bLACK cOFFEe and cANE sUGAR7*

He felt, the man in the hat felt that is pineal gland had decamped, taking refuge in his hypothalamus, somewhere other than where it should be, was suppose to be, his pineal gland. He had heard about this once before, eavesdropping on a couple chatting animatedly over steamy cups of coffee, black coffee stropped with cane sugar and sweetener. The one said to the other, the one that was busy picking a scab from the knoll of her finger, ‘you know the pineal gland is wont to travel, pick up roots and move,’ he said, the one speaking, cleared his throat, ‘to the back of the head, the skullcap, the ganglia knot’. The other one, the one nitpicking at her finger, said, ‘no.’ that was the end of the conversation, the one the man in the hat had eavesdropped in on. He extrapolated what he overheard to how he felt, how he didn’t feel he felt, how he should feel but didn’t. When he felt like this, which he did, though infrequently, the man in the hat would apply a mustard poultice to the back of his head, where he thought the pineal gland sat, or drink a Fanta orange with minced ice. He would eat raw asparagus corm with salt and vinegar, his lips chapped with brine and lye vinegar. By smacking his lips together he could alleviate the sting and canker in his mouth; the tip of his tongue starch with malt and wither. His great aunt Alma showed him how to salve a wound with mayonnaise, and how to edge a pie crust with a fork, his eyes trained on the copse of her forehead, a burl of gray hair tucked behind her ear, her apron white with refiner’s sugar and flour. The sky through the kitchen window, her window, great aunt Alma’s window, was always blue, mallard blue, turquoise blue with a hint of teal and cobalt. The man in the hat didn’t think thoughts, but rather imageries, templates he thought onto, his imageries and memories, recalls and rebuses. In this manner, every thought, every new thought, was an original thought, an a priori thought, thought in images and rebuses. Every thought was a new thought, an imagery attached to a past memory or recall, but one that was entirely different, a reconstructed thought, not selfsame or similar, but once removed from the first thought, the thought that started it all; the first thought, thought when he began to think thoughts. But, if his pineal gland had, in fact, relocated, taken refuge in the back of his head, in the ganglia knot, then everything he thought he thought, imageries, rebuses, recalls and memories, were moot, unpredictable, sketchy and unbalanced. His brain, he felt, might now be nothing more than an Etcher-Sketcher, full of pencil lead and carbon, something that had to be shaken to erase the last image or thought, an antecedent, an a priori of the first thought, thought.