Hope you all had a good farewell to 2007. And no, no end of year list for me this year. This week, I have nothing, see, this is me on vacation. So as a space filler here’s this draft:
THE DAILY SUN
One day I woke up and time had stopped moving in a straight line. I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but the moment it happened, I knew it. I knew it like one knows the days of the week. I knew it like I know that yesterday I went to the Hiram Bithorn Stadium to watch Cheap Trick and my best buddy kissed a girl I wanted to kiss. I knew it like I know that today Brooklyn will finally beat the Yanks in seven to win the big show. I knew it like I know I have no idea when I’m going to wake up tomorrow. It’s really quite simple how this happened and I’m going to tell you the whole how and why of it, but that’s going to have to wait, because right now, Frank is banging on the door like the robots are coming, and I have to go do my paper route.
You see, I’m fourteen, I’m sure of it, I don’t question my age even though I don’t always look my age and I have memories as old as history itself. Just because I know certain things doesn’t mean I can’t be fourteen, I know how old I am. And I know that I have to do this paper route, or Frank is going to whip me like it’s 1955. He’s yelling that the newspaper is not going to deliver itself. What a prick.
But I’m going to lay in bed a little longer. The sun isn’t up yet, and Frank stopped banging. Oh, he’ll be back, he is “collecting” his anger, as he likes to put it. In the meantime, though, I’m going to stare at the ceiling, and think about how much I hate him. I can’t tell if I am tired from all the partying with James last night, or just tired of Frank’s ridiculous idea of taking over the world one newspaper at a time. He says he’s fighting the good fight in the name of newspapers everywhere. Oblivious to the obvious. I mean, we all know what happens. In the end, the sun abandons us. Ah, frozen cities… but I’ll be long dead by then. Meanwhile, today, there’s Frank at the door again, did I already mention that he’s a prick. It’s like he’s constantly hearing that O’Jays song in his head, money money money moooney. Except, he’s never heard it.
Under the covers I’m already dressed, shoes and all, ready to go, but I won’t, not just yet. What day is this anyways? I hope its not Sunday, the Sunday paper sucks. I remember when I told Frank I quit, that was a good day. Sunday before Thanksgiving. Ha. Frank had to fuck himself carrying those monsters house to house. But I haven’t quit yet, though I could. I could quit right now if I wanted. So why don’t I? Damn, how many times will I say that in my life? I guess I was kind of born to be a junkie. But not today. Today, I’ve got that bastard Frank still banging on my door. I do not want to go ride a bike at 4am. Ok, here comes the even louder bangs.
He thinks he is so tough, and he only has one arm. I think it’s his left hand. He’s always angry in the morning. Frank is the poster boy for impatience, at least when it comes to getting us out of the house. Once we’re gone, I’m pretty sure he just jacks off all day. When his mom is at her deathbed, in that skanky run down hospital, he is not going to visit her once, too busy with the damn newspaper empire to bother, that’s the kind of prick he is. So we all compete to be the last one out the door in the morning. We all try to be the one that causes him the most pain each morning. Well, not all, Alfredo is working the heir apparent role, though we suspect he’s not all that earnest about it.
Haha, he’s really at the breaking point now, so I better go. Or maybe I can push him a little further… Eventually I’m going to push too far and he is going to break down the door and whip me so hard with that claw hand of his, that I’m going to spit on his face, and run off, get on my bike and never come back, and live a life filled with anger at my dad for being such a prick. Well, maybe not filled. Could be worse. Could’ve been worse. No wonder quiet heavy music is such ambrosia to my ears.
Frank and his claw… a printing accident many years ago, and he still wants to deliver papers… ok, ok, now I really have to go.
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What a great day. Well, the day sucked, pushing paper all day long, but once I got off work, man, what a great day. And now I’m sitting here at James place, say hi James. James says hi. Well he didn’t really say it because he’s blowing on his trumpet some god awful noise to wake up the neighbors. I never figured out how they put up with it. I can hear the neighbors’ TV like it’s in James’ living room, so I’m sure they must be able to hear his horn like it’s blasting inside their heads, it’s so freakishly loud, yet no one seems to notice. It annoys me sometimes, but eh, I’m always stoned at his place, so it’s just like a dream anyways. James has played with some cool cats in his day, but now he just gets high and blows that damn horn like someone wants to hear it. Could be worse.
Anyway, today was a great day, today I found a copy of a song I’ve been searching for years. I’ve had 99.99% of all recorded music at my fingertips and I could not find the song. It’s a song that my mom used to play after she put me to bed, that song that I forgot about until I have children and suddenly that song is going to be right there back in my head, with all the lyrics, and instrumentation as clear as if I was hearing it through the cracked door of my room while laying on my crib, staring at the shapes on the ceiling, listening to that beautiful song mixed in with the sounds of my mom holding back from crying. Today I found that song, in a used record store of all places. Me selling my Butthole Surfers Double Live album at way under its value so I can buy some much needed relief from this spiraling life where I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and there it is staring back at me with my mom’s sad happy eyes, saying buy a day in heaven with me and tomorrow you’ll be in another time where I won’t be around, where you once again will have forgotten about me, where I will be nothing but a small moment in your future or your past, until those children come and remind you what it’s like to be a parent. So yeah, I didn’t buy it, I took my money and came over to James’ place. I’ll get to that record again someday, hell, maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up in my crib with mom making potato pancakes. Now that would be nice. Probably won’t happen though.
Frank beat it into me that I’m not one of the lucky ones. No one is one of the lucky ones, only other people are lucky, he would say, and he’d stack enough newspapers on my bike rack to cover my route and then some . I don’t know how I ever managed to ride that bike with so many newspapers tied to it. One day I quit, I threw my bike, with the newspapers tied to it, right into the river. Then I walked up to some guy standing on a stoop and asked him for a cigarette.
That’s when I first met James, though I didn’t really start hanging out at his place until years later. That day he looked like the ghost of all that is cool. The ghost of a guy killed by his own coolness. Transparent skin, frozen breath, bags under his eyes like he had never slept, but was always dreaming. The sun wasn’t getting the hint, and this cat looked like he was the one telling the sun to chill a few more minutes before coming up.
That’s when I met James. And then I didn’t see him again for years. Just like I wouldn’t see Frank for years after that day. And somehow James will end up being more important to my life than Frank. I wonder how that happened. Right now it doesn’t make sense, but I know what happens. Now, if I can get James to put down the damn horn for a moment I can maybe recall that song that I’ve been searching for so many years. And I can sing myself to sleep on this filthy excuse for a couch and pretend it’s tomorrow and I’m waking up in my mother’s arms and she’s scratching my head as I lay on her lap. Now, if only I could remember that song.
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I remember when at 5:00am, I will be at the hideout, everyone drunk and on some cheap club speed, and Monica saying let’s go to the river. And we all pile up in grandma’s old Torino and head for the river. Ridiculous no? Apparently not. We will get to the river as the summer sun is just coming out. I haven’t worked for about a year, and apparently I’ve already forgotten about that too. Really, what have I done to my mind? And up the mountain we go, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and Monica’s hand on the other. I didn’t know I could drink that much. Well, I guess I really couldn’t since I ended up with some kind of embarrassing story and my head under the wheel of the car. I do remember that Monica took care of me, held my head, held my hand. But something else happened at the river, yet I don’t know what it is, maybe I’ll ask Monica but she’s asleep. And I don’t want to ask her anyways, maybe I won’t have to ask her. Not today anyways, today I’m old and tired, today I’m not getting out of bed, today the side of my waist is swollen like someone punched me over and over right under my ribs. And my dear Monica sleeps in a rocking chair. I’ve always loved her, and I love her when she’s old. I love her when I’m old. Old age that has made me soft, and mushy, full of aches and strange swells. Old age that has carried my will for too many years. Good old age, bad old age. Could be worse, I guess. My guitar is collecting dust in my granddaughter’s attic, because she hasn’t discovered it yet, Monica is still here, and I still have a few years in me. Maybe I’ll take a nap before the doctors come prick me some more.
i read or heard somewhere that, according to some law of quantim physics, linear time is an illusion of the human mind. maybe in the same sense that our minds create color when our world is said to really be only varying shades of grey. it has also been said that time may be a “bookmarking device” that our brains use to keep from being overwhelmed by our always happening universe. if we step outside of “time”, maybe our worlds would be like the world your post describes. very good writing.
yes, i misspelled quantum. what i get for typing in a hurry.
I’ve always wanted to be physicist, but i’m not sure i can even spell it right. A physicist and a classical pianist, to me that would the combination of combinations. Unfortunately neither goes to well with laziness which is ultimately what my particular nurture and nature combination seems to want. So instead i write weak pseudo attempts at science fiction, and play the laziest guitar this side of jimmy buffett. oh well, i’m sure neither physics nor classical piano are what they are cracked up to be (is that the right phrase?). Though i bet it would be cool to ponder supersymmetry while playing Prokofiev’s War Sonatas on a ten-foot grand in some abandonded airplane hangar. ahhhh, unreachable dreams, what would life be without them.
And Brian, I’m always game for books that make crazy claims about time. So if you have any titles associated with your comment, please let me know. Or we can just continue with a free form discussion of time. My premise on this story, part of which is above, is as follows. Time is slowly compressing. A modern hour would’ve taken a day, or a month or even a year the farther back you go. This of course is related to the expansion of the universe, or the approximation to a black hole (though i think the black hole experience would be reversed, time would expand instead of compress). Anyways, eventually as we reach the maximum expansion of the universe time will be so compressed that one second would include thousands of years of our time-rate. I’m trying to discern what the human experience would be like under those circumstances if they were happening to one person in our time. I’m sure its an idea that has been tossed around in sci-fi books for years, but i dont like reading most sci-fi, so i’m probably doing a move similar to pierre menard’s.
anyways, I appreciate your reading, and your comments. I have fond memories of having insane conversations with you back in the day.
And of course its also about a slew of other crap and really i think the guy is just a little crazy more than anything. I kind of think of him sort of like Kozwinkle’s Fan Man. Or maybe he’s just dead. I dont know yet, we’ll see. I do know that its not going to be all that sciency, cause i dont care that much to check the science out to make i get it right (as i’m sure you can tell from the above comment, the science is sort of more of a label than actual science).
Horse Badorties, thats the name of the Fan Man… a great book, check it out if you havent.
Carlos – first of all, I don’t think you’re a lazy guitarist. I think you’re playing has grown more robust over the years. Remember when you dropped that nylon string guitar track at the monastery? You wanted it to sound like Johnny Ramone but you didn’t want to run through an amp or any effects. You pulled it off and that took some muscle.
I like stories about time travel. Good stuff here. Reminds me of a book I looked into on account that I heard about it cuz the author was dating one of Tricia’s Professors. It actually got some notable reviews. The Time Traveler’s Wife.
This is far from a science fiction exploration of the space-time continuum, but a heartfelt love story of two people who must live with this curse as part of their lives. Ms. Niffenegger has thought through all the ramifications of the time travel, and sewn it seamlessly into the storyline. Once you accept that time traveling is a part of Henry’s life he can’t control, nothing that happens to him seems farfetched or out of character.
Yeah, that book was actually a pretty big hit.
There’s a handful of great S.F. books with similar conceits in them. Jumping to my mind are many of Dan Simmons’ earlier S.F. works, like his Hyperion series.
I think it’s almost time for NAP to begin some franchises in other arenas. Food has been mentioned. There have been more than a few works of fiction/creative writing. Some photos and other sundry art. I’d love to see a few collections of the various loosely music related posts, along those sorts of lines.
Maybe I’m just addle-brained at 6 on a Saturday morning, but wouldn’t the expansion of the universe and black holes have exactly the opposite effects on space/time? Think of the expanding universe (in a very rudimentary, planar sense) like a hunk of silly putty on which is imprinted the entirety of human literature. At the moment of the beginning of the universe, all of this writing would be jumbled up together, essentially forming one completely unintelligible jumble of words. From there, as it expanded in all directions, those words would separate and move apart from one-another. At some point, and very briefly, they would be spaced in an “appropriate” manner, such that sense could be made of them, and they would tell their many stories in what we would think of as a linear fashion. After that brief moment of intelligibility, they would continue to stretch, warp, and separate, again losing all sense of meaning, until one would no longer even be able to recognize individual letters, so far stretched would they become.
Exactly the opposite with a black hole: the putty would approach the black hole and, once it began to experience the relatively weak gravitational force of a black hole, start to stretch out slightly until it eventually condensed with all the other matter at the center or event horizon.
OK. I’m done. Liked the piece, Carlos.
As an interesting pseudo-addendum to the thought that as the universe expands, time actually slows down, I always found it an interesting concept that in the earliest part of the Bible, pre-Great Flood, human lifespans typically go up to something like 900+ years old, and yet now we’re lucky if we hit 100… personally I think there are other explanations for this, but it’s an intriguing idea to think that at whatever point human life began, we marked time in a much more compressed fashion, so someone then and someone now could live technically the same length life, but back then we would see it as taking several hundred years, almost a thousand, but now it’s divided by a factor of ten, so we’re living almost a hundred years…