As the owner of a corner lot, it is my privilege
to keep the entrance to our cul-de-sac clean of debris:
leaves, sticks, muck, you name it. Ah,
to walk down my driveway and see my clean street!

Which reminds me of fun guy, Jean-Paul Sartre,
who wrote, And it was true, I had always realized it;
I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance.
I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life
put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction.

Once, after a hard day of not selling real estate
and an evening of listening to my sump pump
pumping water from my basement, I put out feelers
to the neighborhood bar. Little did I know,
my girlfriend was putting out her feelers, too—
to the man on the bar stool beside her.

Moral: Be careful where you put out your feelers.

Which reminds me of the time, canoeing
through the Everglades, my buddy leaned too far right
and turned our Florida pleasure into universal fear
when we tipped over and found ourselves in muck,
not to be confused with the alligator-free muck
I scrape from my street.

Moral: Small pleasures can suck you in
            and bite you in the ass.

But rightfully or wrongfully, I do exist. And like it or not,
you do. So, you might as well put out your feelers. 

Accept the offer of the wiry climbing instructor
with the jaunty red cap who invites you and your father
to a talk he’s giving that night in Jackson Hole, where you
will find yourself paired up with the person to your right,
a young man with a slender face and blonde ponytail.
But what good are feelers if you don’t put them out there?

Heed the instructions that, for the next thirty minutes,
would have you staring into the young man’s face. Ask yourself,
have I ever seen a face so thin, a beard so wispy?
Are his eyes green? Blue?
Have twenty minutes passed? Have two?

As his slender face becomes a horse-face,
it occurs to you that were he a gift horse
you are looking him in the mouth. Until now,
you have never thought that suppressing a laugh
could be painful, in complete contrast
to the pleasure you experience when you feel
a tap on your shoulder and hear your father say,
“Let’s get out of here!”

Moral: The intended object of your feeler
            (e.g., a wiry climbing instructor’s promised talk)
            might not be the destination of your feeler
            (e.g., your father’s tap and his welcomed words—
            a pleasant destination you will arrive at each time
            you tell the story for the next fifty-two years,
            i.e., lots).

Turns out, the author of such cheerful works as
Being and Nothingness, Nausea, and No Exit
was, along with his life-partner, Simone de Beauvoir,
a dedicated partygoer. During a party in occupied France,
Sartre, under the influence of existentialism and then some,
climbed into a cupboard and conducted an imaginary orchestra.
Meanwhile, fellow funster, Albert Camus,
turned saucepan lids into cymbals.

We merely wanted to snatch a few nuggets
of sheer joy from this confusion and intoxicate
ourselves with their brightness, in defiance
of the disenchantments that lay ahead,
wrote de Beauvoir.

FYI: Sartre lost his eyesight. Camus died in a car crash.
        Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia
        after Sartre exited with a pulmonary edema.

Sitting here, in my chair by the window,
much as I would like to continue our discussion,
I can’t help but notice a dozen-or-so gumballs
calling out to me from my street.

Moral: A rolling gum ball gathers no—no, not that.

           Eat, drink, and sweep merrily,
           for tomorrow you will—possibly.

Or how about?

          Climb every mountain. Paddle your canoe.
          Face the orchestra, not the audience.
          You’ve read enough. Now shoo.