Movie

I remember the dark theater, and how cold it was in there. That was always the best thing about going to a movie. The temperature. In the middle of the summer, I went to the movies and always brought a jacket. I always wore long pants when I went to see a movie.

And I remember them. I remember all the movies that I went to see, midsummer.

Even if others don't remember the movies, I remember the movies.

Admit it, you remember the movie as well as I do. It's stuck behind another memory, in the gates of your neural pathways. Your synapses, chain lightning bottled up in your skull, like the electric fence I walked by on the way home from the movie that I went to see at the dollar theater near my house, are hiding your memory of the movie and making you lie and say it never existed.

But it existed. The movie existed as surely as you exist. In fact, you exist because the movie exists, and because all movies exist.

Even the ones someone made up.

Don't blog, I say. Go see the movie instead.

Walk by the electric fence. It's raining. The fence buzzes a little. Slap at the fence with your hand. It isn't powerful. It's a light shock. A single, electrified wire is all it is. It keeps a horse in the yard of a house. In the suburbs. There's a horse in the suburbs, and single electrified wire holds him at bay.

If that's true—and that's true—then, certainly—the movie exists.

Peacock

I went on vacation. I was online and I found a travel site that offered competitive rates. The site was:

flanneryoconnortrips.com

According to the site counter, I was the third person ever to look at the site. According to the email I got from my flanneryoconnortrips.com travel agent, I was the only person ever to book a trip to Milledgeville.

I took a bus. I rode to Georgia on a big, grey bus. No one sat next to me. The driver hummed quietly to himself all night long, and it helped me sleep.

And then I got to Milledgeville, and I checked into a bed and breakfast. I unpacked a few of my things and put them in a dresser. I only used the top drawer, because I only had a couple of days worth of clothes.

It was early afternoon, so I decided to go to Andalusia and look around the farm.

At the farm I saw a peacock. And the peacock was the reincarnated spirit of Flannery O'Connor.

It told me. We talked all evening, until the staff asked me to leave. I asked if I could stay the night outside, that I would sleep on the grass and talk to Flannery. They repeated the request for me to leave.

And then they repeated the request again, but this time, one of them added a shove. So I left.

And came back the next day.

And the next.

I quit my job on the phone a week later. I got a job in Milledgeville, busing tables. I bought an old, used car, one that doesn't run much. It's parked near Andalusia. I sleep in it.

I go to the farm and talk to Flannery O'Connor. She does most of the talking and I've learned a lot from her. Like this:

Flannery O'Connor hates it when kids on the street swear and everyone can hear them.

I have always hated that, too. Old people can hear them. I hate it when a young person says a curse word, and an old person gets a painful grimace. Flannery and I have that in common.

Flannery and I have a lot in common.

I go to the farm and talk to a bird. I don't blog.

Bird.

Creature

There's this creature I know who is having himself a lot of trouble with the present tense. The creature is spending all its time trying to figure out the present tense, and that is a real problem because the creature was created in the past tense, but lives now in the present tense and wants to do its best to figure out the tense shift that is its "figuring out" life. You know?

So, this creature having trouble with the present tense looks out at the present tense and always sees it like its through an old glass window, even though "looking out" is sort of a weird way to describe the way eyes or seeing or something like that work.

But. Old glass. Glass is solid, but also, even though it doesn't seem like it, a liquid, and very very very slowly it is pulled by gravity, and glass warps. That's why it looks like it does when it's old: it's flowing to the ground.

And that's what the creature sees.

I am a teacher of sorts. I am the sort of teacher who tries to teach the creature how to understand the present tense. So, I am busy teaching.

And cannot blog.

(I'm back. Sort of. Maybe once a week. Maybe Mondays for a while.)