On my drive home I felt inspired to write something tonight and then it left me. It was going to be one of those third person entries that people think is about me, but they aren’t. Sorry to disappoint or to lie if anyone truly believes it is about them or about me.
I pine for the future, a return to things that haven’t even happened yet. I don’t want to go back to the time when my cousin Dwayne and I were jumping on a trampoline and running about the neighborhood barefoot. I don’t want to go back to when his older brother Jason could still beat me up (he always did it with love). I don’t want to go back to High School. That time of great confusion and experimentation when I just grew my locks long and put up a front so less people would pick on me and more people would think I was cool. The time when I threw a rubbish tin at some idiot’s head in a fight. The time when I changed the way I dressed, so my Father would be at peace thinking no one would think I were a “gangsta” or a “thug” in the foreign state of California. I don’t even want to go back to the time when I really found out who I was, inside and out.
I just want the future. Give me the fucking rocket house, give me the meal-in-a-pill. Give me Judy Jetson. Give me Elroy. I would nurture his intelligence and keep the bullies away from him, so he could grow up into a witty, hyper-intelligent robot scientist who everyone wants at parties because when he gets drunk he sings old Bob Dylan songs he’s translated into Vulcan, shirtless on the hor’devour table hunching with the ice sculpture that my friend and I stole just to class this joint up. They’ll all chant, “Go, Elroy. Go, Elroy. Go, Elroy,” and I’ll know I did a good job. Astro will be long gone or maybe he’ll be a robot. I wouldn’t know.
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