Still life with stage screw

A piece of Bar Harbor, a stage screw, a leaf, a large acorn, one of my mother's many mouse figurines, one of three cotton scale weights that I liberated from an old mill building and a river rock that I think looks like a recumbent bunny. (Click image to up-rez.) — A piece of Bar Harbor, a stage screw, a leaf, a large acorn, one of my mother’s many mouse figurines, one of three cotton scale weights that I liberated from an old mill building and a river rock that I think looks like a recumbent bunny. (Click image to up-rez.)

My living space is dotted, now as always, with little aggregations of domestic clutter. Found objects, objects that I’ve made or bought or liberated from less appreciative owners. All carefully arranged and occasionally dusted. All pretty to me.

They help me remember stuff. The red-handled stage screw is youth theater. The brass weights are “rusticating” with my father. (That translates as “breaking and entering,” by the way. We cruised rural Sumter County in search of dilapidated farm buildings to ravage.) Rocks and seed pods, metals, ceramics, fibers, knicks and knacks of no obvious provenance.

Psychics, I’ve read, believe that inanimate objects are like sponges, soaking up people’s thoughts and feelings in subtle ways. It’s possible, I guess, but I’m too much of the world to know for sure.

Another interesting message arrived via the contact form today. A visitor identifying himself as Charles Upton of Lexington, KY (couldst be the poet and metaphysician?) sent me a link to a YouTube clip of Princeton economist Paul Krugman saying this to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months.”

“And what,” Mr. Upton asks, ” is Krugman actually saying?”

I don’t know, Mr. Upton, but as you’re no doubt aware, Carol Rosen claims that Werner von Braun told her repeatedly that our government would play the “alien card” one day to justify the weaponization of space. Maybe Steve Basset’s fondest dreams — and von Braun’s most fearsome predictions — are about to come true.