Tales from Oregon Pt. 3

(and a happy New Year)

12/17/2008

I am struck by the intellectual impotence of these people. They seem to be aware of their inability to change or alter anyone's opinion in any meaningful way. They are smart, and experienced, but they have over time, lost that mysterious faculty that enables one person to influence another.

12/18/2008

It's 8:00 in the morning and I'm sitting up in bed listening to the rain pattering against the window pane. It's the storm that was supposed to come in sometimes yesterday afternoon but which rolled in later, as I was preparing to go to sleep. It was roaring a few hours ago, with strong gusts of wind blowing against the side of the house. I've always found that I sleep better when its raining outside, but I kept waking up last night. However, I'm not exhausted for lack of sleep. I think its because I went to sleep so early last night, around 9:00. I remember when I was young and I went to sleep every night at 8:00 on the dot. I'd be up at 6:00 the next morning, and the days would last forever.

There is a strange pseudo-reality that seems to hover on the periphery of every memory I have of my early childhood. I say "early" her out of a need to differentiate between the two parts of my childhood, the first and the second. The before and the after.I moved from California to Connecticut when I was seven years old, and I have remembered almost everything about my life since then. Everything before that is hazy and jumbled with occasional patches of striking clarity. The nature of memory has always intrigued me, and I am compelled to assume that the reason for this dramatic change in recollection quality, from cloudy to clear, stems from the dramatic change of that transnational move. Suddenly my life was bifurcated and my forced realized of the transient nature of my existence, my life in California, subconsciously forced me to take a stronger and sharper perception of everything that has happened since.

My memory of my early childhood, however, is not completely realistic. It cannot be. There are things I remember which float aimlessly though the bubbles of clarity, inter-mixing with the real. They are strange artifacts, these pseudo-memories of quasi-realities. They consist of a varied multitude of things, hitting every level of my senses with their vivid unrealism.

to be continued