Boondoggledness

Chadwick Piebald stood in the exact spot where the lamplighter lit his last lamp and higgledy fished for eels, gently pulling the eeling-string to and up. His great, great-uncle Moesha Piebald taught him at his knee to eel and string, tucking the caught eels beneath the greatest part of his greatcoat. They caught dogfish (Mustelus and Squalus) and dried it in a sooty fish-kiln built out of tinder and woo-dash. There is no Chadwick Piebald nor a great, great-uncle they are mere knockabouts in my head, collusions and disruptions, nothing more. Without them I would be lost, lost to other thoughts, thoughts of a less savory character. Right now, this very moment, I am thinking about the loss of character in my own life, my lifeless life; a life spent in search of characters to fill the emptiness, the void, of my own characterless life. Chadwick’s and Piebald’s; great, great greater uncles and waifs with raffish hair; jaunty jaunts and steps that tap and tip and tack across the blacktop top, these I imagine, or imagine imagining, the point seems measly and not worth the bother of getting to the point of, piebald baldness, roughed-out and copied onto tracing-paper. This squalor of thought; this thoughtless thoughtlessness: such upheaval and boondoggledness.