I didn’t know what to say at first when I was confronted by a thought—the conductor of a train, a young man, in Alaska, that told us about the history of the region over the microphone and then showed his face and posed the question: “Does the voice match the face?”
So I had defined voices from the future (more advanced than me) as having mothered me—hence my decision to define voices from the future as the voices of women. Well, this conductor of Alaska, then, as a man, must have been narrating the past because he was a man and also because he started out with a voice that eventually matched a face such that he was in the process of becoming real: he represented me, in fact. That wasn’t the same as narrating a past as a real person—he was the combined voice of the past perfect, and, as such, I understood, from the thought and my reaction to it, that, in fact, the voice of the future—a perfect voice that had yet to become real (in the same way that AOC started out perfect and then became a real person) saw me in the same way that I saw Zach—that was this young, happy go lucky man’s name.
So Zach might’ve been in the process of becoming real, but he wasn’t real yet: instead he was the definitive version of the past perfect—the combined or superimposed goodness of all goodness that had transpired before I was born. I remember thinking, however, that it was annoying that he might’ve been walking through all the cars on the train and asking if the face matched the voice in the expectation of getting a tip—and i wondered if that were how somebody in the future saw me—so I asked myself: what am i expecting that would annoy my friends and family? I couldn’t think of anything I was doing that would’ve been considered annoying except possibly hoping for an encounter with Alex thanks to my broadcast and or the fact that I might’ve expected, at some point, to get paid in my own lifetime.
Then I considered the possibility that, thanks to President Jack Daniels, people weren’t making enough money to live—there was no livable wage, and so Zach might’ve been forced to rely on the generosity of others. I just thought it was kind of coarse because, thanks to President Jack Daniels, I’d never make enough money to marry and raise a family of my own. Therefore I was annoyed mostly with Jack Daniels, really; in fact I really didn’t like the guy because life out there was way too difficult. The pursuit of happiness, as I might’ve said before, is not enough. We need to be happy people—and that starts with people making enough money to pay for a couple of children with a house big enough for them to have their own room. That was a long way from happening—and, in the interim, as a last resort, children were being forced into existence in order to outnumber the ruling class—as if they were being drafted to do something about our poverty—even if that just meant outnumbering the ruling class when it came time to vote—that was good, i guess, but anytime you’re forced into existence you tend to suffer, as we do, in war.