A single plastic container, all alone

My wife made this comment, offhandedly. The subject: a plastic salsa tub that she had just washed, now destined for the recycling.
It struck a chord in me, and I immediately blurted, "That is going to be the title of my next blog post!" though I had no notion of a topic for said post. And so, in the tracks of the great word-painters (inebriated, stumbling through the black, bleak blankness) I contemplated this single sentence. Could it describe the grotesque tableau that surrounds the average man? Plastic containers... stationary figures... solitary...

I've been reading Kafka, if that is not obvious already.

I guess I have no choice but to surrender this sentence to pure poetry. Something ethereal and serendipitous provoked that prose. And yet something deep-seeded and tyrannical within me desperately wants to make it my own, to swage and sinter it into a uniform theme, an impression, an epos. Yet my hammer is weak, my anvil soft, and no matter what my concentrated effort, unadulterated this phrase stands stronger alone.

And thus is life. To detect inspiration, unprovoked, and clutch and claw at it, and occasionally fall flat. Only occasionally, though, for that is art.