• "Undersea life will be better than we remember." Doubloon 1/26/12

At 11:47 last night, it was 33 degrees. Doubloon The Mystic was at his spot near Pier 59 layered thick in poncho and down with white fluttering helium balloons. He sat playing solitaire and had a basketball trophy on the crate. The night over Puget Sound rolled by clear on slow shoulders as planes banked turns, lurching turbines south toward SEATAC on their approach. Doubloon likes balloons, “The way they move and bounce from the breeze,” he said, “They’re jellyfish and planets.”

“What about lysosomes?” I asked. “Your balloons could function as lysosomes, cellular organelles, breaking down waste materials and cellular debris around you.”

“I’m going with jellyfish and planets. You can have the lysosomes and lice.”

I had music to play for him on his boombox. Miles Davis “He Loved Him Madly” off the Bill Laswell remix album Panthalassa. An openly woven nocturne. A piece to me that echoes similarly through in Zeppelin's “No Quarter.” Miles doesn’t enter until 5:30, and when he does, he’s cloaked, foreboding, drifting in his own dimension and distance. I said, “Doubloon, these sounds are what the pages of a trampoline night like this have to say to you. The bowling ball on the stretched fabric, it's the black hole.” Then pressed play.

Around 6:50 were Doubloon’s only comments, “Long leans the archways of this fish. Undersea life will be better than we remember.”

I had written down words from Octavio Paz and read them:

In sleep-heavy paw-strokes the water fell and rose. Then began the siege of signals, the star’s writing on the sky in blood, concentric circles by a sentence lifted, falling and falling in consciousness. His head on fire, covered with inscriptions, unforeseen passwords opened mazes and densities, silent mirrors transformed the four directions.

“Yes,” Doubloon said, “And the fifth dimension is everywhere and the fisheye.”