I twisted my umpteenth ankle.

It's 12:55 AM and I'm sitting here in the grass on the west side of Bonnie Brae, right there where it joins with Old Bonnie Brae, exactly at McKenna Park, where that big fat water tank sits on top of that hill.

I blame this on the lack of proper sidewalks in Denton. If there'd have been a proper sidewalk going around that corner, where Bonnie Brae curves at Oak St., then I wouldn't have had to walk in the field to the west to not get runned over by traffic coming around the blind curve.

Instead, I stepped into a mudhole at 12:45 AM and twisted the crap out of my ankle. The left one, this time. Now both of my ankles have been wrecked. GREAT. It's 1:02 AM now, and I'm just about to the point of thinking that maybe I can stand up.

DAMMIT, twisting an ankle SUCKS. And to top it off, I get to sit here, just almost near some brambly wildness, with sniffing and clawing at the turf sounds happening just over thataway a ways. GREAT. I'm an injured animal.

Ok I'ma try to get up now without screaming like a little girl.

WTF, MAN!!!

Geez! I mean, WTF! DAYUM, THAT WASN'T NICE AT ALL!

Ok.

Now that I'm calm, allow me elucidate.

On W. Windsor, right there at the rec center, near all of those baseball fields and frisbee golfs and that one model airplane field, I think all of it is collectively called Northlake, or North Lakes Park, or whatev, anyway, right there where the rec center is, you know, that gym for working out and learning karate, right there, the sidewalk on the south side of Windsor ends, and if you wanna keep on the sidewalk, you gotta cross over Windsor to the north side, where the sidewalk picks up again.

With me so far?

The thing is, I think that pretty much everywhere, as in at every intersection in every city, they've started making these crosswalk signals that talk. You know, the ones where you press the button and it shouts WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! and then it shoots a machine gun to tell you when it's safe to cross the street. I ain't kidding, for those of you who might not be familiar with current streetlight crosswalk etiquette. I'm not even trying to be funny, because that's what really happens. The crosswalk thingy shouts WAIT and then shoots a machine gun when it's safe to cross. Look it up on YouTube.

I'm assuming now that everybody knows about those militant crosswalk signals, and if you didn't, then now you do, so that's just some backstory to warm up the frontstory.

Onward.

Right there where I was talking about wallago there's a brand new talking crosswalk. It's not an intersection for traffic, it's just where the sidewalk moves from here to there, to designate the official place from which to move from here to there, like I already explained.

I didn't notice it at first, since I'm so used to walking this route, but as I passed by it, I heard this subtle blip sound that was louder then softer then louder then softer etc. No way could I just keep walking without investigating that thing, so I followed the louder blip and discovered it emanating from that brand new crosswalk thingy, and the softer blip was coming from the one on the other side of the street.

Well, of course, there's buttons on those things, and, of course, they want you to push those buttons. So, conditioned as I am, like a slobbering Pavlov thing, I pushed that button... and it was like that part in every movie you've ever seen where they trip the alarm! On both sides of the street, bright yellow lights - like ambulance lights, or emergency lights, or OH SHIT lights - suddenly lit up and started flashing, like the nukes were about to show up! And this loud machine voice began yelling at the top of its speakers...

YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING! YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING! YELLOW LIGHTS ARE FLASHING!

I tell you, it scared me shitless! I thought I was under arrest by the sidewalk police! Man, I just ran like a dumb blinded thingamajig for a few seconds!

After that I just kinda stood still for a minute, processing the event which had just happened. And... man, it started to piss me off! Who's idea was that anyway, to install the equivalent of a blinding flashing yellow strobe light shouting at 120 decibels on a pedestrian crosswalk? Who was it that thought this up as a good thing to implement? And who was it that reviewed this idea and decided, 'Yeah, this is a good idea, let's make it a real thing!' ???

I WANNA KNOW WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE BECAUSE I WANNA LOOK DAGGERS AT THEM! ALL OF THEM!

Or did any of that even occur at all, with the officially sanctioned insanity invented by the official professional civil engineer and presented as an officially good idea to the officials in charge and then officially built into a real, official thing? Because maybe the city council just gave this job to what's his face the civil engineers son, because they'd SO promised him that they totally, seriously loved retarded kids, and weren't prejudiced at all, and that retarded kids should be involved in city planning projects because it's politically correct? So maybe that's what actually happened?

WTF, MAN!!!

Brain format

I was thinking tonight about how there should be a C:\ format for your brain, but with an option to set aside a D:\ partition for YOU. You know, all of the little things that define your personality, so that you don't have to start over from scratch with a generic operating system.

Formatting drive C would be analogous to deleting all of the malware accumulated over a lifetime, like addictions and bad habits and prejudices, and the drive D partition would sequester everything about you that makes you an individual. Kinda like rebooting to three years old, but with all of your memories and natural developmental devices intact, such as language and coordination and basic social rules and the like.

Imagine waking up from a drive C format. You'd still be you, with all of your memories, but every single one of the neuron patterns that used to define complex habitual and learned behavior would be scraped away. Like cleaning the scuzz off of a years dirty car window, or painting over a bleached section of the wall that's only ever been exposed to the relentless assault of sunlight through that one window for the past several decades.

Since you'd have all of your memories, you'd know beforehand what to avoid and what to embrace. You'd have a heads up on what things are good for you and what things will fuck you up. You'd be able to continue your life after the pause with your self awareness purged of all of the toxic information that you'd been forced to incorporate into the description of your previous self.

I mean, put very simply, your brain is just the wetware for processing the organic operating system of your personality. Like a hard drive with Windows. It's a cogent analogy, you know? It oughta be possible in theory, anyway... all that stuff I just went on about.

Honestly, I'm just bored and don't want to sleep yet, so I went and contrived this thing to write about because it takes my mind off of stuff. I can't think of anything else to do.

Marveling mood

A couple of years ago I was walking around after dark. I was in this marveling mood, just looking at everything like it was brand new and never seen before.

I'm telling this because I'm at the same place now that I was a couple of years ago, when I was in that marveling mood.

I came to an intersection in a residential neighborhood. Just stop signs, no street lights, so it was quiet and dark enough that I could indulge my urge to linger in the shadows.

It was an intersection, like I said, with four corners and four houses, with a yard in each corner. It was the northeast corner yard, a front yard, that captured my attention.

It was like a miniature landscape with all of the normal small things that you'd recognize, but being there and looking at all of it shifted my perspective so that everything became scaled up to an immensity, as if for a tiny awareness which dwelt there.

There was a tree, with gnarly roots that went in and out of the ground, and if you looked closely, it was like terrain. Like a jagged row of miniature cliffs were held up by those roots, with intricate structures within and without, forming a system of runnels and rivulets that followed the growth of the lesser root branches, and those branches were like river valleys that sloped up as hills onto fertile banks that gave way to fresh ground where a forest of grass and flowers and weeds grew amongst the tiny detritus of loamy, broken off, almost dried things that you'd find at the base of a well established, well aged tree. Broken acorn boulders and volumes of bark shards and immense sheltering canopies of mushrooms that grew as huddled masses against the root slopes, forming natural front porches for a community of root dwellers.

Once I'd realized all of that, I really began to sink into the unreality of it. I stared and stared at that complex of roots and the associated structures, and the grass and flower forests, and it felt like, it felt to me like I had shrunk down to the size of an ant, and that I was there, inside that miniature environment, which had become full size to me. So much detail that I'd never noticed before became real, real, real. Like the Antman movie, but this was years before that movie. It's a good comparison though.

While I was down there inside of it, immersed in the unreality of it, I felt this unspeakable longing. This unendurable melancholy. This comfortable grief which was the structure of this miniature universe, and all things here were built upon that grief and imbedded in it, just like the planet earth is imbedded in the spacetime of our universe, with all that we know being built up naturally from that. It was a tiny universe, and sadness was the fabric of reality. But it was oh so comfortable, and I longed to stay there, forever.

I can describe the experience, but I'll never know if my description is enough, because I'll never really be able to know if you've felt these same feelings. This weird, strange, alien feeling of longing inside of an infinite matrix of sadness, but oh so, oh so comfortable, and buried in it. Covered up with it, forever and ever.

This of course is part of the dream feeling, what I'm describing here, that I've gone on and on about, so many times before.