A list of firsts: Lohbado memoir episode 4

lookout tower, acrylic on paper

Pick up a paint brush. Write the memoir with paint brush. There’s something magical about holding a brush and pulling it across a surface. The brush leaves a trail of paint, visual sensation with emotional overtone or mental vibration... Here’s where it disintegrates into poetic fancy...  or silence.

Silence.

Start again.

Make a list of firsts.

First you could describe how you feel right now. Tune in to what you’re experiencing, what’s in your mind, what’s going on around you. Stop, look and listen. Make a list of what’s going on with each of the senses. 

Sometimes Lohbado felt good and sometimes he didn’t.

Discipline. Without discipline, you could sink into depressive inertia. Discipline forces one to do something, even though one feels uninspired, groggy or distracted.

Ok, the author of the book on how to write a memoir suggests making a list of firsts. The first time Lohbado contemplated the letter O. The first time Lohbado picked his nose. The first time he peed his pants and vomited on the floor at school. The first time he was severely punished. The first time he fell madly in love. His first exposure to radiation.

While undergoing radiation treatment in the Department of Standardization Hospital, before leaving the OOO Dome, Lohbado vowed that if he could make a reasonable recovery, he would devote his life to serving Oogah and Oorsis. He went for treatment after his skin broke out in red burning spots. That was his first major sickness. It happened after a fuel tank exploded, just outside the glass dome over the community of four hundred people where Lohbado worked for six years as a PBE (push button expert) employed by the DS (Department of Standardization). He knew which buttons to push... more about that later. First we’ll begin with the list of firsts, or at least, we’ll first start with the firsts and then deal with second thoughts later.

The OOO Dome was a specialized community in the Secret Desert. Lohbado frequently mentioned his experience there, even though he was told not to talk about it. There was a way to talk about it, without blowing the whistle, betraying secrets or aiding the enemy. At this point, Lohbado wasn’t sure who was the enemy. He knew that as long as he stayed within the circular enclosure, or within the round rim of the bowl containing what he was told to accept without questioning, he would be safe.

What lay outside the bowl was none of his business. OOO computers were monitoring the situation. For every 0 there was a 1. The stick-like shape of One gently probed the opening of Zero. It was fine to talk about the OOO as long as he stuck to describing the letter and its circular shape and perhaps to the binary logic of zero and one; but he must never talk about the vast space inside the donut, the hole into the undefined, or what appeared to lie outside the realm of reason and human experience. This is what the OOO people meant by the holy ghost. A ghost literally inhabited the hole inside the letter O or Zero.

If Lohbado could put his finger on the centre of that space inside the hole... something no man or woman had ever done before and no man or woman was ever likely to do. Nobody had ever managed to put their finger on space. One could only talk about boundaries, limits, shapes, forms... If Lohbado could do so, maybe he would solve the riddle of the universe, the Great Mystery as to why there is something as opposed to nothing. The riddle was unanswerable. Each answer only generated more questions, in an endless circle, or infinite regression.

Disappointment after false promise and illusions, Lohbado wandered into the forest. He found consolation in nature. This could be something to write about in the next episode... Lohbado’s miraculous experience by a lake near a rock hill surrounded by forest.