Can you handle not knowing?

Dwight D. Kronersveld had spent most of the night putting cigar bands around the larger, errant dog turds around town again. And I had to decide whether what meaning, or barring that, what emotion, I was going to assign to this. I filled a large scientific beaker to the top with explanations and drank it down. Immediately the back of my head began stinging as if the tentacles of a Portuguese Man of War were tangled in my medulla oblongata. I rinsed out the beaker and topped it off with a boiling mass of fresh anxiety. Down it went. Naturally, I sweat it out over the course of a most unpleasant hour. I had some old depression lying around, so I put that in and mixed it with some furtive paranoia beads I found rolling around behind the couch. Boy was that a mistake. I spent two days on a step ladder watching my neighbor make some kind of dark red jam through a dirty window. In time, it became abundantly clear that if I was going to live with the elusive Mr. Kronersveld's actions, I would have to accept their mystery. I left the beaker empty on the table. A family of spiders moved into it.

(Untitled watercolor. Robert H. Cumming)