...to borrow one of the greatest Minutemen song titles ever.

"The past sure is tense."
-Captain Beefheart

Sometimes I play with the past. I pick it up, roll it around on my fingertips, stretch and pull at it. I roll around in it like a dog with a dead skunk. Sometimes I press it against the newspaper and lift up perfect mirror images of the funny pages beneath. I probe it with the tip of my tongue, looking for the sweet and the sour, the savory spots on it. Late at night, when no one's around, I like to take someone else's memories out and try them on. To look at myself in the mirror, and see if I could pass as a different man, a man with another past, but underneath, I always look like a man with the past I have.

It's a dangerous thing, to play with the past that way, to wallow in it and let it take over your all of your waking thoughts. Sometimes I play this game where I imagine I've won the lottery and I begin plotting how I won't let it change my life, I'll bank the money and only spend it to take away this horrible pressure of living. I think about the shady house in the country and the dependable (but used) car I'd buy. I promise not to quit my job. I can go on for weeks, daydreaming about this in my idle moments, working on my speech to the media about my incredible good fortune. I phrase and rephrase my sentences until they portray just the right mix of joy and astonishment.

The problem with the game for me is that my imagination is so good that it all becomes real to me. I grow sad and irritated as I balance my checkbook and curse myself for squandering my newfound wealth with so little change (both in my life and in coins) to show for it.

This time, I picked the past up while it was hitchhiking. The past was at the end of an onramp to the freeway from a rest stop in central Wisconsin. I had stopped there to walk around a little, splash water in my face, twirl my arms around in frantic circles, wake myself up. The sky was approaching the early stages of dawn and I had already been driving for about four hours. I needed to be back home by morning. I got back in the car and pulled out to the onramp and began accelerating.

The past was standing at the end of the onramp with a grin set on her face, a determined smile around clenched teeth. I was brought up with stories about the horrible things that happen to people who pick up hitchhikers, and, in the early seventies, my parents had even been victimized by picking up a lone woman who was in cahoots with a pair of bikers who robbed them when she told my parents that they were her friends, that they would help her. Once my parents had stopped, the bikers held menacing-looking handguns on them and relieved them of their wallets and watches, then rode away on motorcycles hidden in the brush.

I drove by the past approaching seventy without thinking, until maybe three football fields away, when the clouds above opened up and let water pour down in a stream. I drove on for maybe a second more, then sighed and pulled over to the breakdown lane and began slowly backing up.