Thinking

Eureka!

( I've decided to use potted plants instead of the familiar

light bulb glowing over one's head.)

I recently used the expression "salad greens".
It reminds me of how I think, or how my thinking seems to me. When I first have a glimpse of a structured idea, it is all one particular locale or focus, emotion and feeling, taste of time and place, smells, and things like fluids flowing under the influence of the moon.

If I had written Romeo & Juliet, the first step would have been love... young love and young discovery of love... discover... Verona... dust... sun... smells of love... taste of tragedy; all jumbled in a primitive layered onion, layer after layer, and part of undifferentiated greens and herbs for a salad.

And I don't know what you mean by salad, but a salad to me is a positively ancient Permian explosion of vegetation: all these new types of greens - Mizuna, Mesclun, Bok Choy... where ordering in a restaurant becomes as unnerving as being in Prep School unprepared for Latin class, under the withering eye of the magister studiorum, reading Caesar and stumbling like unhappy Vercingetorix in chains:  A...ah...roo...GA..la... AruGAla ?
A...RU...ga...la, the teacher moans and corrects
Arugala, I say, with the accent in the correct place (shame-placed might I say I mightily be?!)

The shame of even dreaming of salad greens - I ask you, how do I retain that thought from its first tentative sketch as I sit in the easy chair, until I run to write it down? Emotion, taste, smell...old school colors and feel of cardigan sweaters stored in lockers. But sometimes I don't make it... and it becomes infinite lockers in my shady school corridors, filled with cardigan details and wreaths of neckties...

... those rectangular ruins of youth!

--