Michael Scott Hand

Category: Mondays

• 23112020

  Posted at 7:41 am by Michael, on November 23, 2020

  It’s all about perspective.

  Consider: a cookie jar left unattended on top of a bench. A stool is dragged over. A small figure climbs atop it and reaches for the jar. They grapple with the lid, they open the lid, they steal a cookie.

  Hurrah for the child who stole the cookie, we might say. Hurrah.

  But to the parent who enters the room to behold their eldest teetering precipitously on the edge of a stool and reaching for a cookie–a cookie–the situation may appear different.

  It’s all about perspective.

  Snatch the cookie and run, little one. And of course that’s what happens. Dextrous as a monkey the child steals the cookie, leaps away before the stool falls and scampers away from the yelling parent.

  Hurrah, we say. Hurrah. Nobody was hurt and a cookie was obtained.

  But what if the cookie jar had fallen? Shattered glass and crumbled biscuits. Now there is no cookies for anyone.

  It’s all about perspective.

  What if the child had fallen? A sob, an embrace a lesson learned?

  What if the child had fallen badly? A young bone snaps. The parent does not just see it happen but they hear it. Now we’re in a horror. The parent bundles up the wailing child and takes them to the hospital; the cookie jar is forgotten.

  It’s all about perspective.

  When the child who stole the cookie sits outside to eat it and sneers at the kid next door who doesn’t get to eat cookies much. Villain! We cry. Oh, villainous child.

  But what if the cookie was shared? Broken into two at least roughly equal pieces and eaten together in secret? What a bond these children have, we’d say. What purity of spirit.

  It’s all about perspective.

  An ant navigates a maze of broken glass and cookie crumbs; a parent enters into a room; a kitchen stool teeters against gravity, frozen suddenly in time and used as an example in a physics textbook.

  The students mull it over: how heavy is the child? How heavy is the stool? What level of surface tension does the linoleum provide? The cookie jar is forgotten. The cookie jar is not important. Is the cookie jar important?

  It’s all about perspective.

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• 16112020

  Posted at 8:37 am by Michael, on November 16, 2020

  He seeks allegory in every twisting shape and form. A ballerina becomes a tightrope walker; a tightrope walker becomes a dark silhouette against the circus lights; a dark silhouette becomes a gigantic shadow on the wall of the circus tent.

  He can smell popcorn and sawdust and melting ice-cream. He can smell manure. He can smell the terror that the crowd feels as they watch the ballerina on the rope: will she fall?

  Terror and popcorn and melted ice-cream and a net that doesn’t look strong enough to catch a person but probably is. Probably.

  Steadily she crosses, her sequins sparkle. She is hope and she is finely balanced on a rope stretched taught. And the crowd below eat popcorn. They eat popcorn and hope she doesn’t fall. Maybe, somewhere in the crowd, there is a person who hopes that she does.

  One foot slips off the string and it vibrates. The tent gasps, collectively. A kernel of popcorn gets stuck in somebody’s throat.

  Heimlich, Heimlich. The popcorn is dislodged and the ballerina does not fall. Perhaps, we ponder, it was all part of the show. She smiles and the entire crowd can see it. They smile back because she is safe.

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• 09112020

  Posted at 10:04 am by Michael, on November 9, 2020

  A coin on one side has a picture of a King.

  A coin on one side has a picture of a Beast.

  A coin when flipped might show either side: man or beast or beast or man.

  Given time, that great mill wheel that grinds all to grain, a beast may evolve into a man. Meanwhile, a man who turns away from the Irrefutable Cascade may devolve into a beast.

  Beast or man? Man or beast? Perhaps they are not so different and yet–they are different enough.

  A coin when flipped enough times might land on its edge, but this is highly unlikely because of angular momentum. A coin when flipped enough times might fall through the earth; yet this is even less likely.

  A coin when flipped enough times is still a coin. A coin is a currency. Currency might buy a bag of grain crushed by a mill wheel. We do not see it then: man-or-beast. We see only the grain. We bake bread. We break bread.

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• 02112020

  Posted at 8:21 am by Michael, on November 2, 2020

  Examine this clock: lovingly crafted by an expert clock-maker. A finely tuned system of cogs and weights, ornate hands and numbers and polished glossy wood and shining glass.

  The pendulum rocks back and forth, assuming a perfect harmony, marking time with each swing. The clock goes tick; the clock goes tock; imagine the clock. Imagine the clock.

  The hands tell time, but not only time–for each number corresponds with not only a moment, but a feeling. Time to wake up; morning time; time to go to work; time to water the garden; time to sleep; midnight.

  Every number tells a story as every hour passes. Tick tock. Tick tock.

  Imagine the clock.

  When did that hour pass so quickly? When did 1 become 2 become 3? What is 3 o’clock? What is 4 o’clock? A 5 o’clock shadow falls upon the clock’s face.

  And the pendulum, swinging behind a polished window of glass, back and forth in hypnotic motion, rising and falling like Sisyphus, like Atlas, it bears the world upon itself, all time is contingent on its motion.

  From left to right it swings, from right to left. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

  Imagine the clock. Imagine the clock.

  Is the pendulum swinging faster? Or is it your imagination? Like a clock in a waiting room, the hands move through treacle. Or like fun, devouring time in its elation, what happened to the day? What happened to the year?

  Fast and slow. Left and right. Tick and tock. Imagine the clock.

  Time moves faster now, and faster. The pendulum begins to hit the edges of the wood-lined box. Like a blade it scratches the wood, then it plummets, then it rises. The clock is beginning to shake. Tick-clunk-tock-clunk.

  Faster and faster the pendulum swings, almost violent in its urges; which of course is a foolish thing to say for a machine has no urge except that with which we have engineered it to have.

  The clock is broken and the wood begins to splinter. The glass window before the pendulum cracks but does not shatter. Behind it, the pendulum swings wildly: left-right, left-right, left-right. The wood is splintering and the clock is beginning to shake.

  With a pop the numbers begin to fall off. The minute hand moves backwards. Numbers collect at the bottom of the clock face in a jumble: 3 and 5 and 10. Now 6 and 11. Now 12.

  One final violent thud embeds the pendulum in the wood and the clock falls silent. No tick: no tock. Imagine the broken clock. Mysterious hands come to remove it from the wall. There is a clock-shaped mark on the wallpaper where it used to hang.

  The clock no longer serves its purpose and so it is useless. But something about its nature makes it impossible to throw away. So, instead, cracked glass and fallen numbers, it is packed away into a box, placed in the attic.

  There: shrouded by darkness, spiders weave their cobwebs around it.

  Tick tock.

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• 26102020

  Posted at 7:45 am by Michael, on October 26, 2020

  What is the Endless Summer? Is it the last of our childish illusions, thinking that those moments–sitting on the sand and watching the waves–will never end? Is it a holiday we convince ourselves will last forever, at a time that we are at our most vital, all of our potential yet coiled up in us like a fiery serpent?

  Or, is it Endless by virtue of memory? Is it the summer we will never forget? The sand and the blue and the clouds and the blue. Friends made and lost along that stretch of shore, people we may never see again.

  Or, is it the Always Summer, that feeling that we get when we sit upon another beach in another time in another place, grown. Is it a loop that connects the old to the new and unites them; is the Endless Summer merely a romantic, sun-drenched reflection on life?

  Every beach is the same beach, connected to one another by the surging tides and the waves and the gravitational force of the moon hanging low in the sky. Perhaps the Endless Summer is not a thing, but a place; a place that we have been, a place that we may still go, a dream.

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• 19102020

  Posted at 9:08 am by Michael, on October 19, 2020

  2020 is like a year on pause. Like a year that’s been left on pause on a dusty VCR in a dusty basement. Like a year on pause on an old VCR where the tracking line rolls up and down and the screen and the picture is fuzzy.

  2020 is like a VHS tape on pause. You can’t remember what’s on the tape. You can barely make out the shapes of the actors on the screen. The audio from an old, barely remembered commercial hisses and you hiss back like a startled cat.

  2020 is like a startled cat hissing at a VHS tape on pause on a dusty VCR in a dusty basement. The tracking line rolls up and down the screen. The picture wobbles. The tape is so fragile. It’s so old now. It’s worn down.

  We’ve recorded over the tape so many times that the pictures merge, old images overlap with the new. Faces become other faces. Dark doppelgangers stare out from the screen. The tracking line scrolls up and down. The cat hisses.

  A hand reaches for the remote and presses play. The tape grinds and tangles in the machine. The picture is mangled. The half-formed images are lost forever.

  2020 is a basement with a dark TV screen and a useless remote control. The cat is purring. We don’t know how the movie ends.

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• 12102020

  Posted at 7:49 am by Michael, on October 12, 2020

  Reality is an apple. We eat around the core; we throw it away.

  We endure the skin, even though it is fibrous and sometimes gets stuck in our teeth, so that we can gorge ourselves the sweet flesh that is life: that is experience and feeling and sensation.

  Reality is an apple in a grocery store, spritzed and polished. We inspect the skin for bruises, we admire the way the skin catches and reflects the light. We pick a few, the “best” ones, even though we know there’s no real way of telling which ones have already turned rotten inside.

  We delude ourselves with this false choice: do not choose an apple for its skin.

  And although we do not eat them, don’t ignore the seeds or the core:

  For the core held the apple to the tree, and apple seeds–though poisonous–are the way that we make more.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

• 05102020

  Posted at 9:23 am by Michael, on October 5, 2020

  I ponder the primordial forces of creation. Was I made for this: to ponder?

  Four forces churn within the Sphere, encircled by Love and Strife.

  Is love the reflection of the sunlight on the sphere? Is Love the dancing reflection of vision?

  Is Strife the shadow of the Sphere cast wherever it dwells?

  Space is the Void and the Void is so, so vast. There is so much space between Us and Everything, there is so much Strife.

  And yet, forced together by Fate or Gravity: we discover Love.

  Is war Love? Is space Strife?

  Perhaps they believe the world is flat not because the world is flat, but because… “the world is flat”. An atlas lies open on a table and I stab at the page with my finger:

  Fort Nelson.

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• 28092020

  Posted at 8:40 am by Michael, on September 28, 2020

  Remember September. Who thought of such a name? Imagine you could freeze a month into a block of ice and identify the days by bubbles. Like striations in rock, a calendar page, a man toils away for a minimum wage.

  Imagined like this: time is a cage and even a cage includes the word “age”. But as one month ends and another begins, it’s worthwhile remembering that calendars are made from paper.

  Paper was once a tree, but does that remembrance help us see? It does, but your eyes might not be clear yet. A month “ends” but it means nothing. A week “begins” but it means nothing. It is part of a rhythm, the drum beat of time, the rolling rapids of a river.

  Like a biorhythm machine in a shopping mall, place your hands on the images of hands and I will tell you your future. Like a biorhythm machine on the wall of a cave, place your hands on the faded red ochre paintings of hands and feel your past vibrating through the striations of stone.

  Good morning, Monday.

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• 21092020

  Posted at 8:33 am by Michael, on September 21, 2020

  I sip coffee to collect my thoughts. The wind beats against the windows.

  More coffee and I stretch my neck. I stretch my shoulders. Has the caffeine kicked in yet? It’s starting to.

  I sit before a blank white box, pressing buttons. My fingers are clumsy on the keys; they’ve not yet found their rhythm.

  The buttons I press correspond to letters and the letters become words; these are the sums of language.

  Monday is a sum of last week and the week before. Behold the wondrous, cascading maths of time.

  A constant re-beginning, like a child’s nursery rhyme. An infinite progression into the future: another new beginning, another Monday, another.

  New week’s resolutions resolve themselves. Time conveys us forward. Last week is stripped and crushed like an old car in a junkyard. The metal husks of old weeks pile high.

  Another new beginning, another Monday, another.

  Good morning, Monday.

  Posted in Mondays | 0 Comments

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