white space

white  space 

whitespace

clearly

blank

  empty

  negative

  space

off  white

off  color

outer  space

square  one

ground  zero

white  noise

static  free 

 room  to  breathe

elbow  room

no  time

to  spare

personal  space

cling  free

opposites  attract

 

 white  smoke

recalling the future

 ... and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know -- trying to see things as you will remember having seen them). 
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

In the bleachers during the World Series, October 2012, San Francisco. I will remember this. I will remember it like this, as starkly and irretrievably happy, as I am in this film being filmed right now. The smell of beer on the metal floor. Moody clouds as the sun set. The fans in front, back, and sides of me. The frenzy. The crack of the bat. Roars of the crowd. My coffee. The manic shouting (by me). My weeping as the Tony Bennett recording played. Texting back home. All of it. Framed. Sealed. Under glass.

Are such recollections a forced inevitability? Can you will this tape into memory edited in the way you prescribe? Or does that make it a foregone conclusion a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And was it really like that? There is no way to prove or disprove it, the subjective parts. Maybe by hypnosis. 

I would suggest we do this with Big Events: birth, death, marriage, hiring, firing, divorce, travel.

But now I'm confused.

It's never as you imagine you will remember it, not exactly. Yet sometimes it is, or seems to be. Is it like the Werner Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby the observer, the very act of observing, influences the outcome, the results, of the measurement? (I just butchered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Never mind.)

I said we do this with Big Events.

I take it all back.

It's not so much a super-hyper-future recollection as a super-hyper-experience.

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. I don't even know what point I was trying to make.

Maybe you can help me out.

ghost in the machine

It is 2018. Election Day. The Feast of Choices. I voted, made my choices. I had uncharacteristically backed into the parking space outside the Hazard branch library. I won't hazard here a guess as to the 5Ws and an H of the hazard. Turn the ignition. No push button. The engine starts. Wait. Hold it. I'm not ready but I'm rolling forward, sliding as if on black ice. I'm pushing down, down, down, pumping on the brake. To no avail. Huh? Hold it. Can't stop the forward motion, the inertia. Panic. Sweat. Brake. Brake. Wait. The car is in park. What? Oh. What? Hunh? The car to my right, parallel to me, doing the sliding, the gliding, the creeping forward. Rapid heartbeat slows. Reorients. Back to normal. Things in their proper place and time. Back to normal, whatever that is.

It is 1956. I know it is 1956 because later in the journey, after Mom, Dad, Jack, and I, and the Kandas visited Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey, a mysterious conversation ensued in the car. "Are you okay, Josephine?" The dialogue among the adults was confusing. I was 7 years old. The words "morning sickness" were uttered that summer day in the car, in New Jersey, where at the Kandas' for vacation I would enjoy buttered and salted corn on the cob that has yet to equaled in sweet and salty succulence, a trip so satisfying I saved sand in a Dixie cup from Ocean County Park in Lakewood after wading in its tea-colored lake water. After Bobby was born, in January 1957, did I hearken back to Mom's car-sickness obliquely discussed? Doubtful. It was more of a mosaic, a gestalt portrait painted in stages over the years since.

It is 1956. We are on a train in Stamford, Connecticut, bound for Trenton, New Jersey, for a family vacation. One could only hazard a wild guess as to the costly burden this put on our family. We lived in a city housing project, well kept, reasonably safe. We moved there in 1955, part of a seismic postwar transformation unknown to the scared and curious kid in the front passenger seat with cousin Joe Kanda driving. How did six of us fit in the car? No bucket seats, no seat belts. We are on the train ready to embark on our adventure. Some kid in school (for all I know, it was a teacher not a classmate) once told a story of someone being sucked under a train and dying. So, when steam burst forth from the arriving New York, New Haven and Hartford line (the New Haven line; oh, how I would long for a gorgeous serial comma inserted there, seifs or not) engine, what else could I ponder but swift death and extinction by locomotive vacuuming? A terrifying prospect.

Not sucked under but alive, oh, the excitement of sitting in a train chugging toward Manhattan, solid and rhythmic, stoic and hypermuscled, iron in its will and movement. Passengers on a train, human cargo -- living and breathing after not being mercilessly sucked into its abdomen!

We arrived at the terminus of Grand Central Terminal (not Grand Central Station, which is a post office). Presumably to change trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a coveted ownership property in Monopoly.

I am sitting near the window, the window is on the right. We start moving slowly, pulling out of the station. We are underground. Here we go. A gentle rolling sends us toward Trenton. Wait. Something is wrong here. What's the train on the other side of my window doing? Going backward? I don't get it. I stamp my feet on the floor, as if I could step on my own personal braking system to set things right.

"Mommy? Daddy? What's the train do -- ... ?"

Did they see it too?

Some kind of secular miracle. Movement not movement. We weren't moving, the other train was. What's going on here? Did you catch that? Was that for me to see or does everyone see it? As if my beloved Willie Mays wasn't tracking the ball over his shoulder in center field but instead the outfield and the stands and naturally the batted ball were conspiring to move while he was stationary.

And a seven-year-old boy doesn't know where to begin so he swallows his words and buckles up, so to speak, for the ride.

Who or what authored this vection vision of illusory movement? 

Tell me.

Don't tell me. 

Not yet.

What's It To You?

You can't put a price on it. You can't put a price on him, on her, on them. The Price Is Wrong. The cost of medications, of healthcare, of surgery. A matter of life or death. A pauper's grave. A penny for your thoughts. How about a dollar? Or a million dollars for your thought? That single unspoken thought, the dangerous one you can't speak even to yourself, the perverse and criminal thought that will shame and ruin you -- and you didn't even know it was a floating subterranean tidal whisper. A living wage. The cost of living. The wages of sin. Thank you for your time. Paying for the privilege of your time. Our shared time, and space. How much is it worth to you? The meter is running. Stop the meter. Rare silks and spices from exotic lands. Explorers, navigators, plunderers. A lunar rock. A Roman emperor on a broken coin. Fragment of fossilized bone. Anonymity. Secrecy. Mystery. Coin of the realm. The crown jewels. Cupidity. Need. Want. Bartering this for that. Transaction. Gold. Dust. Silver. Rust. What's it worth? What's it worth to you? And to me. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, crystal. Paper or plastic? Ultimately, what's it worth to them? Currency. Flow. In circulation. Streaming. Exchange. This for that. You for me, me for you, us for them, them for us. David Hockney's "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)," $18,000 in 1972; $90.3 million in 2018. Off the grid. Unavailable. Digitally absent. Gone. Missing in inaction. Flood of images. Verbal inundation. She of few words. He of sphinxlike silence. Rare blood type. Bloodlust. Donor fatigue. Daylight Saving Time. Daylight Saving Space. Saving for what and how? Freedom isn't free. Currencies of blood, time, space, platitude, demagoguery, faith, courage, history, and myth. Terms and conditions. Are you available Thursday? They're never available. I can never reach her. He never answers. Rarely. Rara avis. Rare bird. Rare book. What am my bid? Going once, going twice. Sold. How much was that again?