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AS IF THE POTTER'S WHEEL I use each Monday and Friday were not enough to keep me more than busy, I've recently signed up for the use of yet another type of apparatus. While the former has me throwing, this equipment has me pumping, pressing, curling and extending. These activities, I'd have to admit, don't excite me as much as the creativity of building pots, but they should serve to advance my goal of building up a structure of another sort, namely, this bony body rack of mine. While I rue each cave-in of a pottery project, I truly shudder when I contemplate the framework on which I'm hung collapsing from neglect.

Several years ago I had a dream one night which I shall never forget for the creepiness of it. Lounging on a beach at dusk, I looked up to see a figure approaching. To my horror, it turned out to be a gangly, dangly skeleton loping its way in my direction. Its finger bones rattled together and its knee bones clicked; all thirty-two of its big white teeth shone in the semi-darkness, but it said not a word for want of a tongue. My own flesh crawled at this figure's lack of it, and I shrank back into sweating, heart-pounding wakefulness.

Now, I am currently reading a book, a true story, in which a linguist lives for years with a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. This group classifies their dreams as real, non-fictional experiences. They believe that you see your waking and sleeping realities in two different ways, but they are both authentic.

I'm thinking, there's a belief I could put to good use! As I begin my bone-building endeavor, I would be delighted to have some pertinent advice from a bona fide skeleton. Surely he or she would have some helpful tips to relay to me. On the slim chance that I'd ever encounter one again, I'm hoping to stifle my aversion and extend a friendly greeting to him or her (I could very well be embarrassed by my inability to distinguish which)  and ultimately gain some wise council. Hmm, perhaps I'd best be working out some sort of Helen Keller mode of communication in advance.


In the meantime, I hope I don't have to walk into the gym too many more times and wonder what the heck I'm supposed to do with this cornucopia of machinery.

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