When you go home tonight, take the long way home

This afternoon I fell asleep. Well, it would probably be more accurate to say, passed out from exhaustion. I just fell off the end of my rope.

I woke up a couple hours later, completely out of it, lying in the rays of the setting sun. I wasn't conscious enough to get up, but I wasn't quite asleep. The situation reminded me another time, then music that I don't really listen to anymore popped into my head. Bam! I was a horny fourteen year old reading the semi-autobiographic science fiction of a gay man from New York*1. I was dreaming of how to design brass orchids and sleeping too hot to sleep.

There was a time when I meditated on that time, trying to conjure it like a jaunte*2, bend it back like a tesseract*3. It was a mental exercise in memory and a quest for something more than boredom and normal.

Now it's amazing how strong the flavor still is. The flavor of a book. The flavor of a moment. Back when we were all babies.

"How can you live this way?
Why do you think it so strange?"


*1: Samuel R. Delaney and his "Dahlgren"
*2: From Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination"
*3: From Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time"