Lost: First lines of stories, biographical fact, the images of last night's dream, all with the water running down my back and into the drain during my morning shower.

But perhaps that drain leads to the dank, subterranean areas of my psyche, where the dreams and the ghosts dwell. Yesterday I dreamt that a plump middle-aged Italian woman taught me how to macerate fruit. Before the dream, I would not have been able to explain the process of macerating fruit. Yet how could I have known the tablespoons of liqueur needed to soak a peach? Perhaps I read it somewhere in a newspaper or saw it on PBS. Anyways, I think that this knowledge is simply spillage from that drain which, like most drains that manage the waste of the living, gets clogged. This spillage is what I call random-access memory.

I don't control it at all - hip-hop lyrics, Trinidadian proverbs, sci-fi references, Creole folklore, Vodou mythology, etc. belch out from under the surface before returning to where it came from, the surface sealed ripple-less as if nothing had happened.

Perhaps that's why I am such a sentimentalist and hence an orangepeeler, peeling mundanities of the past to get close to the dearly departed. I cling to the past as if it was a rubber raft by which I float on a sea of nothingness. I've got only sensation left: the light on a certain morning in Seattle, Cassandra's gap-toothed smile, the redness of Jimmy�s tiger-patch cap. At the bottom of this briny blackness pickle facts and dates and other crucial details.

Unfortunately, random-access memory does not serve me very well. Birthdays are mis-remembered, final exams dreaded, appointments missed, non-fiction poorly-written, and a fictional voice developed painstakingly, by a spider of a woman, papering her walls with Post-its and visual cues, skeins to make a web of a world where the randomness of events and assemblage of characters and details are only seeming (and not at all intentional, as that would be quite rude to both characters and reader).

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