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Saturday, November 20, 2010

Butterfly Effect


I hold in my hand these envelopes. As a child of four can plainly see, these envelopes have been hermetically sealed. They've been kept in a #2 mayonnaise jar since noon today on Funk and Wagnall’s porch.--Ed McMahon

Who could predict a mayonnaise jar would be at the center of so much controversy? On an ordinary workday and I went to brew a cup of liquid motivation. My spouse asked a question delivered with embedded shards of glass and wrapped in barbed wire. Did I know where his mayonnaise jar was? A surge of adrenaline burns away the last of sleep. We live in a tiny apartment and he is an unapologetic collector. I am smothered by useless things, duplicate things, future things, broken things, things collected to appease the fear, more and more objects sucking the oxygen from the very space which surrounds me. Periodically, I am compelled to thin the brush. I quickly wash a mayonnaise jar from the refrigerator. He is not appeased. I escape to the job, but wonder does the flap over a mayonnaise jar in New Mexico set off a typhoon in Tokyo?

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