The Live Album experiment is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s a whiny song about a Tiny Little Fishy in a Bathtub.

You once read that both the cheapest and the most expensive Portuguese meat comes from pigs. You’ve always wanted to taste the expensive meat, Pata Negra, a black pork from wild pigs that feed entirely on acorns. You probably never will. Well … maybe. You imagine that it tastes full of the brine of the best bacon, the creaminess of Hong Shao Rou, and the husky finish of a dark chocolate.

In the same book, you read about a philosopher that said the problem of not being able to let go is that you can’t pick up anything new. So maybe don’t hold out for the pork for so long.

The future is a strange and unpredictable place. You’d come to believe tomorrow would logically follow your experiences like one foot follows another. As you get older, it’ll become harder to know what from the past was real and what was fantasy. It all just seems like wearing out your sneakers walking in circles. For example, you’ll spend an entire afternoon trying to run down a word that you swear exists: nostalgia for something that never happened. Your adult head will become a cavernous space, impossible to entirely fill and impossible to go back and organize. I have it here somewhere, you’ll say, even if you’ve never had it at all. At times even countermelodies will just seem like echoes from something sung in another voice range.

You’ll want to believe that all of these fragments add up to some bigger story in some bigger world that’s actually going somewhere. But in reality any narrative is just a extrapolation of coincidence. And coincidence is, at best, the world just kind of winking at you, making sure that you know it’s paying attention even if it isn’t doing anything about it.

Some of your best childhood memories never happened, but the bad ones generally come made out of whole cloth. That’s fine, isn’t it? Does it matter if your Dad was a DJ or your Mom was a secret service agent? Does it matter that they divorced when you were too young to remember or that you can’t seem to picture them in the same room anymore? Maybe there wasn’t even a book about pork and philosophy. You have your memories and a lot of confusing ideas. They don’t all add up. They don’t exist independently. Their tangles make up the hammock that you sleep in.

Some days you’ll think about this a lot and really try to figure it out and really try to say something serious about it and other days you’ll just say, “Fuck it. I’ll sing some falderal about a kazoo.”

Home is wherever your head is. Welcome home. This is the bedroom and this is the kitchen and this is the garage roof. This is your grade school art class and this is the front seat of your Mom’s Ford Kuga and this is the front porch at dusk at the beginning of the summer. Now learn to stand firm in your own two shoes. The earth will always be shifting beneath you.

First thing in the morning you line up against the hallway wall for a surprise field trip. Your grade gets this mystery field trips often. Usually they end up at parks or museum. Everyone in the line mumurs confusion. Jake Turnip says that you are going to the zoo. When he says it, he’s so sure that clenches both of his little fat hands. So that’s what you believe.

As you climb aboard you see the French girl sitting by herself, so you sit with her. Immediately you know that this was a mistake. From the back of the bus, you hear your name start to get chanted. You look back and see Matt Murphy and Randy Dugan gleefully laughing and pointing at you.

“… and the French girl sitting in a car. E – M – B – R – A – S – S – E – R!”

Randy Dugan is too smart for his own good.

Neither of you say much. You just look out the window. She keeps a little smile on her face the whole time as if she knows something in French that you can’t translate. Eventually the bus squeals to a halt and you pile off.

You are taken into a large factory and given little white jumpsuits and Goggles. A small patch with a cartoon brain on it and the words “Solution Robotique” are on each of your breast pockets.

On the floor of the factory, you have to keep your hands to your sides. Large robotic arms whirr and crash around you. They solder and lift parts moving slowly down a conveyer belt. You are surprised by how clunky they seem. They jerk violently before they move, as if they are being jarred awake from a deep sleep. These aren’t the robots set to waltz music on the science shows. These aren’t even lawnmowers.

The French girl’s father shows you around. He is tall and thin and has a long and thin nose. You feel like half his voice comes out of his mouth and the other half is split between each nostril. You find it hard to hear his thick French accent over the loud racket of the production line. Finally he asks if you have any questions. You raise your hand.

Do you have any robots with legs? you ask.

“Yes, we have not made legs,” he smiles a fatherly smile. “But you see, we have no robot pants. If I made them legs, they would be, how you say, porky-piggin’ it.'”

The French father laughs at himself but the French girl looks embarrassed. “It is a little joke, you see,” she whispers to you. “He thinks it’s funny that cartoons have no pants.”

After some confusion, Jake Turnip speaks up.

“Do you think robots will have legs in the future?”

“The future?” The French father puts a finger to his lips and taps them, three, four, five times. He gives a dark look down the convulsive assembly line. Then he smiles. “The future is a strange and unpredictable place, full of twisted cyborg versions of people you loved and will then struggle to see any remaining humanity in.”

Even as a child, you recognize that this is an odd thing to say to children.

The science filmstrip clicks to life. A little speaker plays busy blown out music. You try to keep your eyes open. You always fall asleep during these things.

Two children sit on their living room floor. Outside the rain beats against their window. The look dejected at the outside. And then sit on the couch pouting. Suddenly an anthropomorphic cartoon brain pops on the screen. It delights them with a little dance, then it regals them with a brass and friendly speech.

Imagination! It can make water flow uphill. It can make the sky harden and your food taste like candy. Imagination has the power to take you anywhere – daydreams, fantasy, fiction and delusion – all countries where your imagination toils.

But have you ever wondered where your imagination comes from. Does inspiration strike you from some far off land where every fancy is fact? Are your hopes birthed from the same malignant pregnancy as your nightmares? If you fell down the stairs and cracked your skull open would all sorts of little ideas crawl out and scamper around?

The answer to all of these questions and more is no. But that shouldn’t stop you from thinking them. Imagination has the power to make us question all sorts of things. Imagining something then refuting it is called the scientific method.

You see, Billy, man wasn’t given plans to go to the moon. First he had to imagine it. In 1902, 67 years before Neil Armstrong, Georges Méliès filmed men taking a rocket to the moon in one of the first motion pictures.

It may have taken decades but it’s pioneers of the mind that lead us to try to create new ways of doing things.

Tests have shown that imagination uses occipital, frontoparietal, posterior parietal, precuneus, and dorsolateral prefrontal regions of the brain. There’s very little you can’t do when you use that much of your brain is there?

What’s that, Wilma? Do dogs imagjne? Maybe a new meal or a fresh piece of meat, but probably not in the way that we do. Dogs forget where they are going halfway into a room often. They want nothing more than a good scratch behind the ears and to chase the neighborhood tomcat. Perhaps a dog imagines a really long flight of stairs he saw once, but not the way we do.

Take Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He invented the submarine. Without Jules imagination, the Germans would have never had the navy strength it used to kill thousands of good allies soldiers during World War II.

So be glad dogs can’t imagine or they might find some way to be our masters.

What’s that father? Imagination is for kids only? I can’t imagine Mother feels the same way.

Maybe try to do a little exploration yourself. You might find yourself in a new place before you fall asleep.

 The lights of the room are already on when you raise your head from your desk. You’ve drooled all over your arm and pencil again. You aren’t sure what part of the movie you dreamt and what part happened. Oh well. Imagination!