Mike was not a complex toy or an assembly-required set of authentic deep-woods (pine or something) lawn furniture, so he didn't come with any apparent small print sequence-challenging instructions on how to build a world (preferably his) or even construct or deconstruct the consciousness (trace this) he obviously possessed, which, by the way, appeared to swim around (aura-like) and through him like a meaning-starved neon fish with a fleck of cherry-red (Mr. Jimmy) in its strobe-minded eyes.

Let's not count the parentheses (OK?)?

To Mike (and he gazed with long and loving (lovely, really) attention at them), the sky and trees, let alone the birds, sea animals (particularly, Leviathans), and major river systems with their intensely loyal tributaries, along with the billions upon billions of minuscule particles (one of them not yet observed but in the thrall-stall of theorization, called the Higgs boson, a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Though never observed "Mr. Higgs" plays a fundamental role in explaining what the hell we're doing here in terms of the construction of the mass in other elementary particles, specifically the difference between the massless photon and the weighty W and Z bosons. If it's out there and not just part of the mind, it won't be long before microscopic and macroscopic matter [those trees, birds, and even Mike] will make a bit more sense.) had been somehow built or constructed by "Someone" (intelligent fashion designer) prior to human analysis (psycho or otherwise).

Please count the brackets.

In other words (assuming now that Mike knew jack-squat about the Higgs boson and its role in clearing up or jigsawing in - oh yeah, Mr. Higgs - some of the unsolved issues existing between electromagnetism and the weak forces. And let's take a moment here, for a brief, but telling biographical fact on Mike and his attachment to particle physics: He ran screaming to the nearest bar while in graduate school when an Audiology Professor proclaimed in an opening statement to the class that the world was made of atoms {"How about that!"}), Mike felt (or at least kind of felt, especially on days when "things" {no ideas now} didn't make sense), or longed or actually pined or even opined - until his wife, the luxurious and seductive Mina told him to shut the hell up - for a simple set of instructions on how to build (or at least how to understand how "something" by "Someone" got buillt if there was indeed "Someone" or not) something called natural phenomena (i.e. himself or a raging river system). Mr. Higgs and Mike are ironic buddies. (Place Boxing Ring here) "For God sakes," Mina said - on one of his didn't make sense days, which Mina interpreted finally to mean that hubby Mike, viewed as a meaning-starved neon fish, had bumped up against the inevitable fish tank of being a being inside a grand and glorious Fish Tank (Higgs-as-field) which had wily-nily simply appeared some 15 billion big bang boom years ago with time and space and endless experimentation on its hands without any definite or real purpose, in spite of, the god-awful beauty and absolute thrill (is not gone) of just being or if you prefer (you're in now) becoming (let the be-ers {beers} be - thanks, e.e.) and/or tension, as in unfurl the continnuum line, of being and/or becoming, with becoming enjoying the lower case aspects of the alphabet and "being" (when not ontically inclined), assuming the upper case attributes and demanding to be written as Being - "you can't even a pound a nail into a curled deck plank or fix a broken chair, or attach the propane cannister to the gas grill without an apopletic fit. How in the hell do you think you could build a sweet little birdie or the petals of a rose even if you were given by divine intervention the "freakin" instructions written down in black and white and in a sequence that even a moron could understand?"

Mina was definitely hot (Standard Super Model Model of Beauty) and could bust an insult.

And she had a point. Mike was a klutz, a real ten thumber with major issues when it came to wood, nails, hammers, and things like roofing shingles (but not necessarily quasi-spiritual things like spirit-soul- consciousness (what the hay, Spiritus Mundi) and/or the body as a manifestation of the will.

However, Mike - being a fan of being in touch with the cause of things (if not the First Cause) - was beyond a mere point made by an outrageously good-looking conjugal companion and had plumbed his "thumbness" (without detour to Mother Goose, although he felt he was a good boy and secretly enjoyed saying at times: What a good boy am I) i.e. mechanical aptitude "thumbness" and attendant freak-outs associated with things of a mechanical nature (not metaphysical) - look, the guy or should we (we're in now) call him a "rube" struggled at first blush with plugging a three-prong plug into a stationary wall outlet - could and should be traced not to some genetic flaw - some wayward molecule in some chromosome somewhere in his body that simply detested via an advanced and difficult chemical alphabet (again with the alphabet) tool belts and those destined to wear them and consequently failed to deterministically participate in the currents and neural pathways that allow a species - possibly designed to invent tools (and Mike had certainly done due diligence in various museums that chronicled in sundry rooms Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age tools, let alone the Industrial Revolution and by skips and leaps and tra-la, tra-la, tra-la to widget boards and silicon chips (got iPhone) – but rather to the way his old man screamed at him for even coming close to him while he was sawing a two-by-four in half with his neat, power rotary saw. Friedrich Nietzche said guts don't add up to consciousness. Do bosons?

It goes without saying that if Mike's neon fish and vibrating aura hadn't been at such a limited development stage during those initial "construction" moments with his dad, he might have thought the rage of the father is passed on to the son, as his old man shoved an autographed Bob Cousey basketball into his gut with the following specific instructions (and from this point, or singularity, one {come on, you and I}could trace {deconstruct?} Mike's fascination with Presence as in his presence and how he came to be and/or was constructed):

"Get the hell away from me will you. There's nothing to learn here. There has been too many damn carpenters and tinkerers in this family to begin with. There's no need for another one. Learn to shoot a damn foul shot. Win one for some goddamn team!"

Voids come in all sizes, not colors.

The void in Mike via his dad's incensed and incisive words was a small one at first, about the size of a hummingbird. A void that sang (hummed) that he wasn't destined by chance and circumstance to understand how things got made – how things felt and roughened the hand, which would have been OK, if he had learned to make a foul shot during crunch time. Unfortunately, however, he didn't. For the moment he showed up in the park with his spankingly new orange b-ball, one of the park rats (so called, back in the day) wrestled the ball from him, after it had clanked off the rim, and ceremoniously pulling a switch-blade from the inside pocket of his black leather jacket stuck it (with much park rat to do and applause) into the flashy orb, issuing forth a bang in terms of decimals of sound that is (now) a matter of pure perception or conjecture.

Logos, baby.

For Mike, it was loud enough to get things started, and it would be foolish to maintain even a metaphorical equivalence to the initial theorized explosion. But it did possess enough bang-for-its-pop for Mike to fly through the park on speeding, high frequency bubbles with his neon fish suddenly an advertisement for a world full of questions without answers.