walking through memory's places (Final Act) by: Jeremy Hight

I am now getting a glass of water. In my memory of 1976. The hall carpet is puke orange shag which is probably something from films that was deemed to fit. The walls are crooked and seem extremely high, this must be from being a boy of 6 ; the scale is off like the child’s drawings of purple sky, planes with wings at odd angles with the logic of faces in a fake Picasso portrait painting, of cars flat as crushed cardboard and cats and dogs seemingly made of wires and cute awkward smiling faces. This makes sense in an odd way. The bathroom as I pass is vivid and feels accurate. The kitchen as I turn a light on in this memory comes alive with earth tones and a sense of having left in the real world just minutes ago until I now reach for a glass and essentially violate the belly of a cloud. The cupboards have eroded away in these decades, the sad bastards not relevant enough, maybe not individuated, like those people in the background in iconic photos and crowds . A romantic notion is to imagine these people as somehow incidentally remembered, some passive sort of recall becoming extras in dreams at night. Who knows, probably not. The glass has little gold flowers on it as the water from some place holder of 35 years fills the glass.

walking through memory's places (Act 2) by: Jeremy Hight

A fierce santa ana wind is blowing so hard it is bowing in the window here in 1987 in my bedroom. The dry wind other years will send huge fires up and raging, some to burn to the ocean shore so far from here. My mother’s Multiple Sclerosis has sent her through the sad progression from walking to cane, to 3 prong cane , to walker, to wheelchair…soon it will be the humming electrical one she will ride around in until her body denies her even this. But in this memory and place she is asleep downstairs while the wind blows and will awaken to another day here in this world , this tissue paper thin world of many slivers of past and place. The stereo plays a Kraftwerk record, that one scratch soon to click and pop. The wall posters are Theda Bara and SST records. The bed by the wind has covers that change colors , I guess I can’t remember which ones to fit here so it flickers like some insane illuminated sign or a John woo film fight scene set to fabric. It is a melancholy room. The walls are a bit dirty and the closet is cluttered. The bright green of the artwork Cameron Jamie gave me when we were friends glows in recall amongst crushed books, magazines and old clothes still vivid now. The wind again bends the window, this time in the shape of a glass toenail. My brother’s room down the hall as I walk toward it moves from painted lines n the wall, rush records and a surfboard to the empty room and mattress on a floor, the dusty hall of spiders it became a decade later. The bathroom as I pass has bent wood for the floor, the shower is a glass so frosted in recall that it is near white. The sinks are aligned and waiting with a sad little floor dresser full of aging junk and beer cans. The window is a hole and the wind should blow through now as I move toward it but this synthetic place has no wind, only this illusion outside, outside the illusion inside that I still dream of, have nightmares of, hold onto for reasons I can never grasp. I walk down the stairs and front door is vivid and feels accurate while the hallway is half empty and half some stock image from a hundred horror films, the huge impossible banister pointing out to the windy night that forever exists and is long crushed into a past never to again be touched. This place I want to leave but in dreams I will always return.

walking through memory's places (Act 1) by: Jeremy Hight

It is 1992. There is an odd glow in the distance that changes colors in this memory. The air is cold even though it surely wasn’t , again some literal placemarker of the past in some electro-chemical confetti and the way it re-assembling (flawed) into memory, the way of old television sets of a time never to be seen again, of the color off and knobs for it, of horizontal , of vertical, of static and fuzz and fade.

This lawn is surely from a series of photographs that now sit in a bag behind old clothes in storage as much as this moment or all the years of these steps and spaces now forever undead with all the oblique great distances and closeness that memory entails. The cold seems more acute now and there a santa ana wind that was not there.
I did not know what was coming, those words from my father’s mouth in that water bed now forever a country and lone island at once. The television with the brown cable box above it will glow forever like
some ember more than integer in front of this long discarded bed.

The door and the hall lead past a living room now a carpet on nothing, another television I took soon after this world and place to San Francisco to later die in Grad School at Cal Arts painted, damaged, but with the grace of someone who has lived a long life and wears the years , a beauty we cannot possibly touch nor fully understand like my luminous souled grandmother we will both bury and celebrate in a few days from tonight. Her grace nearing 100 we cannot touch, only celebrate even as we mourn.

My father says now “It is on” as he did then. His words are clear even now as the back wall undulates and the window changes shape behind that tv in this forever and gone room at is forms and people and place . The L.A riots have begun. The distant glow was the city burning/ is the city burning. In south central unbeknownst to this space of memory my grandmother can see flames down the street. The images of unrest, of police brutality, of corruption and anger, they are a sort of oatmeal of motion on the tv now as I turn back in this past and walls vanish, , my mother turns and looks at me , her eyes now only of photographs and recall , my father soon will turn up the volume on that tv in this room now unfinished and vivid, breaking a bit in recall as time goes on. The bed undulates and the lamp light grows clear now in this place drawn from a million pieces , surely one of a thousand places like this to walk imperfectly as past. i will come here vividly and incompletely for the rest of my life in sleep.