I spend a great deal of time near windows. At work, my nose is about 2 feet away from one all day long. Because of light changes i can see people through it half of the day and the other half of the day people can see me. Seldom do we all see each other at the same time. I guess it's a bit like role-playing in that way; i like to watch and oh, now you're watching me. Please don't look now. I'm eating. Please turn away.

I've seen some intersting things through this window. Once, a great white wolf dog was being chased through traffic by about a half-a-dozen people, 2 of which are the rhythm section of a fairly popular indie rock band.

Just yesterday a police car pulled up on the wrong side of the street, sirens lit up and festive. The driver jumped out, and gun drawn straight out from two stiff arms, yelled at someone to get down on the street; which this certain someone did, face first into the cigarettes and gum that decorate our sidewalks. Just atop some of this gum and slightly to the right of the gun a girl was trying to get her bike unlocked, her bag of groceries from the health food store so close that the cop might've been pointing his gun at her jar of tahini. The cop yelled, many other sirens came racing up dressed in black and white chrome and steel, other guns were drawn and the girl continued to unlock her bike just inches away from it all, seemingly unfazed, her mind quite possibly distracted by visions of POM juice animals being massacred for no reason other than to color the juice blood red. But that's another, far more tragic story than this.

This is about windows and not even the one with all the policemen and gangsters in it either. This is about the window is in my apartment that my bed pushes against, the one that my sleeping head lays about two feet from each night. (So, for those keeping score, that's more than half my day within two feet of a window.) ((for those keeping metric score, that's 60.96 centimeters.)) (((that's more than half a day on the days i work for those who scour sentences for inaccuracies.))) ((((but if you do that then why are you here anyways?))))

This window can be pretty noisy. Not the window itself but whatever's behind it, which i suppose is usually cars and people and arguing people and people on drugs and people on drugs who argue in cars and (once) a 19" crt monitor which seemingly fell from the sky and landed hard in the middle of the street creating a mess of cars with people arguing in them for most the night.
It can get noisy and it took a little while for me to get used to it. I'd tell myself that the street is an ocean, that the cars are waves and the sound i hear is the tranquil pound of the sea hitting up against the shore. The sirens are whales, the garbage trucks make the crunch of coral against coral while the manic, once high school theater star turned drug addict screaming at his lover and feigning suicide in the center of traffic is a dolphin. A sweet, bubbly, smarter-than-thou dolphin coming off three-weeks of shooting speed and sacrificing any reasonable thought collected since childhood to the fires of self-hate. Cute lil dolphin!

Last night was different though and I didn't need to make an ocean. Sometime soon after i hit the bed something unnatural settled in, a strange force overcame our fair city. It was perfectly quiet. All at once, and for a few short minutes, no one was in their car driving by, no one was on the street, no monitors fell, and no trash needed to be picked up. It. was. perfectly. quiet. As if some city-wide decree was passed that said "Do not do anything between 2:01 am and 2:04 am" and everyone complied because if you did your name would be submitted for a chance to win a fabulous new i-phone and by golly, i'll surely be quiet and not do anything for those few minutes because i'd sure like one of those i-phones dont'cha know.

It was quiet, perfectly so like a baby wrapped in her first blanket, quiet enough that i think the moon shone brighter and took on a fullness seldom seen over these skies. I was taken by the silence, not yet asleep but entranced, what a jewel the sound of nothing is in the city!- in those moments of quiet i'm sure that many took steps closer to perfection. Me, I tumbled out the window, all of me falling out into the world and back into time and into another window that i slept under.

Let me try to simplify this because it all makes very little sense to me now anyway. I didn't actually fall out the window, no, that would hurt and be pretty embarrassing (and noisy)- what happened is that my mind slipped out the window and traveled backwards about ten years prior. entering through the window of a place where my 10 years ago self was on the brink of sleep, in nearly the identical state that i was in last night in bed. At this place these two "me" consciousnesses met and exchanged information, my "now" consciousness telling my 10 years ago self about the state of me in 2007 and my 1997 self registering that and creating a sort of deja-vu that i can now remember experiencing that night 10 years ago. The deja-vu information that i felt in '97 was:
a) i live in san francisco.
b) iam different in that many of the things that were so important to me then are not now.
c) this is a problem.
My initial reaction to this in '97 was sadness and disbelief- i had a very distinct ideas then that are at odds with the deja-vu information about my future self that i was receiving. Basically, my future self worried me.