dEMENTIA sOU'wESTER

He was a truant thinker, thinking thoughts not based in accepted wisdom, incomplete, inarticulate thoughts. He thought thoughts at random; series and computations of thoughts thought backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, an incoherent garble of pretense and dimwittedness. When not wolfing down birdseed and apple skins, he sat at the table across for the man in the hat, his sou'wester folded crosswise on his lap, eyes blank as death. He was loosing his mind to dementia praecox. He heard voices, yowling tenors, high-pitched sopranos, deep guttural bassos. He saw spiders and millipedes, toads and sprites, dead raccoons and earwigs. He sat, the man with the shamble leg, in the absence of his thoughts, thinking backwards, then forwards, then neither forward or back. He sat sitting, dreaming of birdseed and apple skins, loosing what little mind he had left to voices and pictures that roamed the scourge of his brain, squelchy with Listerine and breath mints. Nothing happens for a reason, thought the man in the hat. Not even nothing, he thought, not even that. Everything is accidental, haphazard, unsystematic, and not worth the bother of bothering about. More ink than words in the Bible, he thought, how bad mannered, obscene, but not worth the bother still. Loosing one’s mind seemed a small pittance to pay for an acquittal from the madness, the obscenity of it all.

‘You want your soup?’ the man with the shamble leg asked the man in the hat. ‘Jell-O’, he replied. ‘You are welcome to the Jell-O, but not the soup’. The man in the hat shuffled his feet beneath the table, ‘Jell-O, strawberry with fruit bits in it, your welcome to that. Not the soup?’ said the man with the shamble leg. ‘Not the soup, never the soup’.