The little gods are a pain in the ass.

Sketched lightly across the flat landscape are trees, skeletal and dark beneath the endless gray sky. The highway cuts a straight line, and the traffic is thin and fast, made up mostly of large trucks, some barreling towards Houston, others out across the state, bound, perhaps, for San Antonio, or clear across, like the running man, to El Paso.

“I feel God in this Chili’s tonight” is an absurd line played for laughs by The Office’s Pam Beesly (Jenna Fisher in the US version of the series). Absurd, for wherever God may ultimately reside, it surely cannot be at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chili’s. However, that is not to say God or something that might be mistaken for God could not have been felt in this particular branch of America’s second most popular casual eatery.

The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas is hosting a traveling exhibit called Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art. One of the items on display is a conch shell trumpet. It sits alone, under halogen bulb, in a sterile glass box. The plaque and the voice on the audio tour recording reports that the Maya considered such objects to be ensouled. It has an entrancing presence, sad yet powerful, like many of the artifacts on display. Though they are revered pieces, as they must be to have been included in the exhibit, something feels amiss.

The meme shares with the trickster many attributes: the ability to exonerate the guilty and implicate the free, to profane the sacred while hallowing the lowly, and to cut through complex issues and calcified defenses with a Trojan horse simplicity. Therefore, its relationship to art, much like our own, is complicated. To even begin to comment on the meme, one must first be able to speak of art. This is in itself a high order. To fail to recognize the aesthetic attributes of a revered work is to risk philistinism, while to sing too loudly the praise of overrated or simply bad art is to risk the labels of basic, mid-brow, and plebeian. To begin to approach the art object in the way the work calls for, one must adopt what the late anthropologist Alfred Gell called methodological philistinism.

In a courtyard of carefully fitted white slabs, the setting or dying sun has turned the stone to coral. The carefully fit-together slabs enclose me in a solid courtyard. The carefully fit-together slabs make up both the walls, the floor, and the fountain itself, which is in no way ornate, but is set in the center of the courtyard where it stands as an organ of some magnitude. I am made small by it.

I eat my Oreos with relish. No—I mean I relish in the Oreos I eat.

The earth is wrapped in cognition. A patchwork network of surveillance made up of an untold number of senses blankets the planet from pole to pole. Leviathans patrol the deepest reaches of the ocean with their telepathic soundwaves while the eagle takes in the entire desert at a glance. Roots tunnel deep and wide in search of nutrients, moisture, and stability. Insects vomit chemical hieroglyphics easily deciphered by their brethren. Mycelium convert meadows into satellite dishes. Water itself feels its way forward, finding the channel of least resistance, and this little clearing in the woods has become a hotspot of surveillance.

Arboreal scar tissue webs the air in a fountain’s frozen spray above the dark stump. Invisible, but there. It rises up in a solid trunk high above our backyard, and up there, far above our heads, explodes into a network of branches, reproducing itself fractally in a labyrinth of lines and leaves.

In regards to greeting children, Alyosha, that holy fool, understood it best: one must begin with a practical remark, without premeditated guile, so as to be altogether on an equal footing. In that manner, I notified the neighborhood children that the best rocks for skipping could be found further down the river, on the stretch of bank known locally as Caleb’s Beach, though any knowledge of Caleb himself has long passed out of memory.

An “L” had been spray painted onto the end of “Fina” at the gas station where we stopped. Dana was asleep in the passenger seat as I stood in the cold parking lot outside the car. The gas station was up off the highway, nestled upon the low slopes of the desert mountains.

The seeds arrived on a Tuesday. Chloe hoped they would mean salvation. A great fever had settled down. In the west, where it first hit, the people were said to have eaten one another, but those are just lies Texans tell about Californians.

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The mattress swells until the sheets are strained taut and the usual number of pillows look small and pathetic. It grows so that it presses against the entire perimeter of the room. Standing in the doorway, the man prepares himself for the climb.

Awakened in the night, I could not shake the feeling that the two houseplants beside the bed were watching me with evil intent.

The town decided it would benefit from a bit of public space, so we began construction on what could best be described as a cathedral. The proper permits were acquired, the space donated by a local philanthropist, and work was quickly underway. First, the existing structures in the area had to be torn down. They were mostly dining establishments: fast casuals, local links of globe-constricting chains — nothing special, but they did have their devotees.

I live in the shadow of a university I never attended. Well, that is not strictly true; I did attend it, and I don’t live in its shadow, merely its presence, which is heavy and ominous.

Increasingly translucent grow the leaves on the shade trees with each passing harvest. By the time they drop in the fall, they are but empty husks, like insects drained of their lives by the hungry suckling of spiders. And in the spring, when new buds appear, they are fewer in number and lighter in color. The great dark flowers which once bloomed beneath them, unfurling from the trunks and covering the grass in vast umbrellas of shade, are shot through with holes, pale and hot, incapable of sheltering any living thing come summertime.

We live in a summer resort town. In the winter, no one is around but us and the workers at the flour mill. For our exercise, we jog laps in the drained lazy river at the water park. Sometimes, as we are walking back in the evening, we see the illuminated forms of the mill workers trudging home, the white powder coating their bodies luminescent beneath the streetlights, the vaporous smell of bread floating in the air.