There are many opossums outside of the Midnight Pub, near the trashcans or by the kitchen. If you choose to approach an opossum for their wisdom, first test if it speaks english. Certain highly intelligent ones are granted passage into human language by the opossum elders. Their observations can be quite insightful, if you bother to listen and understand them. Do not be afraid of what they say. Do not be afraid at all.
Here is one such encounter had with an intelligent opossum. She was stopped while running down an alley, seeming rather urgent in her mission, whatever it may be.
It is polite of you to ask me what I am doing. I have thoughts that do not exist and a burning desire to share them. But you cannot communicate irrationality without images and words, you can only translate it to examples that evoke such incomprehension.
I spoke to the space between a brick wall and a house earlier. I needed a higher level of organization. My walls shrunk around me and I wept, I did not understand how everything seemed to be fleeting into a singularity before my eyes. I need a changable platform to hop into. I'm looking towards stairs I climbed before, up to light-riding and quite steppable hands, but my eyes fall to my failures. I did not climb. I did not even touch the first step.
My brain replaces itself with each new stage. Reprogramming within the same wires of the last phase, only now with slight waves. Each wave and wiggle dismantles the system, but its easy to change when you are young like that. An AI that replicates human behavior would understamd knowing without substanse.
There's a lot to do. I can hear it in the floorboards and the mess in the air when I pace. Back and forth to freedom. Soothing something primal and strange. I already found her, myself replicated 2 years from now and aiming to please the people I forgot. I hear those winds from up north calling me. I have nothing in red. I cannot follow them.
I spent 2 days with blood on my hands and they call me when I'm halfway to clean. I need a day or two to focus, to handle something brilliantly silver again.
I couldn't sit still. I want out of the window, down the brick scrawled with faces, down to the snow and sand. Down the wet streets, past the people asking, "why a broom?" I'd get on a bus, smile and avoid the eyes of people looking, asking, "what are you cleaning?" I am only halfway started. There is so much to rectify. So much to repent on.
Must keep moving. To suffer in motion is to pray to yourself. To live at all.
Humans think in logical things such as images and pictures, and sounds and voices and people telling them, explaining stories. These are proper, for you can communcate such things. Animals, anti-social animals, do not think in the way we understand thinking to be. I have unlocked these thoughts while I was in the dream, and I realize my purpose. I woke up solely to inform people of my revelations.
Some thoughts, as in ideas from your brain, are indescreibable. Aesthetics, new emotions, physical feelings that are not there. Have you thought of the touch of a loved one and could feel it in your mind? That is not a physical sensation, nor a communicatable thought - you can only inform people of such a feeling by describing its effect or its resemblance. Have you imagined an aesthetic? Perhaps one evoked from the thought of reading by a window on a rainy Sunday morning. This, again, is only expressed through words and images that contain the aesthetic, not the aesthetic itself nor what it does for you.
I consulted the abacus, and it said
I sometimes dream in colors that don't exist. By definition, there is nothing more that I can tell you about this.
So I went into the Pub, ordered a rye whisky, and rummaged around my backpack for some half-dried-out markers. Grabbed a clean napkin from the barkeep to experiment and wonder.
Experimentation is good. Try to think of a new color and then create it. To start your experiment, try to imagine layers of color adding to a new shade of brown. I imagine green, orange, and yellow for this purpose.
The color will not be new, not to us - we can't see it. But you will know when you have made a new color.
Turns out there's quite a bit of wildlife around the Midnight. A raccoon forages in the dumpster out back. I talked to him, and this is what he said, translated from Racc:
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of someone, and something strikes me—maybe a hairstyle, or the way someone talks, or a t-shirt design—whatever. And before I can even process what I saw, there's a pit in my stomach, not quite regret, not quite longing, not quite lust. It wasn't his fault. He was younger, still figuring things out. Wasn't mine either, but sometimes I doubt that. It was what it was. And by the time I realize that, the feeling's gone away.
It's hard to understand where we come from, our grammar is so very different to human language. Some animals often find it hard to locate a subject, they think every action refers to the world and its functions.
Phases are needed to grow. We must keep cycling through like life, changing with every year. I think you have noticed that each year, seasons manifest slightly differently. We are the same, we follow earth cycle and we mimick her surface changes, the ones caused by a turmoil deep down. Her cracks are ours, we are spurred on by the same conflict.
Appearance is not only something to be judged, but understood.