2. The dog, then my baby, holds a star The dog holds the puffy star in his mouth in patient offering to baby. Baby reaches towards the dog’s mouth, retrieves the star, mouths it. Its yellow fabric goldens up in the wet feathers of their commingled spit. Spit that out, says the mama, with no urgency. Urgency is the worst possible motivation for making a trade. Trade making requires levelheadedness, accurate market analysis, grit and/or forbearance through uncertain or certainly awful conditions. Conditions that have been structured before or beyond our volition explains very much of what we call experience but not everything. Everything else is the only what which the candidates and elected officials want us to take interest in. In time everything else expires and it turns out conditions have been allowed all along, ha ha ha, to persist. Some birds come, time to time, as before. They so far persist. Persist in trying to make exchanges. If you’d rather, trades. Trades have been progressively undervalued in our culture. Culture explains very much of what we call experience. Experience waking up from a dream of waves to a cry that crescendos with the sun’s coming up. Up comes the sun along with the rise of her cries that begin with just a bit of air from the throat. Or it’s not coincidental, she sings it up, out of her throat. Throat sounds like goat sounds, unlucky. Unlucky things abound here, are linking. Thinking being also a kind of trade: off.