1985
and we drove through a little town in Idaho, not long after a visit to Craters of the Moon, and we still felt like ship-boarders, like stowaways, and outsiders. kids learn best under stress, and happy childhoods lead to high cholesterol. god help me, i'd rather die of just about anything but heart disease.
in this particular town, the people we visit have a raven named Oscar, a bird raised from juvenility. Oscar speaks no fewer than 6 words, and plays cards, and was once arrested in Pocatello for vandalizing an automobile. that's when they clipped its wings.
1995
it’s pretty, as i remember, anyway.
we're poor. did we waste those years? a decade ago, it would seem that we would have accomplished something by now. fame must have slipped through our fingers.
it's hot. and so hot even in the memory that i still recall the details using the passive ‘to be.’ i don’t have AC, and we have the soft top open, worsening our thirst.
Idaho’s a goddamned desert.
1995
there’s a hole in my memory where two events fill the conversations of colleagues and acquaintances.
“He did it. I mean, come on.”
just a few days before I boarded a plane to Romania, i remember watching television video of a white bronco racing down the LA freeway. i never hear another word about the whole episode until a year later.
“We thought it was terrorists, too. God. Our own people. Can you believe it?”
is it worse? they don’t feel like my own people, because i was across the universe. i don’t know who brought down the Alfred P. Murrah building. i'm just trying to traverse this godforsaken desert.
2005
i'm still not really sure what happened. i stopped watching television in ’94.
“it was awful. It’s hard to describe how we felt that day. Vulnerable.”
“like when your folks walk in on you and you’ve got your pants around your ankles and nothing except Ladies Home Journal to cover your shame?”
“You should be more serious.”
“Pfft. Seriousness is for adults.”
“YOU’RE 34!”
“Pfft. Maturity is an attitude, not a number.”
“YOU’RE A PRETTY BIG FUCKING NUMBER.”
“Do you have any more fritos?”
“Truman Capote won the O. Henry when he was only 22.”
“The dude from ‘Murder by Death’?”
“Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel when he was only 41.”
“Yeah, but that was 100 years ago. Back then 40 was really 60. I’ve got time.”
you've lost your chance to live a life of significance.
“is it so bad that I just want to die pretty? i demand a closed casket. i've got a photo picked out and everything. just set the frame on top. oh, and the password to my website is taped to my desk.”
“you’re sick.”
“that’s my significance. it's not so unusual, if you think about all the places we’ve been. national parks that look like the surface of the moon, animals once incarcerated, innocent people at home killed by our own, innocent people abroad killed by our own, cheap alcohol, an overbearing sun, stories of accomplishment against a backdrop of our own fruitless struggles, and i only want a few words to make people laugh. they used to drop people into caves just to study different points of view. my number’s not so big.”