To be alive, to truly be alive, is to be a fragment spinning out in the void, like some errant piece of the great cosmic machine lost in the dark. Before birth, you are whole, one with everything; after death, you return to the void. But in life, in the middle of the mess, you're just drifting; part of something larger, but forever dislodged from it. I felt this most vividly on an acid trip in my early twenties. A piece of flesh, tumbling through the emptiness. But then my brother tossed a baseball at me, mid-trip, and for a moment, I wasn’t falling. I was caught in the pulse of something shared—a connection that hummed across the air like an echo, the daylight stretching long and slow; from my own impending death back to the memories of childhood.
Eating, though—eating was a childhood ritual, a language all its own. That's the thing I remember most vividly growing up. As a kid, it was Saturday mornings, especially. The perfect day to disappear into a bowl of sugar-laden cereal, washing it down with milk and toast, while cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian and Goober and the Ghost Chasers hummed in the background, filling the void. Each bite, each moment a steady drumbeat of repetition, a foundation to build your day upon. And so, I’ve carried this act of consumption with me, this search for something to fill the empty space. I’ve never outgrown it, though I wonder if I should have. It’s a curse of genetics, this need to consume—thankfully, Saturdays are still a rarity, and I’ve yet to fully expand to the size of a sofa, but I've flirted dangerously with such a reality.
Life isn’t a box of chocolates. When you’re handed life, you don't get to poke at it first, test for the poison; you just dive in. Whether you choke or swallow it whole, that’s your fate, your trial.
But then, life... it’s more like a pack of baseball cards. It's the other thing I remember with utter clarity about childhood: my relentless pursuit of baseball cards. You buy them with the promise of newness, the thrill that this time, you’ll get the one card that’ll make it all worth it. But mostly, you get duplicates—the same old faces, the same old players posing for the same tired photos. The world shrinks back to its mundane cycle. But sometimes, buried in the pack, you find a card that shatters everything. I remember pulling that Mike Schmidt card, his mustachioed face glowing from the plastic, an electric pulse of hope. At that moment, I wasn’t just a kid holding a card. I was holding lightning. A crack in the Universe.
