“I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man.”
Thirty-five seconds into the day and my face was a Brazilian carnival of colour. I’d been woken from dreamland, surfing waves on a crowded Copacabana. Streaks of purple, pink, blue and yellow now criss-crossed my face like some kind of psychedelic spider web. Alice was perched on the bed between me and Apocalypse Mommy and doing some early morning art work. On our faces.
There were strange, luminescent cave drawings on the walls. If you followed them back you’d end up at the beginning of this 5 a.m. curtain call.
Raindrops keep falling on my head.
“Daddy,” Alice said, kneeling on my face, kicking Apocalypse Mommy in the eye and falling, face paint first, into the wall. “What shape is pasta?”
I winced. “Have you been painting pasta on the wall with the face-paint?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. What shape is pasta?”
I asked her how long she had been up.
“Since I started painting. What did you dream about Daddy?”
And I told her about my surfing dream.
“I was a mermaid,” she said, standing up to act out her dream. “And a unicorn. A mermacorn. I was a mermacorn and… and… there was a tree and… and we were in the forest and the sky and the mermacorn was good and we had doughnuts and and and…”
She was breathless, trying to keep the memory alive, hold on to the fleeting incandescence of a dream. I’ll never know if she was recounting a dream or just writing a story, pulling images from somewhere deep within her pre-frontal cortex. Making shit up. Making life up.
“You had a doughnut and Mommy had a doughnut and then the mermacorn flew away but we were in the desert and there were penguins and then I painted on the wall and and and… I can’t remember any-more.”
Who could remember anything. I’d started writing the rules on my left arm. The days on the right. My arm was too thin. We needed shorter days. It was Thursday.
CERN was closed. The Standard Model hadn’t accounted for lockdown. The muons and the gluons were practising a complex version of social distancing, popping in and out of existence here, there and everywhere.
Lockdown through wormholes.
What if we had a BBQ with our friends and family in a different universe?
Come on CERN. Put that in your large hadron collider.
You can’t? You’re busy working on quark-gluon plasma?
What the hell is quark-gluon plasma?
It’s an interacting localised assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal and chemical equilibrium creating particles that make up the ingredients of the universe.
Can you simplify it please?
Call me stupid. Just don’t call me Ishmael.
Raindrops are falling on my head,
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothing seems to fit.
It’s a marathon. Not a sprint. Like this. Like being a dad, a human, quark-gluon plasma.
Left arm. Rule 6. Keep a happiness diary.
Toast with salty butter, the way a rugby ball bounces, the way hiccups just disappear, the way lightning is never the same and how music sounds underwater.
Raindrops keep falling on my head
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red
Crying’s not for me
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complaining Because I’m free
Nothing’s worrying me.
We did a physics lesson on the fridge.
“They have funny names,” Alice said. “I like the beauty, what does the beauty do?”
I said I had no idea. Many times. It didn’t make any sense.
“I’m only four,” Alice said, eventually. “Can we go outside?”
And I said, “But it’s raining.”
And Alice said, “It’s OK Daddy, it’s only water.”
So we went outside.
And jumped in puddles.