forgets

& I wonder if anyone I worked with has this problem..
I wake up in cold sweats from the same bad dream, no not the one where you can’t run fast enough, one more plausible to an adult mind.. you get up and go to work like you’ve always done, yet you feel like you haven’t done this for a long time. You sit and get to work, but you can’t do anything right.. you still know enough to know you’re making mistakes, but you can’t seem to think of how to stop making them. You get called in by a supervisor and get fired on the spot.

Had you told me I’d find myself retired two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you, but here I am and where before I’d think my greatest fear was that I couldn’t forget everything I’d learned, now it seems my fear is that I have when I no longer really have need of it anymore. Most of my certifications have probably expired, and it’s not like I can just go buy the equipment I used at radioshack.. is this just a sign that I need to find something else to do with myself?

I’ve reached so many people’s sixty five at forty, and I should be greatful, but I’m restless as always.

I think I’ve abandoned enough electronics to know what the apocalypse would look like for them. & the thing is they don’t beg and plead like we do, they demand, charge me, then just go dark, never reaching the dock. When and if you finally do ever find a job for them again and boot them back up, then they do so without complaint, refreshed and anew, ready to go about things as if nothing had ever happened.

People remember the end for a while, they remember scratching and clawing to get back to their safe spaces. They yell when the lights go out, fingers frantically waving at any switches in the vicinity. When we come back though, I don’t think we remember so much what we were doing then and there in the moment shit went crazy, but we don’t seem to have any problem assigning ourselves to get to work again. To put everything in it’s right place.

& we wouldn’t fight our programming, we’d get right back to work on what blew us up the last time, we’d swear we wouldn’t let out the magic smoke. What I wouldn’t give to get it right again.

i’d always admired the tenacity of plants to grow, oh sure everyone knows about them sprouting up in cracks through the cracks in sidewalks, but that seemed easy for them in comparison to giving it a go with someone who doesn’t have a green thumb. I’ve always liked buy little bags of seeds and just plant things around the yard, and even though i’d gotten better, and things had gotten easier with the advent of grow lights and timers, apples always evaded me.

The always just seemed to wait for what I don’t know when I’d placed them in a hole in the ground. You know naturally when you cover something, anything with dirt you think it’d instinctually try and dig its way out, but they seemed to be as scared of the sun as me. Well one day I decided to consult wikipedia and there it was, an answer phrased like it was something a grandparent would say with a sly smile on their face.

See apples are trickier than other plants, they want to feel the seasons change before they decide to become what they were meant to be, to become a tree, and more specifically they need to feel the cold of winter before spring. Now the problem with that is being that I live somewhere where it’s happy being summer all year round, they’ll refuse to move out of their seeds without some coaxing. So you’ve got to convince them they’ve been born somewhere more to their liking, when in actuality you’ve just got to stick them in the fridge for a few days. They’ll emerge proud little sprouts thinking they’ve beaten the winter and are ready for spring, and then that’s when you can plant them in a machine that lights them and feeds just as they need automatically.

& while of course with nature it’s a numbers thing, and some won’t make it to be trees, enough are growing as fast as they can every day so that in years we’ll be able to repeat this again. So there you go, those are apple trees from seeds brough to me by my brother from georgia.

whenever someone else has one then four-near-five year olds are asking whe theirs are. until then they never really think of them