Patrick Shine

Cypress, Texas

Remembering Alonzo
Vietnam, May 1968

It’s been pretty bad lately. Actually, it is damn hard to remember when it wasn’t. I suppose things were very different once, yet I don’t have many moments to reflect on them. But that would be before I inherited my new mind, something that has eradicated all previous patterns of thought. This mind simply overpowers everything that came before it. All conscious, maybe subconscious too, ideas and decision-making methods that had been creviced in my gray matter for the entirety of my life up to now, twenty four years so far – they are gone. In fact, I celebrated my birthday less than three weeks ago. In a rice paddy.