What happens now? What happens next? Be sure to leave the ruining kernel of entropic ruination and dumbness, to innoculate against perfection. What do we do next? Where do we go next? What’s the plot? What’s the story? What’s the conflict? Is it fair to ask your students these questions if you don’t even have good answers yourself? It almost certainly is not fair. I think we can agree it’s not fair. *sitting at one of the cafes that also has alcohol* It’s a good thing they had a changing room with showers and full laundry services here. Yeah, and it’s a good thing they let us sit in the changing room, our naked asses on the long varnished wooden bench, while we waited for our clothes to dry. Yeah, and it’s a good thing we’re close enough to the same size so that it doesn’t matter whose clothes are whose, because I don’t even remember anymore. Yeah, but I think these were originally your shorts, because they’re a little tight on me, but it feels good for some reason, and in the back of my mind I’ve kind of been trying to figure out why it feels good. Do you have any theories? Not really, not yet. Oh, OK. *let it go then; drink exactly one pint* They have really fucking good beer here. What’d you get? I don’t know. Some kind of amber or something. You? A stout. It’s not bitter, though, that’s unusual. Nice. Yep. *it gets loud because more people are coming in, perhaps because the sun’s gone down and what else are people going to do?* So where are we going to— Did you notice this place has a tasting room? Yeah, I was wondering about that. What do you think they taste? Like different kinds of coffee? Or beer? Yeah it’s weird, there’s nobody in there. Do you want to go in there? Yeah, it’s quieter in there. I’m not really in the mood to have to shout to be heard. *go in there; the noise of the other room gets muffled like when the scene changes in a movie* There’s just the one huge table. Weird. Are we even supposed to be in here? I don’t know. No one’s rushing over to yell at us, so— True. Sit? Sure. *sit* I feel like at some point we’re going to have to decide to put some concerted effort forward, and like, make a plan, and make some decisions, and say “no” to some things, and get organized. Ugh. I hate doing that. I mean, I do too, but we can’t just wander from cafe to cafe forever, can we? Well no, I mean we’d run out of money eventually. Right. Did we even pay for these beers yet, by the way? I thought you— Do we even have jobs? Not, I mean, not exactly. I used to— I think I used to have. Like, some. Some jobs? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Like I think I used to ride my bike or something. That was your job? Sounds like a— No, I mean, I used to ride my bike to work. I think. I have some kind of vague memory. There was like this street with all these old factory buildings and stuff, and it was usually sunny and with a cool wet breeze, and sometimes steam would just randomly come up out of the street and out of some of the buildings, and it would make these billowing clouds in the cool bright air, and— Sounds kind of cool. Yeah! Yeah, I guess it was. I don’t exactly remember where I was going with that, though. How bout you? How bout me what? Did you have a job? I don’t know, I mean, I guess I must have. Doesn’t—I mean, doesn’t pretty much everybody? Hmm, I’m not sure. *sip* So. So. So what’s next? *outside the old double hung windows there’s trestles and bridges and lackadaisical traffic* I dunno. What are you up for? Pretty much anything. All right then. *look around the tasting room for any kind of a door* That’s weird. *suddenly a bunch of gulls making noises outside, muffled by ancient masonry and layered background hums you hadn’t noticed before* I thought— How did— I guess we’ll have to go out the fucking window. Hey, what the fuck. Why not. We’re still—I mean, we’re not *that* old, right? *open the window; it groans the way old windows do, that warp the sky and protect the past; swing legs over the sill; jump* I still think we— *grunting as the hard silt of the ground under the trestle rushes up to meet your feet* —need some kind of an organizing principle, or plan, or guideline, or mission or something, so that we have something to focus on, to keep us, like, present, and moving forward or something like that. I don’t know how to explain it, I just feel like that’s what’s missing here. You’re— *grunt* —probably right. *dust off; look around; when a car goes by dozens of feet overhead, there’s a nostalgic misplaced echo in the undergirdings; there’s a few cans and bottles under here; on the concrete above a sloping pile of charcoal-grey gravel someone’s painted a bunch of squiggly letters and astonished-looking characters; you two are two of them* Push it. Push—no wait— Wait, I— Hang on, let me get on that side. *eventually push the giant slab of driftwood free of the cloying sand; leap on at the last minute and float out; it’s fucking freezing but for some reason this seems like a good idea* Oh god, it’s too early in the year yet; the water’s still so fucking frigid! I know. Holy crap everything on me that can be shrivelled up, is! Right? It kind of feels good though. I sorta like that puckered testicle feeling. You are so fucking weird. *float; bob* Hey check out that gull. I think he’s trying to decide if we qualify as food or not. *the gull circles in mild confusion; makes that preternatural sound they make; today you feel like you can almost understand it; you are almost certainly wrong* Look how weird the beach looks from here. *a ragged bite of a styrofoam cup; a tiny glint of blue-green glass; the soggy sagging footprints of children who are almost grown up now; strands of milkweed; dirty clumps of moss* *how many different colors of sand there actually are* *a skinny black boy with long lean biceps and cut-off blue sweatpants, looking for something* *various stages of death; a reeking fish, a half-creamed head attached to a weathering skeleton, just a rib cage, a faint mound of scattered dust; a colony of biting gnats* *a loose pile of brown logs* *an empty vodka bottle with the label mostly gone and the cap for some reason on* *a pink plastic ribbon that used to be fluorescent; the way the sand completely covers one end and completely doesn’t touch the other end; it’s that land in between where there are individual grains; that’s—that’s where we live* *we’re that one grain right there—that one, yeah, and that one right next to it—that’s me and you* I’m getting sleepy. Me too. ’S’nice, though. Sun. Bobbing up and down in the waves. Tight skin. Prob’ly freezing to death. *the way a sudden chuckle ripples through you is delicious, leaves you full and empty, exhausted and well used, alert and calm* *hold hands across the expanse of wood* *the way the water on your hands and fingers bends the sunlight* *your knuckles in alternating pattern shine with lake and sky and sun and goosebumps form along your arms and thighs* *look at each other, directly, for just a moment—maybe the first time you’ve done that all day* Should— Should we head back— Back in—yeah, I was kind of thinking that. Look how far away the beach is getting. Ha, yeah. I mean not like this is exactly the ocean with fucking undercurrents and riptides and whatever the fuck, but still. Yeah, besides, I am getting really numb below the waist. Right! *it feels so right and elastic and good to stretch at the waist and aim your legs toward the horizon, and start to kick together, making yourselves like a paddleboat, churning up greenbluegoldclearmurkyfrothysparkling water, and slowly start the impulse drive toward land* *finishing up another cup* Do you want to go somewhere else? Yeah, but I don’t really want to spend another five bucks at one of these damned cafes. Let’s just see if we can get down these boulders and go right up to the lake. Do you think that’s, like, allowed? I mean I don’t know, why wouldn’t it be? It used to be. Everybody—I mean we used to go down to the lake all the time. Remember? Yeah, I just, I mean so much has changed. It’s hard to tell anymore. But hey, listen— ?— Did you hear that? Yeah! Seagulls! I mean, lakegulls, I guess, but whatever. Yeah! Let’s go! *leave a tip; clink the empty round ceramic onto flat ceramic; push back upright wood across flat wood; mount the rocky knoll that serves as the northeast wall of this cafe’s patio, and enter mountain goat mode, descending* Ha! I’m a little stiff, but I can still do this. I know, right? It’s been a while, that’s for sure. I don’t think these are the best shoes for this. So take them off! You think? Why not? *take off your shoes; feel the depth of solar radiation, stored up in these fantastic boulders; served back up to you a memory at a time; descend* Did you notice that that girl that took our order had one eye that was larger than the other? Did I? Of course I did! I always notice that type of shit, remember? Oh yeah. I couldn’t remember if that was you or me that notices that type of shit. I mean, did you ever think that it could possibly be both of us? Oh, yeah, well I guess that’s not completely out of the question. This day, I mean what this day has turned into after the earlier metaphysical excitement, is a really good example of how a friendship has many long hours of relative boredom and unedited imperfection that don’t usually get eulogized. True dat. But that’s all part of the building blocks of a real friendship, isn’t it. Yeah, but we kind of tend to forget about that, looking back through our anodyne memory filters. But yeah, it’s really essential. The boring parts, I mean. Right? I mean, I think so. As far as I’ve been able to tell. Good. That’s kind of reassuring. Right. You want to change into each other’s clothes just for kicks? Sure. *you aren’t exactly the same size; the different fit of the other clothes feels intimate for some reason; your friend’s warmth is little different from your own* The problem with abandoning all trains of thought that become boring is that you get bored so easily, and then you never go anywhere. Fair enough. So are we close enough to the lake yet for your taste? *on a rocky promontory literally suspended 40 feet out over the water; whenever a large wave comes along the spray gets in your coffee cup* Yeah, I guess so. *pulling a fish out of your oatmeal bowl becomes necessary* Why are there so many cafes? Did this town used to have this many cafes in it? There’s like practically one on every corner. Yeah, I don’t— Hey wait, there’s ones even in between the ones on the corners! What the fuck is— Holy crap, dude, I think every single one of these doors leads to a cafe! Now this is just seriously weird. I guess a lot has changed since we came here last. No shit. I mean, cafes are cool and everything but I kind of would think that a city would have to have some kind of other stuff— Yeah, like a certain amount of like, I don’t know, industries, or shops, or places where people actually do different kind of useful stuff. Useful. Hmmmm, yess... Useful.... Are—are you OK dude? Yeah, oh. What? Yeah. No, I’m fine. I was just thinking about that word “useful.” Oh. What about it. I don’t, um. I don’t know. It just, something about it just kind of makes me uneasy. Oh, yeah, OK. Well, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. Oh. Oh good. Oh goody goody goody goody goody goody goody good. Ah, ha. Um, so do you want to see if one of these cafes has any ice cream or something? Sure. Let’s find one a little closer to the lake, though. I miss the feeling of mist in my face. OK sure. *walk generally eastward, wending between blocks and blocks of city streets lined with various cafes* *emerge, *blink blink blink* into the light of early Spring late afternoon. The sunshine is watery, perfect, the air slippery with little clouds. Out here, time goes a little slower, so walk instead of flit, and pick your way along the railroad tracks, kicking loose spikes, scuffing the toes of your tennies on limestone chunks. Bits of plastic bags and cans and busted up old chunky computer monitors and detergent bottles and rusty springs and torn t-shirts and everything else dot the scape like flotsam from the beautiful decay after a mass extinction.* It’s funny how things slow down once you decide you’re going somewhere. Once you decide you’re being watched. Once you decide you’re the watcher. What is dead and what still lives? Don’t ask now; we’re walking, and talking; there’s certain things you think about, while walking with a friend, that you don’t have to say out loud. It’s better to just let them stew, in the quiet grace of walking with a friend. The quiet things will have their say without being said. They’ll flavor the water; drink each other. So, what do you want to talk about? Where do you want to go? Suddenly I’m very sleepy. I kind of want to— Wait! What? One of the functions of being a friend is to bug the shit out of you when you kind of just want to go to sleep, and to drag your ass out into the woods to do fun stuff, and you kind of don’t want to but once you do you’re glad you did. Remember? Kind of. I guess vaguely yeah. OK, so don’t go to sleep right now. Come with me instead. Where are we going? I love it when you say that. I love being able to say that. I miss it so much. I know. Our strengths are constructive interference. I know. Let’s sit on this railroad track for a minute. OK. The rail has been under the sun all day, and now it’s a hot bright line that warms my ass through my jeans. The chips of rock and rust under my feet make a satisfying grinding noise as I settle into the perfect position. A bug is walking across my knee. This is this instant, and it is exactly as valid as any other instant. All our redundant thoughts are kind of amusingly innocent and useless and have also been around for centuries, just sitting there like molecules of water waiting to be part of yet another wave. Wave goodbye to the train, the— Wait. The what? The train, you know the— Holy shit! There’s a train coming! *you can feel the subsonic death threat of a train in your throat, when it gets this close; it fills your body with silent roaring* Let’s go! *laughing, scrambling down the scarp* Holy shit, that was— Mother fucker— What the— OK, so we narrowly escaped death by being squished the fuck all over the place, *brushing off knees, straigtening shirt, that sort of thing, still kind of laughing* what do we do now? I don’t know, let’s just walk into town, *town, that strange attractor* and see if anything or anyone pops up, and maybe someone or something will happen to be related to our theme of “doing something about something” or “doing something with this.” Damn, bitch! What? You did it again! What? What did I do? You said something about “writing!” I did? What was it? It was “see if anything or anyone pops up, and maybe someone or something will happen to be related to our theme”—do I need to explain that one? Oh. Ha! Nah, I think that one’s pretty self-explanatory. Thank god. Because I really didn’t feel like explaining it. All right then. Let’s go. *link arms, and proceed to the sidewalk, leaving the punctuated equilibrium of the tracks behind for now* OK. Dude said, “the clock’s rolling.” <p>Dan is to my right. He’s a little older and fatter, so I already like him the best out of all these guys. Then across from him is Mitchell. Is that how you spell that? Who da fuck knows. Then next to him is&#8230; I don’t know, some fucking guy whose name I already forgot. He’s kind of handsome and fuzzy and seems sort of serious but not too serious—a nice, mousy guy maybe kind of like I used to appear to be before you got to know me. He has a notebook with the word “Hostel” written in ball point on the cover. Reminds me of Wait But Why’s “12 kinds of people you meet at a hostel” article. Chuckle. I’m so superior because I’m not young and culture isn’t made for me anymore and I’m supposed to be whatever.</p> Here’s a fun game. Mess around with the Ulysses preferences until the clock runs out? No! A different fun game. Stroke your chin and your young-guy fuzzy beard while staring into the depths of your Macbook monitor? No! A different fun game! Have a weird wooden contrivance to prop your Macbook up on because like just putting it on the table isn’t good enough? No! A *different* fun game! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you? Can you not stop being self-protectively judgemental long enough to actually do something interesting? Oh, I don’t know. I maybe could be able to maybe do that. If you, you know, rephrase it in a less negative—I mean, a more positive way for me. Because you know how sensitive I am. Yes. OK. Yes. OK. Yes, I do. I had forgotten. I mean, it’s been a while since we’ve gotten together to, to you know, to—OK, how about this. Let’s just skip to the fun game. OK. OK. Here’s the rules: when it gets boring, stop trying to explain the shit out of it and just move on. But what about— Ah dit dit dit dit! You can always play the boring game a different time. That’s like part of the deal. We separate them out. It’s like casing versus delivering. Or something. What we used to call “Writing” versus what we used to call “Revising.” Oh. OK, I guess. OK. Then the second rule is, create as many mini sub-games as necessary as you go along. Like for instance, today it’s this: warm up with some subject-verb pairs. OK. I’ll do that now. OK. I’ll wait. OK. I’m done. Have you noticed we say “OK” a lot. OK, I’m going to ignore that. OK. OK. What’s next? Well, do you feel good and warmed up? You know what I like about the “subject verb” game? What? It leads you into unexpected zones. It’s like finding tiny breathtaking flowers in the desert. Agreed. We should totally use that for one of our little podcast thingies for students we were planning to do. Yes, that’s a great idea. (I’m going to make a note of it right now.) You know what else is a great idea? Feeling kind of paternal and wise around these kids because they can’t even write for 40 minutes without checking their phones or going up for a refill or staring off into space for long chunks of time, because like they don’t even know how shit works, and haven’t had just the plain hours of experience that— No. Oh. What then? Well, I was thinking something but I forgot. I forgot which one of us is me and which one of us is you. Yeah, me too. Should we just say fuck it and not worry about it? Yeah. That could be kind of cool. Like the first real variation on “Him and Me” since Him and Me... cuz like, there’s no distinct personality placeholder values for each “character;” the idea of character becomes fluid, random, arbitrary, and you know I don’t want to say “quantum” because everybody says that and I have a feeling it’s going to make me look dumb, but still. Yeah, I know what you mean. I have a feeling there is a particular word for what you’re talking about, but I can’t think of it right now either, and because we’re in like anti-intellectual mode at the moment where we’re not supposed to do anything boring, I guess just forget it. Let it slide right off your head like the entire Internet age. Flit flit flit flit from one thought to the next, and nothing sinks in and there’s no more pretense that any of these alleged chits of data amount to anything like information. What? Wait. Go back. What’s the word for I don’t know. Can’t rememer. Neither can I. Remember, now, I didn’t say you couldn’t do anything hard, just that you couldn’t do anything *boring.* So if you’re not bored by trying to think of the word you were trying to think of, by all means— Oh, yeah, that’s actually a really good distinction. Yeah. Remember when we were kind of entertained by words? Sometimes, in between lust and drugs and grunting pleasures of the moment? Yes. Do you remember anything else from those days? Yes. Yes, anything you’d care to share? I’m not sure. What’s the point? What’s the guiding question? I don’t really want to just— Yeah, I know. Um, let me think one second. OK but— **Can I think for one fucking second without you tapping your foot and pressuring me to sign something?** What’s the balance between keeping going and When you say “what is” is the subject “what” or is the subject the thing on the other side of “is”? and I don’t I I’m not You know what’s cool about the subject verb game? What? That you can’t use “not” because “not” is always just an adverb. Oh. “Just” an adverb, he says. That seems so dismissive, so forlorn. Kind of sad. Can a part of speech have existential sadness? I guess it can now. Aha! What! I think you just said something! Um, yeah, I mean we’ve been sitting here talking and I’ve said a shitload of— No! I mean just now! I think, finally, one of us just said something that actually could be slightly interesting! Well, that’s kind of the deal, isn’t it. You generate a lot of clicks like SETI, just on the off chance that— Yes, don’t change the fucking subject on me now. The thing you said before, “I guess it can now.” Yeah? What about it? That’s what writing is! Don’t you remember!? We came here, we came in here, into this abandoned warehouse factory thing, whatever the fuck this place is, because we couldn’t remember what writing was! We had that in common! Yeah—we kind of recognized each other, and knew we knew each other from somewhere, but couldn’t remember where or why we should care, and then we came in here, and you accidentally, through time-carving and babbling and meaningless letting go of shit, accidentally said something, like put together pieces of units of bits of whatever the fuck you want to call it— And actually accidentally made a message, like a thing, like an actual object! Like, that’s programming! That’s simulation! That’s reality! That’s writing! Right. Right. And I can’t even remember if it was me or you that said it— And that’s the point, too! *in unison* **IT TOTALLY DOESN’T MATTER!** God I love abandoned factories. I love being alive. I love weird shafts of light and the ominous throb of history. I love coffee. I love how the weather changes. I totally, I mean I fucking totally love you. I am grateful for the physical presence of you. I am grateful for the mental presence of you. I love how sometimes everything just gets scrambled up but we have this thing called consciousness that makes us feel together even through all that. So much, so much can go wrong. There’s so much horror in the world. People are fucking monsters. They kill each other all the time, and worse. Are we going to pretend we can do anything about that? Do we have to pretend that coming here and doing this is somehow related to taking a stand? Is it? If it isn’t what do we do that is? That’s a good fucking question. You can’t just leave it at that. Let the question burn. Do *not* under any circumstances turn it into one of those heartfelt, stupid-serious-face blog posts everybody writes on Medium. God those are so fucking useless and depressing. They’re just guilt orgies. They are fucking priveleged middle class aspirational absolutions. They’re like fucking Catholic confession. They take the place of doing anything about anything. Can you do anything *about* anything? Well.... What? Let’s ask the adverbs. *dramatic pause to let that shit soak in* You know, nobody but us thinks that was dramatic at all. I know. But that’s OK. We live here. We live here in this abandoned factory warehouse thing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t go out any time we want. That’s the awesome thing about living someplace. If you *live* there, it’s not necessarily a prison. It’s a place to go out of and come back to, again and again. And while you’re out, you can maybe take a random stab at doing something about something. Like we did today. *like we did today* Um, did you hear something? Yeah, like an echo or something? Yeah. That was weird. Ah well, whatever. So, where do you want to go now? Wait—anywhere, as long as it’s with you—but first— Yeah? I just want to check back in and make sure we were both on the same page about the adverb thing. Oh, OK, whatever, sure. I mean, yeah, now that I am starting to remember more and more stuff about you, I do remember that you always had this tendency to kind of nail stuff down. It’s one of the things that I love about you but that also kind of annoys the hell out of me. But that I love about you. Yeah, well, never forget, it’s how we managed to have a roof over our heads. If nobody had nailed down those planks up there, this place would still be— You’re right, you’re right. So yeah, about the adverbs, as far as I understood it, it wasn’t even really about the adverbs as such, it was the thing you said about “now they can,” because by us writing it down (which is just an anachronistic skeuomorph for some kind of informational transformation or organization that neither of us is remotely qualified to discuss in any appreciable depth), it became true, or real, or measurable, or visible, or observable, or created, or whatever you want to call it. Like the airstream turkey? Like the airstream turkey, I think, yes. Although there may be more to it than that, or else there may not be any more to it than that. Things that are simple are powerful. And scary. Don’t forget scary. Right. Can we go out now? Sure. Let’s go.