by Michael Lutzker

Here’s a crudely constructed stream of consciousness, in need of editing, perhaps. Hopefully I don’t come off mentally insane or inebriated. But here goes:

I’ve been thinking a lot about God lately. My thoughts have been rattling around between my ears, like in a pinball machine, setting off an array of alarms and buzzers left and right in some way you just can’t understand how. And you are just frantically, jamming on that plunger as if that little metal ball was your life, and you can’t take your eyes off the lights and you can’t hear anything but those sounds, man, those buzzers. You don’t know what they mean, or how you trigger them, but they are satisfying, and you seek them out through experimentation. You just keep jamming that button on the side frantically to keep that ball up, as if your life depended on it. Then eventually, either because your pulsating finger fails you or because, and you swear, that the machine is broken, that metal ball cascades down out of reach of the lever. But you insert another quarter, eyes still transfixed, and a ring of foamy saliva below your lower lip, and try it again. One game flows into the next, without stammer. Thoughts continue to rattle and roll and swirl. Next thing you know you’ve spent half the afternoon away and are down $18.75 in quarters.  But that’s life, sometimes.

Anyway, I’ve been having mind-boggling thoughts life the one evidenced just now all weekend. Maybe I’m just sobering up after a semester-long adrenaline high, but the thoughts are coming in like a broken gumball machine, and I’m slippin’ and slidin’ all over these gumballs in slapstick fashion trying to plug up the hole but can’t seem to make any forward progress. It’s really quite comical, and everyone’s getting a good laugh this weekend, because I’m really tickling a lot of funny bones and being abnormally chatty with meek acquaintances. It seems as though I cannot interact with anybody without sounding like a drunk boss toasting all his neglected employees and getting a little grabby with the female secretaries at the annual Christmas Party.
John Steinbeck once said that a work of literature has five layers of meaning, and that the extent to which a reader interprets it is a reflection of the reader. There are people- thirty percent of Americans actually- who read the Bible who actually think that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and then lived to tell about it. At the same time, there are people who read Catcher in the Rye and think that the author is personally telling them to go kill John Lennon. Sometimes fiction is truer than non-fiction. That story I told you about the homeless guy handing me his newspaper wasn’t all true; in fact, most of it was not true, but I wanted to introduce something about myself to you all, and I couldn’t find a non-fiction anecdote to fit the bill. So I made up a story, even if it was overly sentimental and would have made me gag if I was in your shoes. Because isn’t that what we are all here to do in life? Make up our own stories, determine our own destinies, no matter what percentage of them is all fantasy or fictional or fake, and let others, depending on their intelligence or level of shallowness, judge us or analyze us for themselves. I don’t have to explain what this particular piece of writing which you are currently reading is about; you already have your own idea fermenting about it from the moment we met.

I’ll admit, I’m not usually very open with sharing my writing, atleast not with any serious conviction,

until I realized this truth, which might seem stranger than fiction,

that we are all here to convey meaning about you, me, us, life, God, and the human condition.

What springs us forwards; what holds us back; our dreams and our fears

Every road leads to the conclusion that, we are all walking mirrors.