(Continued from earlier)


Triceratops meanwhile had managed to right himself, and galloped now after Hedgedog, shouting frantically "Don't worry, Hedgehog! I'll save you!" He ran right up to the bank as if to do so, then retreated several yards to safety - Triceratopses, though brave to many dangers, have an implacable fear of water. Up above, Unicorn, who had indeed been frolicking among the clouds, spotted the two making their winding way down the river - one erratically through eddies and swirls, the other weaving between bank and dry land. She leapt to Triceratop's side and asked:

"What's wrong, Triceratops?"
"We must save Hedgehog!" shouted Triceratops back.
"I am a happy butterfly" said Hedgehog quietly, but both the horned creatures were too busy making a plan for his rescue to hear him..

"I know how to get creatures out of rivers" said Unicorn. "We must fish him out!" Luckily Unicorn was able to find a fishing pole nearby, and with some difficulty (such is the plight of hooved creatures) Unicorn managed to loop the line around her horn, which she then flew above Hedgehog. Try as she might, however, she could find no place to hook Hedgehog. Though the hook cut at his underbelly it could not find purchase there, and when she tried to guide it into his mouth as she would a fish he simply spat it out with a look of disgust. Hedgehogs are very silly creatures, reflected Unicorn. She leapt back to Triceratops and told him: "It's OK. I have a plan. You stay here".

She leapt off then, leaving Triceratops and Hedgehog to continue their synchronous trip down the river. Presently Triceratops began to notice a certain thumping quality to the earth, which - he had stopped running now, listening alertly - which was certainly increasing. Thump! Thump! Was it an earthquake? Triceratops began to tremble - Triceratopses, though brave to many dangers, have an implacable fear of earthquakes. He had just curled up and shut his eyes when over the thumping he heard a loud trumpeting. Elephant! Sure enough, Unicorn had brought Elephant to aid in Hedgehog's rescue. This was good news indeed - with Elephant's trunk, they could do anything1 Triceratops stood up just as Unicorn and Elephant came rushing to the bank.

"Yes, that's a hedgehog in the water alright. Well, no matter, I'll just pull him out" said Elephant in his baritone voice. He had already extended his trunk and was about to reach around Hedgehog when Unicorn shouted "Wait!"

"Won't his spikes hurt your trunk?" she asked
"My trunk! I suppose they would! I was so caught up in my magnanimity that I forgot entirely my own safety! Well, no matter," he declared flatly, "we'll just bat him out".

He picked a large stick up in his trunk and took to rescuing Hedgehog. The river made Hedgehog a difficult target, however; one bobbing up and down, now here and now there without any sort of pattern. Worse yet, the few times Elephant did hit Hedgehog, Hedgehog just curled into a ball and bounced off the bank back into the river. Finally, an exasperated Elephant swung as mightily as he could (quite), missed entirely and fell himself into the river.

"Effooo!" blasted Elephant through his freshly wet trunk. He stood up and marched out of the river.

"Well," he said to the other two, "I suppose there's nothing we can do. Hedgehog will simply continue down the river into the ocean".

Unicorn lowered her horn and Triceratops began to weep. The river was slow here, and the three were able to give their pace a funereal dignity. Elephant laid his trunk on Unicorn's mane, and consoled her: "We tried our best. That's what matters".

"I suppose so" she murmured sadly. "Farewell, little hedgehog".

Triceratops said nothing, so great were his heaving sobs. He wailed and gasped fro breath and his cries were so loud and so pained that they penetrated even into Hedgehog's heart, and he remembered then that he was a hedgehog, not a butterfly; for no butterfly ever understood the pain of a friend, but hedgehogs are naturally empathetic. Hedgehog rolled over and swam to the bank, where he pulled himself up.

The would-be rescuers, lost in their said thoughts and morbid procession, didn't even notice the river's sudden absence of Hedgehog until behind them a small voice said "hey, wait up ya'll" and not even then - they were quite sad and Hedgehog was very quiet - not until he waddled up beside them did they realize Hedgehog was returned.

"Hedgehog!" cried the three in unison; and Triceratops danced a four-foot-jig; and Unicorn neighed merrily and soared back and forth over the river; and Elephant trumpeted in pleasure, then lowered himself to allow Hedgehog to climb his back. From here Hedgehog could see all around the valley, and he realized that in the progress of the river they had come quite close to his house.

"Friends," he proposed, "let us retire to my house and eat a meal". And they did, and soon their laughter echoed throughout the valley. All the creatures heard them, and knew they were joyful - except up above one black speck, flying erratically, which never knew anything at all.






For reference sake, I had just read a ton of Nabokov and was beginning David Foster Wallace*, which is why the language is somewhat more florid than one would think necessary for a childrenish story. I was also obsessively reading the Tao te Ching and spending a lot of time feeling sorry for myself; any petulance you perceive is not imagined.


*incidentally David Foster Wallace is a great man. Read "Infinite Jest" sometime, or if you don't have time for an eight or nine hundred page book (with 100 pages of footnotes!) try a short story collection (Oblivion is his newest and I really enjoyed it) or any of his nonfiction is amazing. One gets the sense in all of his stories of a man far more self-aware than can be healthy, really. He's also drop-dead funny.
6:07 PM

About a year ago Nicole, whose art our house is more or less a gallery for, decided to embark upon an ambitious graffiti project wherein we would (with owners' permission) paint a hip-but-innocent series of stories, each involving a hedgehog, a unicorn, a triceratops, an elephant, a spiraly sun type thing which we pulled from the aborigines to be a constant motif for some reason, and, you know, whatever else we felt like painting. Upon our first practice run, it was quickly discovered that I was not in any way lying when I said I had no artistic skills (they caught me looking up on the internet 'how to draw a hedgehog', this after I had accidentally drawn a porcupine), so Nicole charitably told me to write a story we could illustrate. I did, but we never had another meeting and nothing further happened with it because Nicole is a goddamn hippie (who now lives in Berkeley, as well she might). So it's been sitting in the trunk of my car for months, until the other day while cleaning (sidenote: my car is clean! this may not seem worthy of your attention but it is so rare and wonderful an event that I feel like shouting it from the rooftops) I found the notebook I wrote it on and so for your pleasure I transcribe it here, though I think most of those precious few who read my blog have already heard it:

One day Hedgehog was lying on his back by the bank of a river, staring at the clouds and imagining all the white fluffy things they could be.

"That one is a white fluffy duck", he said to himself, "and that one is a white fluffy hedgehog, and so is that one is, and that one is...that one is..."

But he did not know what the last cloud was, because it was unlike any other cloud he had seen that day. It was a small black speck, growing slowly larger. At last, after some study (hedgehogs are a cautious species by nature, not given to wild exclamations) Hedgehog declared: "That is not a cloud at all". He thought then that it might be his friend Unicorn, who was often given to flying merrily among the clouds. But where Unicorn flew gracefully and purposefully, the speck flew erratically, as if nothing but the wind gave it direction*

Hedgehog then thought that perhaps the ever-growing shape was simply a leaf blown high from its tree and now floating gently to earth. But surely it was too lovely to be a leaf - for Hedgehog could see now that in the shape were yellows and reds and blues arranged in swirling patterns that seemed to echo the creature's flight path: chaotic and formless, but with an underlying, ineffable unity.

Suddenly it landed on his nose, and Hedgehog, his eyes crossed from fierce concentration, finally realized: this was a butterfly. His eyes gradually unfocused, and with that strange, dreamy conviction that often overtakes hedgehogs when they stare at clouds, he declared quietly: "I am a butterfly".

Hedgehog and the butterfly laid there then for some time, silent in their lepidopteran camaraderie. This is how Triceratops found them as he came strolling along the river.

"Hedgehog!" he shouted, his eyes wide in terror, "You've got a bug on your face!" Triceratops, though brave to many dangers, have an implacable fear of insects. He centered his horn on the butterfly and charged as fast as he could, but the butterfly was too light: his horn could find no place to enter, he tripped over Hedgehog and landed face first in the ground, where he promptly stuck.

Hedgehog, who had not really been paying attention to Triceratops, was dismayed to see his butterfly friend fly away. "Wait for me, comrade!" he cried after the butterfly, and pranced intently after it. So was intent was he on following the butterfly that he did not notice the ground beneath him switch from mud to river until it was too late. Such are the constant travails of butterflies in hedgehog-form, he thought to himself as he bobbed up and down it the stream, but remembering how the butterfly had let the air guide it Hedgehog relaxed and allowed the river to carry him.

I'll transcribe the next part, in which Triceratops will round up some help, in the future.



*originally I had 'naught but meandering winds' and have changed it here so maybe I won't wince when I read it
10:14 AM

Soon I'll have internet again, in the new year, in my new house. It will be a year of internet, unlike the last year, which was a year of no internet. It was peaceful, and I read a lot, and sometimes I was bored and didn't have the internet to fiddle around on, but (this is importantly different than years previous) I was never bored at the computer. Except that time I started playing that game that was like jezzball and it turned out that at some point God allotted me jezzball skills such that it will just keep going and I got to level 25, meaning there were 26 balls bouncing around the screen which my poor old computer couldn't handle and it just gave up, which was just as well, since I was getting, as I began this sentence saying, bored.

I don't have a lot of direction in my life. Sometimes I think that is a good thing, mostly I think it's a bad one. Direction is no doubt important to future happiness. Am I spitting in the face of future Alex? Am I obligated, me present Alex, to insure future Alex's happiness, by virtue of our body-sharing (in a sense; I mean, if you grind down future Alex (that is, like, 40 year old Alex is really who I'm thinking of) and you grind down me you won't find a single atom in common. but then neither will you between a wave here and the same wave here; form is what's important, even if his form will be somewhat degraded)? And how can I insure future Alex's happiness? How can I know his tastes? What if I were to spend my time stockpiling cherry cokes, only to lose my taste for them in a freak cherry coke accident? That would be bad.

I don't have anything to write, I just want to write. I don't write enough. I enjoy writing, especially like this, in a stream-of-consciousness self-indulgent way. Then later I read it and am embarassed (sic), but then try not to be, which only makes it worse. Poor future Alex. When I was a kid I had this theory, that there were millions of different Alexs, we switch off every second or millisecond or nanosecond or whatever smallest amount of time I then knew; it's hard to notice the switch but a sufficiently attuned six-year-old can do it. I don't think I have ever internally renounced this theory, and it really makes a lot more sense to me than the single-Alex hypothesis. It was also useful on long car trips, such as when we drove from Illinois to California to fly to Hawaii - my sister was whining, as she is apt to do to this very day, and I counseled her that in a certain sense this was already over, and that it didn't really exist except in our memories, and we wouldn't even really remember much of it, so it doesn't really exist, so you needn't worry about being bored (since you don't exist). This did not offer her much solace. It also is ironically the only part of that trip I remember, except later when we went to Disneyland.

Paragraphs should, I realise, indicate some grouping of thought, but these ones just indicate that I have reached an embarassing number of consecutive sentences and if I don't skip a line people's eyes will glaze right over, as they do. My family's watching the President's Analyst, which is a funny movie about spies. I have been unable to squelch a sort of low-burning anti-Christmas in my gut this year, I don't know why. I think it's the expectation of merriment and my naturally contrarian self. If I voice this my family will assume it's cynicism and anti-consumerism. We never escape who we were when we were 18. Many of my shirts still have no tag, because I cut them all out, because I didn't want to wear a logo in any way. It is very difficult to put my shirts on right, but capitalism still stands. Now I force myself to wear logos, and even wore an Enjoy Coca~Cola shirt while working at the anarchist bookstore, which may have been much and I think I was internally hoping to get a leftist reprimand but nobody said anything. Anarchists are surprisingly reasonable, nice people, though I always want them to be the raving dogmatic anti-everything they're supposed to be, because it would make my conscience about not really being much of one a bit better.

We are all the product of ten thousand histories colliding, and we are ten thousand histories producing, and we can't escape that. I was embarassed (sic), today, when we went to McDonald's (we always go to McDonald's on Christmas Eve, it's the Knox Lame Tradition), when my father came in he said loudly that if the TV wasn't turned off he was leaving, which we all shushed profusely and he backed down but when we sat down he asked everybody if they were watching the TV, then turned off the sound, my mother meanwhile was enlisting me and my Uncle in gathering napkins to wipe down the table. We are very middle class people. No matter what I do in life, I'll be a middle class white guy doing it, and sometimes that irks me. But you can't escape histories. Not your own, not anybody else's. Historical forces snowball and dominate each of us, they shape our reality and our selves and our interactions. The best we can do is try to recognize them and try to overcome them - personal initiative is something I frown on on some level so I'm not happy with how this is coming out, but I do think it's important, to see how you've been shaped and are being shaped and to recognize that there is not really you, just these ten thousand colliding histories, but that some can be catalyzed and some can be inhibited. I dunno. Maybe the best thing to do is to pour some eggnog and watch a movie with the family. History may be important, but it's also just made up. Quiet, humdrum activities, on the other hand, are real, and if you can't enjoy them your life will not be worth much.
3:32 PM