One evening, you find yourself wandering the island, full of a strange restless energy, too tired to concentrate but too wound up to relax.
Walking in twilight, studying the moving shadows within the Savage Garden, you catch sight of a spectre humming to himself, whispering an unearthly melody audible only underneath rustling leaves, only between drops of rain.
As you listen, you hear fragments of a story you will never be quite able to piece together. Some of it comes in words, some of it appears in your mind as pictures - but each picture you grab ahold of takes you to another place entirely. Nightfall brings you back from the land of the story just in the nick of time. The ghost, you realize, is long gone.
This was the story you were told.
A Side: Caffeine
I slug hot caffeine from the metal canister-mug in my hand as I drive, and it sinks its' sharp little needles into my stomach lining. Like furry little Gotham the cat, standing up ferret-like on his hindquarters to sink sharp little knives into my leg, gaze questing, pointedly seeking mine.
"Where are you? Don't go to the human spectre place. There's nothing there, it is made of nothings. Be here. See me. Be now. Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up."
At work on the front desk, there's a large wooden hourglass filled with sand. I cannot explain the neurotic compulsion that forces me to turn it over, every time I see that the top half has run out of sand. It's extremely important to my subconscious for some reason, that slow inexorable drip of sedimentary time, the tick-tock-ticking of the clock. Where is the time going, when it's not flowing? Slipping through my fingers, away into the nothing land?
Night-time, front stoop, orange streetlights humming away in the dark, noise of the powerlines snickering under your teeth. The wind is biting, but for some reason I'm invulnerable tonight. Spectral is asking what my questions... no, Questions are. What am I looking for, what drives me, what is the Thesis? It will take me a full 24 hours to answer; at the time, it's a question in a language that has no meaning to me. I can't answer, and it doesn't quite bother me that I can't answer, but almost. I want to say that more significance lies in the question than the answer, but I cannot properly articulate the why and wherefore. Is it important to have goals? Is it uplifting to not have them? What price do we pay for all our illusions?
Morning. There's a pileup on the exit ramp off the 80. Needle claws in my stomach. A woman in a skirt, looking lorn and helpless, talking to an officer who looks like he's being as helpful as a man with no help to offer can be.
Meters away, a car lies twisted and broken by crossed intentions and too much velocity, lying on its' hood. Meters past that, a figure lies prone on a stretcher. The paramedics are working. The figure's not moving. Time tick-tock-ticking, and meters past that, bare untrammeled asphalt. On my way to find that hourglass. On my way to chase that Thesis.
It's important to flip the hourglass, not because of the continued flow, but because it is important to act in that non-moment, that time without time. That is the place where goals are found, and decisions are made. I want to inspire that in people, I want them to have a timeless moment while they consider what I've written, or said, or created. I want them to trade one back. I want to give to somebody else what those who inspire me have given to me.
The needles under the skin, the tick-tock-tick of the clock. Just to remind me to act, not freeze, not stay and live there in spectre-land.
Is this how you'll die? Under a ton of twisted metal, fallen hard from your tower of creature comforts, staring sightlessly at the sky?
07.09.07
KB
Your writing always inspires that timelessness, that still moment right before a synapse fires a new idea along a fresh path of neurons.
You make brains burn.
Well done.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE a comment!!!
*cough*
What? It's, um, "Squeal Like A Little Girl" Monday. Didn't you know that? Everyone knows that. And as an underappreciated holiday, it could use a little support, thank you very much!
And -- thank you very much! It's an old piece, but I had fun writing the new lead-in, as well as hiding things in the pictures. How's about you, whatcher mullin', Mullin? Let's see a post, chop-chop! ;)
Nicely done. I like the flavor text very much.
Say what? Man, ALL my text brings the hot flavor!