the Hitch Cock Rock edition

NF, ONE L
Issue #6

1. Many birds have cryptochromes in their eyes, which sounds like the latest Grifter Crime Family scam, but are really proteins that allow the birds to migrate great distances, since the proteins react to light in such a way as to allow them to "see" the earth's magnetic field, and therefore constantly and with total accuracy orient themselves from above.

2. No "Take a left at Home Depot" for the Common Grackle or Mr. Blue Jay. Which is odd, since the earth's magnetic field comes from the spinning of molten nickel and iron in its core, and the electrical impulses that whirling magma produces extend in waves into space, more or less holding our atmosphere in place, like a hairpiece in a storm, and without which we would all immediately die from solar radiation exposure, covered in thick orange foundation or otherwise.

3. Every couple of hundred-thousand years, the magnetic poles reverse direction, either at a whim or for reasons we have yet to determine, but no word yet if the Grackles adapt to the reverse on the fly, or get badly confused and begin to dive-bomb Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor out of spite.

4. In any case, migratory birds experience the world in as different a way to humans than an animist spirit in a rock does to a Shinto Monk.

5. So why do we presume, due to the random method our eyes "see" as developed through millions of years of evolution, that what we perceive is part of a common reality? What if we saw in six dimensions, or on the atomic level, or in infrared, or didn't see at all?

6. In that case, wouldn't the entirety of our concerns, let alone conceptions, be radically different? Wouldn't our theology and cosmology (such as we have managed to cobble them together) be woven anew, even if the context was exactly the same?

7. If we could "see" our own magnetic field like certain birds, might we not worship the charged particles of the solar wind instead of a water-walking hippie? If we could view quantum entanglement in real time, would our notions of solidity, let alone a self (there is no self), let alone the meaning and purpose of that self, simply fall away, shed like an inconvenient skin, and all the accreted nonsense, the stories we've told ourselves over millennia, suddenly seem like gibberish from an apparatus that fed us incorrect signals all along?

8. All of which is to say, what if we could actually "see" Donald Trump? What if, with eyes of Grifter-attuned cryptochromes, he was revealed, in fact, not to be the president, but actually a sweatily obese, dim-witted, soul-sucking golem with a huge red tie and a robot wife?

9. What if we were suddenly aware of the enormous needle protruding from the center of his forehead which, like a wasp, has been rammed into the center of America and begun to suck it dry?
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What, friends, would we do then?