Before we had sex

...a dispatch from bewilderness

I began working in media when I was in my 20s and magazine covers were painted on caves. Back then, women didn’t get pregnant. We were either “expecting” or a stork was coming soon. We also didn’t have sex, friends, or girls. Correction, we didn’t have Friends, Girls, or Tinder, which invented sex in 2012. (I wrote about this recently in Another Jane Pratt Thing. See cover below.)

My name is J. I live in the state of semi-amnesia, I mean the state of Virginia. Once upon a time I wrote words in mint condition, sparkling, witty, bracing, brisk. That was called freelance writing. Then I was hit by a drunk with a truck.

When I began in media, we didn’t have 30,000,000 ways to boil an egg, because Google didn’t exist. We also lacked 767,011 ways to make lasagna, including those loved by real Italians for 900 years.

Things weren’t airbrushed, encrypted, triple-buffered, sound-bitten, or written by bots. Back then, humans could talk with each other in person, without being distracted by a glowing orb in their hands.

Now? I mix things up and say things like, “You can’t tell the forest from the horse that left the barn before it was locked.” This seems to make people squint or itch.

Words fly, fall, or race through my brain, missing points, friends, and the proverbial boat. Subjects do the same. So do time, space, seasons, reasons and news.

So I invent my own news with stories like:

*Baby conceived without scientists

*Fall cancelled after 3 billion seasons

*Man who got head stuck in washing machine had worse day than you

On the rare occasions I’m with someone else, I unexpectedly catch the subject I mean to bring up. It may have been a phone call from I forget who about I forget what. Or something equally essential.

The “subject” appears and disappears more or less at once. There are a few good points, too. I can meet new friends, then meet them again five minutes later, when they’ll be new again.

There’s another weird thing, too. I catapult from extremely low to surprisingly high on cognitive tests (from very smart to very not-smart) with same “predictability” you would expect from a pinball. And with, I might add, the same sense of grace.

Find this piece — which deals with sex and magazines — in Another Jane Pratt Thing on Substack