There are days that come around every once in a while that will validate everything you are. When the universe will peel back and reveal to you the glowing golden light at its core. When the trees will spray the sky with purples, and reds, yellows and greens from their flailing trunks like bizarre, octopoid elephants, when the skies will burn blue like fire, and your thoughts and wills shall be actualized by a world that often seems not to notice you. You will be complete. You will know that avoiding drugs, alcohol and medication all this time has been a great idea because you can definitively say, “This light comes from me. I put in there all by myself, and I can learn how to do it again and again until the day some wicked trans-dimensional necromancer sticks my soul in a jar and leaves it there for the rest of eternity.”

Today is one of those frabjuous days. I love my terrified, lazy, procrastinating self. Because I am so much more than that, and I know I will bludgeon those parts of me into submission with happy and determined rainbow-thoughts, in time. I am ever so fond of being alive and seeing all the strange and alien sights in this world. I love singing myself breathless in my car. I love my books and all the strangeness out there. I love saying “No” and doing things a little differently, and breaking all the rules that no-one ever made.

And I love that tonight I will whisper goodnight to you, and that will make everything feel okay.

Because this is me. I’m immersed in me, and I forgot how splendid that is, when I let it be. Not those cold, dead parts and mechanical pieces of wraith and void that, while a part of me, I myself can only stand with a certain mute horror. The Six, the glitches, the mélange of the many, many parts. I’ve always known who I am. It is mine to look inward. Grasping them is not so easy.

But today… oh, today…

Everything is so brilliant.

Kepler

It began on a night some months ago now. A simple question. “Do I know Kepler?” And since that night, I have felt that thought come upon me many times. While I tilled the soil in the garden as Winter loosed its fingers. Walking through an exhibit at the University, startled by the notion that it is spinning which makes the Earth a geoid as much as it is gravity that holds it together in a sphere. I did not know Kepler. That thought found its way into my head to occupy the space left empty by the departure of another.

Have you ever had the sensation that you are living a memory? That sometimes when you see things, you’ve seen them before? Not Dejavu exactly, but a memory of something that has yet to happen. I have those, at times. I’ve met people before I’ve met them. I’ve brushed my teeth in a perfectly ordinary way and felt the exact same feelings in two instants; first a memory, and then a reality. It is difficult to remember the future. Most of the time it is an act as unconscious as breathing. At others it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is going to occur, because the future blends together in many potential states, just like the past does.

But this night, the night I had that question planted in my brain, I knew a certainty in the future that demanded to be seen through. It haunted me for weeks. It kept popping up in my head like that one item on a shopping list you can’t seem to find even as your cart fills up to its brim. Don’t forget to…

And so I did.

xxxxxxx is a local sidewalk that gets quite busy on Friday nights. It plays host to several restaurants, Cafés, a club or two, and a Design College. On the corner is this carpet shop or art museum, I never quite know which, which displays these gigantic rugs in the window covered in crazy designs. Half of them look like they were once white and after having too much colour spilled on them they’ve been repurposed and sold as modernist exhibits. Others are geometric and squiggly. I love looking at these carpets as I walk by.

That night, I had one purpose wrapped up in others. A band I know played music in the College parking lot on market days fairly regularly, so I thought I’d drop in and show my support. At the time, however, they were running late, so I went off to see to my other business. I mused on the corner as I looked up at the carpets. I hurried along, past thin alleys that cut through the boardwalk and up into a little pizza place. I considered the menu very carefully. One pizza was a given, because I knew what I wanted. I did not really know what to put on the other. I think I settled for something with meat and mushrooms, maybe peppers, and two cooldrinks. I sat and read while I waited. I’m having trouble recalling the book. Something from Verne perhaps, or Fynn. It had that old, tough taste that can be hard to chew through when you are distracted. I don’t think I managed to read very far into it before the pizzas were ready.

When I had them, I returned to my car and put mine and the Crème Soda on the passenger’s seat. Then I took the other and the Sprite and walked them around the corner, past the carpets, past a leaky pavement and some orange construction tape, past three cafes and up to a bus bench. There was a man sitting there, wrapped in layer after dirty layer of clothes, picking through a plastic cart filled with junk. Possessions to him, I suppose. Not junk. Cardboard and trinkets of arcane potency, for survival in the city.

The moment exploded before me. Every permutation I had seen pass through my mind. Every response he made, every gesture and hour we could spend, sitting and talking, feigning some sort of equality or familiarity in our shared humanity. The possibility of me actually caring, and not just ticking one more thing off the to-do list in my head. They hit me all at once and they were so very heavy. So humbling.

“For you,” I said awkwardly, holding out the meal. That – just that – took up all the energy and will I cared to invest in the moment. It was all that was necessary. The other possibilities crumbled away. I did not want to talk to this man. That echoing sentiment of ‘Pass it on’ would happen with or without further prompting. His reply of ‘Thank you master” irked me, common though it is in The City. I am no man’s master. I do not engage in voluntary acts of charity out of some sense of responsibility or superiority. The idea of Pity derails my code more than I care to admit.

So I walked off, and left the potential of that moment at its core and brutal economy. Necessity, nothing more. A future remembered, experienced, committed to the past. Yet the night was young.

I recovered my own pizza, and not feeling particularly hungry after a few mouthfuls, shared it with some of the groupies who had set up at the café across the street from the College until the band was ready to play. I listened to them talk, mostly. I do not generally engage in conversation unless I am questioned directly.

Time passed, and the band eventually had their turn to play. Old songs. Familiar songs I had heard them play many times. They were new, and so they didn’t have much variance from those few good songs. What to call it… Indie Rock, I suppose, though this Indie concept still escapes me since it refers to Independent music rather than a specific kind of music. Still, it had all those light inflections of something not quite refined or mind-blowing, but still beautiful. A Shade of Memphis, perhaps, stuck between prompting personal appeal and an urge to be on a bigger stage.

As the same tunes went on, one of the groupies I had been sitting with said she was going to get cigarettes, and asked if I wanted to walk with her. I said ‘yes’. I didn’t, of course, mainly because at the time I wanted to be anywhere and anyone other than myself, but there are many parts of the code that deal with honour, and when a lady asks to be escorted along the street at night, honour is certainly called into question. So we went along the street past many cafés and restaurants, past the blue-dyed mess of carpets, up to a corner store so the girl could get her cigarettes. She asked me questions along the way, and I answered. The usual ones. Where is that accent from? How long have I been in The City? Have you ever gone back to The Old Country? [incredulous surprise] And you still have the accent? We bump into two of her friends, and after being introduced they ask the same thing. This scares me, all the time. It is the big bogey behind the bedsheets of the human experience. The shadows become a million things when you put a light behind them, but take away the sheet, and it’s the same pair of hands dancing in the glare. So many faces, but one solid mind operating in all of them, so that to a point you can predict what they are going to say, what their reactions will be, all their thoughts and opinions which exist simply because they are fashionable and easy to think. Gods, that scares me.

When she’s done getting her cigarettes, she asks me to go with her to a nearby bar/club/thing called The Office, and thinking of the return journey to The College, I agree. We are absorbed into the amorphous cloud of 20-somethings. Noise is blasting from the speakers almost too loud to hear people speak. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder and I let them turn me around.

“Hey there,” she says.

“Hello,” I say, inclining my head by the slightest degree, not really looking at her. I turn back and walk off, following the one I came here with. We stand a bit back from the bar, where there’s enough space for the people around us to thrash their arms and call it ‘dancing’. She peers up at me, oddly apologetic. Not long after, we leave. Just outside, we bump into one of the bartenders, who she knows, and who I know from school. We reminisce for a while. He comments on the hair. Everyone comments on my hair, as though it is a unique animal I am carrying around with me as a social icebreaker, but not nearly so affective as a chinchilla or a bushbaby. He has to get back to his shift. We mercifully begin the trip back to the College.

And then past the carpets, past the orange tape, just outside a café, a man walks up to us, leaving one of the cafés. He walks strangely, drunk or tipsy, or perhaps simply inspired, and he says to me, “You!”

“Me,” I agree. “How do you do?” I say.

“Very good this evening, sir,” he says to me. “You remind me of someone. What was his name?”

“xxxxx?” I suggested, out of habit.

“No, not xxx,” he says. “Do you know Kepler?”

And here, in this morass of an evening, I find something else to grab my attention and fill the newly emptied space in my mind. Do I know Kepler?

“I have never met him,” I reply. “But I know of him. He’s up there with Newton.”

“Yes, that’s right!” he laughs. Then he turns to the girl. “Listen to me now. This is a very good xxx you have here. You must not let xxx go. xxx is a good, good xxx. I can see it! You will be very happy together.”

“Okay,” she says.

‘Do I know Kepler?’ he said.

“Promise me now you will stay with xxx. He is good, do you know this? Promise me.”

“I know. I promise,” she says.

Do I know Kepler? I wonder.

He laughs again. “Thank you, my friends. Goodbye.”

“Good evening,” I say. We walk away.

“Well that was odd,” she says.

“Yes,” I agree. We arrive at The College, and she tells a few of the groupies about the strange encounter. I stare at someone out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I know them. I don’t. No more than I know Kepler.

My duty done, I quietly slip away, and drive home.

Do I know Kepler?

It is now months later. ‘Good’ I may be on the lips of drunken prophets, but I have not seen that girl since. Instead, I kept on looking out for Kepler, wherever I may find him. I am meeting Kepler for the first time, today.

Johannes Kepler was born in the sixteenth century in Germany, an astrologer who dreamed of the idea that planets may yet be alive. He saw Earth as a colossal whale, whose breathing drives the tides and the winds, and who swims through the heavens as a gigantic organism in its own right. Kepler was a dreamer. He lived at a time when astrology and astronomy were virtually inseparable, and mingled in their mid-section with theology. One of the early supporters of Copernicus, who challenged the idea that Earth was the only ‘central’ planet in the universe (where in actual fact we now know that all planets can only be seen as moving in relation to another cosmological entity) and upgraded the telescope developed by his contemporary, Galileo. As a man, Kepler was cursed with frailty and myopia – he could not actually see with any particular clarity the stars he had committed his life to studying. The result of this was that he could focus on the mathematics and geometry of his craft by interpreting the research of others. His work with telescopes and optics actually led to the realization that images are inverted and flipped by the retinas. For his efforts he became Imperial Mathematician and served under many rulers, giving sage and trusted council in the courts.

In addition to his many scientific works, Kepler had one perspective piece that followed him throughout his life. It is a short novel called Somnium, and recounts the voyage of a man to the moon, the society he finds there, and how his relative perspective of the Earth and the sun change due to his position. Originally put down by his heliocentric lecturers, Kepler held on to the manuscript to publish at a later date, refined it, and in its initial printing found it put in as biographical evidence against his mother during a witch trial. He ceased his cosmology for a time to defend her case in court, and was successful, though the stress of the proceeding killed her shortly after. The full Somnium with its complete notes was only published post-humously with the aid of two sons (another dying before its completion) and at last, the story was immortalized as the very first in the science-fiction genre.

On Kepler’s grave was writ:

I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows,

Skybound was my mind, Earthbound my body now rests.

So now, I have met Kepler. I like him quite a bit. He lived at a time when magic and science were oddly clasped, and died when science was at last gaining an upper hand. It is difficult to say anything of his character but that he was a hard worker devoted to his craft, that he was a dreamer and as such, a visionary. I would be honored to share any association with him.

And now what new thoughts may fill my mind, I wonder?

Once closes one’s eyes, and the universe rushes in to plug the gap.

continued...

Tuesday II

I haul myself out of bed and into Tuesday in a flurry of activity; reading messages, opening doors and gates, making my bed, putting away laundry, eating my breakfast. My pursuit of these matters is fluid and mechanical, blending into one clean motion.

Good morning, N. Good morning sky pirate hordes. Good morning, good book.

After letting in the domestic worker, my morning is almost totally consumed by reading. Even my customary tea breaks (which are often as frequent as breath) are reduced by my urge to unravel this story. I am strongly reminded of Dracula, but with more warmth and perhaps less true character. Dracula’s letterhead style always stuck with me. It made it real. It explained the difference between what I was feeling and the true horror the characters felt themselves. Some of that is lost in ‘salem’s Lot. In this direct storytelling style, there’s this expectation of being terrified first hand. I am not terrified. I am morbidly intrigued, and perhaps a little disgusted. It is enjoyable, but I think the letter style is better, under the circumstances. It worked for Stoker. It worked for Lovecraft. If I ever write a horror story, I think I shall try and make it work for me, too, unless I am good at emotional conjuration to an ungodly degree.

I eat a pie creature and three strawberry babies. I let out the domestic worker and drive around the corner to do my lift.

“Hi J!” I say.

“Hi 6,” he says morosely. I wonder if this is just because he’s back at school or because his budgie died while I was looking after his house. This is my first time seeing him since then and I’m a little nervous.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Okay,” he says. Goodness, I’ve conditioned these kids well. Now I’m the chatty cathy and they’re all sullen and silent.

“Well that’s good. I think.”

“Happy birthday,” he says.

“Thank you,” I reply. “I already feel like it was ages ago.”

I chat a bit more, a little nonsensically, as I drive him home. We get in just as his sister arrives.

“Happy birthday for Friday,” she tells me.

“Thank you,” I say. “Enjoy your afternoon.”

I drive off.

I sing ‘The Middle’, whistling the musical bits. I stop around the corner from my house, where municipal devastation trucks are tearing up the sidewalk. I drive a little further. I park on the curb at a four way stop. Shopping bag in hand, I approach an overhanging mulberry tree. With tentative and surgical care I pluck off leaves from the tree, feeling terrible about myself, like I’m some horrible pancreas-eating monster. I don’t want to damage the tree’s growth. I pick the shadiest leaves, or those that are too close together. I even consider coming back here with a bucket of water and some fertiliser. When the branches close to the road are practically bare, I cast my gaze over the low brick wall to the desolate garden beyond. The house looks abandoned. There’s trash in the yard.

Forgive us our trespasses.

I scoot over the wall and fill up the rest of the bag, and then pick up three or four cans from the base of the tree and return to my car. I return home.

It my room I find 30 or so balloons lining the floor, leftovers from my birthday party.

I text xxx. Very funny.

I boot up my pc and launch into a more detailed pirate raid. I take down the Gilmore Girls boxset from my shelf so I don’t forget them. I nab some cake. I check on my cockroaches.

They like carrots. I’m so pleased.

More pirate administration, a flurry of balloon popping. Fear my teeth, ye bloated and rubbery demons! My room is cleared. I pack more clothes and food for housesitting. I go to the garden, see the cracked earth and dry dirt, and begin hauling buckets of rainwater from our defunct pool to pour life into each corner. Half of the time the music from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice plays in my head. The other half is the suite from Plants vs Zombies. I haul uncounted buckets up from the bottom, and empty out about half the storm water that came a week back. I go shower, hot and moist with sweat.

I emerge clean, and dress. Navy blue jeans. Short-sleeve black top with a swirl pattern.

I occurs to me that I may be rushing through this today. Maybe I’m just having less deep thoughts... but no, I’m just having more personal thoughts. There are some things I can’t share with you, dear reader. Happy things, hurtful things (to me and others) and hopeful things. I have a future now. Every day, in every way, I get better and better.

I pack up what I need for now, get in my car, play with traffic. I try to remember the name of the right road, and succeed on the second turning, spotting the white griffin at the gate. Moments later, N and D pull up behind me.

A lets us in, I park, desperately gathering up everything I need before I go inside, and finding myself four arms too short in doing so. I manage, awkwardly, though I don’t get to D’s door before she opens it herself. Darn. I’ll do better next time. Librarian knighthood is a difficult and not always successful pursuit.

Hugs all round. I hand N the bag of mulberry leaves (which we supplement quickly with ones from A’s garden), as well as plastic tubs, and the Gilmore Girls box set.

We go inside. More ‘hello’s. Booting up my laptop at a snail’s pace, provided the snail is moving backwards on an escalator. Chats and things.

I open my latest story, and crawl through to the completion of a dialogue. It’s difficult work. I enjoy dialogues, but they aren’t easy for me. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time watching them, but being part of one – both parts of one – requires innovation and effort to a degree I don’t ordinarily exercise. Which is kind of sad.

I don’t like talking about people. That’s another reason you won’t get much out of reading this. I even hesitate to use other people’s names. People have their own business, and for the most part I am happy leaving them to it. For the most part. Sometimes it’s just a matter of choosing who to hurt.

After study group, I head on home, pick up my hissing cockroach colony and some food, and hurry on back to P’s. I let everyone know I made it back okay, and they do so in return. It’s late, and we’re all tired. I talk to N a little more, and then collapse into bed. I sleep clear through to morning.

Wednesday II

I wake up yawning. This always strikes me as an odd thing.

With reeling limbs and ambulatory slowness, I bumble through to the kitchen, get a bowl of cornflakes, move my car.

The gardener arrives. I let him in and exchange pleasantries about the weather. I make him a cup of coffee, and return to bed. There I read the introduction to a book on speeches I received for my birthday, and when it’s done, I boot up my laptop.

Sky Piracy. Again. I read a wonderfully descriptive chapter in ‘s Lot. I chat to N.

I then prepare to watch Gilmore Girls while writing, and find the dvd player won’t recognise the dvds. I guess that’s the universe’s way of telling me to get my nose to the grindstone and do some actual work today. I take a frozen pie out of the fridge. I return to the bedroom/office. I open up the continuation of the Shadowolf story, and I write.

Temperance sacrilege

I left the gardener out. I eat the pie. I pick up J, drop off J, and drive across to xxxxxxxxxxxx. Along the way I am thinking of what it means to be Wild. To have some sort of holy force that governs you past law, holds you back in some ways and sets you free in others. I grin madly at the onrushing traffic as I head off to xxxxxxx, a far distant corner of the city over the horizon. My memory fails just as my GPS did and I have to rely on my phone and my luck to get back on track. Both of them pull through in their way, and get me there. I park my car and walk up to the castle-facade that fronts Hollywood’s Costumes, and get hit by a wave of rubberised plastic as I go in. I return the costumes. One jumpsuit. One corset. One red shirt. One pair of tights. One black dress. I pick up the deposit and head back along the motorway to N’s. When I get there, we sift through a large black crate of Dubia Blatsica, recording their lengths in centimetres. They look like large woodlice, armoured with scales like armadillos. This is a difficult and often nose-curling process. The dubias live in a mushy spread of their own faeces, and produce more when they are picked up. I don’t mind. We work while watching Gilmore Girls (the current flavour predominant in this week) and count out around a thousand. We clean out their crate. N then goes off to her dancing class, and I go to fetch D. I get horribly lost. I’m not yet used to the area, and somehow I manage to make the same wrong turn on the freeway three times before backtracking and finding my way to the highschool where D works. It’s dark by the time I arrive, and my stomach feels ulcerous with the stress of being late. I don’t like being late. I apologise to D when she comes out, get the car door for her. We head out to R’s place just over the nearest mountain, and when we get there, we arrive almost as N does.

Together, we set about packaging the roaches into tubs. Today I have the easy job of preparing their habitats, putting in half-cartons, wheat bran and carrots to tide the little crawlers over until someone buys them and feeds them to their pet lizard. The process is getting more efficient by now, and we finish off fairly early. We have some tea, and set out. Back at N’s I’m starving, and she graciously gives me some food. We then feed her roaches, and I head back to the house I’m looking after. My mind keeps wondering, reflecting, glistening brightly. But it is late, and I sleep well.

Thursday II

It’s hard to recall Thursday now. The world has moved on. I have become lost in it, slept, reawakened, had time deluge me.

Thursday I was alone. I started watching Gilmore Girls from the first season while searing ventilation holes into the plastic tubs we use to package the roaches. Two and a half hours later they’re done. I keep watching while doing exercise, sit ups and pull ups, then relaxing. I write. I read. I immerse myself in the world of this show. Fast talking, obscure cult references. Intelligence and charm. It’s definitely my favourite TV series. The world doesn’t really need action or adventure of the dramatic sort. Just honest human contact. Arguments and apologies. Love and compassion. The quiet unity and merge of many lives.

At one point, I move to the bed and read ’S Lot. I finish a chapter, and close my mind and eyes for a moment.

I awake four hours later, groggy and out of place. I feel like I’ve been drugged. I have to relearn to use my limbs, to type on my phone, to do everything. 4 hours of nothing. It’s like I fell through a crack in time. True sleep. Sheer nothingness. Not sleep as I generally know it, but as I’ve always imagined it is supposed to be.

It is unnerving. I do not like it.

I watch more TV, lethargic and mentally wrecked. Eventually, just after midnight, I collapse.

Friday II

After a more natural, churning, thoughtful sleep, I awoke to a bright morning of swirling cornflakes and ideas. They burbled and clogged, and swiftly disappeared. That morning is lost to me now.

But I spent the afternoon with N. We talked about everything as she drove us around the outskirts of the city,

Entropy. Moments spiral away from me, and are lost to the ravenous beast that is history. Ah well. I tried. In part I succeeded. That’s all I wanted.