From Everett Dock Q-32

I can remember a time when I thought, things will turn out all right. And I know that, at the time, I considered myself a well-rounded person, and a thought like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to have. You have everything if you have your health, that's what they used to say. I just want my thoughts.

I wish I knew the breaking point between being one person, and becoming someone else. Maybe there's not really a breaking point, maybe it's more like a smear in the memory. It's a slow process that takes place while you're sleeping and things begin to undulate to make a different person after three years of waking up.

I think I've become a golem of bad memories. Lost memories. I think my skin is made up of memories I can't recall. And I am guessing it's driving everyone up in VChicago friggin insane that I'm trying to somehow...collect my memories.

It is difficult to retain, but I do it as kind of a production, like a play. The easiest thing for me to do is think of a smell. I start with the smell of plastic, new plastic, and go from there. The smell creates the genre of the memory, and new plastic reminds me being a kid. Then the stage is built, the wood foot bridge over the creek, add the leaves scattered all around. Somethings you don't have to think too hard about, it's Fall. It's getting cold and the sky is coat-lining gray. Add the sounds, no...birds aren't right, the creek is slow, you're getting it.

Remember it's easy to remember the face of a kid you knew, if you didn't know them as an adult. My memories sometimes put full beards on ten-year-olds. So you have to create the person and for me, it's easiest to start with the ears, for whatever reason. They're just about impossible to remember, and can you say for sure whether or not your ears are detached? Don't feel! But the difficulty of trying to remember someone's ears brings the rest of them into sharper focus.

There's only so much of the memory that can be brought back. The rest falls away into inference and supposal. I know that King pushed me off the foot bridge into the water, and I suppose it must have been freezing. I don't know what happened to King, I suppose he moved away, because I think I would remember his death. And I infer, by being freezing and wet, that I would have gone home to change into some warm clothes, but I can't recall that, either. This is a memory that I keep framed inside, separate in the box like a photograph. I always have to find a way to keep them as individual incidences, so as not to confuse them with the...static in my mind.