It was the third seventh of the first hour of the first day of the greatest writer's brick crisis in the history of the known universe, and the fact that Skip had now thrice forgotten everything that had ever happened to him wasn't helping the situation.  He had a distant, vague memory of a time long ago at least fourteen minutes back, when something to do with him had begun for the first time.  He got the vague idea that it had progressed in some way or another, and then stopped progressing, and then decided that the starting and stopping of progression in general was the only thing there was, and hence started again.  Then he had a very clear memory of forgetting everything that had ever happened to him, and of a second progression of time pretty much just like the first except with the addition of a lingering deja vu that it had all pretty much happened before, a deja vu that was now doubling itself as life began repeating itself for the third time in fifteen minutes of fame.  It was a phenomenon Skip decided to call "treja vu".
            The most prominent aftertaste in his mouth after the whole 14-minute ordeal was that of having been thrust into a nightmarish clashing of newness and oldness.  The newness of the very beginning of the progression of a great Age of Ages--in harmony with the freshness of his short life as an obscure frwoa writer somewhere between the dawn of the dawn of time and the end of it--and the end of it.  All in all, somewhere in this strange polarity of genesis and finality, he had accumulated some small amounts of knowledge and skill.  While he couldn't remember what they might be, he decided now would be an appropriate time to finally put them to practice.  Or at least for the first time in recent history.  Skip looked around at the strange thought-metal of his train pulsing in and out of reality--as if its atoms couldn't decide whether physics should exist or not or what it meant for tangible matter if it did--and began to describe what he saw and felt.
            " 'My first memory was waking up on the train.  I had no idea who I was or what was happening or why I was plagiarizing the pilot of ABC Family's Kyle XY almost word for word.  My mouth wasn't sure what it was narrating.  My eyes weren't sure what this weird metallic primordial element was, or how I was sensing it, or how exactly it was holding me up, though it seemed like the weird trippy glowing metal in Contact when what's-her-face is in the spherical metal beach ball that's about to sploosh her down into a trippy galactic journey of poetic discovery and child-like wonder resulting from the hallucinogen pill they gave her by mistake before she boarded the thing.  Yet while whats-her-face lacked the literary skills to convey her detailed experience to others, I had the inverse dilemma: I was a talented writer quickly regaining his skills, but in a world that lacked anything worth writing about.'
            " 'With every new breath of prose and alliteration I spoke, I began to remember what it was to be a writer, and at the vague idea for an intangible universe around me--that had billions of years to go before fleshing out into matter and physical form; somehow I knew this--I remembered what it meant to be born before my time.  Every comedic writer is born with satiric instincts that ultimately piss a whole lot of people off by demeaning their lives and otherwise commendable works of art.  Every writer's life is filled with a rich plethora of detailed places and complex people constantly begging to be documented and fictionalized and parodied, or just immortalized in the snapshot of a poem or thoughtful stall scribble.  Every environment except the first Age of the known universe known as Okuaka.' "

||< (last)   (next) ||>