And who are you? You, the reflected, refracted light image tossed back into your receptive, wanting eyes by a coated piece of glass. If glass is just melted sand, can your body be nothing but a misshapen collection of cells, of nerves, muscles, flesh and bone, tossed like a garden salad by the Great Waiter, maybe even the Maitre D Himself? To serve who? You? Him? Cart/horse/backasswards stuff. All that Reductionist stuff scares the fuck out of me, takes away the comfort of not knowing the Great Mystery, like a hall pass during a calculus final. These self-identity gurus, Locke and Stone and Butler and all their buddies, I wonder if they know what Dylan means when he says, “I've reached a place where the willow don't bend. There's not much more to be said, its the top of the end. I'm going. I'm going. I'm gone.” Ah, but he’s not gone, while the philosophers now float. He’s still the troubadour in the long black coat. Funny thing is, the harder you look, the faster it runs. Runs away, wanting so bad to be found but only on IT'S terms. Terms. What do you require? Thirty days—same as cash. Low, low rates OAC. Hurry. Operators are standing by. What are they standing by? A shadow of themselves thrown by the sickly, yellow fluorescence of artificial light. Where are the valid ones? Locked away in some Italian prison for telling the truth. Locked away in the prisons of their own mines, mining for even more truth to cause more pain to purge more validity so that one day when they pull away that one final non-descript stone, grayish black, like their eyes, like their soul, the answer will be clear and the weight will lift and they will arrive again at the place they started from and never left but journeyed far and wide and deep and powerful…and they will pick up the rock, glowing bright and gold in the single ray of sun, laser guided through the only crack in the Great Mountain and they will hold it in the palm of their hand as it slowly, decomposes into dust, ashes to ashes to earth to…

When I was a child I spoke as a child. I wish I could remember what I said to you, if I met you. Did I meet you? Did we play together? Did we know each other? Did Winnicott stand above our dirt mound while my trucks pushed dirt up onto a pile and your dump truck hauled the dirt away to a place that had no need of significance, like the peace signs we would doodle on our Pee-Chee folders or the bathroom tissue grabbed from the supermarket shelf? Did he turn to our mothers who were sipping boiled coffee and smoking Cools in their gingham print frocks at that precise moment in time and place, tell them that it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self? Did the Sunday preacher tell us who we were back then? The only line I remember from a thousand church services was stolen from Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Hell yeah I do. I think. Don’t I? Fucking hope so, though I have yet to recapitulate and ventilate the preconscious memories lest the change upset the homeostatic balance of things. Ah, balance grasshopper…wax-on/wax-off. Fish are very symmetrical creatures, mirror images port and starboard. They have accurate scales. They are balanced. They are not the most intellectual of God’s Creatures, but they don't seem too stressed about it. And they taste good. Can’t say the same for some of my girlfriends. Very off –balance. They are built with a low center of gravity but covet more weight on top. Some are smarter than fish, most smell much better. But still, very little sense of symmetry.

Cooley had a nice mirror. It wasn’t his but he gave it away. Robin Hood the Sociologist. “The Looking Glass Self”. You wonder if your shit don’t stink? Open your heart not your nose. It’s just some endless film loop, really. Just looking for anonymity when we need it, fame when we’re horney. Old enough not to get carded, young enough to cum twice before you fall asleep. Only remembering what has a reason to stick to the greasy gray matter with wrinkles like a newborn’s ass, watching our life change, one damn wrinkle at a time, trying to get to a place where our nerve endings dance and dangle and then just blow up in the end. Trying to divide ourselves, like cells every seven years, reborn, rebuilt, the fountain of silicone. Whatever turns you on. Better to be something than nobody.

Germans with names that can’t be spelled telling us that without self division there can be no self-analysis. And to be known has become its own virtue. Famous for being famous. Not quite Woody, taking it easy, but taking it. Sometimes I want to be a handcrafted chair, fine Corinthian leather for all to ogle over, admire but dare not touch. Other times I want to be a shaggy couch, full of holes, stuffing oozing out between the millions of butts that have enjoyed my padding. A big game hunter I would be, your fat, comfortable, gregarious, beautiful, loving ass my prize. Or a painting maybe, cheating death by creating immortality on a canvas slopped with petro-chemical products in 64 colors, each a metaphor-labled fluid medium, the illusion of permanence dripping through our ego fields until dried. Until we need to peel it off, chip away the layers and let the little truck driver come up for air.

The exact definition of “metamorphosis”, the defining moment, to define the the magic that draws us into the whole, the music that flows in genetic beings; our definition of Self is contextually bound by how we perceive its/our value. An audience of one need only be satisfied. Yet human animal is the most social of all living creatures—murders, rape and war not withstanding. Love: the desire to flow together like water until you can’t tell me from you from me. And in the next moment we are like rabid mongrel dogs willing to eat each other’s liver for the corner office and the last raspberry scone. And so it goes. Give it a moment. So will you too, I suppose. The two Neils: I Am I Said to No On There and Take a Look at My Life. I’m A lot Like You Were. The two stand before you now, raw as a December oak. Solid, weary, strong and endangered. Sometimes you are so perfect I have to make mistakes for you. But my dreams are made of honesty, and the madness I feel claws it’s way up from some rooted bowel to strangle the old, give birth to something else as I drown in my future. Happily. If only for the sake of the validity as it dances in wide circles on the tip of an ancient arrowhead. Still, I cannot travel by the way I came or dance to the same dance as I did to the song before. In finding ourselves we must first loose something, everything. And realize that while life may be a circle that can never be squared, the corners, out of the stream and the flow of some Great Spirit’s breath, do not provide the safe harbor. Maverick must stay engaged, listen to the dreams of Goose. The unclouded recognition of oneself must be in the design of something beyond. Life is no pain-by-number plan.

And the “I” must become the US.