You send yourself letters endlessly. They are postmarked from the future, some future date, some invented date, or the dates are all over the map—future and past switch places like Tuesday and Thursday, or Sunday and Monday. That is to say, not every Tuesday is actually Tuesday. Thursday swapped places with Tuesday, but because you have accepted at face value, have embraced with benumbing metronomic regularity that Tuesday is always Tuesday, you do not realize when Thursday has taken Tuesday’s place. It looks like Tuesday, acts like Tuesday, slots in between Monday and Wednesday just as Tuesday would, yet it is not Tuesday. It is Thursday in disguise, in drag. The letters you send to yourself may not originate from where you think they do. The past and future are mysterious counterparts. Every invention is a non-sequitur, and an invitation to reconsider your angle of perception. For example, remember that old nursery song: Rock-a-bye baby/on the treetop/when the wind blows/the cradle will rock/when the bough breaks/the cradle will fall/down will come baby/cradle and all.

Why was this baby put in a treetop? How tall is the tree? Let’s assume that the treetop is fairly high, why post a cradled baby there? Who are the parents? What kind of parents would do this? If ordinary human parents, did they have to climb the tree, bearing the cradle, and set it in the treetop? Doesn’t that seem like a difficult task to complete? And again, why do it? What if these parents weren’t ordinary humans, but a winged or levitating species of human no longer with us? Or perhaps they weren’t human parents at all, but birds, and the baby was a flightless baby bird, in its nest-cradle, which came crashing to the ground. Or, if human, what happened to the baby? If down came baby cradle and all,  did the cradle smash to pieces upon impact, was the baby badly injured, did the baby die? That which is soothing is oftentimes haunting. Or creepy. It is the melodious drug lulling into a false sense of security, peace, a cataleptic state.

Do not trust the letters you send to yourself. They are the fiction upon which broken cradles and false Tuesdays are built.