The Wisdom of Age is learning it can always get worse. But the misery of Endless Childhood is a self-inflicted curse. I was right about hindsight being blindness, though I didn't really know what I was talking about at the time. Having aged several years, lost a mother, and some hair, I've been living lots of days that are trashed in advance, beached on the shore of a backward glance, bloated, trapped and helpless. So how do I roll down off this beach, and learn how to swim again? I'll have to evolve new limbs, and learn how to crawl, and learn how to stand, and learn how to walk on land. I wasn't always a washed-up whale, beached and bloated and trapped in the past. In fact once upon a time I was a little plastic beach ball, and I could move pretty fucking fast... My boyhood was buoyant and insane, tossed by the wind across the tops of the waves, all along the safe shallow shoreline, on a bright sunny day... But, when I brushed the blunt edge of some grown-up's impatience, my immediate reaction was total deflation, even in the absence of strong-arm persuasion, my thin skin burst, and I lost my elation. Sinking in the shallows, a broken beach ball, The Kid With No Skin, ashamed, and red, and raw, beyond reason, way too sensitive, blurred eyes blinking, hot shame rising, cold heart sinking, and singing with the savage howling wind, which blew through the ragged, growing hole in the skin of my belly, soft underbelly, all over underbelly, it's all one big vulnerable belly, when you're a ball, with nerves all over... I follow the feeling, and allow it to surge, and cover me up 'til I'm further submerged, and then sinking and sinking and afraid, on the verge of submersion, up to my eyes in aversion, when miraculously there's an inversion as I cross the thin line, between the green and the blue, and suddenly the whole world is new... I close my mouth and lungs, I hold my breath and open my eyes. Sunbeams are columns here, they hold the roof that blocks the sky. It's nice and quiet here, and nothing can touch me. My limbs and heart beat slow, and no one can rush me. My fingertips and toes resolve themselves into a steady engine, I am a submarine: silent and safe and absolved of tension... Then a lifeguard reached down, touched my shoulder, and broke the spell... I awaken on the beach, Now, the sun has set, "God what's that smell?" As I lay here, stinking, under twinkling stars, I begin to notice tingling in my newborn legs and arms. I've been dozing in the present while my mind was floating in the distant past. As I lay here, sand piled up all around me like the bottom of an hourglass. "How much more symbolic can it get?", I laughed, and though I still felt grim, I decided that I'd better get to work on learning to improve, and move, and make use of my new limbs, very carefully at first... and so with slow, delicate intention, I ease down the sloping beach. I can hear the sound of ceaseless, peaceful rolling waves, they're almost within reach.