a letter home

They laugh at me when I speak of raising a newborn human in a ten gallon tank and still I think it is a good idea what love and spice to a roomscape such a creature not quite skinklike in its ability to burrow, in fact no burrowing at all and completely unable to climb through trees, like a larval scarab requiring a pile of dung, eggs so carefully oviposited upon it, dutiful mothers, like earwigs guarding their clutch against intrusion. A baby's room should have machine guns, a teenager's room should have books, a soldier should have flowers, a maiden should have reptiles, a mommy should have drugs for her day, a daddy should have the solace of a strip club and a cigar. I regret missing the formation of the solar system, it is a hundred thousand years that have slipped my mind, as have the last six ice ages and here again cometh another one, delayed or halted by anthropogenic climate change, cities flooding, blue sharks on Market Street in San Francisco, crocodiles in lake Michigan, and mangroves everywhere. It should not surprise me that people stare in disbelief at my own disbelief, that this nervous system of ours could have evolved in an arboreal frugivore, a terrestrial scavenger, a homonoid, the odds were stacked against it. Unfortunate indeed that, like plankton, we drift aimlessly as individuals across the earthscape and have such limited propensity for forming structures out of our own bodies. I am lonely for you, one with whom i should exchange pollen, lonelier still for the trees we would grow. Soon, seed shall be set and our story will give rise to yet another, still, with my minds eye and deep memory i see it all, in colors as astonishing as oil paint, the sea scorpions, the sunset on cloudy uranus, the view from a distant star as our own sun spirals round the galactic center. One tulip, then another, then armageddon, then geology, then rat men, then tree lobsters, another armegeddon. I miss you. I miss your mind.