Today you’ll write about that time you found an alpaca dead inside the city canal while you were walking to school. How disturbed you were by such a regal jaw agape at sewage currents in the muck and by lips flapping in the algae riptide of a thousand pollywogs. How you stared and stared at its lifeless husk wet with bloody rivulets cascading from untold numbers of cruel wounds. And wondering how the beast had managed to be here, then remembering the farm where the soft creatures roamed like aliens in a liquid metropolis just above the waterway. It’s fall, you remember thinking, must have been a silent dive.
You’ll write about the boldness of bloodhounds sniffing for scraps at the dirt walkway of the canal above the rodeo grounds, abandoned by their masters and hungry for anything. How their dead red eyes would zero in on ankles as the bicycles whizzed by their porches, mocking them for their exhaustion, and how those eyes said, “you watch yourself when we’re both on level ground again, fella…”
You’ll remember how you secretly wore shorts under your pants so after you left home to walk to school, along the old canal path, you could strip the pants off and give your legs some life. How you’d watch reruns of The Simpsons at your best friend Danny’s house, where his dog Blackie would stench up the place with its ancient breath. How we watched the unfolding of the Los Angeles riots on TV in real time following the Rodney King trials, and how we realized, for the first time maybe, that the world was a dark place full of danger everywhere.
You’ll write about how you threw your prescription glasses in a garbage dumpster en route to class because a girl told you you were cute without them, and a bully called you four-eyes for the millionth time. How that bully rots in jail now for murdering someone he found sleeping with his mother. How you wanted to interview him from prison for a book like some kind of revenge-craving Capote, and how you thought better of it because in a way your secret revenges are being played out without your input all the time, and without you doing anything but moving forward.
Today you’ll write, because you can. And because you have things to say. And because it’s the only way you’ll ever remember anything.
