YEARS PASS

i kept a journal two summers ago when i was a housepainter. it was the first summer i'd ever lived out on my own and i was in the mood to document it. i guess it's no different than any period of my life since i turned 15, but this one wasn't fictionalized like my memoires of high school. i did not give myself an anagrammed pseudonym or hide my identity behind an invented character. i recently took the journal out of the notebook it's been kept in for the past two years, and read the first entry. it was written on a day not unlike this one. i remember it quite well, in fact, it was end of may/early june and i was only a couple weeks away from a series of changes that brought my life to where it is now. this is what i wrote, word for word:

"Walked by a place in Collins Bay, a fairly tall dike with lovely wild flowers peeking through the grass and weeds. I figured a river was behind it; I was surprised to see railroad tracks.

I made sure to take a good look at the surroundings, so that when I make my next train trip to Kingston from Toronto, I'll pass by it and say 'Hey, I was there on such and such day thinking about what I would think when I see the place the next time I head by on the train.'

It's like staring yourself in the face sometime in the future.

There I'll be, standing in my painting clothes with my canvassing notebook in my hands, saying to myself, 'So you stood here once...who cares.'"

i remember writing it with some sense that what i'd experienced was some kind of rift-in-time moment, the kind of realization when you recognize that in the future, no matter who you aturn out to be, you'll always be the same person you once were. my cynicism at the time, however, brought on by my serious doubts about my place in the world, prompted me to write the final words which, in retropsect, was a deliberate attempt to sabotage my own wonderment. i remember feeling really excited about my little exercise in self-reflexivity, but once i'd gotten to the end of my journal entry, i remember thinking "you're not supposed to feel wonderment and excitement about anything." so i shat on it without thinking twice.

i'll never forget that afternoon, and i'm not sure why. i still watch for that spot when i'm on the train and i still picture myself in that paint-stained uniform, staring at myself on the train. so on the dike i'm imagining my future and on the train i'm conguring up my past. perhaps i have not been able to separate the moments from one another. i always felt the urge to put this into a script somehow. it'd be the beginning of a movie about a young guy and his pivotal moments. this would be the opening scene, in which the young guy would approach the tracks and see a train go buy, and a scene of himself on the train in the future would be edited into the larger scene so that both moments looked as if they were happening simultaneously. the older version of himself would be on his way to some important conference, and the rest of the movie would sporadically jump back and forth through time to tell the story of two or three really important years of his life. the movie will have no soundtrack and will have no sex in it.