Spaced Oddities

The night sometimes wraps itself around me.

There’s an oddness to it that I can’t quite explain. Emptiness and hollow, a long, dark hallway. I think it’s way I don’t slow down. Or rarely slow down. Like a child who sprints up the stairs after flipping the light switch, desperately trying to beat the blackness.

The unwinnable race.

And tonight is the first night I’ve had. Alone. Here. With nothing to do. Or, since I have too much to do, without doing anything. Eventually my body and mind just shut down, escaping into the past. The darkness. The tunnel. Reliving all of the events between then and now that got me here.

A silent movie. Stuck on repeat.

***

Tomorrow I’ll give my first real academic presentation at Ball State.

I don’t sleep well before my presentations. I don’t sleep well before any public display of anything. If I lived the rest of my days and never gave another presentation, I would certainly die a happy person.

Unfortunately, that’s the not way of my career. And the very thing that drew me into the fields of study – writing and technology – was the solitude. The never-ending solitude and aloneness of it. The ability to slink into the woods, unnoticed. At will.

And today that world of solitude is called “social.” Everyone wants to learn about it. Everyone wants to know. And this thing that I’ve played with for 25 years is now important.

Which means presentations.

***

I found a girl tonight.

From years ago. A different lifetime. The one beacon from back then. Dysfunctional. Wretched. Destructive. A partner in adventure. And oddity.

Those stories won’t get told here. They won’t get told now. They may not ever get told.

Some things exist best in the tunnel, in the space between the click of the light switch and the top of the stairs. How she appeared and why she appeared and where she appeared is of little consequence to you. It’s enough that you know that she did.

And now I am there, again.

***

There is little about my life that makes sense to most people. There is no linearity to it, which I suspect is the reason I have ended up studying and doing the things that I do.

Exploring notions of time, place and information. How they change. How they move. What that does to us.

These are not idle hobbies for me. They are the pieces of my life, the addict life, that bubble up around me. Every second of the day.

Not that I notice them most days because I’m sprinting. Running up the stairs. But still around me just the same.

And sometimes at night, they wrap around me.