The Rolling Stone, The Dancing Rock

I keep thinking the rock is going to start moving again. Every morning for the last six months, I’ve woken up early and gone out to watch the rock cause I don’t want to miss it when it starts again. Some days I swear I can see it move; a distance so minuscule that it’s imperceptible to the naked eye, but not to mine. Then again, what I perceive may only be my imagination.

I know one thing for certain, and that’s that my mom thinks I’m crazy. Not just crazy, she says, “fucking crazy.” I tried telling her about how I saw it dancing like an ice skater in the Olympics; she loves watching ice-skating on the television.

“It’s really groundbreaking stuff, mom,” she rolled her eyes. “It’s like watching Alex Hamilton triple jump, toe loop jump, and smooth glide out. Mom, it’s like this: Einstein had his theory of relativity when he saw the way lightning struck in the distance while riding on a train. Well mom, I saw a rock dancing, and it’s time for me to develop my theory.”

This was at the beginning. Nowadays I just ignore her, and she does the same. When you know something that other people can’t see it’s hard to communicate with them at all. There develops a rift between you, and the distance widens with time. Each day I go out to observe the rock, the distance between my mom and I grows. In the early days, she tried to keep me around; I’m a lost cause to her now.

I got her to come along to see the rock with me a few days after I’d initially seen it spinning in beautiful circles, the day my life changed — in scientific jargon, the day of the Great Movement. When I came running into the kitchen to tell her I’d seen the rock dancing she looked at me oddly. I reckon I was convincing, for I got her to come along and take a look.

She sat out there watching the rock with me for about two hours — she still holds the record time — and she said she didn’t see nothing but a rock sitting in the dirt. “You didn’t see it move?” I asked her. She looked at me like I was crazy. “You’re disturbed,” she said. I nodded my head and looked away.

“Ah, yeah, it’s okay. It barely moved anyhow. Probably imperceptible to most people,” I said.

The next day she tried to get me to go see a therapist, “just, ya know, to help keep you on the right path in life.”

Anyway, six months ago, when I watched that rock spinning in those beautiful fucking circles, I realized something. There are things in the world, powerful things, forces that go unknown to all but a select few of us. So I was kind in responding to my mother. She didn’t see it, and she probably never would because she was so stuck seeing the world the way that she’d always seen the world. There’s no way to force someone to change their view.

“No, mom. It’s okay,” I said in response to her asking me to go see the shrink. “I appreciate your concern, but it’s okay — I am okay. You’ve taught me well about what’s right and what’s wrong. No need to worry.” And I smiled. Charm works on most everybody. She shook her head.

Those first couple weeks after the Great Movement, I tried to let everyone in on what I’d been blessed to witness. I figured that everyone else should be able to see what I had seen; the world would change overnight. I wasn’t greedy, going about bragging, as some do. I know some other scientists out there keep their hypotheses hidden — so long as they feel their research is incomplete — in order to keep other scientists from stealing it, as if observations were objects that could be stolen. Research is never complete. Two years down the road, someone will test what they think is final and known, in a different way, disproving everything that was not so final and not so known. Not me. I told everybody I knew about the Great Movement, and even some complete strangers. I posted daily updates on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Every time I’d meet up with a friend for drinks, I’d tell them about the shit.

Most people reacted in much the same way. Their eyes would light up with amusement, but it wasn’t earnest interest, almost like it pained them to try, to stretch their minds, to understand what I was saying. ‘Ah well, Einstein and Copernicus went through the same shit,’ I told myself. I kept on observing and recording the rock. At some point I knew I was bound to have another breakthrough, and they’d all be thankful I did. At some point the rock would start dancing again, and you can bet your birth-year penny that I was going to be there to record it so all the world could see.

Chalk this up as the hard part of being a discoverer. Shit though, I was not prepared for how hard this stage could be; so many days and nights alone with just my memories of the dancing rock. It’s made me feel bad for poor old Einstein. Overnight Albert and I became long lost siblings, connected by an understanding of the world and ourselves. Like me, he hadn’t chosen to go through the trials he’d gone through. He hadn’t said, “I want to think different, I want to observe the world different than everyone else.” No, no…that’s not it. He was just born different, like we all are. But instead of embracing what it is we are born with, as Albert did, we try to fit the mold of popular culture or a hip outcast group, maybe the next alternative movement, so we can hold onto a good job, a solid family, a position relative to the rest of society. But we lose our ability to think as free agents, our opportunity at true happiness. We digest culture so we don’t feel all alone, but still we are alone, and then, even worse: We are strangers to ourselves.

The Great Movement has turned me into what most people call a dropout, but it wasn’t something I wanted. At times I tried so desperately to hang onto my social life that I could feel every millimeter as it slipped through my fingers. My obligation is to the rock over everything, because that’s what a scientist does. I can never be sure when it might start dancing again. For months I tried to get my friends interested in it. A couple of them have come to watch, however they chose not to come back.

Billy was the first of my friends to come out to the rock with me. I’m twenty-five now, and I reckon Billy and I’ve been buds since we were about seven years old.

I told him about the rock and its dancing more than a few times before he said he had some free time one Saturday to come out and give it a look. That Friday night before we were set to go observe, I ran over all the possible awestruck reactions Billy would have; there were expressions, speechless mouth-gaping wonder; Billy jumping up and down, spreading his arms and leaning back, looking up at the sun, yelling “Hallelujah! My god! My god! This is incredible!”

He met me at my house in the morning and we started the two mile walk out to what I told him was my observation lab. My mom says that it’s just an old shut down lumber mill. Yes, mom, it once was a lumber mill, but now it’s a scientific lab of first order importance. Some people don’t understand how places can be redefined, or people, or reality as a whole for that matter. They go on hanging onto the ways they know because it’s more comfortable. My guess is that my observation laboratory will always be an abandoned lumber mill to my mother.