musings

I arrange my things in the room that Terhi just vacated, looking forward to six weeks of not too much movement and a fast Ethernet connection only a meter from the bed. ain’t no slackin’ gonna happen! not that it will affect my dreams, memories, but there is something of a fear that I will nerd out here. gotta remember to go out and dance with students some, even though they have hardcore patterns of sleep deprivation and such where bands don’t start ’til one in the morning and people party all night (thank god the nights are shrinking daily!). push-ups, recollections, replays of fragments of this and that memory, and I am not losing my hair except as it is SO long now, longer than it has EVER been, that it gets tangled, and for the past year I rake a handful of it out each couple days. still plenty. how is it at this AGE to have long hair. retro hippie that I never was because I wasn’t old enough to do those hippie things like Free love and stuff. like the mirrored aviator glasses I had starting wearing in High School which have migrated, did migrate to the smallest round frames possible that I picked up in Paris in 1982 when Randy and I were there at the end of a three-month trek in the Deux Cheveaux (Citroen CV6) across various stages of a European Holiday. those round frames were filled with rose-tinted lenses as soon as I settled into the first step of life in eLAy, Bellflower, to be exact, working for UNOCAL. before I got the Fiat Spyder Pininfarina-as-second-car, the six-foot-three-triple-fin swallowtail surfboard, a cake of Mr. Zogs Sex Wax (Best for your Stick!), and moved to the bungalow in Santa Monica away from the poison air of inland eLAy (one morning there was a chemical smog that was stripping paint off cars in Long (Wrong) Beach, the morning news said. danger!) silicon dioxide mediation for me began in third grade, Miss Selman’s class — the woman who put a staple through her finger and cried in class — diagnosed as having “lazy-eye syndrome” which lately I have heard never existed as a real affliction. they fitted me with a black clip-on plastic patch to go with the nerd-of-nerd four-eyes frames. trauma. to be a four-eye with a patch, this was too much for me and them. I lost the glasses on a 747 en route to San Juan, Puerto Rico on the only non-auto-enhanced family vacation I can remember. Virgin Islands — set up a precedence when I came back and proceeded to perform slide shows with bought slides and pictures taken by my father. no, there was a car involved, a VW Bug which the five of us (my brother was not present) puttered around the island of St. Croix in. I think this was all before the Caribbean was really a yuppie destination, actually, it was definitely before yuppies at all. Maybe doctors of the 60’s went there to play golf in plaid Arlon slacks, alligator-skin-trimmed golf shoes and Dick-Van-Dyke-Van-Housen shirts. We had to get from Washington to Miami to San Juan in that PanAm 747 with the spiral staircase to the upper deck where there was a genuine 1960’s cocktail bar with piano, then to St. Thomas and on to St. Croix in a converted PBY Catalina which, fantastically to my ten-year-old brain, took off and landed on the water and the pilot invited me to the copilot’s seat but I was too chicken, so I think Nancy, my sister, went instead. before or after this time I built a model of the PBY Catalina — in the war version with two plexiglas machine-gun turrets on the rear fuselage. the glue would always get on my fingers when gluing window parts, and, as a potent solvent, would always screw up the clarity of the windows. nowadays kids just sniff the glue instead. I have no memory of getting high while building the countless 1:72 scale war machines and painting them with equally toxic paints. what is the replay factor? (where do cultural markers enter into this form of expression. this collected, bad-breathed exhalation of words proper and improper) cultural noise is something that I avoid. the process of travel can be a process where you strip away all the same-ness between things, people, and places, and just get the difference. forget all the pieces of quaintness and kitsch that accompany culture, forget all the accoutrements of growing up that couldn’t be explained to a foreign friend, not REALLY explained — you had to be there, forget anything that wasn’t less that 2000 years old, and stare people in the eyes, hunters and gatherers alike, and do a Vulcan mind-meld, period. multitasking into the evening, slow Light dying.

and so on. Terhi announced in the middle of the evening a couple nights ago that it was her birthday, that she had forgotten. I have decided to let go of any thoughts or plans of structure for this manuscript. I will make it in the form of these bits chiseled from a facade that people would expect one to show, but I am not so interested in showing what people are expected to show. inverting the customary formal relationship, why not? and the other thing is that I think I will go BACK into the now 27 chapters and begin to modify it bit-by-bit, remapping a history that never really was.