Stacking The Deck, Cheating The Future

While I wait a few more days to open my gift of lyrical soundmaking, I see the past.

Waiting... Waiting? Not waiting! Planning. Preparing. Listening. Dancing in the middoe of stores to music from hidden speakers o'erhead.

How often do you lean against a fence post and watch the young calves or kids dancing in the field? Do you compare the children's behaviour to that of their parents who methodically eat and chew, eat and chew, eat and chew and poop?

Do you ever see adult cows or goats dancing on new feet? Should you? Would you expect to see such a sight?

Tonight, my wife and I wandered through the menagerie of the import/export business as exemplified by a chain of stores called Pier 1 Imports. We gazed at the shiny baubles, played with the sparkly bangles and stared at the shiny beads. We also snapped our fingers and jiggled our bodies to the rhythm of seasonal songs.

And then in came the past, a group of teenagers dressed in the latest fun fashions, including faux fur lumberjack hat, who turned on the mimeograph machine in my head, pulled out the slide projector in my skeleton closet and flipped the transparencies of my yout'. There was I 30 years ago, skinny and young and having fun again for the very first time.

What is time? Ask the inventors of chess. Ask the king of kings, the ancient shahs of the Iranian regions of Persia. The rulers of India. Ask the emperors of Asia, Europe and Mexico. Seek out the meaning of time where time has no meaning on Mars.

I know the future. I know the past. I know some parts of this moment that was the future, now the moment, now the past. I know I will make wonderful music together. I will experiment and make sound combinations that have meaning only to dust devils on alien soils.

Tonight, I saw the past and the future and the future and the past. Thirty-year increments at a time.

Tonight, the shock of time that does not exist shook me, the person who does not exist.

I saw myself 30 years ago and didn't know what to tell me. I mean, after all, what's there to say that hasn't been said in any number of tales, both ancient and new? What could I possibly say to the person who hasn't yet lived the life that others dream and wish for that person to fulfill, both in their fantasies and the fantasies of that person who's full of promise and potential?

"Hey, look at me! I'm you 30 years from now. Is this what you want? Is this what you dream about?"

A slice of time that 30 years ago I and my friends called FHMS (Fort Henry Mall Syndrome). Now I know that FHMS is universal but back then I didn't. Back then I had ideals that guided me and my interaction with friends. Back then I thought that I lived on a rare mountaintop, a life paved with gold and lined with low-hanging fruit. I can now say I know better. FHMS is life but I hadn't live life to know that then.

So what if I lived a sheltered life in my teens? I can't go back. I can only look forward. Where in the crowd is me 30 years from now, looking back at myself in my late 40s and saying, "WOW! If I only knew then what I know now!"

In a few days I'll capture thoughts like these with musical notes and fragrant oils, with computer bits and bytes and lyrical pieces, climbing the vertical ladder of life from rung to rung, swinging back and forth, caught in Earth's gravitational pull for the moment but 30 years from now?

As I accept the fact that everything I think is a combination of everything that's been thought, then I can think about what hasn't been combined by groups of people who are thinking thoughts that have already been thought. I'm not trying to escape the world of people. I'm getting the world of people to stop thinking of themselves as living on one world, while at the same time believing I'm the only person reading what I write, because I am one person in one species on one planet in one solar system. What I can do and think, anyone else can. What anyone else can do and think, so can I.

Have you ever smelled the Sun rise over the moons of Saturn? Have you ever heard a comet crash into Jupiter's atmosphere? Have you ever shaken moon dust out of your spacesuit? Some of you will. Thirty years from now we'll laugh at how simple everything seemed as this calendar year ended and the next one began. I'm planning for that future right now. Aren't you?

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