I told a coworker off the other day by reminding them

that inverting interpretation is something I’ve always found a kind of joy in.

I went on to say that I think this is because what’s often real and true

needs to be broken and taped and without a frame first

in order to get a fuller picture of the relationship between

what is seen and what one wants to see.

I looked at my reflection in the mirror this morning

and noticed my glasses were fogging up

as if a child had put his mouth against the backseat car window

and exhaled a frosty layer of breath across it

before pulling his finger down through it and writing a greeting backwards

for the car in the passing lane to understand.

Take my student. Yesterday she walked up to me

and told me my glasses were on backwards and I had to make a joke about

the fact that they were all taped up and missing a nosepiece

when I replied it’s not my glasses that are, but my head that is.

We laughed at how easy it was to make fun of ourselves

and point to a deeper truth at the same time, okay, well maybe just I did,

and she was just laughing at me.

But that’s how upside-down interpreters spend their down time when

their gut tells them that the reality they are living in is only partly known,

and that the only way to right that parallax error is to turn unknowing

into a self-correcting technique that is making a little bit of fun of oneself

for a chance to see things clearly. We all got our things.

And mine is how I like to make sense of consciousness

by sort of swimming through one confusion and unknowing

after another until I’m diving down through an emotion

and stopping at corals reefs of inference and intuition

that feel like they go on for miles and have an impact on everything,

almost like uncertainty itself were a kind of communal brain map of neurons

we were all flowing like, whether we see ourselves that way or not.