Episode 3

Episode 3: A Moment Alone (Segment 1)

            When we think about Form, we think about the shapes of things. There are many shapes in the universe. My favorite shape to think about, other than the tesseract, is the triangle.

            I have always, in the most mild and uncertain of ways, considered the possibility that I am the reincarnation of something or someone; or, more precisely, I feel as though I have been several things in the past.

            For instance, sometimes I feel like Voltaire. I feel like I wrote Candide.

            At times, perhaps times spent in a park or a field, any large plot of cleared land really, I get the taste of dirt in my mouth and it is not disagreeable. I smell the wind and it urges me to start running around the clearing, at full speed, and with absolute, unwavering disregard for anything else. This is the dog in me, or my past.

           

To the authorities on such matters,

            This may be admitted as a theory which explains my pleasure, along with my fellow male peers’ enthusiasm to urinate outside, in woods, on trees and things of similar shape and orientation. We are all dogs, as has been noted by several of our female peers.

            Yours,

                        MDW

            P.S. The study on women living past lives as cats has some potential in regards to receiving some grant money. Should be approved before New Year’s Day.

***

            I have had dreams of flying. I know what it is like to be a bird.

            I know you’re worrying now. Don’t waste your time. These are just little daydreams that I wish were true. These dreams don’t affect my day-to-day functioning. They do, however, have some genetic background that needs to be excavated, when I find my mental pickaxe, of course. Well… no blunt objects, fictional or otherwise, are necessary… My father, from time to inebriated time, will tell me that he feels like he is me, or that I am him, that I am his second chance at life.

***

            How did I get this time alone?

            I was outside on the second story balcony of house number two. After having exchanged blows with the twenty-somethings a cigarette was in order. Stressful situations make me want cigarettes. I was wearing my redneck uniform, which consisted of a sleeveless cotton shirt (a more modest substitution for the classic “wife beater,” as seen on popular television and in popular magazines about popular people and objects of affection)… yeah, the sleeveless shirt and the exercise shorts with the stains of who knows what (blood probably) permanently grafted on by time spent at the bottom of the insurmountable pile of dirty laundry back at my place. Oh, and some flip-flops. Can’t forget the flip-flops.

            When you smoke cigarettes like I do, you often find yourself next to a trashcan, or behind a restaurant, somewhere normal people never end up on any given day. You often find yourself alone like I did, like I do.

 It is a blessing, and worth all the risks involved in my opinion.

I am not embarrassed about my smoking in front of my family. I let them think that I am embarrassed about it because of how I seclude myself from them when I do it. In reality this is an act of courtesy for the little children in my family: my little cousins. They don’t have the wherewithal to make such a decision as willingly stepping into the tar pit of death.

Best not to tempt them to stick a toe in.

My attire did, however, embarrass me. But, only marginally. You see, I have tattoos…Lots of them… on my arms. My family seems to think they are signs of criminality and violence, and perhaps they are, but that doesn’t give them the right to twitch their head and pass guilty glares at me every time I’m playing with their kids. More on this later.

***

            Back to form:

            I think about puzzles and literature and paintings and pretty much everything worth thinking about the same way. They are fragmented things. They are the evidence of a calamitous event where the artist or the creator met the world in a head-on collision- where he or she realized, ‘holy shit I am in this thing called life and I’m supposed to tell these people how that feels with a picture, with words? And, if I don’t, I’ll feel like I was a worthless human being?’ That’s enough to explain anything they call “art” for me.

            When we think of puzzles, we think of a form, composed of shapes that are easily recognizable as shapes that fit into one another to make the form. I’ve been hiding behind form. The footnotes and all… I broke this thing and I tried to put it back together. That is, experiencing a thing like a family reunion is the same as the artist experiencing life. The memory of the family reunion is fragmented. This is the sad fact of memory. This is the happy fact of research. I have been given a very complex puzzle to put back together. I have been given a tesseract to reconstruct. The footnotes are my mimetic glue. I’m trying to piece this back together.

            So give me some slack.

            I tossed my cigarette off the balcony, knowing the second it left my finger that I would have to go down there and search for it in the twilight. It was getting close to dinner time. There would be people walking around the house and they would know I was the culprit and would chastise me and lecture me, as families do.

            Must return to the story proper.

I’ll be checking in with you, like this, from time to time.