I like to think of the geologic timeline of planet Earth as a Cracker Jack box layered like an elaborate parfait where each era’s biggest jokester buried a time capsule and if we dig ages later we might find, say, a Lego, fallen in beside peanuts, heavier than popcorn, settled toward the middle above arrowheads and bronze age artifacts, Viking sod hut outlines and backfill made of oyster shells, well past Easter Island monoliths shaped like those mugs with exaggerated faces all the way down to the brown bottom where a thin prize hides its hieroglyphic joke. The whole snack makes us hungrier than when we began because nostalgia isn’t filling it only raises more questions the way ethnographers, never satiated, studied only themselves while they jotted assiduously about the other, and baseball was here before we had a mortgage or plastic and nobody ate a whole box alone ever, and I don’t know why I feel compelled to hold the box up to my mouth and tap the last dust in; I cough every time and the flavor becomes the smell-flavor-smell of cardboard pulp and Fan-A-Vision where we hope to see ourselves see ourselves and I love the Phanatic so much it hurts when he drives his four wheeler away and night bursts the field greener with city skyline behind a dream so aquatic the way thousands of people cheer and flare like schools of similar fish in colors against blue deep water and the memory of three peanuts rationed that if I hadn’t eaten them might have spelled out a truth like a lot of this used to be ocean a historical rune lined up in my palm like breath blowing dirt from a fossil buried eons ago like everyone waving their foam fingers to the parking lot where their wheeled box waits to shake them home
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