Threshold Markers

Soon after graduating from college, I came face to face with two important facts. The first was that I was a drunk, and the second was that, despite my education, I had no marketable abilities or particular skills at all. I didn’t know how to address the latter condition, but had been given, along the way, some idea as regards the former, so checked myself into in-patient rehab for the month of October, 1989, and promptly got involved with one of the networks of support available* upon my release. It was nearing Christmas when this next thing happened, and it was such a subtle thing that it may very well be no thing at all. It is tempting to dismiss it outright, as it seems almost entirely owing to my state of mind at the time and was very likely a misperception of something quite ordinary. I was in a very jittery and not-sane frame of mind in those early months of sobriety. If you can imagine the psychological equivalent to having your entire body covered in scabs, and then the scabs all suddenly torn away, leaving only burning nerve-endings and raw, bleeding flesh, yet for all this still being infused with a giddy sort of blind optimism and near-infantile level of self-absorption, then you might appreciate the state of mind I inhabited. I was at the very least capable of interpreting things in a skewed sort of way.

But what I saw, while looking out the back window of my parent’s two-storey house, overlooking the neighborhood hills perhaps a quarter mile away, in addition to the seasonally-appropriate festooning of colored Christmas lights, tucked in amongst the other houses in the densely-packed and tree-lined suburbs, was a wall of red-orange light. The area of light itself was about the size of a house, though it did not appear to have any roof or any adjoining walls to form a regular structure. There wasn’t anything to it except for a large, flat rectangle which glowed evenly throughout, though not intensely, and with that same glowing orange-red that I recalled the glyphic L-shaped object having, from my sighting at age fourteen, as well as the (then) more recent Madeleine-cookie airship. This is a very particular shade of orange – richly luminous, seemingly alive – and if it is possible for a color to indicate by its shade, its saturation and intensity, that it is somehow itself intelligent, then that is what this shade of orange-red does and did. This wall of light wasn’t up to anything; it was simply planted there, amongst all the other lights. Except that it seemed way too big and way too even. Seeing this put me into a particularly anxious state. I called my mentor in the “program”**, telling him what I thought I was looking at; that I felt that if I went to it – which for some reason it seemed like I was supposed to do – I would be made to drink (since that was my greatest, and genuine, fear at the time – that something beyond my control would make me drink, which maybe sounds ludicrous, but actually kind of isn’t). I expect my friend thought I was ordinarily newly-sober insane, but he was able to talk me down from my state of near-panic, and convinced me that I didn’t have to do any such thing. And though it was still several days until the holiday, and the neighborhood lights otherwise remained until Christmas and New Years, I know that by either that next evening or soon after, the large rectangle of orange light was gone and did not reappear.

Some few years later, I had another, very subtle kind of sighting that occurred in a similar context. I’d been afraid to go to a small meeting*** at a hospital in Ballard (a neighborhood in north Seattle), one that I knew would be sparsely attended by those in alcohol and drug treatment at the hospital, and even more sparsely attended by other, sober members from the community at large. So basically, I expected I would be on my own if I went, and if I went, it was expressly to be helpful, if I could, to an unreceptive and resentful room of people who were more or less held captive. I did not want to do this. In fact I unreservedly did not want to do this. I battled against my sense of obligation all the way. But in going, as I approached the Ballard neighborhood, the hospital, and my increasing dread, I remember noticing in the sky overhead, hanging at what seemed a really high altitude, a small silver shape, bluntly cylindrical. It was so high, and so far off, that it was hard to see it as more than just a smudge, but it hung there, and for the duration that I watched it (several minutes) it stayed pretty much in the same place. At the time, I thought it must be a blimp or balloon – although I’d never seen a blimp or a balloon up that high before. This was at many thousands of feet into the hazy sky. I checked its position often as I drove through and eventually found a parking space alongside the hospital. In some corner of myself, I imagined that seeing this thing was an acknowledgement that I was crossing an important threshold, in being willing to confront my fears and work, ostensibly, for others’ benefit, even though I didn’t really believe that the object was anything all that extraordinary at the time. And as I sat in the meeting, which itself was quite unremarkable (what the hell had I been so afraid of?) I looked sometimes out the window toward the grayish sky, and was still able to see the object overhead. It’s position was just such that from where I sat, I could look straight at it. The funny thing about this memory is that I have the impression that the sky was simply crammed full of objects at the time… This was a regular fantasy of mine from that period, that objects – seemingly ordinary objects: helicopters, airplanes, blimps, whatever – were just about everywhere in the sky above the city, that it was almost more crowded up there than it was down in the busy streets. I don’t know what it was about the sky on that day that gave me that impression. Maybe it really was crowded with airplanes and helicopters and blimps and balloons. Except that how crowded could it actually get?

*Forgive the cagey wording of this statement. The “network of support” is one that everybody knows, and that I, frankly, have no trouble with naming and associating myself with. The network itself however contains within its literature of very strongly suggested traditional practices, as regards its public relations philosophy, the imperative that members not publicly identify themselves specifically as such in media like for instance this sort right here. This is as much for the good of the network as it is for that of the member.

**See above. Trying to describe this very specific state of mind and context puts me into a position of playing perhaps somewhat loosely with the concept while keeping to its letter. Yet to describe events without this context renders them almost entirely meaningless. I.e. "I saw a dot up in the sky" – and, yeah, and, so what? 

***Etc.

Olympia, 1987: Wrong-sized Star

(Note: though these events are all in front of me, in written form, culled from my journals of last summer, any attempt to put them into the order of their occurrence seems to get undermined, again and again. Perhaps this is in the nature of memory itself, which seems to have its own needs for narrative structure, over and beyond any mere chronology of fact. Perhaps it is more a matter of the language that I’ve formed them from, or into, which dictates what is included or excluded. The journal is in fact kind of a mess, sprawling and unruly, and as I wrote these entries initially, their recollection wouldn’t keep to any convenient timeline, no matter how hard I tried to follow one for my own mnemonic purposes. Events would not keep in order, but came as they would. Hence the following was among the last that I actually remembered, though it comes in time before the previous entry.)

In my sophomore year at college, I lived in the small city of Olympia, WA. This was in 1987 and for most of that year, I was living in a very odd, shared apartment complex near the county jail. This rather barren neighborhood was situated atop the mostly undeveloped plateau, from where I could take a long, stepped pathway down the side of the hill, through a wooded slope to a wide road and an area which opened out onto a lake. The road led into or out of downtown, the lights of which shone in the darkness directly across the water, about a mile away. Rail tracks also ran though this flat area, and a land-bridge crossed the water for the railway, leading to a switchyard and into the city. I walked this route often, following the tracks into town to read or write at the local coffee shop. Twice I jumped onto slow-moving freight trains to to town. The first time I got away with it. The second time, I didn’t, and I never tried that trick again. This would have been in the wintertime, and not long after Whitley Strieber’s Communion had been released.

I’d just bought a copy in hardback from a shopping mall bookstore. I’d felt compelled at seeing that famous face on the cover, which I remember seemed so very familiar at the time. This response is by now a familiar trope among contactees, I’m well aware, though I didn’t at the time feel as if I knew that woman, or believed I had any experience with grays. Rather it seemed – or it seems now, after long reflection – as if I’d already been saturated with that image in media. Yet I don’t think that was yet the case. The ubiquity of that almond-eyed face came later, as a result of the book and its cover, among other things, but that hadn’t happened yet. At the time of this experience I was then reading Communion, and it was having a profound effect on me. I was fascinated and utterly terrified (which I believe is a very precise definition of the numinous).

On this particular night, I walked back from the coffeehouse along my usual route to my apartment on the hill, along the rails and over the land bridge. It was cold and damp, but not for the moment raining. I smoked a lot of dope at the time, and so I was probably at least a little bit stoned. I remember as I approached the train yard at the outskirts of downtown, I looked up into the clear night sky and saw, among the usual array of stars, one especially large, flat, shimmering disc of light. It was white, having liquid-like edges that, though generally hard and circular, wobbled and shifted. It acted much the same, optically, as any star seen through the atmosphere would, only enlarged to some ridiculous proportion. Size-wise, the disc was much larger than any other star in the sky, yet it was smaller than the moon would normally seem. There was no moon visible in the sky that night. I remember thinking at the time that it must be Jupiter. I certainly did not think it was a UFO, or anything all that unusual… except that it was so big, and oddly shimmering, with that uncertain edge. I had the chance to watch it for quite a long time. It hung directly ahead and above me for much of the walk back home – through the rail yard, over the land bridge and back to the road – and it never once changed its position or behaved in any other way strangely. It was just like any normal star, only much, much bigger, as if optically enlarged. And though I was likely reading Communion on that particular night, I did not at the time see this thing in terms of any such phenomena. That association only came later, on reflection, perhaps by several years. It seems such a minor thing in itself, but the memory of it has stayed with me vividly for these past twenty five years as some sort of marker, to indicate this particular point in my life.

The Haunted Rooms, Olympia, 1988-89

After the aforementioned childhood images, which could have been dreams – certainly they follow in part the logic and the tone of dreams, though I have never remembered them in that context – and the two very clear, upfront and personal sightings of things that were obviously there, obviously in the sky and, moreover, were obviously not planes or clouds or even the Goodyear blimp (yes, thank you, I do know the difference) it seemed as if for a long time nothing else of this sort happened. Yet my years as an undergraduate and as a young adult were perforated through by certain images and irruptions of the stuff of meaning, of the supramundane. My mind and my character were far from cohesive. I was dissolute. I drank heavily and accomplished little, descended into a pervasive lassitude and depression. As a result, though drinking like this kind of held me together at the time and made life bearable, I now regret just about every moment of my lifetime between 18 and 22 – though less for my behavior while drunk than for the way the intensity of need (only partially met by drink) and sheer, chronic horrible feeling caused me to act towards others who were, for a short time, close to me.

During this period, there were a couple of events that stood out as especially odd. Now that I think of it, they both happened at the same rooming house where I lived for most of a year between 1988 and 1989. The house seemed to be haunted by a resentful ghost. The landlord, a middle-aged woman whose father had died suddenly and violently while building the house, had inherited it some twenty years previous to my living there. The building, a dismal and dark spot within an apparently otherwise normal suburb, had never been properly finished, though it had been inhabited for all this time by a variety of marginal characters, some of us students, many quite shady, most all of us desperate in one way or another.

On one late morning in the autumn – more likely by then approaching early afternoon –I was simply too lazy to get out of bed. After some hours of lying awake, I both felt and heard something explode inside of my skull. It was like a small bomb physically in my head that literally exploded. That did get me up; that got me out of bed fast. I was scared, and I felt certain then that someone or something had intervened, had set this thing off in me, as if to say, enough is enough. God only knows to what purpose. But it was time to get up and do something, though to my perspective there seemed little point to the day, and nothing worth the effort.

The next event from this period happened some months later. I’d moved into another room in the house, above the cold garage, to the expansive but unheated, uninsulated attic room where I spent the worst and most difficult winter of my young life. The springtime would soon be full of bad drama surrounding a downstairs neighbor, but that, I think, hadn’t happened yet. The room beneath mine was then still empty. The angry ghost would manifest at night, pounding on all four walls at once, or interrupting the power in measured intervals of three (the possibility that mischievous people might have been behind this certainly exists, but I couldn’t see why they would bother with such coordinated effort, in such numbers as these pranks would on occasion require). The event that followed may very well have been little or nothing at all: it only seemed to be some kind of skywriting, seen through a window. To see it, I would have been lying on the floor, looking out at the sky, but that isn’t so unusual. What was unusual was the oddly glyphic form of vapor arrangement that I saw. This was at least a decade before the issue of chemtrails became part of the public dialogue, and the utterly bizarre tic-tac-toe patters I’ve since seen photographed in the sky, as if daring those below to notice. This could have been a precursor to that particular form of jokesterism, whoever was behind it.

What I saw, made out of cloud, from my perspective, was a long horizontal line, out of which, attached at the base, was formed a small equilateral triangle, and in the very center of this was a single dot. These were very precise shapes, only starting to untangle and waft away, made out of, yes, clouds. I saw no aircraft make them, and I’d heard nothing – or at least hadn’t noticed, though this design hung at fairly low altitude. It’s hardly impossible that this wasn’t the work of somebody in a small airplane just practicing their craft. It just seemed outright mental at that level. But what did seem meaningful was that there was a communication of something very strange going on – at least I felt it to be so – and this, like so much, remains at the level of an uncertain liminality between the mundane and transcendent, the banality of obvious, stupid fact and the mystery of possible, deep otherness. These things, too, may be expressed by people and their activities. Perhaps what I speak of is less an external event than it is my own frustration with the seeming limits of first, myself, and secondarily, normality. I felt that quality of otherness to be expressed in the fact of communication through these unlikely shapes, though they, like much else, could very well have found their source in my own longing that it be so.

Mark and I Became Robots, 1975

In or around the third grade, perhaps sooner, my friend Mark had come to my house. This would have been around 1975. We played at something in the basement, I have no idea what, but my mother at some point had come downstairs with a plate of apple slices for us to have as snacks. This seems to have been the catalyst for what happened. I and Mark took a slice of apple each and bit into them. A moment later, we found ourselves standing at opposite corners of the basement recreation room, and between us there had formed a tunnel of swirling gray vapors. As if enacting the movements of a pre-determined ritual, the two of us walked toward each other. I remember Mark’s face, very clearly, as being utterly neutral – he had no expression whatever. I felt my own face to be as blank as his. Our movements were automatic, almost robotic. That is not to say that we acted or moved machine-like, but that our movements seemed necessary and precise, executed without consideration, neither with hesitation nor hurriedly. As we approached each other, there was nothing visible to me except for Mark’s blank face. Everything else was enfolded in the gray mist. As we got to within some few yards of each other, we both simultaneously rose up by an inch or two – we weren’t floating; it seemed rather that we had stepped onto adjoining ramps, leading to a slightly raised platform. There had been no such platform on the carpeted cement floor a moment earlier, and I couldn’t actually see that there was one now, but neither could I look down, nor could I see anything beyond the perimeter of the fog-tunnel and Mark’s face approaching mine through it. Yet we had both been lifted up slightly, and I now walked on something solid. We passed each other – Mark to my right side as I was to his – both staring straight ahead, and once past, we returned to the floor, descending that same “ramp” the other had stepped previously up. The fog disappeared. We returned to whatever it was that we’d been doing. My mother, who’d taken a seat at one corner of the room, had sat there throughout this whole exchange and was still there. She had no reaction whatever, in fact no expression on her face at all – much the same as both Mark and myself. I don’t remember anything that happened immediately after that. By the fourth grade Mark and I weren’t friends any longer, though, and I have no recollection of what actually came between us to cause a rift.

Additive, Responsive Shape

In the summer of 1988, I’d come back home to Bellevue following my junior year in college and met up with my high school friend Eric and his girlfriend Leigh. We were going to the movies. The film was “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and was playing at the Crossroads Cinema. With Eric driving and Leigh in the front passenger seat, I sat alone in the back. Along the way, we’d parked the car in a field about a mile from the theater to smoke some grass before driving the rest of the way in, so we were kind of high as we approached the cinema. As we drove through the suburban traffic, my eyes stayed fixed on an orange shape low in the sky, almost directly above where we were going. I don’t remember that anything seemed all that strange to me about it – it was simply an orange circle in the sky, more or less moon-sized – but one of us mentioned it, and another said, “Oh, what, that? The moon?” “Not the moon… it has a flashing light under it.” I looked at the shape again and saw the flashing light, which was at the end of a long, silver pole that hung from its underside, and that I could swear had not been there before. But now that it had been mentioned, I saw it clearly. Eric, I believe, then added, “What, the oval-shaped thing?” Oval-shaped? I’d been looking straight at it and seen it as circular, but now that Eric had said this, the thing was unmistakably an oval. (My memory of these particulars of who said what, and what first, about what qualities, is very blurry – but the salient point being that each of us saw some different feature about it, some feature that the others hadn’t, and as we each described that particular thing, it became not only visible but obvious). As we neared the theater, we also got closer toward it. It hung maybe one hundred feet above and just across the street from where we were going. Now, close up, as Eric parked the car in the lot, I could see a great deal more about this object.

It glowed a luminous, saturated orange-red all throughout its Madeleine-shaped* body, nowhere any dimmer nor any brighter along its structure, but evenly and brilliantly, though not brightly, lit. The shape was, horizontally, teardrop-like, and with a rounded top that tapered down evenly in proportion to its width, while the bottom was, overall, flatter, though with a pronounced domelike bump at the center. Circling around the midpoint of this bottom dome was a red spot, more intense than its lighted surrounds. It’s motion was machinelike and absolutely perfect. This struck me as an eye, and though nothing more than a red dot, it seemed yet to express something very complex about what was inside or behind this thing, an exquisite and bizarre intelligence that was at once a machine, a plasma, and/or something organic. The metal pole with the flashing light projected straight down from this bulge, and the whole craft seemed perhaps 30 feet long. It simply floated there, above what was maybe an apartment complex, and it made no sound. The busy suburban shopping mall and its surrounds, at 7 or 8 o’clock on a summer’s evening, did not seem the least affected by the presence of this object: people went on about their business while traffic moved steadily underneath the it along the crowded thoroughfare.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I got out from the car first as Leigh and Eric lingered over something. I couldn’t tell what was holding them up, but it gave me some time to watch the object closely, to observe how it moved in a slow, controlled drift forward. It seemed I had a telepathic connection to the object, and I remember thinking that that was how it should work. Had I read about this somewhere before? But as I thought toward the object, move to the left, or, now turn right, it would do so, and very suddenly, yet still in very slight, little movements. My friends by now had gone to stand in line to buy tickets, and so I went to join them, yet still I kept my eye on the object, which they seemed to have no further interest in at all. Finally, I said out loud, though more to myself than anyone else, “What is that thing?” Somebody in the line ahead overheard me and turned around, took a look up and down at me, and said belligerently, “Don’t you know the Goodyear blimp when you see it!?” It struck me though as particularly odd how angry he was. I didn’t respond – I couldn’t think of how to respond, because obviously this wasn't that, no matter how stoned I was.

We went into the movie, and nothing more was said about it. When some time later, after a year or two had passed, I happened to run into Eric and Leigh again on the street in Seattle. We’d not been in touch for a while, and there was a bit of an awkward chill between us by then, likely from simply growing apart. I asked Eric if he remembered seeing that thing that one night. He either didn’t remember or didn’t think it worth considering, but evaded the question. He even seemed to have a hint of contempt toward me for bringing it up at all.**

*The reference to a Madeleine cookie only occurred to me some few years later when, standing at the check out line at a Starbucks at that same mall, I saw on a point-of-purchase display these neat little cellophane packages with single cookies inside, hung from the wire rack, and I thought excitedly, that’s exactly what it looked like! I learned the name of the cookie because it was printed on the package. The only major difference in shape between them was that the cookie had ridges running along the gently-sloping side, whereas the top of the object had been completely smooth.

**At the time that I first wrote this account, which was about a year ago, this latter encounter with my friends in Seattle seemed perfectly clear. Now, as I’m reading through and editing this entry, I don’t remember asking Eric about the object at all. I don’t think I’ve simply made this part of it up (as in, to make a better story of it), yet at the same time I can’t entirely rule that out either. But why would I? The point of writing these journals was not to impress anybody, and I did not at the time intend to publish them. It is as if that specific memory has been altered or removed in the act of recounting it.

1981, Olympic Mountain Range

In the summer of 1981, when I was fourteen years old, I saw something that was more than my imagination or any willingness to misinterpret events and delude myself. I remember it vividly, though perhaps with many distortions by now… but it remains the event that marked me at a time when I was ripe for it, needed it, and it has shaped me indelibly and suggested a deep sense of purpose, though that purpose has always been at best rather vague. At worst, I’ve felt its seeming lack. I’ve still to this day never heard anyone else quite describe the thing or things that I saw that summer night, despite the immensity of it, and partly for this reason I’m left to feel that it was meant for me, as something intensely personal. I’ve since seen how these events can seem to communicate very specific if symbolic messages to different people at the same time, with tremendous economy – which suggests a vast intelligence, among other things – but this seems to have been for myself.

We would’ve had the vacation house on Whidbey for only a short time then, a year or so, and I don’t think I’d had yet the alienation from my childhood friends that would make me want to avoid them. Yet on that visit, I didn’t bring any of them along; I went with my parents and their friend Stu. My sister, then nineteen, would have distanced herself from the family, so she was not present either. I remember little of the daytime: I could have spent it rowing our small, plastic dingy over the nearby body of water we called the “lagoon” or walked alone along the beach, or spent the day reading quietly in a corner of the house. We had (and still have) a telescope on a tripod kept near the front picture windows that look out over the Puget Sound, across to the small city of Port Townsend and beyond that, the Olympic Mountain range.

At some point not especially late in the evening we all went to bed. I was sleeping in the loft above the master bedroom and its adjoining bathroom, which was the only bathroom in the house. When I woke up in the middle of the night and needed to urinate, it meant that I had to climb down the set of steep steps to ground level and skirt along the edge of the main living area, with its picture windows. This night, something caught my eye outside. I went to the window and saw across the water, far in the distance, yet so immense that it stretched seemingly as long as the entire length of the far-off mountains, a dully luminous orange-red “cloud” hanging in the sky. It would have been miles across. It didn’t have any sort of mechanical structure, but it wasn’t exactly all that cloud-like either. Rather, it had the appearance of a wide, flat paintbrush stroke slapped against the dark sky as though it were a two-dimensional canvas, and had a variety of tones within it of deep orange to red, perhaps amber. It was a wide, bent line, down at its edges, and the edges had a sort of stylized feathering to them, while the top and bottom lines of this shape was clean and distinct. These colors glowed, but not brightly. It almost seemed wet. They were the only light visible in the sky.

I stood at the window for a time and watched this thing, not especially astonished but curious. Mildly curious. I remembered the purpose that had gotten me out of bed, and so went into the bathroom, then came out afterwards into the kitchen area for a glass of water. I should add that this, getting a glass of water in the middle of the night, was something unusual for me at the time; it is something I almost never did, and so to do this on this particular evening is significant. It was as if something were directing me to do this, and for a reason that became apparent later. When I went back to the window to look again at this strange thing outside, it had changed, just in the time while I’d been the bathroom. The large cloud/paint-splatter shape had been replaced or changed into a discreet, much smaller shape, one that was geometrically regular and clearly of intelligent design. This was an L- or boomerang-shape made of the same dull orange-red light, consisting of two circles at one end, an angle of the same width as the circles and rounded at the ends and outer corner, as though drawn from the curve of these same circles but extended, and then terminated by two more circles, also the same size. With my glass of water in hand, I though to look at this shape more closely through the telescope, and so trained it toward the light with my eye to the eyepiece. I saw through its lens the same shape, enlarged, and noticed that it was moving, drifting very slowly to the right, more or less the north, its lowest edge just beginning to disappear behind the foothills of the mountains. Clearly, though much smaller than its earlier incarnation, this thing was huge, conceivably a quarter-mile or more to each of its “arms”, as the foothills behind which it was descending were perhaps fifty miles away. Like the first shape, this one also appeared completely flat – and not only because it was so distant. To it, the sky seemed like a page of drafting paper, facing me, showing me its perfect geometry without the distortion of perspective.

What is both unusual and distinctly common of experiences like this, so I’ve read, is the mildness of my response to it at the time. Though I was curious about this thing that I was seeing, knowing it to be unusual, my response was tepid, lacking any of the astonishment or fear or disbelief that might seem called for. After watching this new shape for a minute or two, I set my half-finished glass back on the kitchen counter and went back up to bed, where I fell immediately asleep.

In the morning I found the glass where I’d left it and knew that I’d been awake in the night. I’d not been dreaming. I’d seen this object through a lens, and the lens had magnified the image. What I’d seen had therefore had the properties of light, and behaved consistently as light would. It was as if these small tests of the reality of the thing had been determined beforehand and fed into me, so that I would perform them and know that this had actually happened, and that I had seen something that was actually there. But I’d not thought of this at the time; I had only done what it occurred to me to do, though these actions at the time had an odd significance, as though I were responding to suggestions of deep meaning. It was only then that I began to think of how strange this whole thing had been. I remember telling my parents and their friend over breakfast that I’d seen something very odd, and described it to them. I don’t think my parents had any reaction to this whatever, though I remember Stu looking at me, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide and alarmed, though but for only a moment. The subject was immediately dropped and I knew better than to make any further mention of it.

The Acorn and the Bumble Bee

Out of what is mostly otherwise a haze of forgetting, a couple of moments in my early childhood I retain with clarity. I don’t know what if any importance to attach to these memories, other than they are among the few that remain. They stand out more or less on their own and with little context, and seem more like dreams than anything else. But I don’t remember them as dreams. I remember them as moments of waking reality where the rules were bent, as if in early childhood this sort of liminality were normally possible to a larger extent than anytime later.

In the first image, I was very young – maybe five at the most – and it was a warm summer day. I stood outside the front door of my house, where I’d just come running out, perhaps following after other friends in the neighborhood. (Note: this is a bit of a disconnect here, because I don’t remember at that time having any neighborhood friends; that would come some years later.) As soon as I’d run through the door, however, I stopped very suddenly at the very top of the porch steps. For some reason, I was compelled to do this, just as I was similarly compelled next to raise my right hand, my index finger pointing straight up at the sky. After standing for a moment like this, something quickly dropped from above and attached itself to the tip of my finger. This looked like an acorn, but it acted and felt more like an insect. The rounded bottom part of the “acorn” was a mouth that opened and firmly fastened onto the finger that I’d unwittingly, yet seemingly so deliberately offered it. Something inside of the “acorn” pierced the tip of my finger like a needle. That is as much as I remember. Before this had happened, I’d never paid any particular notice to acorns, but afterwards, whenever I saw any on the ground, or still attached to the tree, they seemed very odd to me. They seemed reduced, somehow wrong because they weren’t animated. They didn’t have a mouth with a sharp tooth inside, or behave at all like the one that I’d first encountered.

The next image is from some time later, though I am still quite young and quite small. There was a corner of the sill of our large front window, where, closest to the front door and the entryway, there lay a dead bumble bee. I remember being impressed by the size and the strange fuzziness of this kind of bee, which was unlike all other bees. Over the course of several days, I would often return to look closely at this corpse, which lay otherwise unnoticed by anyone else in the house and undisturbed. One day, however, when I went to check in on the body, it had been replaced. In its place was a simulacrum, a stuffed-animal version of itself that was much larger, but similarly hairy as its actual counterpart. But this replacement was obviously a stylized fake – even a little kid like me could see that. Made from cloth, it had a crown-like collar around the narrower throat separating its head from its abdomen. This collar was cut along the outside with triangles in a radiant star pattern of many points, and had concentric rings of contrasting hue. Its face had sewn- or glued-on eyes made of discs of similar thick material. I remember feeling shock: someone older, my parents or perhaps my older sister, was aware of my interest in this dead insect and had played a trick on me. My world felt suddenly insecure in a fundamental way, as if I could no longer trust it.