Every story ever told

... A dispatch from bewilderness

There are approximately eight billion humans on earth.  We communicate in seven thousand languages.  Chief among these are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic.  Each has an alphabet.

Those of us who use English arrange 26 shapes to tell every story ever told and create all the news on wars, culture, climate, gender, science and everything else.

Speaking of science, some folks still don’t believe in evolution.  They say it’s just a theory, but they wouldn’t jump out a window, would they?  As long as we’re discussing science, humans began as Cro-Magnons about 100,000 years ago. Ants began as ants (or so I assume) a few million years before.

I learned to read at age 56, or relearned to read post-accident with the patient help of no one at all. I tried reading magazines, newspapers, books, and found words looked like endless ants speeding, blurring, blowing up. Letters moved forward, backward, up and down.

The brain is amazing.  It controls every blink, breath, heartbeat, every thought and every word. The three–pound blob remembers the name of your fifth-grade teacher, your date at the sixth grade prom, and your childhood phone number.  But fly through a windshield crashed by a truck — and it’s a crapshoot. You might remember something that happened a moment ago or you might not. You might not walk or talk again.

This would be a different story if I regained my former life, complete with my former mind.  I didn’t.  Eighteen years post-accident. I still think with a stutter, speak with a limp, and have less usable space in my brain, so I run out of memory fast.

Today I had two coins in my hand. One was a dime and one was a nickel and I didn’t know which was which. I can spackle all I want but underneath I’m still broken. One broken brain and five broken bones in my back. I frustrate others by leaning on them and by not leaning on them, and baffle them both when I seem normal and when I don’t. 

When I began in media, we didn’t have CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). Webs were webs. Clouds were clouds. Nothing was frontloaded. Nothing was print-adjacent. No one was beating bots or massaging kale for a five-part bento box. We weren't even unpacking the past.