Thank God it has come to this. Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen … There is power in numbers, and post-2000, those blandly insignificant numbers, not meaningless but freighted with false importance that leads to soporific if not vacuous reflection while now, on the one hundredth anniversary of the twentieth century truly beginning in Sarajevo and the archduke terrorism assassination that helped set off the Great War, the one my grandfather, my first memories of him, his arm scar with the shrapnel still inside, the hard bit you could feel, the world a century ago that is brought forward to me as something so real that I can touch and smell it, grampa’s pipe tobacco and Amphora brand smoke, flakes of Sunkist skin, faint urine, black tea leaves. What is the English staleness that tilts toward death at all ages, but never mind because my grandfather is with me as I write this on the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War, the one where his stories, and by extension mine, come from.
That’s what it is in, then. Why the past, 1999-2013, fourteen years yield little in comparison. That in stories we begin with reflection and until this moment in 2014 there wasn’t a root to grow from, a place from where a hundred years is yours, that you can live for a hundred years in a single moment.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Next Race
