A case for everything being fine the way it is.

The edge is the only place I know. I work there. I walk there. I make pancakes there.

The edge isn't a place of perpetual near-disaster, like the place the old cliche "living on the edge" describes. It isn't a place from which anything can fall, even. On the edge, there is not even an up or down.

It is like the wick of a dynamite, lit and burning hotly along, but with no dynamite at the end of wick, and no burned ash behind. It is just the burn, seemingly to a destination, and as if there are remnants left behind.

The only struggle on this edge is our own. As a unit, we constantly strive for improvement, in a world that is already beyond compare. It is finding faults with Michelangelo’s perfect circle.

Many, many months ago, there was a Japanese Buddhist Zen monk named Bojuku and he said to his disciples, "All is perfect!" A hunchback was near, and exclaimed to Bojuku, "what about me? I am a hunchback...what do you say about me?"

To which Bojuku replied, "I have never seen such a perfect hunchback in all my life!"

The edge.

It is where the bright light of the dynamite wick burns whitely. It is where the hump of a hunchback is as flawless as the camel's hump but considered as defective as a lump of cancer in the breast.

The pancakes I make here on the edge do not normally come out as perfect circles. They are misshapen and full of pockmarks on one side. A boy with acne can grow into a man with pockmarks on the outward side of the cheeks.

Occasionally I will make a pancake that satisfies the quintessentialness I hunger for. It is a perfect circle, browned evenly on both sides and soaks up the maple syrup just the right amount.

Then I eat it, and digest it the same as all the other pancakes. The beauty queen will stop breathing. The pockmarked man will die.

On the edge, we are. On the edge, we never aren’t. One the edge we relive. On the edge we re-die. This happens on the edge all the time-ALL TIMES. Like sparks of light shooting from the hot fire burning down the neverbeginning, neverending dynamite wick...stressed as we are over invented cinders behind and a detonation that will never happen.