Chapter 1

Right.

Right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right right rightrightrightright.

Ridiculousness meaninglessness. One word in a forest of itself is meaningless. In a row, all in a row is nothing, really.

Gently.

Merrily.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. This most profound, meaningful statement any human mind has ever expressed is embedded in a song we instantly “know” to be meaningless ridiculousness….

Each twenty-year cycle on our planet, within our human species, is a generation, responsible for all innovation, style, and new things—like each spring’s leaves—triumphantly oblivious of the humus of countless decomposed forbearers beneath them.

This moment of periodicity is perceived as a self-evident reality by the newly-arrived swimmers in their part of this stream’s current, to utilize another metaphor. A species of beings with a much longer or much shorter generational period would appear correspondingly “different” from us and our often unexamined generational pattern, which we “know” to be what is, and, is simply—real.

Sanity is a fickle rat with a fixed view of events inside itself and without—without which, nothing Is. Who is sane? Please—point; no, it’s not rude…. An automatic answer is: a sane person does no harm to themselves or to others.

How can I know what you mean by that? I don’t … I can’t. Can you know what I mean? Can you say something without comparing what you say to something else? Is reality only relativity? Is relativity all there is? Largely… yes. How “right” are you? Actually? Can this be discovered? By anyone? If you are right, what does right mean to anyone else? To someone not right? What is your reality compared to a thousand-year-old, somehow still standing, dead tree on another planet in another galaxy or to one of uncounted myriad fossilized dinosaurs in New Mexico’s desert?

“Right,” you nod, sagely.

The boy had some time before the two adults in the house he lived in awoke. He had selected a handful of cold rocks from the side of the road as birds flapped overhead, feet tucked into their belly fathers, bodies streamlined, necks outstretched. His long morning shadow eased slowly ahead of him. His breath steamed. The boy’s left hand gripped a single rock.

He walked on the cracked sidewalk past houses with cars in driveways, bikes on their sides in yards, with portable basketball nets and scooters left leaning against bushes. After two intersections and more than twenty houses, he came to the old worn-out single-wide trailer. A faded, algae-covered red car perched precariously on four jack stands in the sloped asphalt drive. The fourteen-year-old boy crouched to peer under the car. All the wheels were still on, surprisingly, and rusted parts, just lumps under leaves, really, were lined up on the edge of the asphalt driveway, partially concealed by tall, unmowed grass growing there. He felt certain that the car would fall easily over if he pushed it slightly in the downhill direction.

Examination over, he stood and resumed walking. After the trailer’s overgrown yard, a tall leaning tree stood twenty feet in, past the wide, deep drainage ditch. He jumped over the ditch, which was free from water for now, though the grass was dewy and almost frozen. His footprints followed him into shin-high frost-covered grass. The pale, dark-haired boy looked up at a large branch where a mottled grey elongated globe, almost hidden by leaves, loomed. Lingering predawn stillness was giving way to a slight breeze as the sun crept higher over the horizon. The uppermost leaves in the tree were already bathed in the morning light; those around the hornet’s nest were still in darkness. He didn’t see any flying hornets, but that probably wouldn’t last.