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It was driving home today when I glanced at the approaching clouds thru the car window and things resufaced in my brain. My car is very quiet and comfortable. Inside my skewed brain, rolling back and forth between some two mental demarcations another semi-flawed piece of fruit was about to fall to the ground.

Simple phrases mystify the less-used locales of my brain. Whether it's something abstract like obsessive inversions (you can always turn it around...) or a simple "i love you", I cannot stop sifting and re-sifting thru the unconnected fragments.

A reputation for being overly-sensitive to nuance follows me around like some lost and starving dog looking for just a meal. Strange how lost dogs always are willing to presume a new home. Survival makes all possible. As for my nuance reputation -- on one hand it's deserved, on another level I of course prefer to think it isn't so.

At work when I need that one specific and unique answer, it's just a artistic sequence of a skillful reductive dart directed at a google to fish out the answer trail I seek. In one sense I look for something I already know, something I already have at hand, that I already command. I am only looking to epitomize someone else's understanding. Guessing at likely "nuanced" representations and characterizations is a strength of mine.

I pull up to the red light and brake to my stop. For some reason I take notice of someone in my left rearview mirror in an older green Honda Civic turning left. I make a note of the license plate.

Back to the sky I take a mental photo shot and then look back to see what other days and times were exactly like now. Like old kodachrome carusels shuffled back and forth, every once in a while the gears shift, dis-engage and a card gets pulled out and stacked to the side, and then the shuffling resumes. For a brief moment I hear and see the Ace of Spade card flapping bac-a-bac-a-bac-a-bac on the bike I am riding down a concrete street in a houston suburb to my friends house to play football and listen to Herb Alpert on the mediocre stereo he got two xmases ago.

On another plane, I see thru the eyes of someone walking up to the backside of golf clubhouse after a soft rain on a saturday morning a standing pool of reflective water in the black grainy asphalt like silica mirrors back at me. Just like the day in Minnesota off 80-ish I-494 near Bush Lake when it stopped for a few seconds.

It's like this in every place and any place I go. I search to recognize in Colorado for what it was in Kentucky and in Minnesota. Tulsa and Kansas City. Phoenix. And especially baselined in Houston. A wide open ocean in Venezuela, California or pulling up to the dock in Gulfport (again).

Layered like morphic and sedimentary layers all into one segment. A soil sample in the centrifuge.

Ahead -- a trio of reckless young skateborders dash across the road ahead and skirt hastily right into the sidewalk. I'm turning left ahead. I never did ride a skateboard though I remember handling one once.

It's ironic but for someone who always seems to have wheels underneath them, I could never skate, do skateboards, ski, or anything else that put something moving under my feet. No balance. Kryptonite & Superman. And we all have our flaws, imperfections, and at minimum, our defects.

Yet more than anything I have always been moving and maintaining my balance has been my strength.

Throw anything at me and I'll immediately forge an intelligent response and invite a qualifying response from you. I'll learn from your question and invite you to do the same. It can be as simple as shims in a door or frequencies and the coherency of propagation of organic lasers.

Inverted obsessions (I told you I can't forget). Ever been in the situation where someone has tried to tell you what the error of your ways was. And they did it repeatedly and recurring. You begin to think they are obsessed with your perceived weakness. At some point they stop and go away but you continue to think they are obsessed with you. You begin to wonder what they think of you and how they react to you.

Pretty soon without knowing it it is you who is obsessed with something that is only a proposition (and challenging invite) in your own mind.

You become obsessed by a perceived outside obsession that does not exist.

My subdivision is coming up and I move to the right lane. Out of self-defense I try to step back one level and wonder if I am obsessing about something by formulating such a thesis. There is nothing wrong with analyzing things (at least in my mind). I cross it off as healthy and move on.

I was driving home today, and I thought about you whether you know it or like it or don't care...