I Ponder the Bewilderment

I sometimes play a game with myself when I am walking long distances. I did the same in the past from time to time when I was driving long distances. I imagine a past version of myself, for example when I was seventeen and cloistered in the nefarious Fort Stockton, Texas. I imagine this past version of myself occupying my current self’s senses for a short while. I choose senses instead of mind because it makes the whole fantasy more intriguing. This ancient me experiences everything I am experiencing during my walk without the experience of the intervening decades. I ponder the bewilderment at having skipped those steps.

One specific facet I pondered this morning during the walk z Narodní Třidy přes Vyšehrad a domů was the bewilderment at an alien language surrounding my ancient self. How would he approach finding out what this language was once he returns to his own time? I lived in a world without instant access to the sum total of human knowledge held in the palm of one’s hand during my high school years. Would he go immediately to the Fort Stockton High School library or the Fort Stockton Public library and scour books on foreign languages until he found references to words he briefly glimpsed? And what would those words have been? Street names? Na Pankráci? Brand names? Škoda? Words or phrases repeated in advertisements or grafiti? Šetři peníze. Jdi do prdele, pičo.

It’s a fun game.