it can be hard to tell if the railroad tracks lead into our out of the city. right now she’s barrelling breakneck towards the underbelly of the skyline, watching the green watercolor blur of rural scenery gradually gain hardness and rust. she left home less than a day ago. “I miss her already” she thinks to herself and giggles (because who would actually be saying that!) under her pajamas she’s seal-smooth and supple, tight from a season of austerity mixed with summer’s sultriness. the city’s definitely getting closer now. whizzes past a giant sheet-metal rooster. a fountain of gold glitter. a haphazardly bustling community made of shower curtains, shipping crates, teepee’d sticks, green coats, faded tattoos, and beards. the punch-card logic of sequential buildings only inches from the train window alternating stacatto with empty lots and weeds. That switchman waved at me? surely not, but it looked like it. Maybe he was swatting at a horsefly. ---- i think being supple -- maybe not lithe, it’s probably a little late for that -- would really help me pretend to be a writer for the next couple of years at least. if you want to be supple you’re going to need to quit laying about on your (work) computer right before you go to bed. you can’t just sit and drink. you have to stop eating until you’re quite full multiple times a day. did i mention you can’t just sit and drink. Yeah, I hear ya. But--if I don’t drink, how will I get all emotional and loose and inspired? (you ask) Well, you’ve done it before. I think you can do it again. Once you get it out of your system, you can taste your own emotions better (although it’s true, you do have to remember to inculcate situations where you’re spiritually quiet enough to let them surface). It’s like salt, kind of. Maybe. All I know is—Split Rock. remember? the skyline highway. that rock tower. the turtle. lightning. the perfect sun stitched by hand into the perfect arching sky. having maybe one or two beers one of the nights. “you wake something in me that’s sleepy.” a selection of smooth rocks in the tent. waking up and typing at the picnic table. mosquitos. zipping up the tent. “and even a craving for sweet sediments”—I wonder what happened to any of that stuff? Well, I guess I can’t do it justice by trying to encapsulate and frame it. Maybe it’s become my own personal myth, and sacred text only makes it look ridiculous, like “a story that’s not true that people used to make up to try to explain where things came from.” Those silly ancient people who didn’t know anything! who hadn’t ridden the elevator of evolution up to the top floor like we have! Yes, when you’re young or in college or something smelly and hip like that, you idealize this notion of a time long ago when split rock lightning sunshine castle highway. When you grow up and get a job you’ll understand how naive you were. You’ll fall in line and get a nice belly on you and a wife and you’ll rely on alcohol to feel words and high clear singing thoughts, like a normal person. You’ll come back to the church of alcohol and gravity and five o’clock shadow and at six o’clock you’ll have a good big square meal and then you’ll lie down and die. but when you’re young and cute and stupid and you have braids still wet from swimming in gooseberry falls and your overalls are loose over your lithe taut skin and the best meal is a picnic with a new friend, then you can still have the puerile indulgence of believing that there was some kind of magical primitive time a long time ago where they drove up a rollicking hill in the middle of the sky, got out and walked, buffetted by the breeze, and turned around and looked over the city and the harbor, and felt like there was lightning in their soul. Like there was a future full of bouncing words cascading off of one another and plenty of room and space and no words for new words to grow in and run away like graffiti on endless train cars in the rusty sun. And they could feel the warmth of this without any drugs. Ha ha it’s a nice old-fashioned ideal, but you notice how you kids never have a whole lot of historical specificity to back it up? Where’s your actual research and citations? Besides some witch book that was written by some feminist, I mean. Voices, ha! She lets voices, she claims, speak, taking turns, quietly, rotating, until something starts to take shape. OK, sure. That’s nice. But it’s not quite true—I mean, I’m a professor with a mustache so you can’t argue with me because I have an authoritative voice and an office down the narrow hall behind the broad oak tables that (unfortunately) we weren’t able to excise quite *all* the golden molten sunlight from, damn those high windows—this building was built, well, a long time ago, I don’t want to get into exactly how long ago, but let’s just say when this building was built there were still quite a few people going around believing in those funny clueless imagination-fear-based made up not true fictional myths like you young people like to bandy about as if you know what they were supposed to mean—they don’t *mean* anything, OK? They’re symbolic. They’re like a puzzle or a code; you have to study them a long time and have some degrees and be preternaturally smart like me and have a lot of citations and footnotes and scholarship before you can possibly begin to appreciate how utterly meaningless your myths are, god damn you. It’s not true—it’s not true—we didn’t steal your holidays! How dare you! Take it back! We didn’t! We didn’t! Stupid pagan singing fat ridiculous irresponsible intellectually lazy glassy-eyed chanting hypocritical mumbo jumbo talking gauzy skirt wearing get some real fucking shoes coming to class late staying out in the field all night listening to a goddamned whippoorwill fucking pagans! He shakes a little bit, but only because he only had a donut for breakfast. He takes a small short drink of hard amber whiskey and puncuates the desk with the hard bottom of the glass, full stop. He’s got a wife, and a pretty nice car with air conditioning. He’s going to leave here, leave the smell of paper and antiquity with that overtone of goddamned sun. He’s going home to his belly and his wife and his lines on his face. He looks distinguished. On him it looks distinguished because he knows which phrases to chuckle at in an offhand controlled way, showing that he’s too smart to be astonished and bray like a donkey. He already knows the reference. He and his colleagues have parties with actual crockpots with real appetizers in them, that they can afford. There’s a little stack of napkins and when you’re done you can place the toothpick on one of the napkins, quietly, politely. You have things to talk about with these people, because you are a grown up wearing khaki slacks, for god’s sake. This is what civilization can buy. One of these people even knows how to play a guitar, see? You and your drooling flailing drum circles, pounding the sidewalk with your bare paws like dogs, you can’t compete with sitting on this couch in this room where we have coasters and real wood end tables, learning some folk song from the old country and knowing it’s quaintly ironic because it’s not actually true, you fucking idiots. Don’t you understand anything. And fortunely, thank god, we’re civilized enough not to start singing and playing guitar and carrying on until we’ve had enough to drink to make it conceivable. Unlike you. With your rocks and your towers and your skyline highway and your sky so crisp and high it takes your breath away. With your wind and your hair and your teeth and your bright ideas and flying back down the hill. Oh, I know you. I know you. Just wait. You’ll get married. You’ll drink. Everybody drinks. That’s how you write. You’ll get fat like me. Just wait.