Patterns in Normal entries

Not to long ago (minutes, not years) I had conceived a flash; the feeling familiar and nostalgic, like finding a pair of gloves you stored ten winters back. It came to me as flashes come as a singular image in a shell of words. Between the immediate past and the immediate present I misplaced it. Like the winter gloves it is not lost to this world, but it’s in a box somewhere in a head full of boxes.

I tried opening a few. That happens outside of time like a hard edit for a commercial break. I found things, but not the flash. Not yet. I found this;

And I found a box of patterns. In 1980 I enlisted in the Oregon National Guard. You take a written test before the interview or the physical. It is sort of like an I.Q. test. They call it an aptitude test. In 1980 I realized how western civilization measures the value of a stranger; Pattern Recognition. Whatever talent I have or don’t have at pattern recognition is … uncultivated. Native. Inherent. I never studied, nor plan to study, how to be more proficient. I did, however, in 1980, decide I would mark patterns.

I don’t do that often, that is, decide what is important to observe. As a child I recall a perfect summer afternoon, pleasantly tired from riding and playing baseball all day, I had no obligation or responsibility and something in that moment made me decide to not forget, that this, this perfect blue afternoon was exactly how it felt to be a child. Sadly I only recall the desire and not the essence, not what provoked the thought. This paragraph is intended to demonstrate a pattern of thought despite the well of years between.

When the national guard sent me to Columbia South Carolina, specifically Ft. Jackson, I was regular army for two months. Part of basic training is a tear gas tent. It takes the better part of a day to impress upon grown men the importance of a gas mask. You go into the tent with a gas mask on and are asked to take it off and say something like your name, rank and platoon. The Sargent who was doing the training asked if any of us had been tear gassed before. No one said anything and I spoke up and said I had in 69,70,71 and 72. It did not go well.

That’s what was in the pattern box. As a nation we were divided along several lines, political, cultural, civil liberties in the late sixties and seventies. That pattern re-emerges; a national angst, hostility, unrest. We are once again fighting over sexism and racism. Sort of. No one is getting tear gassed. Can I combine the patterns of helmets, knee pads and seat belts — that is; does this generation want to do their hostility in a safer way? I don’t know. I recognize in myself that same generalized rush of adrenaline and fear for the soul of my country.

I think that’s what the flash was about. I’m more articulate within the vagaries of fiction. When I sat to grind out this dense nonsense the pit bull in me was not going to let the idea go, though the meat had been torn from the bone. I am built like a pit bull, short and hard to knock over, loyal, loving, drooley, and I don’t let go of things on purpose.

Here in the dusk of the twenty tens the counter culture of the dusk of the sixties is looked on with disdain. It’s like that Clarke novel where the aliens straighten out humanity but don’t show themselves until generations have passed. The look like the devil. He makes some other profound statement, but the core of the trick ending is we foresaw our own end and personified it. I don’t know. Something about patterns.