The first time. Or the time after that, or any of the thousands of other times I've randomly had the occasion to impart a particle of knowledge I've gleaned from living in the future so soundly and for so long. There was a time when I thought I would make a page largely out of stories I would dream up, and then put them in dark, hard to read green on black so that by the fifteenth hour of staring at the screen, you would be ready for more. I tried time and time again to speak clearly but nothing ever comes out the way I intended. I'm a stranger in a foreign land, where no one speaks my language and no amount of explanation or phrasing ever gets me anywhere. And when I said it wasn't my conscious choice, I was perhaps overlooking a key issue; that it was all a matter of time.
This was back when flat panel monitors were by and large too expensive to own. Anyone who had one was opulent, and the rest of us dealt with second hand tech and overly large cathode ray tubes, which themselves could prove quite deep, but anyway heavy. Reason, I suppose, won out in the end, as I can't go into a computer lab or private residence to see a CRT anymore, and the Reason that I had applied in order to come up with the colour scheme became another bauble in the pile of anachronisms that is my life and the things about it.
Everything else simply got along without a clue as to how or where or any other journalistic intent. And I swear to God if you had to go out every day and watch things that shouldn't happen, that have no reason, no past and no future, and then happen anyway, you would all crack in a New-York-Minute, so already I'm at a swell disadvantage with the average John Q. Voter when it comes to getting out of bed every morning, and I mean on top of (or perhaps regardless of) the cold and the dank. So why is it so hard to imagine that I might be touchy about something totally innocuous? What is innocuous to you, what you've been inculcated in your entire lives is something monstrous to me. Something bizarre and untoward. And I'm supposed to be the one to stretch my mind around it and accept matters and move on and ignore reason and use too many goddam ands in my sentences while I'm trying to cobble together an exposition.
When I said it I wasn't joking, and I wasn't fishing for a reaction. I was stating a fact. You're talking to a guy who keeps his dates in the Chinese year calendar for grins. This man sleeps in a pile on the floor of his room, and does his damndest to make it look half as messy as other rooms, but he just doesn't have enough crap to his name to pull it off. He's just as likely to appreciate the five foot oil-on-canvas abstract nude that his older brother and artist painted as he is to admire pixel art. The clothes he keeps for every day wear appear to most people as costumes for Halloween.
It really doesn't matter how it happens time and time again, and I'm coming to wonder whether it even matters that it happens. It probably looked like a stroke of vanity when I said it at various times. It certainly seems vain to tell everyone you meet that in time you'll fall out of currency because you don't rate or whatever. Maybe I'm not being clear enough.
Think back to when we first met. Chances are I told you as clearly as I could about the future that I was certain of. I told you that in time, everyone I know comes to hate me. Maybe it sounded like a warning. Maybe it sounded like an excuse. It probably even sounded vain, but here we are. Years down the road, and where do I rate?
Footnoted.
Pigeonholed.
A thing carefully but awkwardly placed, and dusty.
And the great thing about having an axe to grind is that it may reasonably become sharp by the time you're done. I have an excellent stone to use for the purpose, so allow me to reign in an old metaphor before you spook him into acting like the savage you say he is. The act of grinding has always been one of the more soothing experiences of my life. I used to spend 14 hours on my days off in the machine shop around noisy multiple tons of metal, hellbent on turning down an inch or two of aluminum into a bearing plate or caliper claw. Sometimes there would be dozens of students around me working at some twenty other machines. The grinder itself would have been about three times normal size for a bench grinder and oh how I would be the proudest guy on the block if I had one in my garage. Something itself a wonder to behold. The stone could be spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, if disjoined it could fly into a wall after plowing through your soft body with ease, a marvel. But my attention would be entirely on the bit that I had to sharpen, and the edge on that bit, and the point of that edge where a spark would dance. Everything else would disappear entirely. All that noise fades to nothing against the music of my grinding. To grind an axe with a stone is simple and humble and soothing. It is a doting man who has an axe to grind, and a peaceful one who takes the time to grind it.
He stared at me as though I wasn't there, and I allowed myself to be paralyzed because I knew I had more patience for shenanigans like this, and by staying there and listening I was locking my friend into doing the same and it would annoy him a great deal. The man didn't so much stare as look distantly beyond, like the audience in myself and my friend were at the same time of utmost importance and totally irrelevant. It didn't matter who we were, just that we were there and listening as he told us his life story and how he came at that moment to be an ill-dressed, bourbon-smelling old bearded man in a baseball cap. A large part of his story consisted of asides about how we shouldn't take up drinking. This followed about two-to-one the number of times he took a small flask from his coat to wet his mouth. I would have guessed at the contents except that I didn't have to because the flask was both clear and labeled. He was not drinking maple syrup. This caused my friend to chuckle ironically, but it only made me more resolute about my course of action. I concluded my conversation with the man, telling him to stick around for awhile and that I would be back. I then went to the nearest sandwich-seller I could find and procured something I judged to be edible, healthy, and tasty without being opulent. By the time I got back to make my donation to this man's cause, he was gone, and I gave the sandwich to the hobby shop we had intended to go to in the first place, telling them to be on the lookout for this or another man, and if you don't see one by the time the shop closes, would you just eat it yourself? I didn't want it to go to waste, and I'll be damned if I fund another man's drinking habit after he gave me a sermon about how awful it was, just so he can go to the local shelter I has staffed before and have his meals.
I didn't find it fulfilling either time I went, though my compatriots in the Confirmation class seemed to be having a wildly fulfilling spiritual experience for the effort. I saw dignity in the face of honest work. I saw human plague and humiliation. I saw my attention drawn to the smallest parts of life to the point of ignoring everything else, and I am sure I came off the grander spiritually, but I'll be damned if it was anything I wanted to smile about after. Maybe you feel like laughing after you've vomited. Maybe I wasn't so clear.
With the cold comes the opportunity for me to show honest work. Even patience, it seems, comes at a price.

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