Okay, I’ve changed. And these things happened all of fourteen, fifteen years back.

In my neighborhood—I’d just recently moved there—we had a public junior high school, and whenever I went out to run shopping errands or take a walk I’d pass right by it. So I’d find myself looking at the junior-high kids exercising or drawing pictures or just goofing off. Not that I especially enjoyed looking at them; there wasn’t anything else to look at. I could just as well have looked at the line of cherry trees off to the right, but the junior-high kids were more interesting.

So as things went, looking at these junior-high-school kids every day, one day it struck me. They were all just fourteen or fifteen years old. It was a minor discovery for me, something of a shock. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, they weren’t even born; or if they were, they were little more than semiconscious blobs of pink flesh. And here they were now, already wearing brassieres, masturbating, sending stupid little postcards to disc jockeys, smoking out in back of the gym, writing FUCK on somebody’s fence with red spray paint, reading—maybe—War and Peace. Phew, glad that’s done with.

I really meant it. Phew.

Me, back fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was mowing lawns.

MEMORY IS LIKE FICTION; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products—at times it’s downright embarrassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush. And if my face turns that shade, you can be sure everyone’s blushing.

Still, you grasp human existence in terms of these rather absurd activities resting on relatively straightforward motives, and questions of right and wrong pretty much drop out of the picture. That’s where memory takes over and fiction is born. From that point on, it’s a perpetual-motion machine no one can stop. Tottering its way throughout the world, trailing a single unbroken thread over the ground.

Here goes nothing. Hope all goes well, you say. But it never has. Never will. It just doesn’t go that way.

So where does that leave you? What do you do?