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.