A splinter had dug itself underneath his pinkie finger’s nail. The end of his pinkie finger felt warmth. He wondered what would happen. Would the splinter eventually emerge? Would his pinkie be infected? Would it be amputated? Hell, was his demise imminent? Questions answered: I dug into my nail with clippers until the splinter was sufficiently vulnerable to ejection, grabbed a hold of it with tweezers, and tweezed the motherfucker. The tip of my pinkie finger now feels a bit raw. But I know that I overcame pain and intense discomfort to accomplish something that was good for my body in spite of itself; cleansing. My pinkie fingernail is now jagged, ragged, haggard. The base is forming, and I must vigilantly insist upon adding to it each day. Making more connections, looking the connections over, correcting the connections, making disjunctions where there were connections and then forming new connections with the disjoined. There are lots of things going on underneath us, to which we may not be as disconnected as we commonly assume. We are surface creatures, and it is only natural that we often involuntarily prize the exterior over the interior. Of what sort of connection do I speak? There is the obvious one: gravity. We are pinned to the face of the earth by an invisible force, and would consider it an herculean, nay, deific feat should one of us jump even so high that their lower extremity were to reach the height of their upper extremity, i.e. that their feet would be at the level of their head, we, so very far below, at the extreme depth of the troposphere. We are simultaneously at the extreme peak of another level: the level of the compact, the strata of the earth, from the crust to the core. We are not so much surface creatures or the equivalent of deep-sea creatures of the open air, but in between, in the mean, between the interior and the exterior, hovering on the barrier between the two. We are at the juncture; we may be the first creatures to wonder at what happens underground. The other day, I was waiting outside of a supermarket while a friend was inside shopping, and noticed a police car which went to the drive-through window of the bank which was located in the supermarket’s parking lot. It looked strange there- police cars are supposed to function as police cars, not as vehicles of civilians who share our quotidian needs. They are supposed to be there to act as the authority, not as one of us who happens to have a job which gives them authority over the rest of us. But sitting there in the drive-through of the bank, he looked like a civilian, his car could have been any car. He looked vulnerable and out of place.
