276. Quantum Colors

One door is white. One door is red. The white door is enthralled with light. The red door is in love with itself. One shoe is green. One shoe is pink. They don't match. Yet's obvious they belong together. Today my shirt is black. Tomorrow's shirt is like Schrödinger's cat. It doesn't yet exist. And it does.

hans ostrom 2020

275. The Status of Primary Colors

The red in orange is slightly embarrassed, having consorted with yellow. Whereas the red in purple thinks a lot of itself. The privilege of working with blue, and all of that. As to the red in pink, it will not brook criticism of any kind. White works for it, red-in-pink claims. Pink is beautiful, pink is better than red! it cries. It's this kind of thinly veiled self-loathing which the community of red cannot abide. At the same time, it's this alleged community that red in brown sought to escape when it disappeared into green. It lives there humbly now.


hans ostrom 2020

274. Rude Dream

Well, that dream spat me out like a wheezing cat--leaving me stranded in a tangle of sheets and angst. Something about a packed subway car full of snarling belligerence. Then came a Hollywood-propped drawing room--walls of books, read draperies--full of accusatory ex-lovers I don't/didn't/mustn't recognize (hence the accusations?). Finally a scuffle of worries, a flurry of muffled voices, a storm of squalid fretting misers who form  a sarcastic chorus singing of me and my failures and low-level fuck-ups. Plus as I try to wallow around toward awake, I can't confront my subconscious mind because it takes such pique and invests it, reaps synaptic profits, and spends them on professional plaid-clad sleep-tormentors, talking statues, and loquacious apples blabbing at a cocktail party full of rapidly moving eyeballs, tremulous eyelids, and sweat glands, and now I push myself through the crack between dreaming and not-dreaming, and am exhausted, which is not the aim of sleep, I would argue, if my mind weren't clogged. Fogged.

273. The Borges Hat

Stitched inside the Borges Hat is a series of runes which one Dimitri Ornelas has translated in a limited edition monograph, with notes, in Mainz. Soon thereafter the Borges Hat disappears for 47 years, reappearing on the head of a British spy in Buenos Aires. It is at this point that dimensions of time wrinkle and suddenly you, Mademoiselle Rameau, take position of the hat. You wear it at a party on a yacht in Copenhagen. Late in the evening, your husband Josef, who insisted on wearing a red cumberbund that evening, tries to murder you. He is unsuccessful and arrested. In the disruption of the moment, the Borges Hat fell off your head. Someone picks it up and offers it to you. He is a wizened but fit man who looks like a retired stevedore. He asks if you are all right. Yes, thank you, you say. He says, "This isn't the first time the Borges Hat has provided important protection."