But first, a bit on how I write. My pockets are overflowing by the end of the day with scraps of papers covered with scribbles. My car is carpeted with envelopes, soda cans, childrens book, library editions, articles of clothing, plastic bottles, discarded bills, old paperbacks. My cramped, almost indecipherable handwriting covers much of the detritus. I gather them up when the impulse to clean strikes me and put them in a little box where there are other scribbles that date three, four years from now. I found this one. Usually I explicitly remember where and when I wrote a thing when I read it, and the same is true for particular chapters, passages of books. This isn’t so true very much these days, because I either am getting older or I really need to get back into my dope habit (which ironically blessed me with an impeccable memory, but always served me a missing key episode like ten times a day). Also, my memory of my pre-adolescence up to late teenagerhood is receding like a rapidly drying up ocean.

I half-remember having written this. Parked in brilliant sunlight, warm only because the windows are rolled up and the heat is cranked on high. I am waiting for someone, two someones really. This waiting, I do five times a week… It is written on an envelope that looks to be from a lawyer, but this queers me because lawyers don’t address envelopes to me. Grimed from shoe scuffs, and blotted in spots with moisture, it says

“All I’m left with is a fleshly box of snapshots, juxtapositions of images as meaningless as a hand trailing through wheatgrass, a mystery to be deciphered elbow deep in memory. The child in me is a stranger, my many posturings, my many doodles alien, filled with motivations unfathomable. Know thyself, someone said, but… what to do when thyself doesn’t know you?

Fading into the mist of the past I am a kite, trailing colorful but brief tassels of remembrance, marveling the skies of existence with wonder at how so little went into the building of myself.

Does a stone know it is shaped by the rushing river?

Does a plant know it blooms?

The drone of a bee, the planks underneath the feet, the textiles that adorn my flesh…”

the rest is obscured.