What I'll never know is significant, but some of the people who could have given me answers are gone, and some who are here, to whom I speak or listen regularly, wouldn't know, since what I want to know might not have definite answers, or I might not have the way or wherewithal, even the words, to form the necessary and appropriate questions. I'm a recorder and collector, a listmaker, I studied history, philosophy, literature, and have taught American history, but dissuaded from the academic life after receiving a Ph.D., or unsuited for its piquant rigors, even though well equipped to be an historian, since I could hear or read something and remember it, I subsequently trained as an objectmaker and designer, while haphazardly pursuing odd jobs. I also wait, in the sense that a young man here, when asked what he did, responded, "I'm a waiter," and, when asked, "But where do you work?" the young man said, "I'm just waiting." I am waiting, not just for a letter or telephone call, but for that which has so far escaped me or might come unexpectedly, I can easily wait for mail to arrive, especially here, and waiting for it, even with the advent of cyber deliveries, can be a meaningful part of my day, as can waiting itself.
Sometime ago, months and months I believe, though time is unimportant here, and seemingly grows more insignificant every day, when I hadn't been expecting anything specific, but had the gnawing sense that something must happen to me soon, and should, even an accident, because otherwise life would be the same, and I seek change or create a situation that might effect it, a postcard arrived. It was typed on an old-fashioned typewriter and induced a blurry recognition, similar to confusion between a memory and a story about the past. Its signature looked scrambled or scribbled, even scratched, and I'd seen the handwriting before, I thought, or knew the hand, but also in this guise or context didn't know how I knew it or from where or when. On the front, there was a jumbo jet plane flying in a blue sky and on its hack the sender had typed: "Out of here, going here and there. But where? Where are you? Miss you." Then the scratchy signature. The stamp was franked in Omaha. I was pleased it had arrived and spent an hour, more or less, on it. I don't wear a watch, which bothers some of the residents here, who are concerned with time as I am, though less concerned than people in more ordinary or less-privileged situations, who suffer from the stress of regular schedules, but I was trying to figure out what the jet plane postcard portended. The beginning of worry sounded inside me during that hour, and my skin crawled, but then I worked to subdue myself by various methods, including a mug of herbal tea and slow, deep breathing. Some people's skin crawls incessantly, they suffer from vermiculations, or the sensation of skin crawling, and there are also various neuralgias, or nerve irritations, in which the skin burns and is accompanied by inflammation, which is painful, since often it is inflammation, when white blood cells flood an area of the body, that causes distress and pain; peripheral neuritis is the sensation of damage to a peripheral limb, one that is gone, like an amputated leg, which still produces sensation, but it is in a way a feeling of loss, since the body, or the mind's body, remembers what is no longer there. But soon I looked out at the field, where there were no deer but some small birds, and decided not to think further or badly about the postcard, not to imagine the worst, to assure myself it was harmless and probably nothing, since nothing had occurred, and it was probably meaningless. It might be an omen, which would be a kind of vanity, but better that than futility or meaninglessness, since at the least the postcard addressed to me meant someone was thinking of me in a curious, unusual manner, someone I wasn't thinking of before, but would now, and so I was joined to him, or maybe her, and enmeshed in his travels, though he was distant and anonymous to me, but the intimacy was intriguing, it was intimate, it came close to me, when so little does or is intimate, yet everyone here talks about intimacy, which finally disgusts me, and I must go to bed. The postcard incited my imagination and had brought surprise to my routine and habit of mind, for which I was grateful, since I like surprise and abjure routine.
I like to believe I enjoy surprises, that I'm someone to whom an eruption of the unusual should be usual, or who branches out to advance the implausible. I might fly a jet, become a man, walk backward without a care, threaten like a stalker, speak my mind freely at all times, swim the Atlantic on a greasy back, be silent for months like a Carthusian, have absolute faith, research the first humans and how they knew food from poison and learn their early, even fatal mistakes. The first people, Bushmen, ate raw food that must have carried inedible matter as well as microbes, but then there was the discovery of fire, and cooked meat and maybe grasses, but I might find out when bread made its first appearance and how; I once read a book about pizza, flat bread with cheese is ancient in origin. It is difficult to comprehend a world without the discoveries that are commonplace, but I'd like to. More, I'd like especially to research failure, the dustbin of human effort, upon which our world is also based. Sometimes images and sensational ideas come to me in torrents, but they may actually be worthless or insubstantial, or answers arrive to questions, or some thoughts arrive with remarkable clarity, but they may not be what I need, or they may be parts of wholes and not capable of conclusion, like a scientific experiment just before it's completed. A friend had a stroke, and he could barely form words, his brain a frustration to him when it was ordinarily a boon, giving him ease in speaking effortlessly and precisely, but he was now without words, and felt deficient, so his skin erupted in a red sea. He pointed to a wastepaper basket of basic design but ugly material, wanting me to toss trash into it, and said, with great effort, "Throw it into the waiting for forgetfulness." His ability to read was never affected, and language returned to him, but his naming a wastepaper basket "waiting for forgetfulness" was, with his recovery, lost to him. He has lived in the same house for years, not far from where I first ate Indian food, which I instantly liked, whose spices and smells were new to me then, as was the man I first ate it with, whom I fell in love with for a short time, but Indian food is no longer new, though I still appreciate its tastes and smells, and that friend's house is also near the beauty salon where I first had my legs waxed. The salon's chairs mocked I8th century French design, and its walls were flecked with gold, to invoke that other, supposedly golden era, one of abundance and elegance for a relatively few people, while its beauticians, in street clothes of varying, inconsistent style, provided ordinary care and treatment, haircuts and dye-jobs, as well as leg, arm, and lip waxes, sometimes roughly given, on the worn scarlet silk chairs, and a client such as myself, uncomfortable in this discordant atmosphere, could not relax.