When you are little we pay attention to whether you laugh or cry. If you cry we feed you until you start to vomit a little, or we change your diapers, or make sure you’re warm, or tell the clown to go bother someone else. If you laugh, everything’s A-okay.

Then you learn to talk, and it’s interesting neologisms for a while, and stories about your past lives (“I drowned right over there”) and shared dreams (“Tiger eat papa”) and, generally, fun conversation.

Then, all of a sudden, you’re a fully formed human with interests of your own and it gets hard. This is around the age of nine or ten. You are who you are, nothing’s going to change for the rest of your life, nothing big. You’re what, eleven now, you know what I mean. People think you’re a little kid, but there’s a lot less difference between you and a 49 year old than there is between you and a one year old.

You’re basically your adult self, right here, in a little kid’s pyjamas.

My dad drifted out of our lives at about that age. Once we had formed. I used to think it was because of some character flaw of his, but I no longer think so. Now, instead, I think, basically, dude, it’s really hard to pay attention to what the hell you’re talking about. You talk so fast, and it’s making sense now, and you really have to pay attention.

Little kids, you can get away with saying, whatever.

Now, though.

And it keeps getting harder. You drift further and further away the older you get. You get other interests, I get less heroic, the conversations grow awkward.

I could never get a conversation started with my dad, not really, at the end. We both tried. We lacked the time, mostly, I guess.

So don’t be freaked out if you notice me paying more attention to you.

Also, who would’ve thought my spirit guide would be a hobo spider?

It’s like, you know, Don Juan going, Here, Mig, forget that peyote, I got someone here I’d like you to meet.

A bite to the Achilles tendon.

Even after the swelling went down, and the blister healed, the immediate symptoms lasted two weeks: disorientation, clumsiness, blurred vision, headaches, thicker beard growth, libido way up, and weird ideas.

Like, ideas for houses: tree houses. Or, a hill with a shack on the top, only the entire hill is also a huge house underneath. Benefits of this: you can have goats and sheep on the outside of your house, man.

Or: RVs will soon be cheap used. Nearly free, as gasoline prices climb. Buy them cheap, stack them one atop the other, as high as you need: alternative skyscrapers.

So not a pengine (“Slide!”) and not a weasel.

MW described my spirit guide in a comment here earlier. I quote:

I can see it in my mind’s eye & it’s looking just like an old Max Fleischer cartoon