Frost Heave Surfer

“Okay, because see, I’d like it if you choose what you want to do with the eggs, and I’ll choose my own friends.” He’d drape his wizened, decimated wing over his head and slyly peek out through a gap. We’d have to see if that would stand, because I could see his ideal was to hold the whole disposition-of-the-eggs thing over my head while screwing up my associations according to his whims. Finally, he got caught up in a hawser and strangled while fishing on the docks. It was purely accidental, but I felt bad about because I really did want him dead.
The thing about William was this: The bigger mess of promises he made to the client, the bigger the mess I cleaned up, the bigger the mess of money I made so I could go off in the woods and get over it all by myself. The comfort of others never quite did it for me. Better would be a recitation of logical axioms and small theorems, and a listing of elemental concepts: There was certainty one could rely on..
As much as I kind of wished it could be a peaceful stasis all the time, the fact is, bullshit makes the world go around. And, even, it’s fun. The ridiculous jams that William put us in made me laugh. Of course I wanted to run, too. I wanted to just throw it and yell, “You’re on your own!” over my shoulder. At times when I wasn’t being torn apart by having to deny far, far too much of the reality that I felt I had to grip with all twenty digits, every second of every minute of every waking hour, until I could retreat into my own subconscious where I maintained my own properly-corrected gravity such that I could rest on a surface without violent lateral upswells smacking me around.
I was aware my neurotic attachment to the factual truth held me back. It was a rigidity in my own mind. that I couldn’t throw off one reality for another. Sure, I could make things up, but only in a very ploddingly aware, conscious way. I would ask William, quite earnestly, how did he rectify the replacement of one old set of lies with a new set of contradictory lies? I really wanted to know how to do it, as it would help me get on with things, but it just pissed him off. That was rather unfair, I thought.
William seemed to think of what I did, applying knowledge to effort, as magic. Called me “Rumplestilskin,” but I thought I was more like the hapless maiden; besides, I quite remember doing the work.
I knew it was a drag, too, to need to know, to have things make sense. But the footings have to be 3’ deep at this latitude to prevent frost heave. Maybe frost heave was just the thing. I could become a frost heave surfer …
Because I had already learned just about every fact there was, about everything, and it hadn’t done the trick for me. Something eluded me. If I knew all the facts, what was left?
Believing. What beliefs should I believe? Finding my first ideas of belief intolerable, how much belief would do the trick? I had to believe, at minimum, that I was capable of believing. Okay, Check. And what did I believe? I did believe I could beat this thing.