In a previous past, my face adorned all the currency of an Asian nation on Mars. A banner swept below my stubbled chin proudly proclaiming SPIDLE in all capital letters. I lived somewhere else at the time, but that didn’t stop me from discovering this oddity. It seems that a photograph of myself decided to take a space craft to this distant planet. The Asian nation hailed it as the creator of those big trees that release cotton into the air, inflaming my eyes and impaling my nose. They like those trees there though I can’t imagine why. That doesn’t stop me from trying. I imagine that maybe it’s an aphrodisiac with powers far greater than anything Pfizer can concoct. I imagine that maybe the cotton is used to revive dead people who owned dogs. I imagine that a single drop of the juice that this cotton excretes can power an entire city full of toasters and nothing else. I had the pleasure of using this currency on one of my home planets. It’s not in this solar system so I won’t bore you with the details. The man behind the counter initially refused it. He thought it was play money. I explained to him that it was me on the money and I created trees that make you sneeze (or at least a picture of me did). At that, he offered me the whole store. He sold squirt guns and over-sized calculators at prices so low you’d have a difficult time not doing cartwheels as you cartwheeled to your car in celebration of how much money you just saved. I gladly accepted his offer. I had always wanted a store like that.
In another previous past, before you were born and before I was too, the world didn’t exist. This is a very thoughtful subject despite the abject darkness. The darkness is so bright that my eyeballs ooze out of my sockets and drip into my mouth. I swish the milky liquid around and contemplate swallowing. Perhaps it will restore my vision and in that instant, my eyes travel down my esophagus and into my stomach. It is there that they reconstitute and I am now blinded by the internal redness of organs and blood. Again my eyeballs melt. The fluid seeps down my intestines and out my asshole, into the blackness again where they float on until the universe decides that the blackness is boring. It’s the universe that makes these decisions. A mass collective of blackness has put us here. Think about that for a second.
In the last previous past I somehow managed to travel into the future. It’s a complicated story but luckily I’m good at simplifying things. In the future of the past, I asked you to marry me and you said yes. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. A past future never realized. In the past it was there because I was in the future. In the present it’s only my imagination that informs this precognition. When I lay down to go to sleep, I don’t go to sleep right away. Instead, I spend hours thinking about the aborted status quo. I wonder about the future that is in the past and non-existent in the future. I wonder what it would be like for the two of us to form a tent. He would like that I bet. I wonder about the visit to the sea we would make, and the sand castle we would build. A sturdy thing that would last a thousand years is the end result of that wonderment. Inevitably, I wonder why my skin remains cold and at that moment, I feel you beside me. My skin grows warm and my lips begin to flicker. Time to change the bulb I guess. Then I wonder about choices and that just puts me to sleep. It’s too much for me to comprehend. It’s also good for if you get the flu.
I feel that way late at night sometimes a lot too
although a large part of me knows that a large part of what you write has absolutely nothing to do with me
but still that one song goes through my head: you and me were never meant to be part of the future
In any case, I enjoy the creativity that’s running wildly throughout this entry.
Appeared April 24th, 2006 at 20:57