Children, it has always seemed to me, have a greater understanding of many things than adults do. As they grow up, this native sensitivity is smothered, buried, and destroyed like someone pouring concrete over cobblestones, and finally replaced by what we call knowledge. Knowledge is a vastly inferior commodity when compared to imagination, Imagination is the money of childhood. That is why it is no surprise that little children have a better understanding of nature, death, God, animals, the universe, and some truly hard to grasp concepts like love, than do most adults.

Now with the eyes of a child I focused on everything that wasn't there. The world has changed, it's a different kind of place now, people have changed. Instead of looking up at things we now spend most our time looking down on them. Another reason no one is happy anymore is that people don't have the balls anymore to do anything about the negative these days. Balls, like Imagination, seem to shrivel with age.

In my arrested development stage, life still holds a fascination for me, suspended like the sun over happy memories of the last days of my childhood. Some one, or some thing watches over us I believe, even those of us that stray from the herd.

Here in Texas it is rumored that when you die you go to Willie's house. At the very worst you wind up in a bar singing Jimmy Buffet cover songs. While both of those sound like good destinations, I sat under an apple tree my mother planted many many years ago and thought about a place healthy for kids and green plants, of diamond studded sky's at night, fields of bluebonnets, and everything else time has taken away.

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  I felt a slight shiver as I watched the grimy, neon old Route 66 night slide by my car window. There had to be safer places to be. More practical things to do with my time. I meditated on the subject for about 20 blocks, and the only two possibilities that came to mind were starting up a nudist ranch in the piney woods of East Texas or being the friend that Janis Joplin never had.
  
  So I sat back against the seat with a slight shiver as I watched the grimy, neon Route 66 night slide by my window.
  
   

I had to face Freckles. I decided to pray. Dear God, Allah, Jesus, or L. Ron Hubbard. I wasn't taking chances, maybe it was a cry for help. I waited and waited, no one answered. Either thet didn't exist, they didn't care, or maybe none of them were not interested.

I ventured over to the window and thought I saw a vision. It was not clear if the vision was biblical or not, but several times in the past she had given me a religious experience. Time would tell. She was a gorgeous blond about nine feet tall crossing Austin Street toward my apartment. She looked up for a moment and I saw her face, she did not have that humorless, cold, brittle, Teutonic look. She appeared vibrant, full of fun, adorable, and it's hard for a nine foot tall girl to appear adorable. She looked very sophisticated, at at the same time, like someone you might have left at the country fair of your dreams. Someone who should have always been with you.

I watched as she turned up the sidewalk. Over the fence in the distance near a warehouse I saw a limo, a dollop of clear Texas blue sky, a slow motion man going through a garbage can in the world of the dimly lit, roiling around in the ancient streets like dung beetles pursuing happiness as they are being run down by life .

I closed my eyes and thought of dreams that never were.

I stepped out on the porch and watched Freckles coming up the sidewalk like a red tide at sunset. Somewhere in the world there was a sunset. When I lived in New York there was often no sun or sky to speak of, just garish shadows that fell like elderly people onto the sidewalks and the dull gray blanket would turn darker and bone shillingly colder and underneath it the rats and people scurried faster and faster.

I seem to have become disenfranchised from the rat race and the human race, and began experiencing an inability to differentiate between the two. A possible index of my loneliness.

Freckles waved at me. Now I had to decide where to take her for dinner.

I ate five shots of Crown Royal with several Vodka Tonics on the side. By then everybody in the place looked familiar, especially after I had a Long Island Ice Tea as a chaser. Freckles didn't seem to be able to keep up, but what the hell did I know. I did not decide to purchase a small aluminum foil package of new improved Tide from a nervous pale man called the Weasel who didn't know why he was called the Weasel. I reflected how few of us in this crazy world know who or what we are.

I was pretty well walking on my knuckles by the time we got home. Freckles was taking a lot for granted as she began removing her blouse and her skirt.

"You know I have been impotent for about as long as you have been alive," I joshed.

"That's fine," she said, " it's that time of the month."

'"You are fucking kidding." I cried out.

"I ain't fucking at all"

I just stared at her.

"We could cuddle." she said.

Very late that evening the phone rang interrupting cuddlaribus. I untangled myself from Freckles. Earlier we had talked and I just presumed I had done the right thing before Christmas by giving her her space. What she had wanted was my space, and by that I did not mean the social networking site. I'd been parked in a spirtual towaway zone for many years now and I wasn't sure I needed to start feeding the meter just yet.

She was looking at me from the bed.

"Why me Allah?' I said.

The idea of renewing this doomed relationship was not especially wise or clever. It was just an admission of my own ability to love anyone. Love to me was alot like sticking your sausage in a light socket while playing Russian roulette with the breaker switch. This did not make me a proud American.

My thoughts were a troubled, jumbled embroidery of love, loneliness, distance, life and death. My life flashed by like the blurry, pastel view from a childhood carousel. I thought, maybe that's all it really was.

When I climbed back into bed. Freckles was asleep.

I didn't bother to wake her.

I woke up about half past Gary Cooper time. Freckles was gone. She had pinned a note on her pillow saying she left breakfast on the table. Whatever it was fizzed and bubbled and turned into a darker color like a high school chemistry class experiment.

As I read the morning paper, I kept seeing her face and mine passing each other like two strangers on a commuter train. I then decided I needed to have a serious talk with myself which is hard to do with someone who won't listen. In the parallel lives of Wes and TcbnTX I cared about them both. I may have even loved them. I mean afterall, between the two of them they almost made up an interesting person.

By the third cup of coffee I had fairly given up on the dreamy shards of any youthful notion that life would go on forever. Like every other graffiti-strewn, ennui-driven subway train to nowhere, life would come to a screeching halt and all the passengers would have to get off.

I decided to leave my three rooms and a path and get on with life, instead of waiting around to hear from dead people. "Forty years is long enough to wait on a dead person." I said to all my imaginary friends.

I was one clean shirt away from having to stay in. The background music was trying to convince me that there was no way I could see a happy ending to this story. Maybe Hollywood and the fairy tales had used so many happy endings there were no more in stock.

I tried to recognize the face in the mirror but I was amazed to find I hardly remember what I looked like. Is that what happened when you died? You just blipped off the screen and people forgot you? I still thought TCBnTx and Wes equaled an adequate human being for me. Not that I was all that demanding.

The news was depressing. I left the building doing my best Elvis impression. I stepped out into the day and saw a guy living in a cardboard box, cutting little windows in the sides like you did as a child. If anybody has ever been a child.

I walked to the corner store run by some kind of born again Koreans. More and more I began to feel like I had the soul of a Korean businessman, I did not waste time on the window dressing of life. I survived only on the bare essentials. And these I stockpiled fairly heavily. If things got as bad as everyone was saying I may not want to go out again. I bought enough food for nine lives and enough coffee to keep Amarillo up well past its bedtime. I thought of my old grandpa Slim, wearing his John Deere gimme cap sitting on the porch watching the world go by.

I begain thinking I should try creating a new magazine. I would call it High Times, its major feature would be a foldout centerfold with pictures of high quality cocaine. I don't know what the readership would be but I suspect a lot of people might like to snort the centerfold.

I was confused by todays news. I considered a prayer. Then I said to hell with it. Let the good Christians of the world pray for my eternal soul. Let the little old man with the beanie tranverse the slums of Africa and tell the aids ridden, starving, hopeless, uneducated families of twelve not to use condoms. It cost forty million dollars for him to make the trip. I'm not sure the Church might not have been better served spending that money on cat food for all the cats left behind by all the witches of the world it had burned.