Elsewhere

21 November 2000

When you purchase it, you are purchasing a single entity. On the receipt, it occupies one line. In the basket and in the bag, on the shelf and on the countertop, it occupies one space. Perhaps on the receipt there is a secondary reference to a discount on it, but it is a discount reference to one SKU. It is a can of that gelatinous cranberry sauce. You see it not as two, but as one. Late on Thursday afternoon, while you're awaiting a chance to fill your mouth mericlessly with the crimson stuff pulled from within the abdomen of the metal cylinder, you stop and ponder it. Overturned, prostrate, its very shape is the memory of the can's absence. This, you think, is what love is.

What Ocean Spray has brought together, let no one rend apart.

how it is, sometimes

when the phone rings, we just sit there and stare at it, not knowing what, exactly, to do. soon enough, it stops, and then we try not to think about it for a while. but before long, it begins to ring again.

just a thought

There are things which need forgiveness which are not sins.

A Letter from the Inaccessible (a fiction)

It was indecision, actually, that made me realize what it was, and that I was not insane.

The night I made the realization was the same night that the Junky's Ex-Wife spun a tale for me, as though she and I were pilgrims to the shrine of that Greek goddess who was brought forth in a surge of sea foam. It was her ex's ex, an ungodly three degrees removed from me, who she claimed drowned herself there on the Santa Monica beach that night some years before. It was in remembrance of the occasion that she asked me to take her out there that night.

Mentally hooking the links in a chain of fluid-bonded couples as she was speaking, the apothegm from ninth grade Health class came surging back to me in a most unwelcome thought: in sleeping with her, I was sleeping with everyone she'd ever slept with, and everyone they'd ever slept with, and so on. It was enough to give me a case of the shivers, thinking that I'd had sex (in a sense) with a woman some years back, who'd subsequently drowned there on that beach, and I didn't even know it at the time. I was at once alluring and distasteful.

She saw my shoulders twitch at the thought, took that as a sign of sympathy, and therefore chose to proceed. Diving deeper into the confession, most of the horrible words slid off of me like the wind which at this point of the night began to blow in from the water. Details of her unburdening periodically stuck in the hair on my arms and in the hollows of my joints, indistinguishable from the sand which was making its way up my sleeves and pantlegs.

I was considering the oil rigs out on the horizon, trying to focus, trying to keep them from blossoming into half-mile glittering towers and shriveling into mere lanterns hung from bobbing halyards at once. Just before the tower shrunk and lantern grew to meet the oil platform in reality, I heard her pause, uncertainly, remain silent, but also blurt out, "I slept with her once. I was drunk and kinda high. She didn't remember it, though."

Make that two degrees.

...:...

There is a theory extant, one certainly abused and mishandled on television shows the likes of Star Trek, that for every decision which is made, there is not just one outcome, but many, each with a result which forges on in a separate, parallel universe. And in those shows, especially in those shows, the other universes periodically bleed into our own, causing no end of havoc and forcing the Wily Captain to willfully proclaim that the Trusted Lieutenant is not of this world, and he must return to The Place From Whence He Came. In a sense, that is true. At least, I began to believe it true that night.

What is different, or what actually happens, as far as I could ever tell, is that these universes are spun off, and, like bad sci-fi progeny, die quickly. Cancelled, as it were.

At about four years of age, I grew aware of this, well, awareness. I could see into a 'parallel present' or two, hints at the potential futures. Sometimes. It's more like a memory, like those poor sods who remember evil things under hypnosis, a memory of what didn't happen.

Throughout my childhood, this generally consisted of remembering that I'd also tripped on a stair, dodged a punch from a playmate, or told my mother I'd fed the dog when I hadn't. I could only remember another present before it died, mostly for just a handful of seconds, and universally involving me. Later in adolescence, I started having issues with the world around me, mild depressive disorder. When I was depressed, I made connections to the environment, sometimes watching a car crash nearby and a near-miss simultaneously, remembering the near-miss fade quickly into the sounds of bleating horns and drivers inspecting their fenders for dents. When my Psychiatrist heard of this, he upped my dose and sent me on my way. When the strobe lights and curtains of clouds receded in my head, the memories returned to stubbed toes and dropped utensils. I was convinced that it was hallucination.

In my late twenties, I stopped taking the Zoloft. I met the Junky's Ex-Wife, who I now call My Dearest. I began, when relaxing, or when tired, or when depressed, to see more distant presents. Unpeopled, I saw empty streets and vast fields at once, vacant stretches of office plazas and tract homes.

...:...

"Did you hear me?" she asked. I replied yes, now certain which six billion people, and which me, just winked from existence.

At this point I came to the realization: she saw it, too. It was an echo, a shadow, a mere hint at the memory, but she accessed it just as I had, if only to a much lesser extent. Everyone did. Indecision is the connection with all of the potential futures, and a decision kills all but one. Of course, people often regret decisions, just as she did then, because, like me, they only see them until they die, seconds, at most, down the road. For some reason, though, I'm the only one who watches them die, the only one visited by their ghosts. Beyond that, imagination writes the outcome.

The oil platforms started to split again. As My Dearest was continuing her story, I caught fragments of speech from her, party, car, kneeling, Cosmopolitans. I didn't know which she actually said, and which she didn't. The refinery tower glittering a half-mile high, and the lonely fisherman's lantern bobbing and swaying on the halyard were ghosts, the stronger afterimages of the worlds that divided.

I don't know why some places and things were charged as they were, why some threaten to cleave from reality at a moment's notice into duelling superpositions. I just let My Dearest talk, and when I focused, staring at the oil platforms on the horizon, the tower and lantern gracefully gave way to sparkling halogens and a winking red eye designed to ward off airplanes and evil spirits.

musings of señor prod.

The Revolution gets more interesting day by day.... appearances are important.