It was the dawn of time. All through the land, there was a feeling in all things that something was going to happen after time dawned. Time itself felt very strongly that it was about time for some kind of thing to dawn, and this feeling led time to think that maybe it should be the thing to dawn, instead of some other lesser thing like a pigeon or Mardi Gras. If a pigeon or Mardi Gras had dawned back then, you wouldn’t have heard about it. Time dawning was so important that still today we talk about it. We always say “the dawn of time” whenever we want to make sure that we sound lovely and unstoppable. We say, don’t stop us or stop loving us, for we have invoked the dawn of time. We all care about the dawn of time because it is fun to mention, of course, but we also like the dawn of time because it was the start of time. Many people like time more than I, but I won’t be too proud to admit that time is important and should be in history books, that is to say, in books of a historical nature — books that keep track of all there is to keep track of. In those books, there isn’t infinite space. If you get mentioned in there, you can be assured it’s not just a formality, like it is whenever you put your own name on the internet, as I have done (and now I can’t take it down. I think it’s illegal to. Can you help me?), and time should feel good about itself that it’s in the history books simply because it dawned. That’s all time did, was dawn; nothing very complex, only dawning. No more, and it made the whole period of time that we enjoy possible at all!

We are talking about the dawn of time. Who cares when I dawned or you dawned? We’re just you and me. We could dawn or start a war and nobody’d give a rat’s ass. But if time did it, why that’d be news, and it is news, and so this story is concerned with a piece of news: time dawned, and it was the dawn of time. Extra, extra, read all about it! It was the dawn of time over at the land where this all happened. All through that land everything had a feeling. I say even the rocks had a feeling. Even the air had a feeling. If it was a rock or a piece of air in or close by the land where time was dawning, in it there was a feeling that something was going to happen after time dawned. And along with this feeling that something was going to happen after the dawning, there was inextricably an intuition that in order for things to happen after the dawning, things would have to happen during the dawning, while it was happening, to set the stage in a sense, so that all the things that were to happen after the dawn of time would, when the time came, find that the stage had been set for them to do their thing. If rocks and shards of air existing and feeling during the dawning of time were to set the stage for things after the dawning of time, then things after the dawning could feel confident in their moment and not be nervous to take the stage so set. They (the post-dawning entities) would not have any cause at all to suddenly get cold feet and up and not happen.

All of this was felt and understood by every rock and piece of air in the land, and there was also water that burbled that it felt pretty much like something was likely going to start happening any minute and if you had asked the water whether or not it thought what was going to happen would be cool or not, it would say your question was beside the point, so let’s take heed and all agree that whether what happened during and after the dawn of time was cool or not is not what we’re gonna care about. We’re just gonna care about that anything of whatever nature happened at all; incidentally we will care that anything in the land felt that anything was going to happen. Dismiss what the water says, or might say; that’s all conjecture and we care more about the rocks and the air than the water after all. For a fish it’s the other way around, of course, but there were no fishes at the dawn of time. Quite possibly it is that the water thought of what it was going to do with all its allotment of time once it got it, for time was dawning, and what it likely hoped to do with the time it was given via dawning was to fill itself with fish after fish, to be choked with fishes. That’s right; maybe the water was in fact thinking things like “I’ve had a good run and now I know that time’s dawning (for I heard its alarm sound) I’m gonna fill me up with fish like a good Catholic gets full up of children, and maybe that’ll be the end of me because I’ll have too many fish in me to flow anymore… but it certainly won’t be the end of me because — make no mistake — they’ve been trying to contrive the end of water for billions of years and nobody’s ever been able to pull it off — we’re too bleedin’ tough. Thinking of it now, if you put a fish in me, I’d probably just get that much more stagnant — one fish stagnanter — and I hope my hope is strong enough to assure that stagnant water survives just as well as water that flows…” and such.

But forget the water. it was the dawn of time. Things then felt things I could never feel now because, why, I’m not a thing then; I’m a bloody thing now! Is that so wrong? If that’s wrong then I may end up being the best person to write this piece of news about the dawn of time after all, if my feelings as a thing now can be directly mapped onto the feelings of things then. I’m a thing now, but I’m firstly a thing, period. So put aside your notion you have of me as a thing now and just try to look at me as a thing at all so that you and I can better accept that after all I may be able to convince you and me I have some understanding of how things felt when it was the dawn of time and it was big news — big news in the making. For big news is never big news right when it happens. I don’t care what it is, murder or whatever, assassination or whatever; or whoever you are, whether you’re George Costanza, Morley Musick or whoever; the fact is that the person who comes after the event and wasn’t part of the event but is the one to whom it falls to say the event happened in a certain big way is a device we’ve always gotta have in place in order for an event to become news big or little. Even in the case of the dawning of time I only know it was news because people before me, who lived in decades like the 1660s and the 1950s, and in years like 1662 and 1959, talked about the event of the dawn of time enough and in the right way to make it news, which thank heavens they did, otherwise I’d be the person making the dawn of time into news, before your very eyes, and would you trust me enough to make an event you’d never once thought about into canonized news, especially if it was your first time reading my writing in any context, as I assume is the case for you right now? And hello! I don’t need you to trust me to be a newsmaker. Not one who takes a more or less new event and does the paperwork that turns it into news. That ain’t me. I’m no guy for paperwork. My mom can be, sure, if she has to, and my dad, well, sorta, but I never. Only trust that I am a thing generally much more than I am a thing now, and once you do that trusting, we can begin, in a collegial bantering, to discuss the subject of the piece at hand, which is currently: exactly which feelings were in the things all through the land where time dawned, back when time first dawned and thus created the dawn of time.