What It's Like
Start at the start, in this concept this is the first one, I don't know if it will come up often or rarely. The idea is one that I don't really think I had. I feel I'd been doing this & trying to do it for a long time & that this expression is what came to me, the form & the possibility afforded by...
Excel of all things, smug bastard, I bet it autocorrects to capitalize its own name. Smug bastard that runs the world. My first encounter was at Uof A's computer lab where I helped guys print. It's uncanny to me that that job was the foundation of my entire career out of college.
Which of course I could write a whole book about. I knew this would come up and here it has, I wonder if I'll iterate on it then.
Which is recursive to the project - which I think is to try to coherently idiomat-ize the atomic elements of character that I think can be expressed as a kind of nomenclature for social participation. I.e.: expressed identity is a plastic accumulation of performances absorbed through enculturation & that there is a self-reinforcing , or recursive loop that reproduces social identities & then consumes them which may be consequent of
Because the format grants the process the medium is the message, the medium itself invents, but some word for invents that's more insistent, discovers? The method of organizing thought, which strongly implies to me
That what Burroughs via Lori Anderson I'd been informed: Which is that language is a virus (which I hear with that blaring synth and think I should put on some music or is it too distracting or is there a person from Porlock? I had one of those of my own, this girl named Jen who I met through my band Fuckbeast - which was tumultuous. She had a nerdy beauty that I enjoyed and was sexually compatible with me. I had an interest in trying to have a relationship & was attempting to form one - but she crossed some boundaries & was disrespectful of my time & attention albeit obliviously so as she seemed to have become overwhelmed with ardor, I guess is most polite, but it was still transgressive & I felt no obligation to correct her, nor to continue acquainting with her. I'd think of that situation often as a real missed opportunity or is it? scenario, where I can't determine if I was manifesting authentic self respect or out of some arch posturing, a relic of my high-attaining late adolescence.
Which I always feel very little shame about. All things considered. I still cringe when I hear I hear irregardless spoken & even just regardless is a reminder of Megan Spagnolo's Scorn, which was an early & possibly defining kind of shame But consider johnny come lately's to the leftern side of the liberals, them who called down wars with GB2 & had transgressive racial contrivances borne of the suburb. Once I wouldn't have doubted my use of Borne or Bourn or Born or some fourth thing but I think I'm less a reader of books now & more a reader of the internet where grammar has evolved into a pictoglyphic system, such that the misuse & the specific transgression in the transposition of There, They're & Their each contextually suggests a different unique voice and character that I believe we can each distinguish - so respective to its us misuse in a sentence Their (I'm to going to list a lot of examples, if you get it you get it) by ascribing it to possession you can conjure an image of an impish little kid, maybe big for his age struggling with self-childhood who may pompously choose to use the apostrophe because it seems fancier so it suggests ownership and then that kid feeling a little shame at being corrected later but improving, a person so confident of their future they didn't even consider it a possibility, as anything at all to concern oneself with. (How should I footnote a good note about a thought i had about confidence & happiness & the future?) But you identify with that kid maybe as fact maybe as an imagined reality you can conjure = so then you can see that story in the expression of They're so that this is an image that the They're in this context evokes & in that sense is a pictogram that tells a story.
I'm indifferent to the preposterousness of this project & I imagine a fair few dead-ends returning to this, the fist section of work which effectively represents a manifesto on the project - in the sense of a manifest: here are the contents, familial trauma, the experience of age, financial hardship, workplace antagonism, difficulty growing up. Okay. But containing those things factually but also a manifesto as in: here's what's up, I think I can unwind thoughts to a sufficient ly narrow gauge that I can record them into the discrete cells of an excel table, and that by separating out individual paragraphs or trains of thought I could create a self-explanatory autobiography corresponding to my experience of living this life now & reflecting upon my experience of life as a consequence of my personal history which is something that I use as a tool to unravel my experience in... unravel? I just go with dissect, my experience in late capitalism as I speculate upon what archetypal qualities I've proved to have demonstrated and to divine how others interpret my social projections now as opposed to at other times when I feel it was more straightforward to interpret a person's 'whole deal' & to see if I can figure out where the points of divergence are between the people of my cohort as effectively, double-slit style logical distinctions based on each cultural experience - because with a small cohort the self-selection narrows it down to the point of being descriptive: E.g.: My Brother and Ihave the same attitude about Star Wars but I'm more immersed so he contextually experiences other star wars enthusiasts that he meets to be more or less like me or him when selected by that tag & that tag is one of the discriminators that helps my brother relate to others based on some ur-experiences that we reassert to one another, reaffirm as our bond & review the state of the matter the matter itself - that is, because the experience of the - ur memory is shared & reinforced at holidays :'Make Jere & Sam show off star wars trivia!" it's relationship to us is a gauge whish sets the status of the thing itself.
E.g.: when I told him at Christmas that I didn't like Star Wars anymore, after Attack of the Clones, and when I raved to him about Andor. Meanwhile if he talks to me about football or basketball its with a bit of surprise that i know their rules - so he is... Okay. This will have to be expressed by the work and the medium or this will simply be a failure. But this is the manifesto - the self performed as expression of atomized cultural traits arranged upon the exterior like a cuttlefish adorning itself, and these identities consume & reproduce within a biome.
Which is long and arbitrary & will probably be frustrating. I hope that this can last long enough to bear fruitful results. I hope I can accomplish something meritorious. It's my dream. This is the first tenth column, which arbitrarily is the cutoff point, you won't understand this this time, well, the first time, but then you'll have a different relationship to it when it comes up again. Am I just explaining video games? This column J, the tenth one & I have a little Gandalf feeling about J when I see it, and also 3:15 - I am those and those mean me. My things that mean me. So I think ten sections, verses? Is good.
Second Entry
My uncle died the other day and I'm much sadder about it than I thought I'd be. I knew I'd be bummed but I was tearfully calling my kid about it. I think that my aunt died last year, last January - and that that is still too hard for me to talk about, still too much I miss her so. And then next year her younger brother. They fall like dominos t feels like, that generation, the first one - in America & really with the surname. That’s the relic, I think about my surname & how my brother and sister and i have only daughters, a fine thing we were & doomed... But the distinctions between us made my generation too diffuse - geography & age kept us from being peers - so the coherent center of the family as an identity - they're falling & the dynamics between them are fracturing & breaking down. We as a kin-group are disintegrating. Mainly I think because of
Peculiarities within the unique spectrum of the immigrant experience which I argue a certain sort of first generation person becomes aware of the distinguishing characteristic of personal identity because they are so loosely joined & arbitrarily associated some of them may, like me have the experience of being hyperaware of cultural preferences such that you observe not just their presence but perceive the convolutions of that presence expressed through time & that this course is recursive, so that idioms that arise go from being purely descriptive to being a commodity with a prescriptive element that is explicitly status-affirming.
And part of that isolation is in all of our experience of Sam's passing. I'm surprised that I cried so much when I heard. Not because I wasn't sorrowful but because I'd experienced him in my life as a curious presence who I knew mostly from my parent's descriptions rather than personal interaction - so we weren't explaining ourselves to each other - kind of close but we were keeping up with each other & shaking hands & hugging at holidays. I felt a connection to him that was unique to me & he must have reciprocated.
The uniqueness of the experience is something I feel a need to reconstruct and articulate because I feel the emotion acutely & it illuminates the interior structure that bears these griefs. Under the disappointment component of grief , where death is felt like a personal loss, like a theft. That emotion as the sequence of my fallen elders occurring 'in order' ... I will cry... Because I see them passing out of things I am again illuminated by grief & see that the trail of a person's life as it weaves into your own orbit is instructive of your own identity's formation but that it precedes it by an average & intuitively understandable unit, the generation, and that the progress of these is understood to be reproductive & recursively defined by culture... Here I hope that I have expressed a mental state so exhaustively that it can be experienced by merely reading it. I feel many things about the meaning of it. I mourn my uncle and the passing of his generation. They taught me the basic methods of mythologizing my own experiences & coming to a contemplative state of introspection that if organized & expressed in discrete, memetic elements in a rearranged pattern, in a chaotic pattern, if you will, if those were continuously recreated in a conversational expression, if I could RNG my own defining conscious experience I could create a time-bounded expression that would alter through the course of its creation. So that it could recursively comment upon itself. I realize just now that I've invented Livejournal. I should post this there. Kick the dust off. It's crass that I'm mingling the mention of my uncle's precipitating demise with the vanity & ambition intrinsic to writing projects - but it's truthful to disclose & as of yet, I've not turned to the solemn bit of exposition & as well I have wept genuinely over the man's passing and only thinking of him made me want to write something. Something that could articulate the actual experience of the loss by explaining the particulars of it as loss by understanding memory & merging the experience of memory as a sequential epochal story. Your own story contains all the people you know within it as characters and as they depart the story... You see I tastelessly equate his existence and it's power over so many with a story. It is millions of stories & I am motivated to explain how the myriad human experiences are experienced as stories. I think that narrative derives from the experience of entropy, that the passage of time is irrevocable & that all that is must pass away but not before reproducing itself. I think that minor cultural identities are further distinguished - e.g.: I Had an Egyptian Uncle, he was my Father's sibling & the second oldest after my father. I'm not the only person who fulfills these parameters. I add names & the distinction narrows yet further, you see you can theorize, possibly because of Excel, that there are narrower and narrower distinctions that can be made until the entire account of all those memories can articulate the sum experience of having known, loved & lost an elder. I think that the value in this is in part, part of the project's prelude. A relevant place to start because the specific elements of the experience are distinct in my heart - because understanding those experiences was part of my growing to understand a method of, and desire to, attempt to fully express an experience.
My Uncle Sam was really Sa'ad. His influence upon my life began wherever in the past he and my father formed their relationship. I remember remembering, as in a reverie, sitting in living room on Daventree, sometime in the 80's, maybe looking through photo albums, but remembering distinctly, the experience of living at Seven Hills, the big window with the BB gun hole, the linoleum pattern kitchen, the deep, recessed cavern-like tv room - the train themed little boy's room & where the buffet was set against the couch dividing the rooms my father & his brother played chess until I had to be taken to bed. I was small, and. You see, I have this memory & it is credible, it is real. I reaffirm its truth when I speak with it's other participants. My mother would recollect this scene. She alone. We're ever fewer, those who reaffirm our stories. I think I'm compelled to put this down because I feel the loss of the older generation as something unique & precious that had a life of its own & which is fading now. My father preceded my aunt who preceded my uncle. The three of them had vivid recollections of 'The Village' the remote little enclave where our family started out. Their grandfather is who our family is named for, every one of my cousins has our grandfather's name for a middle name - girls too. There's such a narrow band of us - such a close section that the specificity of our experiences when focused in grief, the grief illuminates the underlying experiences it's like an x-ray and I see the bones in my family members, I see the serial numbers, what makes us unique to each other - the narrowest, most miniature component of 'othering' that there is, and then to define such an element with a distinctive name - even if that name is an entire paragraph. The name would fit in an excel cell. IN this way I can jumble the discrete thoughts that contribute to one another, creating the interior experience through a vivid enough narrative that the reader would feel the experience exactly as I do. As a way of honoring his passing, their passing and to be a little defiant, at least, toward death. These experiences, these kinds of live & the sensation of having it, its' context & reality - these can be transmitted through time & can defeat death. This is the most basic intention, the most valid one. To avenge ourselves against death, to attempt with all our hearts of overcome it through the accumulation of knowledge ability & imagination.
It's hard to know how much of my own immediate experience it's worth noting. My experience today was that I woke up very late & relaxed for a long time with Skyrim, and then went for a long walk. I made myself coffee in the morning in my French press as is my custom. I buy beans from the coop up the block, grind them in the morning, I've come to enjoy the ritual but over the winter I craved for coffee so frequently that I thought about getting a drip machine. But I make myself that coffee & then kind of idle. In more prosperous times I'd likely be more active. I tell myself this & have a plan to be more prosperous, but at the moment my horizons are a little narrower, and as well- I really do like my house & neighborhood so staying around them & being a puttering idler with creative outlets is effectively my win condition. But it was sunny. I saw looking out the window to watch for the cats I like. I got motivated & got to stepping. I realized that sometimes these walks, they're meditative - actually most often they are. I've been in this habit for a while now & it's been fantastically effective at absorbing experiences, experiencing emotions without having to perform them. It's personally quite helpful. Other times it's more exploratory, usually with the season's change. I'm often sending my people pictures then, I'm very interested in nature & ecology. Today was meditative. I thought about the nature of story and how I've said & am coming to seriously believe, that consciousness really is the self narrating its experiences, thus creating a miracle by translating emotion into word & so doing creating a story. The quality of these stories varies by the subject, the teller & the willingness to make the effort. The brain is big, demanding, the mouth has less bandwidth - somewhere between the front of the brain where concepts are clearly bounded & comprehended & the mouth where they're expressed, the mind truncates them, shortens them down to the necessary details. This in turn informs our understanding of the teller - their seriousness, their attachment, their stake, as it were. But I think, well, about this many things - It's the intent of the whole work to express them all, but here I mean only to say, the quality of the storytelling in creating this narration matters & that I believe one's facility with reformulating experiences in a well articulated way can lend them poignancy - leading to a variety of consequences that I'm not sure have been well described elsewhere.
Some time after he'd moved to Texas Sam got married to Donna. I always understood their relationship to have passion & tumult - a Taylor/Burton style thing. I believe they divorced and remarried. He lived in Texas & my sister had a good relationship with them. She was part of their wedding & was always welcome to their house. I sometimes don't remember that my next eldest cousin (who comes in after all my siblings) is Sam's daughter. She's an exceptional person, her husband & children, together they're remarkable & lovely they elevate every event I've attended with them. I'm having a hard time imagining them sad, just doing so, it's heartbreaking & I've not even really talked to them. I don't know how to talk about these things. I've learned to try to be a comforting presence & not to talk too much, to try to internalize the experience in preference for the grief of those more tightly bound to the departed. I feel that this aspect, or ability, to classify orders of proximity, to read that closeness is allied with the broader project of full thought transmission. The next time I went to Texas was for my Uncle Al's wedding and at the parties before and after I recall that all the married couples submitted a note with some advice for the newly wed. I think the objective was to guess who had written the advice. I was I think, 13 or so, and probably at my most sebaceous. I only remember his advice of all the advice that anyone had read. I feel it was succinct, and if you pressed me, I'd probably say it was the only one that didn't involve prayer, so it was maybe slightly transgressive. Anyhow his advice was that if you get angry you should go away for a while until you're ready to talk. I remember his voice very distinctly saying this, and in the way that he said things, his specific soft voice. So... I don't know if that was actually good advice. I do know that it didn't serve me well when I was briefly married. I remember that as being somewhat harrowing because she was very insistent about talking through problems & discussing them which really only served to make me more & mor upset. I couldn't see working through these things without at first formulating what I really thought about them. If I get upset I go off on my own & walk around until I've figured out how I feel about it, what I really think about it. When it's formulated completely, then it's story - an epoch of your life that's elemental & digestible. It's a stream of words that conveys a feeling but which is intended to grant knowledge by conveying the mind's invention of identity as it occurs. I think that even then when I was disappointing my wife I understood that I couldn't take a position or commit to a feeling without adequate scrutiny. In this respect, deliberation, I'm maybe distinctive. My uncle was an entrepreneur & businessman. He was thus also a gambler. I don’t' know that he was either good or bad at gambling & it's not a matter I can judge as I am the gambler's opposite. But I was familiar with affiliated ways of life & I understood him to be in the cohort of acceptable but nearly problematic gambler with some notable hot streaks. This seems pretty common among his generation, social class & so on. Plus, there's always that unifying issue between convicts & immigrants - nobody will hire you so you Must have your own business. He was in convenience stores with my dad for a while. They built that little building on Broadview together & had such trouble with the neighbor over it all, and the first tenant was their convenience store & it would stay that for a little while. I understand that my Uncle & Father didn't get along as partners in business & he moved to Texas. In Texas he got into the video store business which was fashionable in the 80's. Through some happenstance he shipped the whole inventory of a video store to my parent's house & then did not come to claim it or to... The details are ambiguous & I'm certain base in misunderstandings & money-fueled anxieties. Whatever caused it meant we had every movie in the world in our garage for a year - and I think this really affected me - in the way that Zoomers & so on are affected by having persistent access to unlimited entertainment from a young age. I think it's probably why I think about things as I do, or you know, at least contributing. I never quite understood the business side of the first transaction & didn't ask too many questions. Eventually my father just opened his own video store with the inventory & our family learned how to do that business. I was apprenticed into it, effectively, around age 10. I worked distributing movies through rental chain until wasn't a business anymore in 2010. It's strange that I have so much specific experience that's now obsolete but also some unique experience that may prove insightful. Hyperawareness of stories has to have some root in vast exposure to same, particularly when consumed in their premier form. I've formed lavishly complex ideas about cinema, identity, personhood, memory & emotion in some part under the tutelage of Hollywood. I don't regard this as improper but rather, bountiful, because again, as the (then) premier, most elite & richest of the mediums, it produced exceptional products. I say this all in the past tense, but I think of this often. It's all owing to some brotherly rivalry between my father & his brother at the confluence of immigration, entrepreneurship, the 80's. It's a lot & It's definitive of my experience & character. My uncle's story creates my story. Stories are the mind transmitting itself through time. Maybe a hyperonization of acceptable doctrines but - a sensation that I feel acutely can help me to express the totality of experience, to create an impression so complete that it's indistinguishable from having the experience yourself. Maybe it can be done. I don't think I'd have landed on this as a project without the influence of my Uncle over my life. This is done in tribute and in wonder at the circuitous journey life follows, and the continuity of that journey across lifetimes.
Eventually they'd all meet again. My uncles and aunts. The last time I remember them all together, I'm delighted to say, was during my first March Party, an event I invented to encompass both my and my kid's birthday in a way that was amorphous & impervious to the vicissitudes of shifting custodial schedules. We have a lot of March birthdays, to the point where it constituted a whole branch of the family. Us march people. Liza, My own Mother, Grace, Zach, Me & A & ... Oh, Mrs. Fawzy. So I thew a party at whirlyball & lazertag & they were all there. I remember my dad being somewhat still lucid. I can't remember if it was before his diagnosis or not. I remember them looking faded & severe, wounded you could say. Miles apart, states apart they had gotten through life & to see them scowling together. A very old-man presence, a sense of pitiable, difficult experience, resignation, and the defeat, I must suppose it is experienced as, of reaching the end to find yourself still among the people you started with. To see life as adventure and to have it's end be a steady narrowing of horizons in the company of those with whom you'd begun. I think that the bleak circle of life's bounding limits as experienced in retrospect cannot help but crush one's heart. To be driven by that want for more & then to be in the end reduced. A hyperbolic arch of a life, a leap to touch, to see how high one can reach & then to fall, inevitably back to the starting point. To think it is one thing, an intellectual fantasy, but to live & experience it is to be changed by its revelation & I could see, My Uncle and Father, huge men sitting rumpled under outmoded winter coats sitting in plastic lawn furniture around a table of whirlyball pizza. They have the same expression that suggests displeasure but is the neutral, Egyptian, gaze of masculine contempt, but no cast all around & with such disgust. I know it's a desecration to others, my siblings, I imagine, to see this, to have experienced that scene, that way. I don't know if they'd like the characterization but I think "Lion in Winter" just as my own icon is "Robin in the Snow". Fading heroism & youthful resurgence. Not narratively related, at least not programmatically, these may be on a spectrum of acceptable & relatable late-20th century American northeastern sentiments. A kind of feeling - the tension between the image defined by "the tension between the Robin in Snow as supplicating host toward the disapproving but enfeebled Lion in Winter". I think of the I-Ching, how the Duke of Zhou's tool uses the evocation of a relatable scene to narrate a kind of way of being. Narrating the experience so thoroughly that every experience and emotion, no matter how esoteric, is expressible in this metaphoric context - this is the total transmission, the context projected & then called forth. Memory works by by being a flower, plucked from the ground. Sometimes it is a blossom, just a quick image, a faint recollection. But sometimes under scrutiny more is seen, you've closed in your conscious mind on the thought & now you are seeing the stem, the thorn, the leaves, the roots, the bulb, the seasons & the cycles - you briefly examine the flower & end up with a massive totality of context that the scene can be made portable, experienced by others completely. I can say this image, and you can be drawn to the Northeast of Ohio in the cold early spring of '13, the dim light in dust motes cast down on the soggy polished concrete floor of the repurposed warehouse, the noise of pinball machines & family gatherings - off on the side a couple of old men, and an old woman attending to them. They are from a different world but they built the one they now occupy, they look at their creation & still find it wanting, meanwhile, their doting sister still admires them, believes in them and wants them to be comfortable. In them you see your own future & the continuity of the human experience is rendered sacred by the gnosis of the realization & the love that the feeling evokes, I'm the robin in the snow, I'm the occasionally evergreen, the sometimes, seasonally hopeful. I see the jump, watch, am witness to their peak, their apogee - appreciative, a fan - admiring so that it's heartbreaking, an ordeal, to watch their inevitable descent. I feel like I'm overwhelmed, often, by the dismal sensation of following down with heartbreaking recognition a glorious thing that could not long last.
You'd see them together, the originals, the first generation & at some point at weddings and funerals, at holidays when they'd all gather together, you'd see them as a cohort - you could sense them as distinct within our family, another core, and within that core there were the three from the village. Nagi, Sam & Liza, they remembered & remember the stories I'd heard. I always wanted to collect them. I felt the mythology in them, dreamed how it was legendary & dreamlike. A far off world of different adventure & my own dad had been in it, from a young age. When later I'd feel motivated by this, called to outdo, or at least meet his experiences, I was becoming aware that I wasn't meant for that, and that I'd better just appreciate the stories for themselves alone instead of looking at them as moral guides. Realizing that the differences between our experiences was too great a gulf for us to cross. I understand my father in the context of America, that's our commonality in the end, one of the big ones anyway, that we're both american. To him a point of pride and achievement, to me a kind of nightmare default state - a swirl of chaos that's a destroyer. I've known other americans like him & other americans like those he aspired to be. I respected his achievement in getting to where he wanted to be but I couldn't understand his actual goal. He couldn't get mine. I think I understood then, that day when I saw them together & maybe for the last time, that he, they, would never be able to extend my perspective the same deference I had for them was because of their perspective, it's all consuming demand for performance & accomplishment - it couldn't circumspectly marvel at it's nature & its meaning through time. No, in fact they're angry if you try to engage on those terms. What about the money? Who's going to be impressed by this? Nerds? Poor Nerds? Come on! Work harder, stop wasting time! You're afraid. The old man once tried to teach me how to use a sling. I was just a little kid, maybe 4-5? I got the rock to go once, but he could bullseye the stop sign across the street every time. He got bored when he realized I wasn't interested in outdoing him, in making a game of it. Eventually I understand him, I think he lately understands me but is unhappy with the outcome. This is the story, the interior narration rationalizes emotion, creating the continuity of experience that we regard as consciousness.
A memory flashes like a blur, a poorly resolved image that when focused upon becomes more detailed, your mind's convolutions extract crumbs of perceptual recollection filling in the details as you examine it all more closely. Memory & vision have 1:1 correspondences for me. Even in pure abstractions I imagine the words themselves as imagery. A personal memetic alphabet the material perception of which is memory. I'm led to understand this is how all vision works. That the traverse of the input from the eye to the brain has a significant lag & our vision is really a kind of patchwork edit of 1 second old memories presented intuitively to the mind. It handles these images - I imagine - like a spider. I see it feeling along the web for the vibration of some vague impression & trapping it, a color or a smell or sound & then scurrying over, uncannily, to gingerly maneuver the object, study it, then wrap it up & consume it, making more spider, more mind. I don't always have his vision, it's a kind of impression - I think that pondering death, the death of a loved one who had a titanic identity in my own personal mythos - it has a feeling of maudlin predation, a bit grotesque to consume it so, and hence - Spider-Mind sensations, a purely explained mood, a way of being. I think, if I pursue this project at great length, and today, I hope to do so, I think that I could encode all my combinatorial emotional states into an iconic representation. Spider-Mind-Creator is such an idiomatic icon. I name it and it describes my memory of a time - still in childhood with the sepia tone memory of remembering it for the first time as you look at the keepsake photograph, something you kept to remind you, a totem you use to build the memory around. It's crafted like vision, by a spider-in-the-mind turning the impression around, ascribing the photo's faded colors & the subject's dated apparel, it draws in the senses, engages them & conflates them with an array of other memories, my mother gossiping about that day & how exotic and handsome my Uncle Sam was to her young suburban cousins, how he had a smoldering appeal that was mystifying to see from outside, and how it worked on everyone around him. Her memory, recited, informs my own, I have impressions of him from many dimensions & the Spider-Mind catches an image of me embarrassingly adolescent in my Mother's kitchen, her telling me, us both busy with something, washing dishes, putting them away. That's in the mind's eye as is the photo, one I only remember seeing but can't describe clearly, I think it shows a dark man in cut off jeans & sunglasses at Cedar Point in the early 80's. There's a lot of photos of that day & it's of a kind where studying those photos creates a pure image, a sense of being there that the mind-spider recreates, just as it once created it, and creates it anew each time it's been accessed. And the mind-spider adds the memory of first remembering each and every time. It writes to a log but doesn't comment on its edits. My uncle. I loved him, of course, I loved him but my love for my father, much more clearly understood, scrutinized. My love for my aunt was of a higher kind, it's still painful to think about her. My uncle, he was geographically distant, our relation was based on reputation & occasional physical presence. I grew up created by his presence & he reflected my experience of being created by him - our dialogue was cursory & restrained but also momentous & powerful, a very specific kind of family relation that I can think of, in this circumspect way. He's the only one I could feel this way about & it's a unique emotional state that I feel comfortable expressing, capable of articulating & studying without hurting myself too badly. Distance & time & watching from a remove the leaping arc of a high-achiever's life, seen by one entering on the upward rise. I say I'll miss him & I mean, I will notice his absence when creating new memories, and I'll regret that absence because I'd still like to have that bond with him. I'm capable of imagining his responses to the things I see & that's what it is to miss someone. I think the more vividly you can imagine their responses over the stimuli around you, the more intensely you'll miss them, the more thorough the connection the deeper the commitment. I'll miss him when I'm at the next wedding & I can picture him there, and I can imagine how his own kids will experience that absence, and they'll understand what they must have observed me experiencing, these events without your father - the feeling of unraveling. The pleasure of having ridden that jump to the peak, and to see it almost as a complete event, a life lived out in a story.