WHAT IT IS
An affluent group of thugs occupied the best smoking spot, wore the coolest ripped jeans, and spoke with confident authority on all things sports and girls. Their obnoxious behavior and callous disregard were Brown’s microcosm into his future after high school, a future that dissected the mutilated memories of high school but failed to reconstruct the tragedy into anything resembling common sense. Brown was anointed The Turtle by this group of boys, mainly because he was slow and methodical, but also because quick and fast lived in a place of privilege and prestige, dogma passed on from fathers so their sons could meet the challenges of the jungle, the same jungle where they were scared witless, a generation before. That the foundation shook from machismo, was then misdiagnosed as a grand and purposeful orchestration, did led both generations to a place were analysis of anything was thought best to be avoided. This perpetuation was the mud caking the tires, causing them to spin wildly and making certain that forward was backward and backward was a constant state of incomprehension. Brown believed it was some crazy combination of knee-jerk reflexes, accommodating submissions, and polite coalesces that kept his jungle from swallowing him whole, then puking him back up for gawkers to examine. Would history have anything to say to Brown or the turtle he was named after? Not likely, as history is seldom read.
WHAT IT IS NOT
He was very much use it; the world rushing ahead of him in an excited fashion, proclaiming the significance of their task, the reasons for their decisions, and the triumph of their truth and grit. He knew ambition was the crutch that helped win the race of accomplishment by keeping mania locked away at a safe distance, and should mania appear at the edges, an afternoon at the gym or a fresh coat of paint or an evening of small talk would wrestle the beast to the ground. Distracted and determined is not an altered state into the window of our lives, it is a survival malaise that keeps us from asking the crazy questions of universe and quantum and quarks. Even if we were to ask the questions, the answer would float so far into the cosmos that most of us looking up would wonder why gravity could not keep these answers simpler…suited more to what’s in our simple toolbox.
The turtle was simple. He carried a simple message from Buck-jimmy to No.1 and on his five hundred and sixty first day of walking from Lake Tomiko to the state of Missouri, he was caught in a trap set by INSECT agent Brown. As Brown looked at the turtle he did not feel the machismo of a gifted trapper who orchestrated some grand event of cunning, nor did he feel apart of a superior species chosen by others to wreak a particular brand of havoc. Brown’s tools did not explain the cosmos and the turtle’s tools did not explain Brown.
WHAT IT IS/WHAT IT IS NOT 