CHAPTER 1 - BREAKING LOOSE

The quest for conclusions is madness and I met Carl in the nuthouse where they called us nutcases and we called them the same, so it truly was a house of the insane. Everyone out of their minds, except for me and Carl. We were crystal clear and sane like child’s laugther and we took care of them who thought themselves to be taking care of us. Those nutcases, confused like caucasian coconuts and amusing like the same coconuts, and we laughed at those coconuts, me and Carl, and my name is Jones.

The hope for economic growth is nothing but a big joke and “Hey Jones”, Carl said, “How about a game of chess?” and I said yes, sure. Carl lit a cig and said what kills you is fear, nothing else. He said nothing made him scared, said nothing could kill him. “If anyone ever puts a gun to your forehead, don’t you worry, you know, let him pop it off if he wants to, all you need to do is drop a smile and give him a ‘Thanks for the cupcake, you cute little capricorn’, and your skin won’t even be scratched.” I laughed, but not because it was lunacy but because it was the first words of wisdom I’d heard for the past few years. “Hey Jones”, he continued “You know, from now on, you stand under my protection. Nothing will ever touch you, nothing will faze you, nothing’s a coincidence and you’re the reason I’m here right now and I’m the reason you are here and the first thing we’ll do is take care of these coconuts in this crazy nuthouse and then we’ll go on and squeeze the juice out of all the other coconuts in this beautiful world, and you know, behind the brick wall grow the palm trees, and hey Jones, that was a good move, I’m checked mate, mate, you won.” I lit a cig, popped a smile, said “We both won”. “You’re damn right Jones, both of us won. All of us win, and here comes Philip the coconut with the afternoon candy, Philip, my friend, bringing the magic like usual. Philip the provider, ain’t that right? Have a seat, my friend, have a seat.”

Philip, a quite likable thirtysomethingyearold and one of the coconut caretakers, handed us the pills and a tiny paper cup with what was said to be water and had a seat and we greeted and he asked me for a game of chess, and I said “Sure, but you know they say I’m mentally ill, and since you’re the one giving me the pills, you’ll probably knock me down in a flyflap” and he said “Not so sure about that” and I said “Me neither” and five minutes later his king was down like the sense of morality in western civilization and he said “Man, you know how to play chess, man” and I said “You’re damn right, now give me those pills designed to dumb me down.”

And numb me down. And on the second day god divided the waters from the waters and on the second day in the coconuthouse Carl held a concert in the smoking room, serving up classic after classic while firing up camel after camel. Then he told me he was the reincarnation of Trotskij and I was Ernest Mandel and Gandhi said “Hesitation is a sin” and “There’s no sense in nonsense” said Dalai Lama and “There’s so much thirst in the world that I’ll just go ahead and turn myself into a glass of juice and drink up myself” were appearently the words of master Piromoushi Dali Khan, whom Carl encountered on the hills of rural India and on those hills had tutored him on the best kept secrets of existence and when this was accomplished he ended up doing just what he had said, he drank up himself.

Cutting the bullshit is an exquisite art and Carl taught me the tricks of the craft just like master Dali Khan had taught him and already on the second day I was starting to enjoy myself in the nuthouse. The coconuts tried to talk but stuttered, the shrinks tried to walk but stumbled, the nutcases were clever enough to renew my hope in mankind and all of this provided for a highly entertaining circus. “Stop it”, said a darkhaired, cutelooking, twentysomething girl, sitting in the corner of the smoking room, puffing a marl, obviously bothered by something I was doing. “Stop what?” I replied, lighting a handrolled. “Stay out, dude. Stay out of my head.” I looked her in the eyes, locked by her eyes, dodged her darkness and decided to be quiet.

Before coming to the house of coconuts I spent two nigts in the house of addicts. I didn’t want to be in either of the two places. Didn’t even want to be in the country I was in, not to speak of the city. But something had happened to me, some sort of breakdown they said. I didn’t say anything. And appearantly, the wisest thing to do was to return to the home country, the home city, the nuthouse. But since I’d been smoking some of that good old weed, and since the coconuts in the nuthouse regarded that as a drug, and since the some sort of breakdown could’ve just been a result from smoking the greeen, the coconuts sent me to the house of addicts instead, to let their colleagues in crime have a look at me first. I followed every decision being made in the absence of my own decisionmaking with about as much resistance as a jellyfish brought out of the pacific to take part of a gigantic aquatic scientific lab experiment involving oil, water and white magic.

“Jones, do you know what day it is today?” the shrink in duty asked upon my entering the examination room. “Do you believe it is required to know what day it is in order not to be a nutcase?” I asked him back. “Do you know where you are?” he asked me. “Planet earth”, I answered. “Do you know why you are here?” Why am I here? Good question, not sure really. “No, not really.” “You are here because I’ve been told that you’ve been smoking hashish.” “Not hashish, marijuana.” “Whatever.” “I don’t puff the brown, just the goody greeen.” “Whatever. The reason doctor Olivares and doctor Nadoush sent you here is that they need to exclude the possibility that your current condition was caused by the thc before they can give you a proper diagnosis. For that reason, we’ve decided that you will stay here for the next few days. For observational purposes.”

Before unwillingly, or rather ununwillingly, returning to the home country, home city, nuthouse, house of addicts, I was doing the streets of Buenos Aires. The Nuevo de Julio, the pigeons, San Telmo, San Martìn, the rivers, juniors, lorenzos, la plata, the tango, bango, dango, voseo, las attorantas, los babosos, el curro, los piquoteros, el porro, los chorros, la yuta, Zafar!

One very late night or very early morning, while walking los adoquines together with a cool cat called Perrito, I caught sight of a man, or half of a man, slowly moving towards us. His legs were gone like solidarity in western civilization, his hair was long like the amazon, his clothes were torn apart like the concept of time in western civilization. Good things his arms were longer than his upper body, ’cause that was the way he moved, the only way he could move, by pushing his knuckles on los adoquines and carrying his half body one heavy step at a time. “Hombres”, the half man uttered while we were on the passing, “La boca, which direction?” I didn’t know, I was new in town, so I let Perrito the cool cat take care of the answering. “You’re heading the right way.” “Gracias.” “De nada.” “Buenas noches”, I said while looking at him snail away. For a second I wanted to offer him my help, but I held it back. The respect was far too great. Perrito felt my thinking, stopped walking, looked me straight in the eyes and said “Yo Jones, that’s one cool fucking cat, you know.”

Ever since I became a conscious creature my ideological standpoint regarding politics has always bounced back and forth between revolutionary, radical reformist, really revolutionary, ridiculously liberal, revolutionarly conservative or not giving a fuck but nowadays I try not to even think in those terms and I defintely no longer put any of those foul words into my mouth since I find them all silly, stupid and most importantly very, very unsexy and before flapping around on the streets of the Aires I was riffing the rues of Paris.

“He keum, t’veux du beuh?” a fivedimensional little gentleman threw at me from a high street corner on a lovely parisian soir. “Reufré, pas d’roro. Next time”, I hollered back and kept on strolling down the calle, thinking about how good a fresh, juicy strudel pavot would have been right there, right then, while at the same time keeping up a conversation with the girl I was rocking at the time who rarely said anything interesting, which is why I can’t recall what we were talking about. We popped down les éscaliers and hit the tromé, which wasn’t cramped but fairly crowded and we stole the only two empty seats like sneaky burglars. There was a movie playing on the other side of town and that’s where we were headed.

I swallowed films like peanuts at the time which is why I can’t recall what the title was. But I believe it was something I suspected to be overly sentimental since I can recall not being overly motivated on going. But hell, the girl I was rocking wanted to go and since anyone who enters a relationship inevitably becomes moronic enough to believe that sacrifice is a good thing, I followed along, instead of méfu a beuh and dropping a delicious strudel pavot on top of it, damn! and the girl’s name by the way was Crazy Christina but I only called her Christina. At the next métro stop, a middleaged man with weary clothes, a proud back, calloused eyes and an honest smile entered the train. He flung his guitar up and dished up some cool song. I think it was a Cat Stevens tune, but not one of the pitiful ones, probably Moonshadow. Or Father and Son. He made it a short version and then wrapped the whole thing up by popping up a mcdonald’s cup and asking for some cash, some coins, some coin. From the whole tragic car he received not one single pièce, not from me nor from anyone else and from the whole car he received not one set of eyes, not from me nor from anyone else and he stepped of the train, still with a proud back and that’s when I woke up and I at him, looking for him to look back at me, but he didn’t, he was looking ahead. A while later, when back up on the rues and avenues, I suddenly stopped my streetstrolling and sat down on the sidewalk. The girl I was rocking asked what’s up? I said nothing, I’d started to cry. The girl asked what’s up again, like, really, what’s up?? I didn’t reply and she asked again and I begged her wordlessly to shut up and asked myself who I had become.

If I would ever die, my whole theory on life would be incorrect but when my body one day dies there is no way in the world that I will let a funeral be held in my name as I consider it to be less clever than not having one and before I cried the callous tears in Paris I was back home in Chi-Town where I spent most my time at the Cages - dropping dimes, breaking ankles, swooshing them 3’s like Steve Kerr and when not playing hoops, just cruising around the court trying to impress the cheerladies by showing them that I wasn’t just a baller, I was a philosopher with dustier feet than K’Naan as well. I was Wittgenstein with a killer crossover.

In the b-ball circuits, people liked to call me Woody since I was white and I could jump. But I didn’t like it. Which I openly declared. I wasn’t anyone’s copycat.

My partner in crime, who is still my partner in crime and will always be my partner in crime, was Billy. Two summers before this one, Billy and I went on a little trip to show off our skills in the NY. At one point in what was to become a classic Rucker Park pickup-game (or at least that’s what we like to think), Billy snatched the ball from Rafer “Skip to My Lou” Alston. Then we left. We figured it couldn’t get any better than that and unlike MJ, we knew when to quit.

The story of Billy’s heroics became a street legend in Chi-Town, which is why he was given the name Billy the Rucker. But I preffered to call him Ruckabilly. Billy was half nigerian, half mongolian, and I’m quite sure that on his father’s side he was a direct descendant of Djingis Khan. His body was that of a lean mean maneating machine and he had the good looks as well. He had every reason to become a player, both with the ladies and on the basketball court, but didn’t. Instead he chose to go to school. Most people would say that it was the wise thing to do but I say, and I’ve told it to him repeatedly, that it was damn foolish. In my humble opinion, university studies are for suckers. It’s what I think now and what I thought back then. They’re a cause of confusion and not a source of knowledge. Information, yes. Knowledge, no. False information, yes. True information, no. The ability to read, yes. The ability to write, no. Theories, yes. Life, no.

But if there was one person who could prove me wrong on this one, it was Ruckabilly. The guy’s intelligence was out of the scale above average and his critical thinking was one hundred percent intact, so I hadn’t yet lost hope on him. Unlike the case with most of the other birds that we’d grown up with. I was just going to have to wait and see - and shove it up in his face every time I saw tendencies of starting to think the thoughts of the system and not the thoughts of his own.

Someone else had lost hope, however, I were to find out on this sunny day at the Cages. Worn out from too much concrete, me and Billy were chilling in a park nearby when Sharko, one of our childhood friends, came rolling towards us on his equally worn out board. “Ya’ wanna canna a pop?” Billy asked once Sharko had sat down in the shade of the ash tree, but Sharko declined the offer and made it obvious that he’d prefer not to speak, so we didn’t. Then I broke the silence by saying that the ash tree is one of only four trees in Illinois with opposite branching. Then Sharko told us that Hercules had commited suicide.

There is no future, just the perception of a future. There is no past, just the memory of it. There is a present, but as soon as we say there is one, it’s already gone. Which means that in order to be present, you have to not speak. When I was younger I didn’t speak very much. Nothing in this book is true. Nothing in any book is true. Not any word is true. What’s true is found in that which is never said. What Edison never said was always true. Edison was my best friend and brother from another mother. Together, we were like broken mornings and the chirping of the birds. His name was ironic squared. His head had the shape of alightbulb and he was blessed with the same relentless curiosity which defines every great inventor. Had he still been alive I’m absolutely certain that by now, he would have already come up with an invention groundbreaking enough to put him in the lines of the Wizard of Menlo Park himself.

In my eyes, Edison was like a little wizard. Not just intellectually gifted, he was also a precious pearl when it came to human relationships. Unlike me, everyone liked him. And unlike me, he seemed perfectly content with who he was, where he was and why he was. He was a few years younger than me and used to look at me with the sense of admiration that most athletically gifted kids get from their peers. I used to look at him with the same amount of admiration but since I never openly showed it or even admitted it, neither to him nor to myself, it was more like envy. I was the sports wizard, he was the social wizard. He was the creative thinker, I was the contemplator. No topic of discussion was ever too big and never too small. We discussed Einstein’s theories of relativity with equal intensity as the mystery of Dr Pepper (which consisted of the very peculiar fact that the taste of the drink was both delicious and disgraceful at the same time). I taught him how to dribble the basketball. He taught me how to use the Internet. He was always a step ahead of everyone else when it came to the latest technological advancements. At the age of 12, he had learned the art of html-coding and designed his own homepage. Despite his extraordinary level of knowledge he was far too cool to ever be considered a nerd. It was very rare that anyone messed with him and when someone did, I was the first one to know. And then I made sure it didn’t happen again. I was the protector of the prodigy, so to say, even though there was not much need for protection since Edison was a person of almost impeccable likability.

We shared the same backyard. He lived on the bottom floor of the house opposite of mine and I lived at the top. Which made very much sense. When he went outside he did it on the same level as the other kids out on the playground. When I left the house I did it from the bird’s perspective. With the good overview, observing and never down to earth enough to really become part of the rest of the group.

One summer, the two of us constructed a system of transportation between his room and mine which enabled us to send objects like a screwdriver, an external harddrive, a deflated soccer ball, a steaming hot pumpkin pie, a vhs copy of the ‘93 NBA Finals, The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, or a 1.44 MB floppy disk with the installation file for a PC Snooker game which was my first and only online gaming experience. The design was very much inspired by the ingenuity of Robin Hood, whom we both shared as an idol, when stealing all of the king’s money for the benefit of the poor. Another thing we shared was the need to push ourselves and our inventions (or rather, his inventions) to the limit. It wasn’t gratifying enough to see that it was working, the aim was always to see how well it was working. This invention collapsed when we tried to to transport a ten pound handle bar, causing the whole thing to break and had someone been playing underneath, that someone would have gotten really hurt (which resulted in Edison developing a highly sophisticated security and risk assesment procedure before every experiment). The following summer we tried to develop a secret communication system between our two rooms. Kind of like the one with the plastic cups attached to a sewing thread, but without the thread. After a few failed attempts, Edison abandoned the idea. He figured we didn’t yet have the resources for such a thing. Instead we started talking about the possibilities of teleportation.

On a springy sunday evening we had planned on making cinnamon rolls with cardamom at my place, to celebrate the rebirth of the trees. Edison canceled the baking plans in the last minute since he had promised another friend to repair his newly aquired and newly smashed Sony Playstation. I hit the basketball court instead for some late night shooting drills. Once home again I hopped in the shower and let the cool water soothe my excessively used right shooting wrist when a loud shout suddenly hit my eardrums. I cut the water, grabbed a towel and asked my sister and her boyfriend, who were watching The Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen, in the living room why the hell they were screaming. The two replied with question marks and one of those popped up in me as well, but I finished showering nonetheless. It wasn’t until the next day, when heading for basketball practice, that my sister called me up and said Edison had been hit by a car on the way home the night before, instantly killed, neck broken. It took a couple of days for me to wake up from that phone call. When I finally did, I checked the TV channel guide from two days before. Then I went across to the apartment of Edison’s family, where - after the initial hours of meeting each other’s grief - I was informed about the exact time of the accident. It turned out that it all happened at the very same moment that my eardrums were hit by the scream of my own name, “Jones!”.

The months following the loss of Edison, I saw myself drift away from my friends like a lifeboat out into the ocean. There was one person who could receive me and my sorrow. It was Hercules. We were in the same class and it was the last year of junior high school. Our relationship was built on respect rather than conversation. Affectionate handshakes rather than fake smiles. We were both equally uninterested in joining the rest of the class in theír circus of social insecurities. We were in school to get it done. Because we had to. Even though that was something both of us questioned on almost a daily basis. When learning about my loss, he was the only who looked me up. Came and sat by me. And stayed there. “You should be glad for Edison”, he told me. “He’s in a better place now.” I tried to taste those words but they were like Dr Pepper. Six years later, as I found out by Sharko while resting under the ash tree, Hercules had decided to go to that better place.

After Edison’s light was turned out, one year crawled by without a smile and as my why? grew bigger for every day, week, every meaningless month, I decided to do what I should have done long before. I said fuck high school and dropped out like the leaves come fall. Chi-Town had become a Non-Town. If I was silent before, by now I was soundless like a leaf as it falls. On a night dark like the future of a black whole I packed four plastic bags with the most important necessities, slid into my Answer I sneakers, grabbed my sister’s car keys and closed the door behind me quietly like a wildflower in bloom. I sneaked out of the house like a thief and found the rusty 84′ Buick Skyhawk standing at the corner of 75th and Drexel, right outside the same funeral home that took care of the deceased body of Edison. Before starting the car I sat still for a brief, thoughtful moment. East? West? Atlantic? Pacific? West it was and I hit the road like Jack. Jones, I told myself, don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more. Before the blink of an eye I was out on the I-80 and after a year of held breath I suddenly inhaled again. The air was soft, the stars so fine, the feeling of leaving the deepest valley to climb a new mountain soaked into my flesh. It felt like I’d awoken from a dream.

Unannounced was how Edison prefered to arrive. It was always with a sense of urgency that he knocked on our door. Whatever it was that he had on his mind, it was very important. On a very summery second day of May, the day after MJ and the Bulls knocked the Heat out of the first round of the 96′ playoffs, his knocking was even more intense than usual. “I’m watching the Bulls game”, I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to give him a better excuse. Of course, he didn’t let me off the hook that easily. He told me that if I couldn’t even come up with a more intelligent lie than that then I deserved to be annoyed, and he was right. “I need to go to the University of Chicago. Will you come with me?”

My answer was to put a jersey on, grab the bike key and jump into my Air Max CB sneakers. “I need some information”, he said while we were walking through the Oakwoods Cemetery, which is where he would end up just two years later. “There’s a professor over there at the university that I need to talk to. I think he will know what I need to know.” It took us about ten minutes, three laughs, two disagreements and one theory on the meaning of life to get there. It was the first time I’d ever set a foot in a university. The same went for Edison, but since he was incapable of feeling out of place in any social context he didn’t wait long before going to get done what he needed to get done. “Where can I find the department of Geology?” he asked a universitylooking type that was passing by. “You can ask over there, young man. By the counter.”

Edison headed for the information desk and waited impatiently for his turn. Waiting was something Edison did not enjoy. Especially when the people in front of him were asking questions of such low intelligence, but finally they got out of his way like abundant mosquitos. “I would like to know where the department of Geology is?” he asked with emphasis. He had to let the woman behind the counter know that this was serious business, nothing else. She looked at him as if he were a cute Cocker Spaniel at a Dog’s convention. “There is no department of Geology at the University of Chicago, my dear.” The reply struck Edison like an uppercut. “But I’ve heard there’s a professor here who…” The puppylady interrupted him with a kind smile while unconsciousely leaning her head just a little bit forward and to the side, the kind of gesture that only women above the age of sixty can pull off without being highly irritating. “My dear little friend, there is no longer a department of Geology here at the University of Chicago…” It seemed almost like saying the words “the University of Chicago” gave her the same amount of pleasure that a child gets from licking a lollipop. “But what the University of Chicago does have, is a department of Geophysical Sciences.” Edison looked at her as if he wanted to give her a mental slap in the face. “Why the hell are you messing with me old lady”, I could almost hear him think. “This is very important, you know…”

Polite as he was, however, Edison lay his annoyance aside and focused instead on how to, as effectively as possible, extract the information that he needed from the puppylady. “I can tell you that there used to be a department of Geology here at the University of Chicago, but this was a long time ago. In 1961, it was decided to merge the department of Geology with the department of Meteorology. The two departments then became what we now call the the department of Geological Sc…” Edison cut her off like an axe on dry wood. His time was far too important to tolerate this nonsense. “Where is it?” he asked her firmly.

After some cruckerling and kluckercling we finally made it to the department of Geophysical Sciences and since there was no time to waste, we stopped the first universitarian that crossed our way. He was a man with glasses, an academic man with glasses, an academic deeplyburiedinimportantthoughtslooking man with glasses and Edison caught his eyes like a pike. “What can I do for you two gentlemen?” he asked with a certain politeness that I wasn’t very accustomed to, it sounded sincere. “I would like to talk to professor Bowen, do you know where to find him?” The sense of urgency in Edison’s voice was still as present as an hour before and it wouldn’t go away, I knew a posteriori, until his quest for knowledge was resolved. “Professor Bowen?” the academic asked, surprised. “Yes sir, professor Norman Bowen, I need to ask him a question.” For some reason this set off a burst of laughter from the academic, but of the good-hearted kind. “Young man, what’s your name? Edison? Nice to meet you, Edison, my name is Fred.” The academic who called himself Fred offered his hand to the two of us. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but professor Bowen no longer works here”, Fred the academic said. “Why not?” Edison the layman asked, not even trying to hide his disappointment. “Well, he died forty years ago, unfortunately.” Judging from his facial expression, Edison didn’t take these news very well. It made him look sad like a losing cocker spaniel at a dog convention. “May I ask why you wanted to meet with professor Bowen?”

Edison looked at Fred the academic, or rather, seemed to examine him. As if to find out whether this man could be trusted or not. “I have a very important question that I need to find the answer to. The question is of such importance that I intend only to pose it to a highly reliable source in the field of petrology. And as far as I knew, professor Bowen was the best petrologist in Chicago.” Fred listened attentively and quickly understood that this was no petty matter. “I would even say that in the field of petrology, professor Bowen was the most knowledgable person in the world, not just Chicago. So you certainly came to the right place. But you certainly came at the wrong time…” Edison listened to Fred as attentively as he was listened to, as if he had finally met someone who spoke the same language as him. He digested the new pieces of information and rapidly reevaluated the situation. “Do you perhaps know if there is someone else that I could trust in this matter?”

It turned out that Fred the academic was something called professor emeritus in something called igneous petrology, the same field where Norman Levi Bowen had pursued an uncomparably succesful career over the course of three decades, during which he had spent about ten years teaching at the University of Chicago. Professor Fred invited Edison and me to his office, appearantly delighted over this unusual visit, and after ten minutes of both informative and entertaining private lecturing on the basics of petrology, Edison decided that he could rely on Fred’s level of knowledge when it came to the science of rocks.

When leaving the campus, Edison shone like a drolling clone. Although he didn’t get to meet the father of experimental petrology, professor Norman Bowen, he had gotten what he came for - an answer. The expertise of professor Fred had proven to be sufficient. The question that Edison so desperately needed to have illuminated was if it was really possible to turn wood into stone. “Turn wood into stone, what do you mean?” professor Fred had asked when having been asked. “Well, you know, is there any way that I can turn wood into stone?” was Edison’s question when having been questioned. Professor Fred had then explained that no, he, Edison, could not turn wood into stone, but yes, wood could, in fact, be turned into stone. But not by man, by nature, by time. This process was called petrification, stemming from the greek word “petra”, meaning rock. He showed us pictures from a place in the Arizonian desert called the Petrified Forest. With the captivating eloquence of a true raconteur he went on to tell us how this had all happened. The time was about two hundred million years ago. Back then, all the continents that today are scattered across the globe used to stick together in what was some sort of supercontinent. The name was Pangaea. What is now a dry, unhospitable and unbearably hot ocean of sand in the middle of nowhere was at that point in time a magnificent setting for some of the most fascinating events that have ever taken place in the known history of life on planet earth. Roaming dinosaurs, erupting volcanos and majestic monsoons didn’t exactly make any headlines, they were just everyday stuff. One of those monsoons had appearantly made the rivers violent and when the force of water encountered the wrath of volcanos, an entire forest of two hundred foot trees was slaughtered and buried under the ashes of volcanic fury. The minerals of the ashes migrated into the wood and in the fallen members of the formerly flourishing forest, those minerals began to crystallize. The Pangaea marriage turned out to be an unhappy one, the continents filed for divorce and wandered off in different directions, distancing themselves from one another. For some time, ice defeated fire and dominated the earth. But the willpower of the sun was immense and incessant and so the warmth always returned - and with it new creatures. They walked the earth, lived the earth, learned how to grow on earth, but they had no idea what was buried deep down below it. It wasn’t until late in the 19th century that a certain general Sherman discovered the logs that had been turned into stone and after more than two hundred million years had reappeared from the depths of the land. The very trees that had stood the ground of Pangaea and given oxygen to the dinosaurs had been transformed by nature and was now for mankind to behold - and preserve. So yes, it was possible. Wood could turn into stone. The Petrified Forest in Arizona was the proof and one day, Edison said, the two of us would go there to see for ourselves. Before leaving his office, Fred the professor asked Edison why he so badly needed to know if wood could be turned into stone. “Because I had to know”, was Edison’s reply. I thought it was quite a silly answer but Fred the professor seemed to hear something I didn’t. He looked at Edison and said, “You’re on the right track, young man. Stay bright, stay sharp, stay on the path you’ve found and I promise that great things will happen to you.”

As I steered my sister’s silver Skyhawk down Interstate 80 farther away from Chicago for every passing second, like Arizona drifting away from Pangaea, the memories of Edison’s enlightening encounter with professor Fred came into motion in the back of my mind. I needed a destination for my drastic but in my mind entirely logical escape from my hometown. The city where I’d been about to dissolve into just another shadow among all the other blurry reflections of their own unfulfilled selves. I needed a direction. I’d thrown myself into the unknown and in the highway darkness where the flashes of light appeared and disappeared faster than the leap of a jaguar, there was a choice that had to be made. The first choice in my new life. What did I want? Where was I headed? A few hours before I’d finally succumbed to the deafening screams of my alienated existence that had been torturing me for the past year. There was no regrets but it also meant that now was the time to retake the charge of myself. I was the one in the driver’s seat, steering my life. No one else would do it for me. No one else would do anything for me. It felt like the greybrownish substance that floated around in my brown had turned into damn mercury. If I was going to live the life that I wanted and that I’d dreamt of, it also meant that I needed to start making choices, conscious choices, active decisions. For the first time in my life, I felt that my life was mine. From now on, the shape of my future was going to be formed by no other hands than the ones holding the steering wheel in front of me. Fuck everyone else. Let them live their sorry lives if they want to, but I would not let them drag me down in the same gutter. I would go to Arizona. To the Petrified Forest. That was gonna be my first stop. My first decision.

I wouldn’t say that I believed in destiny back then, but neither could I deny that it felt like some of the things happening in my life did it for a reason. To tell me something, to somehow guide me, somewhere. When the whole Petrified Forest episode from two years before had all of a sudden made a surprise appearance in the cavalcade of images inside my head, I couldn’t neglect the fact that I sensed that something or someone else was trying to communicate with me. Ever since the night of Edison’s accident, when I’d heard him screaming my name at the exact same instant as his death, my interpretation of the texture of life in this universe had undergone a constant and still ongoing reevaluation and reconstruction. I hadn’t really come to any conclusions that made sense. It was more like all the conclusions that used make up my perception of the world and me as a human being were being thorougly disassembled, one by one. Ubi dubium ibi Libertas was an expression I was unfamiliar with at the time, but looking back, this idea would play an important role in the years to come.