Water Walkers 1. This is my brain and my conversation within my brain, now being recorded via telepaceiver -- a tiny mucous-textured device lodged in the under section of my neural tissue two inches behind my left nostril, designed to journal all of my thoughts as they occur, from day to day, night to morning to night. So that people, such as yourself, can have historical documentation of everything that will become of me from this moment up until my death. Perhaps it is stupid of me to explain telepaceivers to you as if you’ve never heard of them before. You probably have one inside of yourself right now, don’t you? Or maybe not. Maybe you are from the outer space and don’t know anything about anything. Do you know anything about anything? Well, I guess I should probably treat you like you don’t know anything about anything. You know, just in case you are from the outer space. Anyway, welcome to my consciousness, whoever you are, you who are reading this thought-log right now. I am nervous to think because of you, nervous to wander into an embarrassing dream, think something dirty, vagina-curls, and my hand is shaking and won’t stop as I drink my oil-sweat juice in a landscape of raisins in the sun. But I will try to forget you are here so my life will flow more naturally, my thoughts sometimes fly by very quickly so I hope you can catch them okay, stream of consciousness I guess they call it. I’m trying not to think too chaotically, but thoughts as you know are hard to control. Perhaps many somethings will make sense but other somethings will not make any sense at all. I will try my best, but I am not making any promises that everything will be perfectly clear . . . 2. I am licking the sweat of my palms, sitting on the bank of Ocean City, the capitol of the new world. We call this new world Atlantica and there is a slightly older water country called Pacifica. And these are the new worlds, new as America once was, as Europe once was, as the Fertile Crescent once was. The cities are like small settlements, houses and streets on top of the ocean waves and water. It is something that we had to do, with the land-cities stacked so up-up-up, and everyone in the world gasping for their own space. It wasn’t surprising when we decided to move onto the ocean top. Space is endless, wide-open, on this side of the world. A man walks from the sidewalk into the ocean, he is gray and has a badge under a breast. He steps onto the waves like they are flexi-plastic, and walks across the water to the suburbs in the distance. He is talented at jumping over the waves, keeping them from knocking him down, foam-patterns creeping around him, splashing against legs like rock-islands. The man walks until he is a shark fin in the horizon, close to the tiny houses that pattern the sky in that direction -- a suburb of wealthy ones who live in pointy homes, Arabian palaces, and have very little stress in their lives. 3. On one side of my brain, I decide to walk. The other side is not very adventurous, but there is a place there that is good for a rest -- blankets draped over an ash- ridden burned away building. I like the part I am in now. It is where the world lives. I swim through it -- walk through -- and squish into things and nothing hurts to look at, to listen to. I become overwhelmed in the outside world, in such a sickening way, the color-textures, friends, social-clutter chats, overwhelming until my ears and kneecaps go tic-cricky and it makes me want to jump into the ocean without my water legs on, let the sharks get me, their teeth in love with me. My brain unfolds and tells me things. Don’t ask me what it is saying because you won’t understand its words. My brain speaks a language that is not English or any language the rest of the world knows. It is a brain language, something that is so other-languagely that it is impossible to translate into words. Maybe translate into feelings, maybe into body movements, or paintings, but not into words. And even feelings, motions, and paintings can only express a tiny amount of the language my brain speaks. When I try to explain this to other people, most of them say you’re crazy, you’re crazy and then they don’t talk to me anymore. Nobody understands why my brain is the way it is. They don’t understand that in order for me to communicate with the rest of the world I have to translate English into my brain language, process the information, create a response, translate that into English and then I can give the reply. Sometimes the information gets lost in all the conversions, making a conversation a tedious and often-avoided performance. They called it ADD, a thinking disorder that was very common at one point in history, and they said they could wipe it out of my brain for me and make me like everyone else. But I wouldn’t let them. I don’t want them to mess up my brain with their fishy ocean hands. I hate their fishiness . . . everybody here has fishiness, a salty fishy flavor on their skin, and they like it that way, they have advanced perfumes to cover it up but they like it that way. It is the character scent for Ocean City and its citizens. I also smell this fishy way and it disgusts me to be me sometimes. Doctors, psychologists, scientists of the brain, always want to work on me since I am the last of the uncured cases of ADD. People aren’t giving birth to too many brain-malfunctioned children these days, so they have very few people to study. But I believe my brain-language is a strength and not a weakness. I wish people would understand that and then leave me alone, leave me thinking and drawing. By the way, I mentioned earlier how my brain language is impossible to describe in words but is not-so-impossible to describe in pictures. If you want, I can draw something for you with my thoughts that will pick up on the telepaceiver, so you can get a better idea of what I am talking about. It will still be difficult to understand, but maybe you are really smart and/or intuitive. So I will show you in a drawing my brain-language word for seagull. This drawing is what my brain processes while my eyes look at a seagull. Whyrie is interested in my drawings times a million. She finds me fascinating and I don’t know why, and she studies me all the time. She works at the lab. She is a scientist and a genius and beautiful and really important. I’m not quite sure why she married me.