imagine Velcro

Lack of imagination. That's it. That's why I feel so hollow inside, said Velcro Joe to himself.

He leaned against the back of a tiny red plastic chair and his hands rested on a yellow metal table. The paint on the table gleamed under the colored bulbs above his head except for several small, dark craters that pockmarked the surface.

Joe 's eyes gradually settled upon these marks. He wondered how they got there. Did somebody scratch them out or did the paint just peel off on it's own?. He couldn't tell.

They appeared in different shapes and sizes. He saw near-perfect circles. A bunch of criss-crossing vertical lines that resembled a stack of firewood. Another reminded him of a key shaped like a distended phallus. Blobs of exposed metal, in varying stages of corrosion, melded at places to form ghostly, bulbous shadows, penumbras and all. Eerie fossils of buried figurines, he imagined, as if the metal had swallowed them up.

He lifted his head and looked around. He noticed more colored bulbs in the distance, almost a dozen - these were bigger and flashing red, green and yellow. Alternating in time and space, they were arranged in rows along the perpendicular sides of a thick, wooden signboard with metal plates that read Hotel Reno.

Right below the dancing lights stood a scaffolding with several steps, one that could easily double as seating for an audience of around a dozen people.

"Perhaps they're renovating the old motel. It does look a little scruffy from the outside", he thought to himself although he had found it a little odd at first glance.

Then he paused again. "But why such an elaborate structure?".

The more he surveyed the framework, the more it looked like empty seating for an invisible ampitheatre than a workman's pulpit.

"A stage for ghosts", he whispered. "A new show for those weary souls every night. They might like to perform under strobe lights. Perhaps it's a transcendent ritual of some kind to access the forbidden, other world. Or a longing for the crazy nights of their youth with all the fervor of the undead."

"What if the stroboscopic phenomenon had a parallel in the spirit world -- it made you the invisible visible, just as it quantizes the appearance of motion in the living". Joe smiled at quantize - it had an other-wordly ring to it.

Joe's mind was racing by now.

In any case, he had never quite figured out why they called him Velcro Joe. He knew he never stuck to any one place or object or thing. In fact he never ever stuck to anything his entire life. He had always skimmed, floated above the surface of things, looking down at humanity aloft his perch - happy to survey entire civilizations in grand philosophical sweeps.

As further back as he could remember, he had had this implausible urge to distill all his earthly observations into a set of rarefied, mathematical truths, which he imagined could then be applied ab initio to comprehend, predict and maybe, in the sublime light of understanding, even savour all the messiness and crudeness of our world. All through a sequence of forward inductions and backward deductions.

One wouldn't have to remember banal, redundant facts or myopic theories or work at honing his skills in a particular vocation -- the magic key would throw open all doors - every hitherto abstruse nuance would reveal itself in flashes of insight in a single instant via this barely tread pathway.

Not that he was lazy, but this would be the only way that he could hope to live all those imagined lives in one lifetime. The secret sauce of Reality.

"Imagine, Joe. Why Velcro?" the question came back to bother him. "You're not stupid. Insouciant maybe. Not obsessive. Not anything like velcro".

Curious, he didn't know why and he couldn't have asked them why. He was afraid.

Before long, he was tapping his feet to a furious beat. However, his mind was at relative calm, casually flipping long-abandoned caches among it's overgrown foliage, faint but alive to the diffuse spotlight that swept across. There was something poignant about these quaint fragments from the burdensome tomes of his life's learning.

"Velour and crochet. Velvet hooks. Soft loops and stiff hooks". He had looked up the origin of the word in an encyclopedia once. He had found the story of the Swiss engineer and his dog amusing. Now the word serendipity blinked across his mind's eye.

He closed his eyes. Soft loops of the ethereal imagination. Stiff hooks of physical reality. Nah, that sounded ridiculous. Something didn't hold.

Hold!! That was it! It held. Ensnared the soft, free, flowing loops of the mind's imagination with the harsh, rigid hooks of physical existence.

Madness lay in breaking loose when you pulled it askew. Tore the fabric apart. But it held tenuously if the force was applied parallel to the plane of the bonds. Bent. Flexed. Wrapped around. Tense but it held fast.

Burr flashed now.