In the early ‘90s when I already had 25 published academic papers aged 28. I was a more desirable item than I am now, academically speaking. I was working as a post doc in a group in UMIST doing MOCVD of GaAs growth. I was to an extent driving the research and I had the notion that I was not getting the credit for it. So I read several issues of The Journal of Chemical Physics and noted the group leaders of articles which I found thought provoking, well written and interesting. All involved pissing about with lasers and spectroscopy of some form, esoteric or otherwise. I bought some good quality letter paper and wrote off to them inquiring after a postdoctoral position explaining my circumstances.

I sent over twenty letters around the globe and nearly everyone got back to me in one form or another. The times were different then. People were polite, human even. The majority of them updated me on the funding available which was often none and asked to keep me on file for when money came in. Nobody gave me a flat no. I could apply for fellowships {USA included}. Two groups got back with provisional job offers. One was in Bern Switzerland and the other in Fort Collins Colorado USA. The experiments were similar and these two groups were known to each other. The dude in Colorado was waiting to hear on a recent grant application, the Swiss group had a significant salary available straight away. I chose this job and learned many things about quality and not being slap-dash. It was very educational. I could have waited for Fort Collins but did not. At the time Colorado was more suited to my lifestyle. There was a bifurcation in life. The choice in retrospect has had major implications.

Had I gone to Fort Collins there I would have found a local Jiu Jitsu club and probably integrated much better into the local community. I would have followed my hippy-trippy orientation and ended up exposed to North American Indian things and new age earlier. My then girlfriend would not have been allowed to live as an illegal alien. I might have encountered the Tibetan Buddhism at Boulder. Because of Mork and Mindy I would for defo, have visited. I would have had mountains. My dad thought the idea of going somewhere where there had been prospecting for gold etc interesting. I probably would not have remained in close contact with London and never accepted the cobbled together job that I actually did. I may never have left Colorado.

It feels like a path unexplored, a might have been, even to this day.

If one peruses my dreams, it is clear that they have little objectively to do with my day to day reality of life here on the compound. They belong to some perhaps parallel world, a string of trajectory in the fabric of life, to which I do not physically pertain. They point at other worlds, beyond the hedges. There is perhaps a faint echo of a life in an alternate dimension of sorts, a residual, intangible and beyond. The dreams speak of a “reality”, an enactment, a play on a different stage to this one. The likelihood of the threads crossing is near vanishingly small. What I say and do here has a very local impact. The wider outside world jogs along quite happy without my participation therein, it is a parallel universe which will not cross or converge with mine…parallel lines do not meet.

Shit happens; the arrow of time is entropically irreversible.