My History, Or How I Attempted to Conceptualize Time
If you can picture a small boy in love with Batman, or at least his Hasbro products, tying blue towels around his neck, pouncing on his unsuspecting sisters, then you can picture me growing up in St. Louis, a boy too picky to eat anything, really, I had never tried broccoli before the age of eight. If you can picture that face of disgust I wore, claiming the carrots and peas on my plate smelt like plants, implying that plants were in fact the work of an unseen and malevolent evil, if you can picture that same boy becoming a vegetarian at the age of fifteen, coming to terms with Batman’s fascist derangement and still delighting in his antics, then you can picture me changing.
If you can imagine the same boy, rushing home with a stack of books from the library, pouring them out of a white plastic bag onto his bedsheets revealing that each and every of the twenty items he has checked out are children’s books on every sort of dinosaur imaginable, then you can picture me gaining my literacy. If you can imagine a boy digging in his back yard hoping to find a fossil so to sell to the museum in downtown Kansas City, hoping I’d never have to pay for a box of Gobstoppers again, then you can picture my curious boyhood.
Follow this boy to his first day of Kindergarten, where he told tall tales about his parents. Parents who, according to the boy, were both among other things astronauts, paleontologists, poets, cowboys (It is not clear whether my classmates understood their historical decline or not), vampires, and ship-builders. If you can see this boy telling his gaping friends about his famous father, who always wore mountain-man attire, and who had shot a bear and sustained only a scar from his eye to his jaw, then you can see me learn to tell stories.
Think about the boy moving away from the dinosaurs and the batmen and the blizzards and the wheatfields to a strange and exotic place where he was dumped into sixth grade with the rest of the little heathens in middle school. Watch, closely, as he meets his best friend; watch as they both decide they’d rather play basketball and watch Comedy Central reruns than spend their awkward phase in Boy Scouts, where they met. See the friend’s parents divorce; see them become inseparable; watch these friends talk until the streetlights are the only thing standing outside about the complexities of Eve, the howling future, and God’s strange sense of humor. Watch us boggle our minds at the eccentricities of the artists and the writers who lived and worked and breathed the air of the earth in before us. If you can picture this, then you see me fairly well now: you can see me begin to adopt my morals and my standards and my love for everything.
If you can picture the boy stumble through his high school years in a swirl of time-management failures and nostalgic daydreams, you can see me growing up. If you can see me walking through the woods realizing that whatever romantic idea I had in my head was not worth the spiders crawling about my body, if you can realize the divine image of the boy scribbling his Lovecraftian stories on everything he could see, and if you can stand to hear him mumble incomprehensibly in the face of a heartbreak, then you see me becoming myself, again and again.
If you can imagine the same boy, rushing home with a stack of books from the library, pouring them out of a white plastic bag onto his bedsheets revealing that each and every of the twenty items he has checked out are children’s books on every sort of dinosaur imaginable, then you can picture me gaining my literacy. If you can imagine a boy digging in his back yard hoping to find a fossil so to sell to the museum in downtown Kansas City, hoping I’d never have to pay for a box of Gobstoppers again, then you can picture my curious boyhood.
Follow this boy to his first day of Kindergarten, where he told tall tales about his parents. Parents who, according to the boy, were both among other things astronauts, paleontologists, poets, cowboys (It is not clear whether my classmates understood their historical decline or not), vampires, and ship-builders. If you can see this boy telling his gaping friends about his famous father, who always wore mountain-man attire, and who had shot a bear and sustained only a scar from his eye to his jaw, then you can see me learn to tell stories.
Think about the boy moving away from the dinosaurs and the batmen and the blizzards and the wheatfields to a strange and exotic place where he was dumped into sixth grade with the rest of the little heathens in middle school. Watch, closely, as he meets his best friend; watch as they both decide they’d rather play basketball and watch Comedy Central reruns than spend their awkward phase in Boy Scouts, where they met. See the friend’s parents divorce; see them become inseparable; watch these friends talk until the streetlights are the only thing standing outside about the complexities of Eve, the howling future, and God’s strange sense of humor. Watch us boggle our minds at the eccentricities of the artists and the writers who lived and worked and breathed the air of the earth in before us. If you can picture this, then you see me fairly well now: you can see me begin to adopt my morals and my standards and my love for everything.
If you can picture the boy stumble through his high school years in a swirl of time-management failures and nostalgic daydreams, you can see me growing up. If you can see me walking through the woods realizing that whatever romantic idea I had in my head was not worth the spiders crawling about my body, if you can realize the divine image of the boy scribbling his Lovecraftian stories on everything he could see, and if you can stand to hear him mumble incomprehensibly in the face of a heartbreak, then you see me becoming myself, again and again.