Time to dissolution

Vancouver, 2016-05-17
Davie St

Evening street walk. Crazies in many places. Then street people. Some stereotypical. Ragged, dirty, picking cigarette butts off sidewalk. Then the fellow who carefully dons florescent green & rubber work gloves and opens trundle suitcase before diving into garbage can for refundables.

Or one towing oh-so-carefully wrapped & tied bedroll behind. And lady in clean-cut socks and windbreaking blazer, smart black shoes (practical ones) carefully dumping orange juice out of abandoned container.

Then a so-called normal, walking with friends , yet face stalled mid-expression, almost frozen, as she walks along, inner-now-outer emotion clearly not being felt.

I sit here, walk there, people watching, looking from the outside, a tourist. Separate, distant, protected.

...and wonder.

I wonder, how long could I abide here before being consumed, before there is no difference, before I am one of them.

Realization. To them, I already am a them. Just one more. One more idiosyncratic being, not obviously or even unobviously distinct. A cell in multitude.

The only difference is in me, in my head, and fleeting. I think t'would not be long at all before I, as I know me now, would be completely gone, completely dissolved in multitude, fingering bones of old memories, a person gone.

…

Whitehorse, 2025-06-23

I read this old journal entry 9 years later, and reflect. How many times has this already happened? Am I right now, in my home, dissolved in multitude, a them? Old self gone so long there are no memory bones left to finger? Should I wax nostalgic for this being? Those beings?

Nah. There's here and now to occupy. Shoulder bedroll, snap on rubber gloves, tip out the over fermented juice, drop can in my case, keeping care to miss the clean (practical) shoes, face a rehearsed neutral, and walk on (kicking ciggy butts into the gutter. I doesn't do those no more)

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