A Fantastic Web of Connections
Christian Michael “Huggable” Newman sent me a photo this morning along with a text description:
A rubber gudgeon is a female, socket-like metal fitting attached to a boat’s transom that pairs with a male pintle pin to form a pivoting steering hinge.
Obviously Christian is planning some sort of boat trip. Or, alternatively, he is gathering a collection of rubber gudgeons and pintle pins to the delight of his sparsely decorated workroom.
He hammers the rubber gudgeons to the wall of said workroom with rusted railway spikes (the kind that, as I child, I’d find littered near the train tracks in Fort Stockton). They extend across the walls and ceiling like metamorphic clouds across the dome of the sky. He then takes the pintle pins and connects the rubber gudgeons to one another after establishing exactly which pintle pin fits, to the femtometer, between which two rubber gudgeons. He finds that there is a specific pintle pin for each space between any of two arbitrary rubber gudgeons. This delights him.
After what may be epochs, the result is a fantastic web of connections between rubber gudgeons using pintle pins. He perceives the arrangement as his default conception of beauty, and therefore he fashions a cushion in the center of his workroom so that he can lie comfortably gazing up and around at his creation, at the network of rubber gudgeons connected by pintle pins. He spends more and more hours each day and more and more hours each night (because naturally, he creates several light-emmitting apparati and places them at strategic points along the flooring of the workroom) comfortably gazing up and around at his creation.
After what may be epochs, he one day or night awakens from dozing and finds himself affixed to the cushion. He has become sessile. Momentarily, he thinks of Shambal Brambel and his peculiar fate, but since he is convinced that he is not living on Sao (the moon of Neptune, not the ever so popular tourist spot somewhere near Oceania or the Azores), he quickly dismisses the thought. He then, with less surprise than he might have otherwise thought, realizes that during his doze, tubes were attached to his nether-orifi and so he no longer has to concern himself with his nigh-lifelong toilet attendance preoccupation. This delights him.
He returns to gazing at the beauteous splay of rubber gudgeons and pintle pins patterned across his ceiling and walls, which are incidentally now the dome of his sky. He crawls into and recedes out of various states of dozing. After what may be epochs, he hears a trundling mechanism approaching from a direction he cannot determine. His hearing has lost the ability to ascertain direction since the culminated force of his senses have long been concentrated towards marveling at the dome of his personal sky. The sound comes in and out of focus like distant, dissonant wind chimes.
At one point of crawling into then receding out of drowsing, he detects another presence in the workroom, a workroom that is now his entire universe. A wheeled and spindly armed gadget is immobile beside the cushion. In its spindly arms, it holds a plate of victuals. They steam and pop. Obviously, somewhere beyond Christian’s personal universe, a fully functional kitchen is operational. He muses for a moment about the possibility that beyond his personal universe that other personal universes may exist with other entities lying sessile on cushions marveling up at their own personal creations slathered across the domes of their skies. However, he quickly discards the thought and tucks into the victuals.