Re

Six years old.  I am kneeling with my head on the ground between my knees.  On the shag-carpet in my bedroom in the house in Missouri.  It is a bright Saturday morning.  The shades are drawn and my eyes are closed. I am remembering.

Sequentially, from the present moment, in reverse.  I am drawing up all of the details, exposing them.  Hours, days, months, days.  Days, mostly.  I scan and search for every detail.  Scraping all the flitting moments off darkened walls. Reaching and spinning when I glean that a missing artifact obscures this linear portrait of life on earth.  I dredge it up, with enough time.  Pull it all out and lay it on the floor in front of me.

Under my room there is a crawl-space.  Salamanders slink between shallow pools in the gloom just feet below.  Most of the time, when I'm not crouched over on my head remembering my life, I'm consumed by fantasy.  I've got a lab down there.  I'm working on projects, like a laser-gun, and a drill based vehicle that will bring me back to Toronto.  My brother can come too, if he's nice.

I am still remembering.  It is four hours later.  Probably about noon.  I get back to Germany and things are not as concrete as I would like.  The difference between memories and memories of memories and memories of other peoples' memories is not as apparent as it should be.  But I know that there is something there.  These things actually happened and I am not an island in time that floats independently of past or future.

I am done.  Awakening from a dream.  A dream of all the dreams I've ever had.  This leaves me with a sense of ennui, a strong desire to be the past, to feel the things in the places that are now gone and even if I went there the physical domain would only barely help to prop up my memories to define the outlines of a reality that cannot be touched again.

Not the case.  I can and do touch them.  Every second of my life the shadows of the past overlap one by one.  More as I grow older.  Their forms become opaque, they pile and coalesce.  The present just a washed-out background on which they are projected.

Well here we are.  I don't think that much could be about this as a real infinite bandage-ripping-off  thing.  Sometimes I steal from those around me without giving back.  Like maybe, I'm not cagey, just enthralled.  Sometimes we all are.  Sometimes words are like a sludge of foam and particulate matter that is bushed up as a ring around high tide.  Or whipped around like laundry.  Good thing too.
Really all that one can do in these rut type, agoraphobia meets cabin fever meets self destruction meets delusions of grandeur type situations, is to ride the wave.  Most of the time there isn't any real danger, and its an experience, anyway.  At least its probably better than getting lost in the routine and carrying on like nothing.  That's really the best way to slow down time, to savor it.  Take it all, be selfish.  Choose to exist with all the shit that's going on, really live an it and not above it.  The shit is reality and everything else is an abstraction layer.  Better to not ever hang out up there because you'd just have to peel it back to figure out what is going on or maybe not peel it back at all, maybe just like not even notice that the refracted spectrum type images are so thoroughly expanded that the original content isn't even decipherable at least not without some kind of key or honestly thick manual.
Here we are, it is better than the alternative.

Part IV

The Max Planck institute, where my father worked, was up the hill a little ways out of town.  A collection of buildings in a wooded area surrounding a stone courtyard.  At least that's what I remember.

I remember being pushed in a kinderwagen though the courtyard.  It was a two-seater.  Not side by side like you see these days, but one in front and another behind.  I was in the front and fell out and cut up my knee.  It wasn't a bad cut, but it was bloody.

My father performed research on birds and lizards.  I am told the birds were starlings, but I remember them as crows, as big as ravens.  He let me hold one once, while he drew a blood sample.  They were kept in a dusty, open room below the roof of one of the buildings.  I liked the lizards better.  There were green anoles, and desert iguanas.  All of them in a bathtub with heat lamps shining down.  The desert iguanas were vegetarians.

The was a grocery store in town, run by a man names Herr Pein.  Or Pine maybe.  It wasn't that big but it seemed to have just about anything that anyone would need.  Herr Pein was maybe racist, or didn't like americans, or something like that.  He gave me an icecream cone once though, so I thought he was alright.

They Are

You've escaped a mildly uncomfortable social situation.  You flee down avenues, bike lanes, intersections.  Break free and coast across the river.  Massive and reassuring. This is an anchor to the world.    The gulf, washed up at our doorstep.  Placid, yet wild and powerful.  Here you think of them.

At the sidelines of a party.  The social event of the season for whoevergivesafuck.  Dart in and out of conversations.  You've got the right comments, on the right talking points.  You only offer up a few.  Mildy invested.  Mind wanders.  You reach for a hand that wont be there.  Later you tell this story.

They aren't aware what would have become.  You've both accepted that these mildly jarring reunions are frozen moments at dawn.

I learned apathy, while we honed our ability to indulge.

I am a bit of a chameleon, really.

I mastered delight in the simple things, blurring out inconvenient decisions to come.  Introspection above all else, your inquisition was lost on me.  New media, ghost stories.  A comfortable kind of lonely.

Vampires suck identity out of their victims till they can pass as one of the living.

I have never had an original thought in my life.

Hello I'd like to submit an application.

To what program are you applying?

The one where you get to make the world a better place.

Could you be more specific, please?

Is there one where you get to live on a boat in you free time?

And explore the world?

And make friends who are also making the world a petter place?

Oceaonogropherpologist?

Not that one.

What about one were I can find the things that matter to people and the people that matter to me?

Sir, I do not think you are taking this seriously.

I would like to submit an application to find someone who loves me the way I love everyone before I meet them?

I'd like a boat with a cabin, kitchen, and sails.

Please.  I (don't) want to be alone forever.

Pets are like children.  I've felt like such a terrible person since Tycho died.

I need to pare down my belongings.  No more bed.  No more Books.  No more chair.  No more filing cabinet.  No more pots and pans and notebooks and desk and posters and lizard cage.

I need to be mobile, alive, inspired, ready to strike.  These are things I need.    I need to be on the open road with plans ahead and memories behind.  I'm on track to be a human being.

I'm skating on an ice rink in Eau Claire.  Colby Cody?  Something on the north side.  No one is there like usual.  I'm skating the circumference.  Counter clockwise.  I was going clockwise before, but honestly, I'm not that good at crossovers in that direction.  I'm tired, but I'm skating and skating and the amber light is shining down and there is nothing else.  It is a little bit frustrating to me that all this money goes to my college fund.  But whatever.  There isn't any difference later, it's still going to my college fund.  Retroactively.  

Unlacing my skates.  The laces are tight and my skin is dry and cracking.  I don't really care about it that much.  Alone.  I am pretty alone.  The rink is on the southeast side.  Shawtown?  I'm listening to spiders (kidsmoke), looking at a "no smoking" sign, reading a book by the Dalai Lama about how it is okay to be alone.