So, the data is this: I bumped my head. The details are these: I bumped it so hard that the corner of a stone wall made a neat cross on my forehead. I looked up ready for the almighty to speak. No one spoke. Okay, so that wasn't how it would play out. I looked down and saw blood on my hands. I tried to remember where I was. I looked in the mirror. I was in a bathroom in a foreign country. It was a foreign country where they put waist-high stone walls in kitchens so that anyone daring to pick up a bit of trash from the floor would be bludgeoned. I supported the idea--the robots should be doing the cleaning, not us philosophical humans--but now the corner of that wall had made its way into my little brain. I did not believe it was much at first. I have slipped on an icy porch and split my eyebrow on a laundry hamper, I have cut off the end of a finger, and I have been bitten by nearly every kind of poisonous creature--yet here I am. But this fellow in the mirror looked worried. This happened at precisely 5pm on a Friday. Was this a sign? I opened my fridge and drank my last beer. I looked in the mirror. Still bleeding. So that wasn't the message. I walked to Carolina's, the only one left on the coast besides the rooster, the three kittens who fear my fingers but perch on my feet, and the baby cockroach who keeps trying to snuggle into bed with me. Carolina said many things in an alien or ancient language then drove me to the hospital. Etc. Now here's the thing. I got stitches, I got headaches, and then finally, it seems, I got superpowers. Please don't go cracking your eggshell skull to be like me, but something happened when that little bit of stone let the air into my brain.  At first it was only fear. Things darted past my sight, dark shadows brushed past my head.  I ducked, weaved, blocked, afraid another wall might attack me. I wore a blue hat at all times. I knew that if I took it off, that bit of air would leak right out, and behind it an avalanche of everything that fills my brain. But once your skull is broke open, you cannot close it. Once the air gets in, it goes where it wants, does what it wants. And, most disturbing, it is you. I left the island, realizing that there no one grows old. I assumed my powers would only work there. Everyone there seems to have them. But I have been cracked open, the mess of my thoughts laid out, and one day I will have to take off this hat.

The time is now and now just so happens to be 5:19 on a Friday in the fishing village where they have sent me to keep me from inheriting Abissinia. Inherit is a loose term as what they really fear is my marching into the center of the city with all the generals behind me and also a load of spears aimed right at their betraying hearts. Unfortunately, those betraying hearts were also legally elected. I went to school in the West, so I'm having some torn loyalties. The gods chose me but the people chose someone else. It's an open question as far as I'm concerned. I mean that last time I checked, the gods--even just one of them--could outvote just about anyone. Unfortunately, they are always too drunk to make it to the polls, and lord knows what happens when you go and get one of those voting buses and try to collect them up. I tried to get the voting stations to stay open for an eternity, but they have very earth-bound thinking. It's why they have made such a mess of the environment. Thor used to make more smoke in an afternoon than these corporate fools, but he also knew if he didn't do some clean up, Sif would be all over him. She's a nag, he used to say, but she's my nag. Though, as you know, that comes from a text whose authenticity has recently been challenged. I think the juries still out, though the fact that it was discovered by the "Putting the Men Back in the Chariot Seat" movement on a piece of latrine paper they dug up from their archives might throw at least a penumbra of doubt across it. In any case, it's now 5:28 and while time is passing, I'm neither inheriting the kingdom nor am I drunk. This, of course, must be remedied immediately. Therefore, I'm introducing these notes. In dire times like these, we need important non-sequiturs and other Latin terms I don't understand to stand in for the real thinking that no one seems to be doing. It's a first step. And sure, it's a little woozy, the old foot coming down all crooked on a cobblestone street that not one cent of taxes has found for at least a millenia. But it's a step all the same. And in a pretty hot pair of prince heels. Don't judge. You live in the future and don't understand a thing about straps. It's all about the calves. You can do almost anything with a strap. A bootstrap is basically the caveman cousin to the ones we've got. I've got to go drink the fire of the gods now, but more of whatever this is will come soon, and because it will come in the future, it will obviously be much better, despite the vague notion both you and I have of what this is. What we do know is this: we are all much smarter after the sacred taking of our afternoon "tea." So, I'm off. Send my love to the people of  Abissinia, and remind them not to pay their taxes.