8-19-2011

I am the meaning of small things. I am the devil in the details.

Memories are lost to all but dreams, as easily recaptured. A familiar raven follows me. It's huge. Its iridescent feathers are intriguing, beautiful like oil on the surface of the sea. It should burn, for leering into my soul with its black eyes. Its calls are so ugly.

I sleepwalk through my lost childhood. My old toys all stand surrounding me, for sale in glass cases, complete with their imagined personalities. The Lone Ranger triggers the now distant past, the days before they took away his mask, immortilized in plastic. Tanto, G.I. Joe, Original Star Wars figures, worse for wear, all intermingle in this surreal display.

There are Transformers too, Masters of the Universe, all the comic book heroes, rare stuff from Planet of the Apes and Dune, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, and Evel Knievel's stunt bike. I met Evel once. He said follow your dreams, even if it breaks every bone in your body. Nearly all his bones had been replaced with nuts and bolts, but he had balls.

There's a charcter from Gunsmoke here, and the toy guns still look real in the grip of cops and robber figures from the days real cops and robbers could tell the difference.

On my way home a police perimeter roadblocks the obscured scene of an officer involved shooting. The homeless mentally ill man I passed on the way to the train station the day before lies motionless in the crosswalk, shot, by a rookie lady cop, for crossing the street too slow, permadosed with Tourette's, and reaching for a gnarly twig at his side from a special tree in his world, in his childlike metaphysics, a magic wand.

The day before, he said, "Hey! You got any change?" I said, "I can't change you, man. Only you can change you." To which he replied, "Bullshit!"