... Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup ... My answering machine tells me,"Friday, Twelve THIRTY four A-M!" Today, it's been today, it's been today for thirty four minutes, for two-thousand-forty-some seconds, and I'm writing to you an e-mail. ... Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup ... I'm writing it to you on my old e-mail address, just for old-time's sake. I've done a quite few things in the last two-thousand-forty-some seconds, just for old-time's sake. (When he says "old-time's sake," the pointer and middle fingers of both hands slash quotation marks in the air like the big pointy teeth of a fierce bunny.) My mother insisted that I remove the truck from the driveway, as its enormity was blocking her bitty Volkswagen convertible from exiting onto Rt 49. She'll be doing just that, early tomorrow morning, to take the siblings to Millville Memorial High, and Millville Senior High, Jennifer and Andrew, respectively, the formers with the formers, the latters with the latters, the siblings with the schools. She never took me to school. I walked some years. I walked to a stop and I road a bus some years. Some years, I rode my bike, and it was cold, and I was late. Some years, my father, silent, drove us in the van. So many mornings, I drove my manual Nissan, unhappy with the stop-and-go stop streets and traffic lines: ("the way Americans drive"). In those times, I picked up a girlfriend from some avenue. Melissa. Half the year, I went to her door, as my brother and sister sat in an idling vehicle. The other half, I didn't. She held that against me. I moved the truck, so my mother could make the trip tomorrow morning, in her stick-shift Volkswagen Cabrio, stop-n-going, ("The Way Germans Don't Drive on the Autobahn"). But, you can't just move a truck. You have to drive a truck. Because Trucks love to drive. Volkswagens may be happy cars, with running lights, but Dodge Rams are angry trucks, with lots of stress, and need to pace. My truck has old tapes inside of its glove compartment. Some I bought at a yardsale with Melissa; my English teacher's yardsale. Some my uncle gave me, when I was 12, when I was getting into the Beatles. Some of them I stole from the apartment where we all used to hang out, when we all left, when we sold of its innards. There's a giant condom that Melissa bought me at the Boardwalk. There's an elastic stick-hand that I bought with Julia at the College. In that truck, with those things jiggling, I drove around this town, for old-times sake (he "slashes"), as I hadn't done for so long. I used to do it in the Nissan. I used to do it when someone had hurt me. I did it once when I got my Discman for Christmas. I had played Pearl Jam, then. Now, instead, "Let it Be" came on the radio, and I turned it up. The radio station fizzed away. "Let it Be" ... is playing on the radio in my room now. Had to hear it. Now I've heard it. Now, can I let it be? I drove all the places I used to drive in my Nissan, which would be one year older than the Truck, if it were still alive today, god rest its soul, because if a thing ever lived, a car does. It did, until it was sold for scrap, its corpse putting $270 into the Truck's cost. Melissa was driving old Nissan when it was crushed by a crazy lady's glimmering dark-green Ford. She needed that "like she needed a hole in the head." Needed it "like she needed a hole in her head." "Like she needed that hole in her head." She being Melissa and the Crazy Lady. I don't know whose fault it was. Maybe it was the stick-shift's. Maybe it was just the Nissan's time. Maybe it saw graduation coming, and saw that it wasn't going to mean so much anymore, when Melissa was gone, and I was in College. It didn't have tapes in its glove compartment: it had dried pink tempera paint, from my first love interests, in its filthy trunk. It was old. Maybe it looked up into the sunny sky (it was a beautiful day), and chose made the ultimate sacrifice. Like the Indian drift-wood it was named for, maybe The Drifter looked to the sky, and said, "It is a good day to die." And, in Wilder fashion, it took an ugly Ford muthafucka with it. I miss that car, dammmit. Truck's got too much attitude to do touching shit like that. I first saw that car when I was leaving my first birthday party without my parents there. It was 1988. I was 8 years old. My mother drove up in it. I didn't know it was her. I thought I'd been left there. The Nissan drove me home that day. And one day, that was today, I drove its successor to all the places it used to go. To Melissa's house. And to Benni's house. Past Liam's. Past Donald's. Past Jacob's. Out to Ricky's new house (his old house is right next door, still the color that his criminal father painted it). Out to Hogbin road, where it drove off onto a fire-path, and hid, one Easter, from parents and police. It went to the Millville South Jersey Hospital System Emergency Room, where I took a beaten girlfriend, where my mother worked. A song started as I pulled down a street where I used to wait for the bus, with Ricky and Eli and Ryan and Liam, in front of a church with a neon white cross on its pinnacle, across from the ruins of the torn-down school, where, before it was torn down, I was going to start my comic book company. It got torn down long after my dreams of a comic book company were torn down. Dreams are more fragile than brick and steel. The song was "Brown Eyed Girl." The song is in one of the first videos we all made together. It's a symbol of the "good old times." Everyone friends and just having fun around a camera, stalling until everyone shows up. The song made me a little sad. Made me fill up with words, like endless rain into a papercup. "I'd like to thank you on behalf of the group, ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition." Home? Home and dry? "Friday ... ONE oh TWO A-M!" Thirty-seven-hundred-some seconds now. My world keeps moving. This little bubble of space where I can hear and see, it keeps on punching along. People and things keep falling behind it, stripped off like chipping paint. It's nothing new and nothing surprising and nothing profound. It just so relentlessly is. "There's only one thing that I've learned about life, and that is this: It goes on." (Robert Frost) John Lennon is dead. I mention him, because I hear him singing to me. No ghost, just a tape. After he was gone, after his bubble went to the great beyond, his friends took his canny tapes, and they sung to them. His voice, spun backward at the end of it, over a banjo plays, says, what always sounds to me like, at least on a subconscious level: "I guess we did okay this time, again, didn't we?" How tragic it is to me, that he couldn't say that about the Beatles until after he was dead. His bubble of sight and sound popped before it ever came back to the life that he once knew. The song always makes me feel ... empty. Maybe that's the great question, for me. As my bubble pushes on, dropping the past away into the wind, is the bubble filling, or is it emptying? Am I truly filling myself up with something noble, or am I filling myself up with emptiness? Are children so happy because they are unaware, or because they are FULL of life? And, as we go on, as we're unable to hold onto things that are always slipping, slipping away, are we filled with emptiness? I wonder sometimes, when I'm driving, if I'll ever feel as full as I did "in my childhood." Can new songs ever come to mean as much as the old songs once did, for such a short time? Can new friends ever mean as much as lost ones? Can new kisses ever mean as much as remembered ones? Can new homes mean what the first ones did? Can new cars mean what the first car did? Can my words ever do anything more than struggle to describe the beauty that's been lost to the past? That is what literature is about. That is what mythology is about. That is what religion is about. Thank you for listening. ~Wilder Whispered words of wisdom: Let it be. (Paul McCartney) PS: "FRIDAY ... ONE SIX teen A-M" (approx. 4,560sec) PPS: After revising, "FRIDAY .. ONE thirty ONE A-M" (approx 5,460sec)