I felt the breeze on my face, up close. warm. coming off of the ocean and sweaping up nice and close for intimacy. It whispered in my ear and then she sat, we sat together and watch the stars. Cacophany of ecstatic firings in my brain fusing this moment with others, with my being, with others’ being. Began writing the memories that would become part of who I am. (and what I wasn’t, what I didn’t have, what I’d lost).
The unintentional father, the unawares father.
Son, you are the miracle of nature, but you were an accident. The result of a drunken teenage triste between ex-Nazi rocket scientists and a horny US defense department that liked dressing up, heading into town, and flashing those greenbacks around. I tell you you’re going to reak havoc on some Japanese some day.
Mother cried. She tried to bring them up good but it looks like it didn’t work. If only they’d had protection. A factory in Holy See puts Catholic dictation into condom packets where latex sins used to be. This one must have had a hole in it.
Ah now listen here; I’m not saying that you were unwanted, I’m just saying that no-one was expecting you.
Such news! Maybe it’s time to take another ticket? This old job is not for me. I’m not cut out for this life of mine.
A struggling monkey lies strapped to a dentist’s chair. The chair faces a compound eye of flashing monitor screens, each displaying a different video feed. Trails of wire hook the monkey’s most interesting nerve centres to an array of monitoring devices.
This monkey is you. You’re caught in a deluge of sensations. Bombarded twenty-four-seven by the million pinpoints that taken together and taken for granted feel solid. Our monkey squeals.
Or perhaps the room itself is you. The room in its necessary context, with its unique selection of channels. The monkey has no name but the room is called Self.
I am a hermit. I am hermetically sealed from the world by a malady of perception. I was not formed from my society; I am not a child of my time. I know nothing of Coke, or MTV, or any technology. My thoughts are eddies in a teacup; do not mix into a sea flowing with currents of fashionable memes. Can Shroedinger’s cat survive in this purgatory? When I die I will be reconnected with a tribal narrative. They will create a story for me and resolve the fuzzy greys of my life. They will open the box and see that the cat has been resolved, poisoned.
But no; I am no hermit. I am a trader. As an artisan I weave tapestries filled with vivid colours borrowed from the world around me. I barter and negotiate for your similar creations with crude gestures, and we exchange and finally understand each other. In an acknowledgement of tradition, these tokens we have exchanged are ancient clay tablets of Sumeria…