He saw Mars but he felt Neptune,
he had hoped to feel a certain strong emotion but this
is all they had to say:
"I was the son of a man, and so we came together and we
shook hands."
"We shook hands."
He often wondered what a million people would look like
scattered randomly
across a moonless sky, and how unlikely it would be
that they would all just say the
obvious thing:
"You may call me brother now."
"Yes, brother, I know."
He is forty two,
five-feet-eight-inches tall,
normally wears his curly hair long.
He has a ruddy complexion, broad shoulders and is
barrel-chested,
is unusually strong.
He frequently wears a full beard and sometimes glasses.
He is a college graduate, a talented artist, and
sculptor.
Now, Maps is a soft-spoken loner, who resents society
and all organizations.
Maps fancies himself a ladies' man.
He is an avid chess player, smokes cigarettes, and a
pipe.
He is a beer drinker and loves to eat.
Maps is a man of widespread interests, who might very
well be living abroad.
He felt lost but he felt pretty intensely good,
and he woke up screaming having dreamed of a color he
had never seen before:
"I went to bed and to sleep, it was so unexpected, it
really was frightening, and I saw
pretty much
the same thing embedded in my pillow."
He had no trouble recognizing patterns in the most
delicate arrays of tangled lines,
but he had a strange fixation on partaking in nefarious
things:
"Stealing, lying, cheating, gambling, fornicate..."
He saw red, but he thought five.
He was pleased to find his road trip was enhanced by
number-color synesthesia:
"My trusty Rosinante bounds along the road very well,
leaving the friendly aroma of donuts and
chicken tenders hanging in the desert air."
He willed away the miles while quixotically attempting
to reclaim his inner child,
he was embrangled and enmeshed in something far too
loud to comprehend:
"I want all of the American people to understand that
it is
understandable that the American
people cannot possibly understand."
