay attention, something strange is happening, and it would be wisest not to interfere. Whereof you know not, speak not neither.

Bouncing off zero and and going up for the rebound, laying down plans to puzzle things out, stepping silently into parallel universes, leaving my mark like a posthorn. Things are surfacing, you can see the tip of the fin now, and here comes the shark it carries with it. Countdown commencing, prepare for igniton.

Heave. Ho. Heave. Ho. Heave. Ho. Three down, arbitrarily many to go. This is the time to be digging the burrow and hiding away acorns. Dig in, and look away.

Where are the reinforcements?

No, no. We're the reinforcements.

It's a symbol. Not a symbol of anything in particular. Just a symbol. It doesn't have to mean something to be beautiful.

It's the climax, and everything's coming apart. The Knife is kneeling, arched back in front of the monitor, he's shaking as he picks and slides his six-string towards some fatal feedback overload; his partner-in-arms is windmilling, crashing harder and harder into each power chord, his face clenched and torn. Hungry Tom has pounced on the mike, his voice is in fragments now, tiny shards of scat being blown apart by terrifying crow-calls. Nobody's watching Muskrat with all the goings on downstage, but his kit is literally disintegrating, one of the cymbals has broken apart, they're not supposed to do that, the low tom is starting to go shapeless and crack up, he's reaching further and further with every stroke as the kit tears loose from its moorings and falls away from him. Only Sliver's still in control, he's looking demonic, perfectly calm, down by steps and thirds, and then that terror-inducing half-chromatic climb back to G, seven minutes ago it was a nervous tic, an unsettling instability, but now that broken bass line is all that stands between them and the abyss, it's broken but they're broken too, everything's broken, the song shudders with the force of that ascent every eighth bar, more painfully each time. You can't hear a thing, but maybe you could hear a pin drop, because everything in between is gone, washed over the edge.

Rock on.