COLEMAN'S CORNER (FICTION) II

Before he had even had a chance to wipe away the sleep-drool that steadily leaked its way down his nose and onto his chin, Jeffrey Dunn woke up one July morning thinking of those words, his Papa's words, the stink of life telling you who was who and what was what. Even before his eyes opened or his mouth opened. His pecker still a little bit hard with pee waiting to exit, please, pronto. Papa's voice had crawled inside of his head and pulled him straight out of sleep and into the faint daylight peeking through the blinds. Poking him awake. When he finally opened his eyes that voice seemed to fade away almost all at once, like the radio in the car always did when they passed under Gerry Cheevers Bridge on the way to St.Catharines. He waited a second for Papa's words to come back, they didn't, and besides, it didn't matter all that much. Papa was just downstairs, probably eating his Cheerios and his drinking his pretty gross raspberry juice and getting ready to go cut the grass and rake the gravel over at the ball diamond. Wasn't today the last day of the tournament between all those companies who did stuff that Jeffrey couldn't quite understand, but were important for some reason he could never figure out? So if he wanted to hear Papa's voice for real, well, it was right on there in the kitchen inside of the old man's throat. Jeffrey liked the voice of Papa that came out when he went to sleep better than the voice of Papa's that waited in his mouth, the voice that had dodge all those Cheerios and all that raspberry juice that came crashing down his pipes every morning, snow or shine. The thing was, Jeffrey always knew what Papa's voice had to say when it came and piped up when Jeffrey was asleep. Always stuff he'd said before, either that day or the day before. He never knew what stuff, angry or happy, kind or cruel, Papa would say in real life.

Jeffrey sat up and scratched his crotch and padded his way into the bathroom to take that long-awaited pee, mostly because he had to piss so hard it hurt, bu also because he suddenly realized that he was always curious about what Papa to had to say about, well, whatever, anything, and the sooner the pee was done, the sooner he could get dressed and get downstairs and hear what there was to be heard. Half of the time, or more than that, what Papa had to say didn't make sense to Jeffrey, and half the time, or more than that, it hurt, Papa's words did, but Jeffrey's friend Kendall at school didn't have a father at all, so words that sometimes hurt must be better than no words at all, ever. Besides, it wasn't a Band-Aid-being-ripped-off-all-in-one-go kind of hurt. More like a purple-nurple kind of deal. Hurt so good you kind of liked it, though Jeffrey wasn't about to admit to liking a purple-nurple, at least not out loud. Nipple tugs weren't supposed to be a good time.

By the time he'd taken his leak and had his shower and rushed down the stairs while still wiggling his way into the Spider-Man shirt and the blue-jean shorts that they'd bought down at Robinson's last winter for only five bucks a pair, fished deep out of one of them metal bins in the corner of the kids' clothes section, the bins that looked like cages for fish, or prisons for lobsters, what with all the bars running up the sides, but instead were actually used to hold the clothes that nobody seemed to want all that much, Papa was almost done his cereal. Drinking the milk right from the bowl. Flipping through the Sports section of last night's St.Catharines Standard, which they had delivered just before dinner each night by Kenny Crawford, a short fat kid with bright red hair and a bright red face. Bopping his leg under the table, keeping beat to music that Jeffrey couldn't hear, Papa was.

"Morning Papa," Jeffrey said.

"Is for you," Papa said.

Jeffrey had just settled into his own bowl of Fruit Loops and apple juice, not raspberry, ugh, never raspberry, apple all the way, and Papa was already getting that look he got whenever it was about time to head off to work. Rubbing his left cheek with his left hand and lightly rapping the kitchen table with his right fist, like he was waiting for somebody to open up a little door from underneath. Soon he would be gone, vamoose, and Jeffrey wouldn't get to talk to him until later tonight, six or seven o'clock, maybe later, maybe earlier, who knew, and he knew he ought to say something fast because Papa didn't like to talk all that much in the mornings on a work day, and here he was, already off to work, practically. Jeffrey spooned up some Froot Loops, two red, one green, one almost black, which was weird, now that he thought about it, and probably not normal, and he tried to think of a question he didn't know the answer to that would force Papa to stop and pause and think for a bit. He did this almost every morning, Jeffrey did, and often he couldn't come up with anything, but today he thought of a good one.

"Why's my name 'Jeffrey'?" he asked.

Papa lightly placed the paper on the table, as if he was setting a placemat for dinner, which Jeffrey had seen him do exactly once, which was why he remembered it so clearly. Placemats were not a common sight in this house, and Jeffrey had not even known what it was, that green, square felt rectangle, but that had been a special time, soon after Mum had left for good, and his Uncle Darrell, her brother, who he had never met before, had come for dinner, and Papa had said that placemats showed class at a time like this. Now he was treating the paper the same way, but Jeffrey couldn't see how this time, or that question, was all that special.

"Why's your name 'Jeffrey'?" Papa asked.

"Yeah," Jeffrey said. "I don't know why. Lot of names out there you could of picked."

Papa looked at the paper, not at his son.

"Because you don't want a name like 'Herman' growing up in this town," he said.

Jeffrey thought about that while he ate the last of the Fruit Loops, even the black one, the one he probably shouldn't have been eating, but he'd never heard of anybody dying from eating an odd Fruit Loop. Puking maybe, but not dying. Papa wasn't moving, which meant he was thinking, too. Time for more questions, Jeffrey thought.

"But your name's 'Herman'," Jeffrey said. "You did alright with that name in this town."

Papa smiled, and Jeffrey could see his yellow teeth, even the metal fillings way in the back, but there was nothing funny about that smile. A smile without any humour was a scary thing, Jeffrey realized.

"Herman's a name for a guy who drives a zamboni and cuts grass," Papa said, and stood up. He hitched up the belt of his jeans, and ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked down Jeffrey.

"I don't get it," Jeffrey said. "You do drive a zamboni and cut grass."

"You want to do that stuff?" Papa asked. "You want to make money that way?"

Jeffrey stirred his spoon in the last of his milk, making little tiny circles and bubbles that bobbed nowhere much at all.

"Not really," he said.

"Then that's why I called you Jeffrey," Papa said. "So you can have a name that ain't going to sound perfect on the side of a zamboni."

Then Papa did something that Jeffrey had never seen anybody do outside of a movie.

He winked.

"Key's where it always is," Papa said.

He picked up his paper and headed out of the kitchen and out of the house before Jeffrey could say anything more. Not that he knew what he would say. Winks were supposed to be full of fun, just like a smile, but that wink was something else altogether.

Jeffrey sat at the kitchen table, heard the front door shut, and the shoes on the gravel, and the car pulling away, and the house and the day to come were once again his and his alone. Made him feel almost grown-up, it did. Or at least like a teenager. Also made him feel alone. Didn't hurt none, though. Not that much, anyways. Almost like a gobstopper stuck square in the throat for a second or two before it scooted free and went smooth down the proper pipe.

Besides, he was used to that lonely feeling, especially after he asked Papa especially hard questions. Kind of, in an odd little way, expected that feeling. The lonely one. Used to it so much, he wasn't sure what he would do if it wasn't there no more. Maybe good questions with strange answers made everyody feel lonely. He wasn't sure. Had never asked anybody that, because that would be a real weird question to ask, wouldn't it. He couldn't figure out how to ask most folks the kind of questions that he most wanted to ask. Maybe grown-ups knew how to do it. Jeffrey didn't. Loneliness like this, the kind that sat in your stomach like freshly chewed Doritos, was kind of sweet, he realized. It made him feel sick and satisfied at one and the same time. Like a tall, cold class of Country-Time Lemonade that he didn't want to finish.

COLEMAN'S CORNER

(Note: The following is part of a piece of fiction I've been working on here and there, the opening section of a longer work that I'll excerpt now and then when the mood strikes. It will ramble and meander, delving deeply into the little stuff of characters' lives, and overall it may seem like it doesn't have much of a point to it, but that's kind of my point.)


Jeffrey Dunn's father, Herman Dunn, drove the zamboni at Pete Peter's Centennial Arena Monday to Saturday during the winter, cleaning the ice between shifts of the pee-wee and midget and Junior B hockey games, and in the summer he cut the field over at Hawksley's baseball diamond three times a week, making sure that the grass wasn't too high way out there in the outfield. Hated hockey, hated baseball, Herman Dunn did. Jeffrey knew this for a fact because Papa always came home in the winter rubbing his hands, red from the cold, and in the summer he always came home rubbing his neck, red from the heat, looking even redder compared to the all-white Niagara Parks and Rec shirt he had to wear every day, and he'd never watch hockey on TV or listen to baseball on the radio, even if the Leafs or the Jays were in a pretty good playoff hunt. Sometimes he'd sigh and look over at Jeffrey lazing around on the couch and say: "You keep on doing that. That's why they all call it 'work' and not 'fucking around with your friends and then lazing around on the couch', I guess."

Jeffrey never could figure out what that was supposed to mean, but angry or sad, happy or tired, he liked the sound of Papa's voice all the same, no matter what he was grumbling or grinning about. Like the ice you jangled around in a glass just before the Coke was poured in, Papa's voice was. Sweet beneath the clanking, or something like that. Jeffrey also could never get why, if Papa hated sports so much, the two of them could sit there in the cold of the arena under those tiny old heaters hanging from the ceiling that never seemed to heat much of anything, and watch the game go whatever which way it wanted to go, and Papa always seemed to know exactly what was going to happen with each player on both teams on every shift. Like he wasn't watching the game for the first time like everybody else sitting beside him and freezing around him, but instead was seeing it all again after he'd already watched the highlights on SportsDesk on TSN the night before.

"Watch seventeen, the Hurtzel kid," he'd say. "He's gonna make like he's gonna pass, but he don't pass the puck in the third period, almost never, not when they're down two, three goals." And Hurtzel wouldn't pass the puck, he'd try to score, even from a weird angle way out past the blue line, out where nobody good ever shot the puck unless they were trying to ice it and kill time for a line shift.

Or they'd be sitting on the faded green bleachers out under the yellow sun on a bright August afternoon watching ladies' softball, Papa chugging a Molson down in big gulps as it stayed safe and cosy tucked inside of those foam coasters, kind of like it was hidden, because you really weren't supposed to drink at the ball park, it being public, and especially with Papa being a public employee, which probably make it worse, and Jeffrey would be drinking a 7-Up, never a Sprite, though he liked both, only 7-Up he liked better, he didn't know why, sipping it slowly to make the drink last unlike Papa, who would drink three or four beers but would only buy Jeffrey one pop, and Papa could tell you which pitcher would throw like a girl and which was halfway decent for a chick, considering it was, you know, softball, and not the real thing. He could tell you which batter most likely had celluite creeping down her thighs due to the awkward way she stood beside the plate, or who couldn't make it from first to second in time because her boobs were too big for running. "Can't run with boobs like that," he'd say. "Not my rule. Nature's." One day while watching another boring ladies' softball game Jeffrey just flat out asked him how he seemed to know so much.

"About what?" Papa said.

"About baseball," Jeffrey said. "About hockey. "

Papa turned away from the game and looked down at his son. He wasn't a thoughtful man, Jeffrey thought, because he sometimes forgot about birthdays or Christmas cards, but he thought about stuff a lot. He could even tell when Papa was thinking real hard by the way his eyes got all glassy, like he was trying to focus on something real far off. He'd wipe his nose and scratch his stubble and stifle a Molson beer burp before it could sneak its way out, which meant he was most definitely serious. Usually the burps just flowed like music from a tape deck.

"You see enough shit," Papa said, "and sooner or later you can just smell what stinks and what don't. Simple as that."

BING CROSBY FOR COMPANY

He looked pretty much like what every taxi driver in Manila looks like on a Tuesday morning. Pushing sixty. Tired. Haggard. Simultaneously frazzled and bored. Waiting for ten, twelve hours of screeching jeepneys and homeless kids knocking on the windows to sell cigarettes and rich kids coming back from the mall climbing into his cab to spill lattes on the already stained and split seats. Sweating already. No tolerance for chit-chat with the foreigner in the back. Getting by.

Five, six channels on the radio flipped by before he settled on the one with the Christmas tunes. Have yourself a merry little Christmas in stinking, putrid Manila. The steady rise of the gleaming skyscrapers matched in their off-kilter garishness only by the slums that lined the streets two and three blocks over. So why not add some Christmas tunes to add to the strangeness?

Only I forgot, for a moment, where I was. In Manila. In the Philippines. Where, if the month ends in a 'ber, then it's Christmas time. And this was September 1st. And so obviously some Christmas music was in order. Nothing was strange at all about this scenario. Except me, and what I thought about it. The air was hot and the pavement was sizzling but Rudolph with his nose so bright was on his way. It made me feel somewhat happy. Ashamed at inwardly mocking Christmas carols in late summer.

Why shouldn't the taxi driver be listening to yuletide songs in September? He looked old and craggy and waiting patiently for his next heart attack, and he had probably come to Manila ten, twenty, thirty years ago from one of the provinces, Benguet or Tarlac or even the Mountain Province (which I had been surprised to hear was actually the name of the one of the mountain provinces), and he would die in Manila, after spending his life sitting in a taxi twelve hours a day driving people like me around.

He didn't look like the type that would want Christmas music at six in the morning on September 1st, but it's lonely inside those doors, all day, cigarettes and a bottle to piss in so you don't have to stop the car being your only buddies. Kind of deflating, without Bing Crosby for company.

GENERAL HOSPITAL

Theoretically, we can be born anywhere, at any time, but in actuality, we're born in one place, at one time. There will forever be a precise moment, and an exact location, where we entered the world. (And where we'll leave the world, too -- but only the former do we know about, unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on your point of view.)

This simple concept occurred to me the other day when I read that St.Catharines General Hospital would soon be replaced by a bigger, better, shinier place, one fully equipped with lasers and light sabers and all kinds of cool stuff.

I suddenly thought: The place where I entered this life will soon be no more.

Not that I spend all that much time thinking about St.Catharines General Hospital. Aside from being born within its walls, the only significant amount of time I spent there was as a teenager, getting rehab from an athletic injury. (And the therapist in charge of my rehab? My main opponent's mother. Hmmm...) Recently, the only time I ever thought of it at all was to note that comedian Dave Thomas, of SCTV fame, was also born there. I found that kind of cool. Me and him, coming into our own via the same brick and mortar. Other than that, I haven't given it a mental glance in quite some time.

Still, I always knew it was there, that hospital. It was a real place with definitive, solid stuff that helped me gain my initial balance. There was an exact operating room that served witness to my birth. There was the room where my mother spent the night, me lovingly wrapped in her arms. (And puking on her chest, and shitting in my new, miniature diapers, but hey -- I'm trying to be, like, eloquent here.) My first breaths were taken inside of that concrete building. Everything that came into my life started there.

And soon it will be kaput.

Which is fine. Seriously. The new should give way to the old, and it's only a building, after all, and a new, more advanced facility will help more people, save more lives, allow other babies a better shot at surviving the first few hours of the difficult but joyous existence that awaits them.

I am having thoughts, though. Strange ones. Evocative ones.

I want to find out the number of the operating room I was born in. I want to locate, precisely, where I slept my first night. I just want to be there, in those places, to complete some kind of strange, circular loop. I want to look at those walls, the same ones I looked at for the first time ever. I'd never seen walls before, being, like, five seconds old and all, and yet those were the very first ones I witnessed. I'd never breathed air before, either, and yet I breathed oxygen there, in that place.

I would like to occupy that slot again, if only for a moment.

Not to remember (because I can't), and not to reminesce (because I won't), but just to be there, in that place, as I once was almost thirty-four years ago.

To crudely connect the baby to the man.

I will stand there, and watch the nurses, and smile, and feel silly.

And then I will leave.

I won't actually do it, of course.

Actor John Ritter, whose work on Three's Company provided pretty much the highlight of my childhood years, was born and died in the same hospital, and, as tragic as his passing was, I always thought there was a morbid yet appropriate symmetry to that act, as if that was how it should be for all of us, and yet almost never is.

To exit where we began, as it were.

Not that I want to exit exit, you understand.

I just like the poetic symbolism of it all.

Soon St.Catharines General Hospital will be gone, however, and yet I will still be here. Me, and the thousands of others over the decades who came bursting and bawling into Earth from behind its doors.

We all start at one place, and one place only, and that was my place.

Buildings can't feel a thing, but we can. If I were there, now, I would touch the main door, softly. I would slowly walk across the floor, careful not to stamp too strongly. I would search for that first room of mine, where I slept my first sleep. I would silently say thank-you before I left, and take the bland, efficient, hospital silence as a weary, worthy 'you're welcome'.

"JUST OUT OF SHEER CURIOSITY..."

I stumbled up out of sleep and away from a hazy dream with one strange, resonant phrase ringing in my head: "Just out of sheer curiosity..."

Still stuck somewhere between slumber and wakefulness, it took me a moment or two -- but no longer -- to suddenly recall, with a force like a kick to the balls, its source.

Mad Magazine, probably twenty-five years ago.

As a kid, I subscribed to any number of Marvel Comics (but never DC, no, never, because Marvel Comics and DC comics were fierce competitors, warriors waging battle for the hearts and souls of young tykes across North America, even the world, and you could like one company and love one company, but only one, not the other, for that was the way it worked, so while I had numerous copies of G.I. Joe and Spider-Man, X-Factor and West Coast Avengers sent to my house, I had to secretly, almost in shame, prowl the turnstiles at the local Avondale convenience store searching for the DC stalwarts of Superman and Aquaman, Batman and Justice League, Hawkman and Green Lantern, but it was never constant, never regular, for to admit to such a propensity for the dreaded comic book competition would be betraying the oath taken by Marvel Zombies everywhere), and I also subscribed to Mad, one of those comic magazines that parodied everything under the celebrity stars -- movies and books, tv shows and politicians. It gave me my first hint that the serious adult world outside my door was also one to be laughed at and scolded, deflated and prodded; before SCTV and SNL, it taught me that even the things that I loved were worthy of good-natured scorn.

Mad also produced paperback books featuring any number of topics sure to strike hilarity in the hearts of pre-adolescents everywhere, and one of those books consisted of nothing but questions to the editors of the magazine -- followed by their suitably rude, inappropriate and inane answers. (Were they real questions sent by real readers? Ah, but this is one of those mysteries, like the impossible construction of the Egyptian pyramids, or the real nature and composition of Dolly Parton's breasts, that are doomed to remain unsolved, I'm afraid.)

One of those questions from some long-forgotten reader asked: "Just out of sheer curiosity, how did Alfred E. Neumann lose his front tooth?"

The answer was provided in a full page picture. Neumann, if I recall correctly, was perched on a ladder outside of his neighbour's house, peering through a bedroom window, binoculars in hand, watching a very naked lady take a shower. Neumann is smiling his shit-eating grin at us, the readers; but, known to us and unbenownst to him, the naked lady's husband is rounding the corner of the house, heading towards Alfred with his fists clearly clenched, an ass-whupping ready to be unleashed.

So, how did Neumann lose that infamous front tooth?

The caption below the picture read: "Out of sheer curiosity."

I found that witty beyond belief.

(It took a moment or two, but then it clicked: "Oh, I get it!" I thought. "Because he's curious about seeing the naked lady!")

It was a play-on-words of the original question, to start with; in addition, it provided an answer to something that had always puzzled me; it created a backstory before I even knew what the word 'backstory' meant. It gave Neumann a history, a life, beyond the monthly cover of MAD magazine. He had once been a boy living in a neighbourhood not unlike my own, spying on a nude lady taking a shower, and he had been ass-beaten accordingly.

And, above and beyond all that, there was that carefully drawn, almost pristine image that looked so strangely out of place -- Alfred E.Neumann without his missing tooth. It was like seeing Rocky Balboa without his porkpie hat, or Superman without his cape (or conversely, Clark Kent without his glasses), or Captain America without his shield, or your teacher in casual clothes shopping at the supermarket. It just didn't fit. (Icons become icons for a reason, so I think the makers of the new Sherlock Holmes film featuring Robert Downey Jr. are freaking crazy not to include Holmes's pipe or hat as part of the character. "Ah, but those were never part of the original stories," they say, and that might very well be true, but Sherlock Holmes has cemented himself into our collective consciousness for a reason, and to deny the character the hat and the pipe is to deny us our own pop-culturual history.) That single sketch seemed to open up and shatter any number of boundaries -- artistically and comedically.

I always felt bad for characters in tight spots, and at times I wanted to warn poor Alfred: "Look out! Get down from that ladder! Your tooth is about to be lost!"

And yet, he was supposed to lose that tooth. It was his destiny and his karma; the tooth would be gone but his anarchic spirit of rebelliousness would fill in the gap.

All of these thoughts, all of these memories stormed through my brain as I finally awoke.

I hadn't thought of that particular panel in decades, and yet there it was, nudged into the sunlight by some spectre of my sleeping self.

"Just out sheer curiosity," I thought.

That sentence took me back.

Making me wonder: What else have I forgotten that I don't even know that I've forgot? What have you forgotten from your wonder years that is waiting to be remembered? What other random remnants of our childhoods are waiting to disovered by our ignorant, sleeping selves?

Perhaps tonight we'll find out.

I WANT TO REMAIN UNFULL

Am I the only one out there who feels almost completely overwhelmed by the onslaught of the Internet in the past five, ten years?

It's not like I'm old -- I'm 33, which is, you know, old, but it's not old old, if you know what I mean -- and the Internet has been part of my life for the past, what, ten, twelve years or so, and yet I still feel increasingly like the old fogey who comes late to the party empty-handed and is not quite sure what everybody else is so heatedly discussing in the corner on the couch, drinks in hand, plates already full.

My roommate in university in the fall of '94 was the first person I ever saw using email, and I literally asked him: "What's that? Are you, like, writing your friend a letter? You're going to print it out, right?"

Ever since then, it's been all downhill.

Meaning, I can't keep up. No sooner had I found out that Twitter was the cool new thing, the next thing I know, literally the next week, I'm reading an article in Time or Newsweek or somewhere that Twitter is actually becoming somewhat old hat. What the fuck? I'd just discovered it, and it's already considered old news? What else is out there that I have yet to discover, and yet has already become obsolete?

What scares me is the rate of acceleration with this baby. I've often told students that vocabulary that is now a given in the English language -- email, the internet, surfing the web, blogs, links -- literally had no meaning in a computer context when I was in high school. And some of this shit is only two, three years old, and the language has alread adapted it into the linguistic family which we all distort, corrupt and enlighten on a daily basis.

Not that I'm against all of this development. Of course not. There's only way to go in life, and that's up, baby, up. Forward. Onward. I just keep thinking: My grandfather was my age in 1953. When television was just getting groovy. And think of all that's happened since then. What do the next forty, fifty years have in store? I imagine video email is the next big thing, but I already suspect that it's already here. Somewhere. With somebody cooler, hipper and 'more connected' than I am.

Perhaps that's the thing. All this connecting is actually making me feel unconnected. It's like Norman Mailer said all these years ago, when discussing the snarky, snide, increasingly acerbic tone of sportswriters, who are 'faced with the burden of being clever'.

I think about that phrase all the time -- 'the burden of being clever'. Meaning, when you write in small, encapsulated doses, everything has to be funny, and sarcastic, and insincere, and strange, and offbeat, and oh-so-very-clever. Longer writing -- like short stories and novels, essays and even editorials -- allow you to develop your ideas slowly, carefully, methodically. They are often humourous, yes, of course, but they also, invariably, have at least the potential of being deep. Of touching us and moving us through sustained rhythms of language and emotion. We have the chance to delve deep and see if we can find something of ourselves at the end of it all. Browsing the Internet, I become exhausted, mentally and spiritually, and I find myself, at the end of five, ten years, facing an extreme case of cyber malnourishment, for lack of a better term. Will this be a permanent psychic condition, I wonder.

I fear (and this is the old fogey part of the 33 year old speaking up) that everything is becoming linked and connected and emailed and commented upon, and that, at the same time, so little is being said. We're so busy blabbing that we're not really listening, and we're all continuously trying to be very, very clever, without trying all that hard to be very, very sincere.

Ah, well. As I said earlier, there's no going back. And yet perhaps a happy medium can be found. I want the web to feel like my hometown library did, for some strange reason I can't quite articulate. I want a place where I can sit down and block out the world and browse through the shelves and grasp randomly at something unknown, but possibly perfect. Or at least perfect for that moment, when I need something the most.

Back then, in that library, between those long rows of metal shelves, I never knew what I needed until I found it. When I did, it was a cold glass of water shutting out the sun. I could drink and drink and drink until closing time. Coming back, the next day, I found I was still not full.

WAITING BETWEEN TIDES

This song always takes me back to a specific time and place:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx9br5ISRpo

Back to precisely where, and exactly when, is irrelevant to my point (as is the message of the song, whose mysterious, haunting tone bewitches me still), which is that music accesses different parts of ourselves than movies or books, text or images. We hear something, a song, and we're doing something else, profound or trival, or both at one and the same time, and then later, ten years or twenty years down the line, the song emerges from inside of ourselves, or out of the radio, and it's as if time and space have collapsed in upon themselves. We are twenty again, or perhaps we have always been twenty, even at birth, and we will be once again at death. Faulkner knew that the past isn't even past, but it's also not only present. It points towards a future we can't yet glimpse, or sense, or imagine. A cold wind blows upon our necks as the song sings its glorious, nostalgic, mournful chorus. The sky in stasis so far above is grey and distant, almost mocking, and yet: no matter. From my past my younger self declares (or I hereby order him to proclaim): "I will remember this moment, dread this moment, savor this moment, fucking feel this moment when fate or chance decides to play out its tune for me a last and glorious time."