‘What Happened In The Past Of The Present Future Time’ [A] (Henry O’s World #3)

The Song of Time, and I watched them do it. We were sitting in the graduate school of philosophy, and before the pizza and drunk Kant debate at Waldo’s Pub the gang laughed when the best young mind in the institution flung the book in the garbage, talking about what a fool and how, he didn’t know shit. Just—outdated theoretical gobbledygook, and it was a pretty book. Smelled good in the way only real old books can, and looking down at the pale I thought about it. But I left it there, because I wasn’t turning into the scholar I wanted to be. I was lost. Confused and getting depressed. Typing on a typewriter. Dumb page after dumb page, thousands of lines hammered like I was the first human trying to create fire, the one who failed, and my peers, now they’re lawyers and doctors, and they’ve perfectly lined some of the nicest real book collections in all of the digital media generation. Books like tin soldiers or comic books that never come out of their protective casing. The other students in my class were cooler than me, and they never had to feel like an outcast. They always knew what was a proper source to further their thesis, and they also knew what was garbage. I didn’t know the difference, and so I dropped out of school, and there it was, The Song of Time, the same book but a different copy. Two of the rarest of birds in the entire cannon of western philosophy for no reason whatsoever sitting on rust and jaded bricks and still-burning half a century ol’ dry coal. Two copies in two locations chucked in the garbage only to be fished-out by a lunatic who thought he could solve the riddle of human existence, the mind. What’s wrong with me? I never take the hint and always see an erroneous rabbit-hole like a dancing particle here and there now there and here—at the same time; always seeing sun-spots drift down looking out the rolled-up window in the backseat of a used-car on a hot summer day. I don’t get it. What happened to me? Where did it all go wrong? Cause, I always looked at their logic like—it’s some kinda’ dream.