i want to think about childhood but there's not much to think about. i think it's a kind of refuge but in childhood i left my body for the first time and maybe that became my childhood, a separation, that i couldn't speak about for years, if ever, like the separation that lingered in the house that became our divorce. i think of things that seem more story than experience, like my brother getting a motorbike and me a flat-bottom boat. i sensibly thought surely we can make the shallow creek work if we have a boat that rides the surface like a water spider, but it was super heavy and just rode the bottom mud, and we had to get out and push each other down the creek, our feet swallowed in mud, til we abandoned it there. and that was that separation again, real but a story, like the limbo of grey air that sucked me into the upper corner of my bedroom when i left my body. but that was as real as it gets. funny, i'm reading david lynch, room to dream, and i think of my childhood, and how you mine it forever, how different it seems to everyone else. childhood is a dream you keep having through life- everybody sees it differently, but in some way i suspect it is all the same dream and despite the differences and the the separate rooms in some way it all goes together somewhere. eventually drugs came into play and particulars were lost, but the space the drugs inhabited in my mind is like that grey void that sucked at my soul body long before i ever heard of drugs. in the place of memories i find memory itself. a kind of stillness, a kind of vacuum. it's funny to be nostalgic for something like that. it's not a matter of choice, it's chosen, though. like when you look at some kids, they seem like they might be really malleable, yet they seem already old. this may be a leap, but i kind of think of america that way, as a swirling grey vacuum of memory, where memories go when they are erased by drugs.