Today I had lunch with Bender-boy and Anne, his wife. We ate at an establishment in Andrews that exhibits properties of an excellent tex-mex restaurant, though it could be a brothel in Kazakhstan for all I know. My general perception of the world around me is coloured my delusions of being in another place - ANY OTHER PLACE.
Though, interestingly enough, Bender-boy and I emanated from this area of the world. Perhaps we even defined it. I can’t say that it defined us, as there is an alien psychology in any other “human” I meet from these parts. At least there has been recently - meaning within the past few epochs.
Today I had lunch with Bender-boy. I hadn’t seen him for 22 years, give or take a month. The cliché holds that our communication was quite like it was back then, as if no time had passed. Of course, we have communicated via electro trans-pacific means during the meantime, so the cliché doesn’t have the same weight as it might were we to have had no communication at all.
Sudden memories rose in my mind of time we defined together, and we did define time itself, as time itself was frozen within those memories. They are photographs and static. They are photographs - a far better medium than video.
In a way, we are ageless as our memory between us is, indeed, static. It is, indeed, a series of photographs. We pass through incremental stages of concrete recollections bordered on each side by hazier half-scenes from possible pasts. It occurs to me that unless I specifically created a concrete mental signpost for one reason or another, my recollections shared with others are the most vivid and significant.
Anne mentioned a death. At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but finally it occurred to me that Bender-boy had mentioned the dead friend from the past at some moment or another. And perhaps at multiple moments. Lee, of course. So it has been decided that we’ll take a road trip to Pecos and to the grave. We’ll buy a pack of Marlboro Reds on the way.
Amusingly, Bender-boy gets monthly or bi-monthly messages from West Texas oil fields about work opportunities. Best would be he work a rig, lose a few limbs and, much later, after the fourth accident, live in a vegetative state for the rest of his existence - an existence of a mere seven further epochs.
It occurs to me that I only have a superficial overview of the myriad stories Bender-boy has told me about his working life, though from what I know, him toiling at the zenith of a rig amid the dizzy heights in the baking petrol suffused heat isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, he did work at the zeniths of many smokestacks testing the toxicity of their emissions whilst inhaling the fumes and managing not to tumble to his death. He worked at a nicotine “factory” in North Carolina where he absorbed the drug from the atmosphere whilst adding to its potency by smoking.
Did I mention that we are going to buy a box of Marlboro Reds on the way to the grave?
