the kid who loves the bike

click pic for cool video

One of the kids burned the box, and it wasn't Claudia or Lydia. It was someone who loved the bike. The free association lengths I went to getting that to surface so briefly took weeks. Months, really. The only motivation that came through was just wanting to turn it off. 

One of my weekly chores on the farm was burning the trash in an old barrel, more fascinating think time than drudgery, a bit on the nirvana side. Once that came out I got a flood of after school memories from around 7th grade. Interestingly, I think this random think path found the chink in the fence locking me out. 👇

In all my Tom skimming, the most fascinating part is the most left out, i.e. part of his childhood in Africa. That got me thinking about living 16 miles from a Navajo reservation, busing, the ethnic diversity around the oil town I grew up near, and wondering (likely thanks to my deep Sublime review excursions) things like how our experiences as children around diverse ethnicities compared, given 2 different countries, and how both places may now be affected by BLM. And then I remembered one of the girls I got to know in school was white with blond hair, but her mom was full Navajo and her dad was white,  and obviously she's both white and nonwhite but the way she grew up was definitely not white privilege because being half Navajo heavily impacted everything about her life. She wasn't a typical white blond at all, an interesting thought since my best friend in the same class was full white blond, and she was murdered later by an ethnically Mexican man, so I'm not in any mood to continue the white privilege discussion.

However, that line of free associated thoughts apparently opened up enough in my mind for me to continue into another line of free association today where the me who burned the box showed up and felt completely lost until we focused on the bike and then suddenly remembered burning trash and burning the box years later.

For some reason I always thought there must be more malice than that behind the sudden box burning, but I clearly saw tonight the only motive was a child level decision to make it stop. Just make it disappear and don't think about it. I used to think a lot about how fire is beautiful and magical, and I guess that's what happened.

o_o 

Anyone new passing through, this is an old memory fail problem around yet another traumatic event in my past, and basically the way I find disconnected answers to holes in my mind is by lucidly letting my thoughts wander like waking dreams. It's like I'm watching different parts of me take turns talking to or interacting with other fictitiously projected people, and once in awhile a 'me' with a real memory slides in and shares enough memory to click, and then a very satisfying and often relieving cascade of a number of other memories around it click into place.

That last sentence is awkward, but I'm sticking to it.

No, I didn't get a name on that kid. Was surprised there was another one.