From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.

My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.