6teen

Bang! All of a sudden I jolted upright and found myself standing up. I glanced around expecting to be travelling on a train, expecting the chatter of the passengers, a screaming blue eyed baby would be making a poop in his nappy. A wide-eyed blonde girl would be drawing alone on a sheet of white paper her parents leaving her for the diner car. A tall man, with a bushy black-beard would be rummaging around for a bit of lettuce that he lost in his whiskers. But there was none of that, not even signs of the train seats or overhead compartments. Nothing.

I used my eyes to survey the scene. Nothing. Though I knew I was standing, that was a start, though I didn’t know what I was standing on. There was no colour, no feeling, nothing to grab onto and say: “I am standing on ground!” But I could think at least I had that. And so I decided that I would think away. What is 4x4? Sixteen. I imagined the numbers, the logic, and the equation holding together a bit of the world a bit of what was real. Sixteen must have been of some significance so I thought I’d take it further. “Sweet sixteen and never been kissed,” typical thing that pops into ones mind.

6 and 10 equals 16

8 and 8 equals 16

4x4=16 - Already done

16 follows 15 and precedes 17.

Sixteen is the minimum age for being allowed an official driver's license in many U.S. states. In Australia and Canada, it is the age one can begin to get a learner's license.

Sixteen is the minimum age for getting an adult job in most states and provinces.

Sixteen is the age of consent for many countries around the world it is also the minimum age to get married with parental consent in many countries.

Sixteen is the legal drinking age in France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and Portugal.

Sixteen…sixteen…the word scrambles in my head, the letter juxtaposing, twisting, like ballerinas in the air. I try to think back of memories when I was sixteen, the scent of summer mingled with the sight of giddy girls with a short little skirts running in the cool breeze. If one could employ a professional to keep ones jaw shut and stop the wet warm drool from running down the chin and neck one would. I tried to latch onto to one unique memory other than that sneak peek into the girl’s changing rooms or when I nestled into Brita’s breasts. Granny died when I was sixteen. That was significant! She died alone shacked up in some hospital bed. I was still learning what emotions were, the adolescent that I was still hadn’t come to terms with such depth, well not yet. There was the usual crowd of mourners dressed in black. I remember stifling a sob, while I secretly celebrated such a death with a slug of my grandfather’s forty year old bottle of whiskey that he kept on an upper shelf in his study. I could remember the biting taste, the oakiness of the mature malt burning my throat as it slid down into my stomach. If drink could tell of something, open up a greater understanding of a moment then the whiskey sunk into me, saddened my soul and made me weep not outwardly, but inwardly, where all was locked away. There was no time for viewing, for looking at the multi-channels to get a view of what was really going on inside. I quickly forgot about such a death, besides I had other important things to do, girls being the highest thing on my list as well as keeping up with…nothing really.

Does an age really say how old you are? Does an age help create the essence of the individual. Does age really matter? At the age of 82 one could have reversed back to the state of a baby, drooling and shitting all over oneself. Age…? How does one age? The body ages overtime, like a piece of fruit we all rot away one day.

I collect my thoughts and get back to sixteen…

You can get the number sixteen with four to the power of two. The number 16 was used in weighing light objects in several cultures. I thought of the stiff upper lipped British they had 16 ounces in one pound, the Chinese, always resourceful, used to have 16 langs in one jin. Ounces and pounds I think to myself. Back in the day weighing was done with a beam balance to make equal splits. Heaps of grain was then divided into sixteen equal parts this was a more successful division than to split the grain into ten parts. Sixteen was a very practical number when it came to calculations and figures. Chinese Taoists did finger computation on the trigrams and hexagrams by counting the finger tips and joints of the fingers with the tip of the thumb. Each hand can count up to 16 in such manner. The Chinese abacus uses two upper beads to represent the 5's and 5 lower beads to represent the 1's, the 7 beads can represent from a hexadecimal digit from 0 to 15 in each column.

16 is the base of the hexadecimal number system, which is used extensively in computer science.

Previously microprocessor were 16-bit microprocessor and they ran 16-bit applications.

In tarot, card No. 16 is "the Tower".

The amount of waking hours in a day in an "8 hours of sleep" schedule, I would be lucky to get that much sleep.

There are sixteen pawns on a chessboard and each player has sixteen pieces.