when I was a child, reality was something that I bent and stretched, something that wafted along with my imagination. my favorite game was crouching outside in the backyard with my brother's train whistle, occasionally blowing it when I heard the neighbor's children come outside to play and screaming "all aboard to china! aaall aboard!". I was seriously out of touch with reality. for a long time I believed that I had the power to make wind blow. I would also sneak over to the neighbor's house in the middle of the night with my ski cap and backpack and steal their cats. inevitably the doorbell would ring the next morning, mrs. anselm asking wearily if she could please have whiskers back, please, really, this is the fifth time this week.
I was probably that way because my parents never let me watch television, ever. oh, I could talk on and on about how television has danced away with your soul, stolen it, filled your hollow body with marketed, mass-media information, creating a nation of sameness, etc etc. but, I won't! if you sit, slack-jawed, in front of your television, surely you have seen the soul-shattering Mtv show called 'one bad trip'?. in which, for example, two boisterous, bouncy college girls go out to party for a weekend, but what they don't know is, gasp, that their fathers are watching them! or a man goes out for his bachelor party but what he doesn't know is, tremble, his fiance is actually watching him!.
how scintillatingly serpentine, to know the dark secrets of others, and because my father is dead (an epitaph reading: "a loving father"), I am worried that my whole life is nothing more than a horribly long, horribly personal episode of 'one bad trip,' in which I only exist in choppy montages of sex, drugs, and tattooes, presented to my horrified father, opaque, onlooking.
"now look here," he will say to god, stern, a finger planted firmly in god's sternum. "what could I have done differently? surely you know. you, who created everything out of vacuous nothing, a big-bang blowout of life and death and heaven and hell and good and evil. we could have done without the evil, by the way." and he tucked his precious little planet to a far corner of the universe, Copernican, not Ptolemaic, and he let people hack each other to pieces. "what could I have done differently?" god might wonder, and perhaps he walks arm-in-arm with my father, over clouded hills and trails, to chat about mortality, and the human condition, and why god watched so much suffering take place and yet did nothing.
*in all honesty, however, this is simply my brain, knitting odd thoughts together; I don't really believe in a god, or a ghost, or a great unknown.
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