-{ redgeek.net }-

I was down at Baja Fresh yesterday, my customary chicken Baja burrito in one hand and lunchtime reading in the other, when a grating metallic sound worked it’s way into the periphery of hearing. It had a texture similar to when I’d get sand in the bearings of my skateboard wheels, only lower pitched, rougher, like an blender dying. It was intermittent and irregular, and extremely annoying – and I still like industrial/noize, like Wumpscut and Pan Sonic, so you know this had to be bad.

Looking around for the culprit, I find a small child with what appears to be a Godzilla head mounted on a handle with a trigger. Every time he fired, Godzilla’s eyes would flash and he’d his his electronic roar. Over the course of a microsecond, neurons fired in a trajectory something along the lines of: _

My lord, why doesn’t his mother stop him from doing that constantly?

She must be totally de-sensitized to it, I feel so sorry for her.

Thank god I haven’t bred.

You’d think he’d get tired of that thing by now.

Actually, I was just as easily (and repetitively) entertained at that age.

I wonder if, right now, I can find the joy in that toy that he’s found. _

Well, I didn’t. I tried to re-capture that youthful wonder and enthusiasm and self-centered-ness, but I couldn’t. Until, that is, he took me back to the magic of childhood, when he tugged on his mother’s pants legs and asked, “But what’s he saying?”

Yeah, what is_ he saying? Why _can’t he be alive and communicating? Who says you mother can’t speak “Godzillian” (or some other lizard dialect)? Why not?

I tried to be young intellectually, when what I really needed to do was to throw away all that I know, and let the unknown be just as possible; I need to drop constraints. It’s an incredibly wonderful feeling, a buoyant, light accord with the environment. I savored it for as long as I could, although it slipped away quite quickly.

That roar was still fucking annoying.