Before School

I think the first house I remember was 818 Meandering Drive in Cedar Hill, Texas. I think. [verify address] This is exactly the kind of thing where I can remember a driveway and the angle of the light and some stupid patch of dirt with much more confidence than I can remember the metadata attached to any of it, so I want to keep saying when I am remembering something versus when I actually know it. But I remember dump trucks. I remember fire trucks. I remember digging. I remember being fascinated by machines where you could just SEE the causality, where a thing existed because somebody wanted to move dirt or lift something or spray water or reach somewhere high and so humans built this gigantic arrangement of metal and hydraulics around that intention. I don't think I had anything like that language for it obviously. I was just a little kid thinking the dump truck was fucking awesome. But I liked machines that did things. A fire truck had doors everywhere and every door hid another system. An excavator could rotate and articulate and tear into the ground. A dump truck could take a pile that was here and make it be over there. It was all very literal and comprehensible and powerful.

Digging itself was amazing. There is dirt, and then you decide there should be a hole, and then after enough work there is a hole. This sounds hilariously trivial now, but honestly I think that is one of the oldest feelings in myself that I still recognize perfectly: the world has state and you can modify it. You can push here and something moves there. You can attach two things and now the combined thing has a behavior neither piece had alone. You can keep going until an intention becomes a physical arrangement. I was not sitting there developing a philosophy of agency at age four. I was playing in dirt. But when I look backward, this is more recognizably me than almost any later identity I tried to put on top of it.

There was Isaac too, of course, before there was any coherent idea in my head of "my brother" as something separate from the basic structure of reality. There were two of us. I did not meet him. I never remember arriving at a world and then discovering another person who looked like me. He was already there in literally every frame. People called us "the twins" and mixed us up and compared us and dressed us alike sometimes and asked who was who, and I assume that all of this began shaping us before either of us had the vocabulary to object to any of it. [embed: early photo/video of Jacob and Isaac] There is a later chapter for that because being a twin is not some cute biographical fact. It was an initial condition of identity. But before school it was simply normal. Me and Isaac. Whatever we were doing. Whatever we were breaking. Whatever toy one of us had that the other one wanted.

I wish I had better access to this period. I think some of it is still in there but badly indexed. If I ask myself "what was childhood like before school?" I get almost nothing: Cedar Hill, toys, dirt, family, Isaac. If I ask what the driveway looked like, more comes back. If I ask what kind of plastic the truck was made out of, there is suddenly almost a tactile memory. If I look at one photograph I can sometimes recover the entire room around it, or at least the feeling of the room, and then I have to ask whether I actually remembered the room or whether the photograph just trained a reconstruction that now feels like a memory. I don't think that distinction makes the memory worthless. I just want to be precise about what this archive is. This is not a security-camera recording of my life. It is the state of my own recollection plus whatever external evidence I can still recover.

So I want the artifacts in here. [embed: family photographs] [embed: any early home video] [link: map / house after address verification] Not as decoration but as another observation of the same life. Sometimes a picture will disagree with me. Great. Leave the disagreement. Sometimes my parents will remember a story differently. Great. Put both versions there. I am not trying to win a lawsuit about who I was at four. I am trying to preserve as much of the actual distribution as I can before another twenty years of retelling collapses it into five anecdotes.

I don't remember ambition yet. I don't remember wanting to be an engineer or a founder or a scientist. I don't remember any concern about being important. There was no Steve Jobs in my head, no Jehovah, no calculus, no arXiv, no AI, no San Francisco, no giant theory of what a life is for. There were machines and dirt and another little boy who looked like me and adults who knew much more than I did. I liked figuring out what things did, and then I liked making them do it. That is about as far back as I can currently reach without bullshitting.

Eventually adults started noticing me, and one stupid logistical fact mattered enormously: Isaac and I could not see very well. Mom made sure we sat up front. That put us physically close to teachers again and again, and I think the entire trajectory after that is different because of it.