Wheel! Of! FISH!

A squeaky first turn.

2002-03-28 - 12:37 a.m.

Electrons are sizzling in this weird cityscape under my fingertips.

I'm ingratiating myself to this hip-hoppin' new god that towers over reality like a featherweight colossus.

I'm binding with the overmind, merging with the hive, sinking into the infosphere, becoming one with the collective, wrapping myself in the twinkling silken coils of the Web.

Tossing the chunks of my soul that haven't been hocked off for bargain-basement immortality and what passes for the tattered remnants of my mind out there for the ravening e-wolves to tear to bits.

And how, precisely, does one raven?

Quoth the raven: "UUuuuurrgghllleSnNNRRRKK!"

*drool, drool*

So now I'm going to put my inconsequential non-sequential un-Sequoia thoughts out there for any passing terorrist, lunatic, Vanderbilt, tie-clip polisher or Ginger Rogers impersonator to see.

And I'm going to shield my nervousness at such a prospect with a hip flow of pseudo-cool rhetoric which dances meaningfully on the edge of plagiarism.

Plagiarism don't need a name, baby. It just needs an idea to drain like the little Faustian tick it is.

Of course, sometimes a tick is just a bit of red licorice.

I think that one-sentence paragraphs look more meaningful.

Don't you?

Then again, that kind of spacing gets real irritating, real fast. And if I get irritated reading my own first attempt at a web diary, I'll never want to add to it. And that would be a crippling loss to all the yahoos and google-eyed leeches seeking my truename. They'll never take me alive. I'll fight them to the death. Give me liberty, or give me something else.

Frankly, I don't think we've had much of a choice lately, my fellow Americans. But that kind of sedition can be saved for AFTER my introductory piece.

What is a Wheel?

I am, for one.

A Wheel of Fish is obviously just a cheap gag meant to get a cheap pop from my cheap friends, based on a cheap prop which appeared in a cheap movie. It obviously carries a deeper meaning, which I'm too cheap to even ponder. My time is money, and my money is on my mind.

A Wheel of Fortune is one of your more desirable Major Arcana, as long as you're open to change. Beginnings and endings and life and death all spin in a caucus race and never catch each other, but flicker by again and again and again until it's over and we all get a currant.

A WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE! is a fairly expensive prop which has been spun by some of the finest minds of our time. Although the idiots never know when to buy a vowel.

The Wheel has to be invented before you can get anywhere.

The Buddhists set wheels under rivers to spin and spin eternally, turned by the forces that move earth and time, and with each turn a prayer is sent out through air and water and earth and fire and it must save the Buddhists an awful lot of time.

St. Catherine was broken on the wheel, and the sardonic wench made it into one of her symbols. You have to respect that kind of chutzpah. The lady had her bones smashed to flinders by iron rods while she was strapped to a fire-heated iron wheel, and now her followers carry little dangling wheels on chains. Boldness and a sense of irony. Hot, bone-crunching irony.

Some devout fellow made a mint when he took a spinning firework and pinned it to a stand, and called it a "Catherine wheel". Wheels burn in the night and spin and spin and blaze with glory, until they peter out and are tossed on the used fireworks bonfire in the morning by lucky children who run and hide, shrieking with joy as the leftover gunpowder and chemicals burst and flare with alchemistic gusto -- I can only hope all children had a childhood as fun as mine.

There is supposedly a band with the same name, but I loathe them.

Wheels and deals, wheels to the floor, five years behind the wheel, ground beneath the wheel, to break a butterfly on the wheel -- that's my personal favorite. A proverb for every revolution, and a revolution for every proverb.

A wheel is eternal.

And you have to be eternal to get the REALLY good jokes. Like existence. And death.

And that one about the box.

"NOTHING! ...

... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! ...

... STUPID! ...

... YOU - SO - STUPIIIID!"

That's the lesson.

That's the Wheel.

That's enough for one entry.