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The
piles and piles, bags and boxes, cardboard tubes and plastic-sleeved binders,
all chock-a-block with photos, notebooks, postcards, drawings, letters,
clippings, photocopies and microfiche... all of it waiting--for what? Am
I the only one to be overwhelmed by stuff? Did I indulge all this instant
nostalgia to create the extended family I never had? Lou Asekoff wrote "...no
man is more distant from another/than he is from himself/at another time."
Was all my scribbling and photography a primitive form of time travel, attempts
to communicate from future past to present? I grab at random a yellow legal
pad protruding from a shoulderbag overflowing with notebooks, pads, and envelopes
stuffed with loose sheets of paper, paperclips, tiny scraps and artifacts.
The top sheet in part reads:
9dec97
It's been a year since I've read a book and that hardly seems about to change
on the
PATH
to 33rd I feel I've grown too cynical to want to write much of anything but
here I am scheming my scheme and dreaming these things--wishing to live my
life on two wheels 'cause walking flatfoot's too slow & I reckon I still
believe.
...Which somehow led me to this forgotten and previously unpublished
first-class example of revisionism--a pre-PoD
(B.P.) event recreated from notes in PoD style.
It relates a dream I had after my first day on the office job I took in order
to learn about computers. Twelve years later I see computers as clocks with
people the cuckoos whose every movement occurs on schedule.
The paper itself is the message. It's what
McLuhan
knew. |
