out, cotton shorts still dorky, ass suddenly cool as the evening breeze comes across the trembling stern and bumps against what had been out of reach. home. The realization that whatever happens now, it happens *now*, and not before, and not tomorrow. *Now* the world is perfect. *Now* my friend holds out his hand, and what he’s holding is for me; he proffers and I take, and it’s a perfect, fragrant, sultry, steaming cup of *perfect* coffee. Note: this part did not happen. I don’t even drink anymore. Weird to think of it that way, but pragmatically true. What’s to drink? We have water. That’s what I drink. We’re always on the water, sometimes in the water, never farther from the water than near the water, and the water is in us. We drink it, we become it. I think this is the first day I actually don’t know what day it is. Luckily, it’s the first day I don’t care. I need a haircut. Of course, I don’t need a haircut. I kind of want it to be about sex, and I kind of don’t want it to. There is a definite low-level thrum, as we slither anonymousy along our thin slice of biosphere between the baking sun and the glistening water. It’s not even a slice: it’s a thin thread, between the left bank and the right bank. Right now they’re the north and south banks, but that could change. There’s a certain opacity people’s faces get when they’re genuinely trying to hide their distaste. Their voices have makeup on. Those vowels responsible for cheer, sympathy, and camaraderie get drawn out just a little too long. No matter what the textual conversation is, they’re wearing an invisible cloak of relief that they’re not you. Rain has dissolved the usual pattern. Steady, percussive, the rain persists. Countless tiny explosions on the surface of what we’ve come to think of as our river; myriad idiophonic thumps on the bow and stern decks sing with such incomprehensible complexity as to seem like white noise to the unattuned. But we, we who have lived in this cut of water for days now, weeks, we hear a different song. We hear the soundtrack to the fog. We hear the naptime of the crawfish. We hear the surrender of the sky to the wet femininity of the land. Raspberry bushes glare out of the gray with audacious bursts of saturated color. We stop to select and eat. We leave some. It’s just what you do. You leave some. I read somewhere that if you get a heart transplant, your personality gets more like that of the person whose heart you get. So like if they rode motorcycles and had a dog and were sanguine and optimistic and gentle, you could become less of an uptight, controlling, clenched asshole. He said, “I’ll be a poet until the day I die. That’s my curse and my blessing. Everyone who’s really alive has a blessing and a curse!” “Here’s to the blessing and the curse,” I say. I HAVEN’T SEEN HIM for a long time now. I know he lived in a trailer for a while, in an actual trailer park. The white-T-shirted, corn-chip-eating pathos of that breaks my heart right now, as I think back, but of course in real life, as anything in real life is when it’s compared to your anxiety-ridden, deep-night dreams of what life was supposed to be like, you child, you grown-up child of lost dreams and broken promises, it probably wasn’t really all that devastating. On the way down there, there were two dogs fucking, and it reminded me of a dumb old joke. Pretty soon I had to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a dilapidated but seemingly viable gas station with a convenience store. There was a lot of yellow light, and it made the grey parking lot look gold. This was at the intersection where the road you have to take turns to gravel, turns from a big black and white letter to a little yellow and blue number. I wasn’t sure if I remembered that store being there before. It’s amazing how long of a drive this is. When did I become so afraid of dogs? I’m in the car eating cheezits and drinking a beer and careening down a hill and all I can think of is that there was a time when the pack of semi-wild dogs on the shoulder would have been a thing I would have walked through, low and slow, using my instincts, but now I’m embarrassingly grateful to be racing by in a car spewing dust. Jesus, did I even have a car at that time? How did I get down to the river that first day? Yeah, I walked, that’s right. The realization hits me like a slap across the face from a rival pool-player in a dive bar who’s just realized he can do whatever he wants with me. Jesus, what the fuck have I become? I throw the bottle in the back seat, because regardless of whatever else has happened to me, the fat gut, the flabby arms, the paling constitution, I still don’t believe in littering. Ah, these feeble myths on which we warp our tapestries of self. It’s funny, really, but I don’t feel like laughing about it. Maybe a little farther down the road—shouldn’t I have come to the turnoff by now?—I’ll stop the car and it’ll be dark and I’ll get out by the soft shoulder and some weedy grass gone to seed and I’ll think some obvious thoughts about perspective and the billions of stars and how anything could be happening out there, I mean, truly just anything at all, and a truck will roar past and I’ll wonder if that guy driving the truck has any idea about what-all is going on on the fourth planet out from the the 33 and a half billionth star from the left of that arm of the Milky Way I can see from here, or if he cares, or if I care, or if we’re just stuck down here thinking about our own stupid troubles--him with his load of milk in the ------ truck with its baffles to keep from sloshing around too much and sending him careening out of control on one of these sharp turns--what the fuck is a semi truck doing on this gravel road anyway?--and me with my stupid pseudo-mythological narcissistic exercise in half-denied soul-searching gone sour on one and a half beers and a late night full of fluorescent tubes and windshield-killed bugs--and maybe at some time I’ll be ready to think about that and maybe I’ll be alone and lonely enough for that to really turn into something despite itself, or maybe there will be someone there, and as a result words will turn into other words that I didn’t even mean or think, and maybe there will be some advantage in that, but for now, I don’t know, I just don’t have the energy for any of it, and so instead I hit seek and hope for a station that’s something other than pop pop pop pop country or commercial, but no such luck, so I crack open another idiotic beer and sing along. I’m usually not like this. I guess I really don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me. Okay, occasionally we do make coffee. Like, only about once a day. But that’s still mostly water. Well, okay, what beverage isn’t mostly water? But the point is, I used to drink alcoholic beverages with a remarkable regularity, a regularity that kind of sneaked up on me over the course of several years. Once it’s a thing you do, it just becomes a thing you do, you know? You stop thinking about whether you really “want” a drink or not, and you just want one without noticing it. It’s very unintentional, I guess you could say. The weird thing is, I don’t miss it. I did at first, for I guess I’d say about the first four or five days. I even kind of had some jitters. There was a raspy paper-bag hum or echo in my ears in the evening, a dry mouth in the morning, and a general feeling of missing something. But along with that unpleasantness came a strange sense of power. Like a raw edge—something had been cut away from me, or I had been pushed out of an airplane and for a while at least, I was flying. So that’s why today’s tributary, a mucky, sodden green mass of leaf rot and snake tangle, reminds me of when I would have just wanted a beer without wanting one. It’s hot. It’s after noon. The sun is beating down like a blanket. The water is green and thick, untold depth. And all I want is a drink of water, which I pause to take, and note in passing that nothing’s missing. The superpower of alcohol really is illusory. I’m still awake, alert, in full possession of every possible thought, and there is no buzz except the buzz of fucking dragonflies. Realistically, I’m sure there’ll come a day when I knock back a drink or two. But I continue to be amazed by how not imminent that day has become. As we plod up this tributary, the question arises again: Why are you afraid of tributaries? Why are you afraid of going down the main stream? Wait, now I’ve lost what the question started out as. Which one was I afraid of? Was he the one who was afraid? “There are no aspen here,” he says, as if that explains everything. “Was that a copperhead?” I ask, after a wriggly splash startles both of us, makes us jerk our gazes toward the hell of tree limbs combing dust and dirty foam out of the stagnant swirl on the bank to our right. Everything is dirty here. You would not go swimming here. There is nothing human about this place. But— We pass a cave. We don’t say anything about it. I kind of want to, but— The stream keeps going downhill. It doesn’t look like downhill, but you know it is. It must be. This is the way the water is flowing. We keep doing what we’re doing, until the stars begin to reappear. The way they do that, night after night, is akin to how the water keeps flowing. I wonder if being transfixed by memory is anything like lying on your back on a gravel bar next to your beached canoe next to the impression in the gravel where your friend was a minute ago until he went to go find something or take a piss or something. Honestly, you weren’t really listening when he said where he was going. You were something like transfixed by a memory. Each irregularly rounded or slightly piercing stone presses into your back, your buttocks, the back of your thighs, the coolness under your knees, your ankles, your heels. There’s one that hurts there, and you move your left foot one scraping inch. Better. Your spine, each vertebra pulsed by its own individual rock. How long have these rocks been in this river bed? And you? Another star is born. Another imperceptible loss. We will never be just starting out again. What makes that okay? Where’s the redemption for realizing, barefaced on a dirty random chunk of earth, full like a tick, that that one time we stuck that one paddle in that one pile of water and pushed, that that was the only time we would ever do that exact, specific thing? Transfixed. Here comes my redemption. I push out a little laugh at that. His footfalls crunch percussively into the quiet symphony of my star, my memory, and my motionless earth massage. Coalescing out of an aural plane between sleep and wakefulness, his voice sounds like a kitchen when you’re dozing on the couch and there’s nowhere in particular you need to go and someone else is doing the cooking and you live there so there’s no question: you’re staying. “...is probably just below that bridge.” Yes, I think about it. It seems plausible. How many days out are we? The town he’s talking about is probably below that bridge. I sit up. Yes, that bridge. Its underside is dark as bats right now. So glad we’ll not be passing under it tonight. Something about concrete at night that’s colder than it should be. Some astronomical compact between the death of souls and the aggregation of all that slag and sand: even the most civil concrete sings an alien song at night. I’ll take my gravel bar, thank you. Not that hungry. He passes me a gallon bag of trail mix. 020003 #human #crow Really? You really want me to answer that? I am afraid to answer that because then I will either have to go do whatever it is, or else admit that I am too weak, too chicken. Unless of course the answer is “nothing. There is nothing I would rather be doing than sitting here.” How often is that really the answer? Maybe more often than I realize. Who cares. Me. That’s who. Who else? Who cares. “Thanks.” “I’m really getting sick of this stuff,” he says, face thoughtful as he chews. +++ Ordinarily in the morning I make a rough log cabin out of kindling around the scraps of paper he’s thrown in a makeshift fire ring. I light the fire because I’m the one who can find the lighter. He starts getting food items out and sometimes cooking, and in the process scatters all kinds of packages, cans, containers, and miscellaneous items all over the ground around our campsite. Yesterday it was oranges rolling all over the creek bottom pasture we’ve camped on: he doesn’t even seem to notice these kinds of things—until he decides he’d like an orange. But this morning rain has been tapping on the tarp for hours. It was a dream tapping at first, fading in and out, until just before the sun began to think about spreading its fingers down into the folds of the valley through which our river glistens. Now it’s a steady typewriter symphony, warm and vast, a multidimensional wave of information beyond our power to decode. So instead we merely listen. The surface of the water steams with a popcorn hiss. An undulating mirror under fairer skies, it’s now a curving flat bar of sandblasted aluminum. The willows are dripping like washed hair, while saturated sycamore boughs droop like well-used mothers’ breasts, robed in patchy white. The whole air moves with a breathlike hotness, as we sit in the television-blue glow of the tarp above our heads. My friend leans back on his left hand and his right arm is balanced on his right knee. He’s wearing his beaver hat of course, but no shirt, so I see his stomach muscles tighten up before he shifts forward to bring his left hand up to peel the orange in his right hand. His dirty fingernail releases a galaxy of aromatic brilliance into our humid little universe. His torso rocks slightly each time he chucks a scrap of orange peel towards the strip of nettles and brambles between our weedy little burrow and the river below. The pieces lie there, some orange, some pithy white, like so many isolated countries with uneven borders, settling infinitesimally into the surrounding green. “You’re awfully quiet,” he says/chews. He holds out a segment without looking over at me. I take it. It’s plump, not too acid, not too sweet. It was a statement, not a question, so I know I don’t really have to answer it, but on the other hand— “Hey,” he says. “We should totally paddle in the rain. Let’s pack up and go now, before it stops.” That sounds exactly like something he would say. Another of his lame-brained ideas. Like the time he tried as hard as he could to encounter a bear in the middle of a street. Different story. Whatever. So of course I go through the pleasant motions of acting incredulous and exasperated, and of course we pack up and go paddling down the river in the rain. +++ The girls behind the counter are sucking on suckers, but the flavor they’ll exude, once they actually stop what they’re doing to look at me, will be careful tolerance--at best. My good old friend has taken charge of shopping up and down the crooked, worn-indoor-outdoor-carpeted aisles of this dilapidated bait shop, and left me the awkward job of asking to refill our water jugs. As I approach the counter, I watch first to see what I’m up against, and what I see is frankly unbelievable. There’s a tall, pale-skinned, long-necked girl with a dark ponytail that bobs neotenously every time she moves. There’s a shorter, rounder, misty-faced, doe-eyed girl with a faint spray of freckles across her cheeks. They each have a sucker, and they are staring at each other as they lick. The tall girl sticks her tongue all the way out and down--it’s almost giraffelike--and it’s green--then she lays the sucker up against it, and moves her whole head slowly up, so the whole long, slow length of her tongue slides along the sucker. The soft-focus girl smiles, giggles, and mimics the movement with her green sucker, although hers is almost all sucked, so she’s mostly licking just a stick with some green sugary bumps on the end. Tall girl lets her composure go into a controlled slip for a moment; her laugh undulates her body forward; the brunt of her smile goes into the floor; when she straightens up she rocks back on the four-legged stool she’s perched atop. Finally her motion dampens and she locks gazes with her doe friend, and she sticks her tongue out even slower, even longer this time, and makes another unabashed, long, wet lick, and her upper lip curls into the faintest trace of a snarl this time, and the doe-eyed girl almost looks scared and lost for a flash, before the soft smile and the giggle can escape again, and again she copies, but her licks are never quite as long, never quite as slow, always a little more cartoonish compared to her swan-necked, lanky, hard-eyed girl friend. My main reaction is a hypnotized disbelief. I do have a slight tingle in my crotch, but it’s almost overwhelmed by my awareness of the obviousness of the lechery of the situation I didn’t even ask to be in. For some reason, I don’t want my friend to see this. He’ll ruin it by talking about it. And yet, I really crave to talk to him about it. “So there’s a low-level horniness building, and you’re not sure what to do with it.” “Well, yeah.” It sounds a little ridiculous when he echoes it back to me like this, but I guess that’s okay. Ahead, the north bank becomes the northeast bank, and the south bank becomes southwest. Directly west, there is a gravel bar. He is still in the stern, and therefore largely in control of which way we turn. Instead of turning early to anticipate the current, he begins to barrel straight ahead. Confused, I switch to the left side and dig in with gusto. My tricep, long and thin, flexes with the effort. It’s tan; it feels good; it isn’t enough to dissuade the forward motion of the canoe; all my heaving does is accelerate the inevitable, and with a scraping *boom,* we slam halfway up the bar. I lurch forward with the sudden stopping. The sound of the curling current against the back end of the boat is suddenly loud, like someone pouring out a giant tea kettle fast. Without really thinking about it or being asked, I slide my paddle under the thwart behind me, and hop out onto the stones. I took my shoes off a long time ago; my feet get a tough massage. I grab the handhold and slide the canoe the rest of the way up out of the swim. It’s almost effortless until the very end, when his weight meets dry land. I hunch my back into it for these last couple of feet, and that, too, feels good. The eyes I look at him with are light, cervine, wondering. The eyes looking back are dark, igneous, implacable. The sun drapes this scene in heat. I: shirt. He: no shirt. I feel pale next to his dark olive; scrawny and soft to his compact and buff. We stand there, until the sun is no longer in the place where it was, and the river is no longer, as they say, the river it was. A turkey vulture circles. Every elsewhere that exists is filled with happening; people are dying, elated, insane, miserable, scheming; deals are made; prisoners tortured; communication is breaking down. The news is being bellowed across every medium; most of it goes unheard. Money is being made. Breakthroughs are occuring. Bitter failures are unfolding. Entropy is increasing, but nevertheless, right here, as so often happens between him and me, and it occurs to me for probably about the fourth or fifth time today that this is why I’m here right now, nothing happens. His girlfriend calls and wants to know what’s holding him back. She sounds lonely, angry, and confused, but right at that moment he finds the message and he’s like, look, I’m really sorry but I have to call you back. That whole situation is just not going to end well, you just know it. I should really have a drink of water, he thinks, before I deal with this, and so he sets the paper on his desk, but still he doesn’t move. This message begins somewhere in my, I don’t know, maybe halfway between my gut and my lower back. It bounces back and forth on rickety telegraph lines between that country and the metropolis of my brain. 100913 #stone #copperhead When the pups are ready to emerge from the burrow, the whole clan of meerkats will stand around the burrow to watch. Some of the adolescents might try to show off so they can have more attention than the pups. “Here’s to the blessing and the curse,” I say. “To the curse and the blessing,” he says, and we clunk our mugs together. Just enough coffee spills; just one elongated blob slips over the lip of my mug. 100913 #stone #elephant #copperhead #lovers #mistress The alpha pair often scent-mark subordinates of the group to express their authority, and this is usually followed by the subordinates grooming the alphas and licking their faces. This behavior is also usually practiced when group members are reunited after a short period apart. 100913 #stone #copperhead Despite this altruistic behaviour, meerkats sometimes kill young members of their group. Subordinate meerkats have been seen killing the offspring of more senior members in order to improve their own offspring’s position.[6] I still think of him, sitting there in his trailer, wise, aloof, stoned, detached, superior, completely invisible to the larger world. Somebody loses it in a box in an office they are moving out of. The new guy has to find it, and he doesn’t even know what he’s looking for. Well, the world is mine, now, by god. I step over the left gunwale, and my ankles kick in remarkably well after so long sitting idle. The river rocks grind beneath my rubber soles as I cross the gravel bar to the northwest. Only a few meager trickles and runnels flow between me and what could properly be described as the river bank; the main channel is behind me. The sun is low, low, low to my left. To my right, towards the sudden bend in the river bed, I notice now a great, gnarled tree trunk, parallel to the gurgling surface of the water. It’s one of those perfect sitting-by-the-river spots, the kind of rotund, firm barky surface that practically begs you to climb aboard, that makes you feel like a little girl with a horse between her legs, simultaneously adventurous and safe and sound. But whatever, right now I gotta pee. Hopping from gravel over wet tracks to grassy knoll, I look left and right for the perfect spot. I’m facing in the direction of the path he’ll be arriving on, but that doesn’t matter. I have no sense that anyone is anywhere near nor will be anytime soon. You ever get that feeling? It’s kind of nice and crunchy on the outside, with a soft terrifying center. So saying silently the kind of “fuck it” that only a guy about to piss not in a toilet can say, I just walk a few yards through clicking, ticking, buggy tall grass, unzip, and let ’er rip. Yee-haaaaaaaaahhh, that feels so good my teeth resonate. Holy shit, how long had I been sitting there? A shiver goes up from my lower back and out my shoulders. I’m enjoying the last of that full, relieving stream, and thinking of how cozy and satisfying it’s going to feel to put my shirt on over my slightly sunburned shoulders, the fabric cool against my radiating skin, but warm against the breeze that’s curling ever more insistently across the field between the hills behind me, when I finally, finally hear it. That rustling noise. The unmistakable switch and swash of a nature-loving city dweller making his way over wild familiar territory. I’m just finishing adjusting myself and zipping up when his weed-destroying footfalls pause. I turn around to see his goofy grin. “Dude, I’m not going to shake your hand,” he says. But he holds out his hand anyway. Why? Because there’s something in it. And here’s where I’m almost embarrassed to admit how perfect everything becomes. The naked forest air across my chest. The disappearing color of the sky. The sostenuto sighing of the leaves; a white-noise crescendo as the breeze picks up. The disappearing of the river around the bend. The sinking in: I’m here; I’m not going I have, like, two hundred dollars. So, yeah. Strange how that can seem like a lot, or hardly anything, depending on the situation you’re in. Like right now it seems like a lot, because I mean I never ordinarily carry cash around in the woods. Who would? That’s just stupid. It’s just of course that this time is different. But it wouldn’t seem like a lot like, I don’t know, like if you were just a normal person with a job, and all your neighbors had huge houses with six bathrooms and two sinks in each bathroom and IRA accounts and whatever the hell else people have. Then you’d look at your two hundred dollars and you’d be like, Yeah, right. I’m a joke. I basically don’t even exist in this plane or dimension. I’m an incident. A weather quirk. A bit of fluff blown off the top of one of those wispy weeds over there. Maybe I’ll land in a nice river somewhere, and at least get to see more of the world before I end up jammed in a mini-dam of twigs, foam, leaves, shredded plastic bags, and six-pack plastic. But like, so yeah, really for the situation I’m in right at this moment, I’m basically rich. And hungry. And could really go for a coffee. Oh, there’s nothing quite like a coffee at the right moment. At the not-quite-right moment, it’s just another of those things that exist to fill up extra space in what we think of as the world. An unintentional, non-mindful coffee is basically another cigarette filter not decomposing on some sad, faded asphalt next to a cracked curb stop with rusty rebar poking out. Just the stuff of the world, you know, the stuff without which everything would look like a primitive wire-framed hastily blocked-in computer rendering of an idea of what scenery is—a rendering in which the artist added in a couple of pieces of trash or flotsam, for realism, but only succeeded in reducing verisimilitude, because the pieces were so transparently added, so mechanically placed, too perfectly accidental to look accidental. The only thing more perfect than nature is our idea of geometry. That’s why we never quite get it, never quite really understand where we fit in. We mistake our inability to draw a perfect circle for imperfection; our true failing is our inability to draw an honestly, properly imperfect circle. We can’t recognize true randomness, because we always expect it to look perfectly random. But tea can be good, too. I like some tea, sometimes. Particularly when you’re driving on the interstate Which is in a way kind of the exact opposite of what time it actually is now, here, sitting in this rapidly cooling canoe. The sun is going down exactly as much as that hypothetical sun would be coming up. It’s a hundred and eighty degrees away from tea time, folks. So I really need that fucking coffee, dig? Ha. Sugar for the road. You got some sugar in your tank. Whatever. The weird shit people say. Like, I could do with a sandwich and a cup. Or, I was so hungry I ate my whole plate, even the food. Ah shit, I must be getting tired. Which is kind of fricking lame because we haven’t even started yet. I mean. Or have we? Yeah, and so on and so forth. *Holy shit, what was that?* It flies like liquid plumbing, with too many elbow joints, but only awkward for an instant on the ground. Once aloft, it bends like quiet water through the sky. It has poured itself into our world, leading with its goblet neck, redolent with long-forgotten time. It takes forever to disappear around the river bend; it only takes me seconds to start hearing myself recollect: Dude, I saw a heron. Or dude, you should have seen this heron. Or dude, this heron flew like *right past my head,* I swear to god I could almost have reached right out and touched it. The work of preparing to make something real by describing it to someone significant is somehow simultaneously noble and puerile. Why not build a scaffolding of two-by-fours to hold your perfect vision of a harvest moon? You know you’ll fail, but your body has learned to inoculate itself against the terrifying emptiness of unadorned vision by automatically attempting something more opaque, more attainable than real. Because what good is real? The real is always disappearing. Around the bend. But hey, that’s why god made canoes, right? Um no. Canoes were obviously made to sit and wobble under my skinny ass while I wait all goddamn night for some jackass who’s obviously never going to come. Okay, you want the god’s honest truth? I guess I just feel a little vulnerable right now. Any minute now, Venus will appear. The sky will turn to felt. With random glitter. The water will turn to ink. The rocks will gather up their secrets, secure them for the night. Bugs will disappear. Animals of the graveyard shift will populate the silences. And I will still be sitting here, ridiculous in my shorts and lack of will to move. Some theater in my brain swiftly auditions potential ways that I might feel right now. Horniness flits by, in its autoerotic four-wheel-drive. Desolation lurks around the pit. Thrilling possibility is hiding in the dressing room among the cool, the whispering, the smell of history. Patience is growing bored of its own monologue. And bravery sits in the director’s seat, judging us all, demanding more, next! More. After call-backs, a kind of blankness gets the lead. The others, offered bit parts, circle the house warily, watching, waiting. The canoe is filled with shadow now, except one dollop of sunlight, ridiculously bright, near my left knee. As trees in fall insist on brilliance before death, so the glints of sunlight on the wavelets in the water shine with extra neon zing. Each electric line of light illuminates its corresponding tiny swell of pure transparency. It’s like a firefly dance gone mad; phosphorescence stretched into impossible dimensions. Goddamnit I have to piss. I’m going to have to get up, though my muscles still feel hypnotized and dumb. So finally, just like that, I do. But isn’t that really always the way it works? I mean, really, when you think about it. No matter the decision, there’s always a time when you’re not doing it, and then there’s a time when you are doing it. No matter how momentous or trivial, one ultimate bit gets flipped. A one becomes a zero, or a zero becomes a one, and that’s it. You’re off. No matter how long you deliberate at the end of the high dive, staring at the crazy-waving black lines at the bottom of the pool, knowing someone is in line behind you, hearing the drone of a thousand anonymous judges not looking at you—are they?—no matter how many endless minutes you stand there, dripping, mostly naked, mortal, there is always one instant when you are no longer standing there. And here’s the thing, my friends: you will never be ready to choose that instant. Something else propels you over; perfect readiness is never the activation energy. So what is the something else? I’ve never been able to figure that out. But whatever it is, it makes me get up now. The canoe does that dumb rocking thing canoes do even when they’re mostly on the ground, as if it wants to dance with my cracking knees. I inelegantly steady myself, elbows sticking Straight ahead, the river cantilevers right, and disappears to the southeast. There’s more gravel over there, more crawdads, more nettles, maybe a frog, more flickering leaves, and always, always, always—more water. A shiver passes through me. I desperately want something to happen. Sometimes, though, nothing happens. That’s, as they all too stupidly say, life. I should really have a drink of water. And neither do I. The chorus of small round shadows cast from every piece of river rock elongates. The feathered shadow of the top of my head just touches the bow of the canoe now. Something about the way the sound of the stream remains constant in the fading solar intensity just lifts up that loneliness that was subtle before, and paints it in lurid colors, elevates it to almost obscene sublimity. There’s something almost comforting about being bludgeoned by the loneliness of the spinning of a watery planet. When I shift my ankles and knees a little, versus the slight stiffness forming there, the gravelly grumble of the bottom of the lumie sounds as much too loud as the sumac leaves are red. To my left, the direction from which he should be coming. To my right, across the modest channel, an overhanging clump of the kind of vegetation that screams, SNAKES!!!, and then Did you ever stop to think about how someone’s life is right up next to the distant sounds you hear? Someone’s holding that screaming beast in his hand—his tricep is knotted, it’s flecked with beads of sweat and bits of chewed-up wood. The little chips and curls hang suspended in his arm hair. He’s blinking sweat out of his eyes, underneath his tattered, sweat-stained cap. The chain spins up and dies down, in its own peculiar tempo, like a violent form of breathing, and the disharmonious roar unsubtly commands his focus—it’s a violent meditation, and it soothes and satisfies. The tree he’s decimating falls like an army of goblins under the devastating swath of that mechanical magical sword of doom. 090813 #worm A knight in full armor strolls past, talking casually with a harp-carrying bard in purple tights. But from here, the tetchy whine’s no louder than a pair of fucking dragonflies. And I’ve got my own problems. A soda can is half-submerged in gravel. Sun and rain have faded the label. It looks a hundred years old. It looks like something you might have drunk at your grandparents’ family reunion. Is it old enough to have the old style pop-top ring? The top is turned the other way; can’t tell; just as well. I sure could use a drink of something, though. I do have some water in a bottle in my bag under the seat my aching ass is pressing down. But still. Sure could go for a nice, tall, steamy, dark-roast, fresh, black, styrofoam-surrounded co-mother-fuckin-*fee.* Yeah that’s like a fucking dream, as the sun ticks another nanosecond down towards the bridge, the reeds, the bats, the cattails, and the world outside this narrow little channel of invisibility. And another. And another. He’s never going to show. I’ve disappeared, haven’t I? Why am I down here? It’s so quiet all of a sudden. Where’d the guy with the chainsaw go? The water licks the rocks with lewd suggestions. The water, I realize, has dismantled everything it touches. What’s that thing about the softest thing in the world? Destroys the world. Until it gets destroyed. Dude, I don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about any more. I’m like some kind of lame low-budget animé cartoon in my own head. I’m almost certain now this was a bad idea. 121694 #squirrel Anyway, you’d be a lovely birthday present, even if a few days late. (But, hey! By the way--did you ever find that swinging girl necklace?) Oh, and thanks again for the food processor. I’ve been using it quite a bit lately. The chainsaw guy is probably having a beer. I’m pretty sure I would have a beer after destroying a dead tree. What the fuck. I’d deserve it. I would Hungry. Could really use a coffee. But whatever. The bridge lurks behind my head. I know it’s there, and if the sun goes down any further (if? I mean, if? Really?), there will be a shadow falling across my currently sun-kissed shoulders. I might even have to put my shirt back on. Ever notice how you can sometimes get a glimpse of the most horrendous depths of the nearness of outer space, the utterly freezing emptiness and absolute death that night is a tiny emblem of, hours before night even falls? That happens to me more often lately, for some reason. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. Right here at this bend in the river, the river flows just about exactly northeast. That’s why the sun is setting behind me, or will be soon, will soon be setting the sumac leaves on fire. They’ve only recently begun to turn red—strange, actually, it seems too early in the year for that. Summer’s not even technically over, but the *sumac leaves are blazing scarlet.* Hungry? Yeah, but mainly coffee. \#water And then as evening proves inevitable once again, even the sound of the rushing water changes. Sitting in a grounded boat, ah, there’s nothing more calm and confident than that--until the hour of departure begins to race with the departing day. Every minuscule echo of current on rock begins to grow more cavernous, suggestive. The hollows of this little river yearn toward the bigness of the ultimate destruction of the sea. All water is doomed. And so am I. Dude, fucking whatever. If this asshole doesn’t get his ass down here in another, oh I don’t know, I don’t have a watch, ten minutes, I swear to god I’m going to— To what? I’m sure as hell not going to leave the canoe here. I’d have to pay for it. Of course it’s in my name. The money stuff, yeah, that’s not his, uh, specialty. I mean, he works, it’s not that, I mean how much can you really expect to make working part time stocking shelves and shoving jugs of milk toward the back side of the glass doors of the dairy section—he’s like some kind of frozen fish in a dry aquarium when I see him back there, peering out between the curves of two percent, more sheepish in his dirty smock than any time I’ve seen him in the woods. I don’t know. It’s like he wears civilization like a thrift-store suit. He just borrows jobs. Whatever. I don’t mind being the guy with the credit card. Whatever. But. Sometimes I do wish he’d get a They’re fucking tippy, okay? There! Happy now, fucker? I hate canoes because they fucking wibble wobble back and forth, every time you so much as twitch your dick muscles! Okay? I mean, whose the fuck idea was it to make a goddamn boat that’s like twenty times longer than it is wide? What the fuck? I’m supposed to go down the river in a fucking hollowed-out *stick?* Fuck this! I’d like to be able to have the concept of *sideways* in my kinetic vocabulary, if that’s all right with you, but no. Noooooo! He wanted to take the canoe. He, actually he *insisted* we take the canoe. So here I am, practically immobilized with vague discomfort in this one-dimensional torture craft, waiting for his heinous ass to get his ass down here out of the grocery store, past the parking lot, across the interstate, over the weedlot, through the tires and plastic bags and shrubs, past the condominiums’ backyard, over the gate to the park, into the thick of the oaks and the maples, down from the cliff with the caves and the bats, across the granite flats, down along the winding stream to the place where the smaller streams meet and make the bigger stream, then turning upstream, past the fallen sycamore at the swimming hole where he lost his copper bracelet, veering left at the neverending hump of the water from the great freezing spring, to here, this gravel bar, this predetermined place where we were supposed to be, I don’t have a watch, at least an hour ago. The fuck. I’m going to kick his sinewy ass when he gets here, of course I really won’t. But I’m not so young as to be unaware of the immense privelege it is to be able to talk shit about the *idea* of kicking his ass. When he gets here. If he ever does. Maybe he got run over by a car. At some point, you almost have to think that. It’s like getting a gift card at Christmas from somebody who has to get you a present but doesn’t really know you. There’s a roundish rock two and a half feet off the port bow that’s not completely dry and not completely wet. I guess you could say that’s the edge of the river. The blue-green beetle is gone. I didn’t notice when it flew or walked away. There’s so much that goes unnoticed. Maybe that’s a good thing. My left ass cheek is a little bit sore. Here, let me adjust my weight to get some relief, *and the entire watercraft adjusts it’s weight along with me.* Fucking canoes. The sound of the water-polished stones against the bottom of the boat are like sunspots in my little slack-jawed universe. Yeah there’s definitely more sludgy water in the bottom than there was before. It was like two sandal-widths away from my foot before, and now And what is it about waiting for someone that tries to make you mad, even when there’s really nothing to get mad about? I mean, here I am. I’m here. I wanted to be here, right? No job, no schedule, no girlfriend, no school, no parents, no life. Just here and now. That was the plan, right? I mean, you know, after I refused, and doubted, and debated, and doubted, and decided, and finally gave in. That was the plan. And here I am. So why doesn’t this feel real? No school, no money, no commitments, no attachments. I sure could use a cup of coffee, though. A ticking noise. Something ticks against the metal hull. An iridescent beetle, blue, or green, or both, metallic, suddenly clumsy, following a random drunkard’s walk along the gunwale. *You’re not supposed to sit on those.* Did you know that? I know all kinds of dope shit about this shit. I know how and where to sit, and what the colors of the water mean, and how to steer, and when to not steer. I’m in the prime of my youth, mother fucker, and I’m here to tell you, *I am not wearing a shirt.* And the sun beats down. I’m probably going to get a sunburn. There’s a crashing in the foliage over my left shoulder, but it’s not him. It’s so dumb that I’m even thinking that. Did you ever sit near a road, waiting for a certain person to come pick you up, and it’s getting dark, and each new spray of headlight over the hump in the road is definitely them, and then each time it’s not? How retarded, to be sitting here on the ass-curve of the aft bench of a stupid loomie, feeling like that when a fucking squirrel misses his branch and crashes into a mess of sumac leaves. Scamper, scamper, he hides his embarrassment with quickness. I hide mine with chucking a pebble into the shallows. It settles in among its billion brethren, a pebble again at last. Hey, if pebbles weren’t meant to fly, it tells the river bottom, *then I wouldn’t have.* And then it forgets. Water flows by overhead, and sunshine and starlight over that, and that’s all that happens to it again for a billion years. Do you ever have strange thoughts, not thoughts but sentences, that crash like broken airplanes out of the sky for no reason at all? My ears suddenly feel loud. I want to go somewhere. I want to be somewhere else. What the fuck is this? Why am I sitting here? I’d get up, but— I didn’t want to take the canoe in the first place. It’s aluminum, it’s heavy, it probably leaks, it’s ugly, it’s not even ours, and— Okay, fine. You really Also, the canoe is aluminum. A loomie. A big old heavy clunky loud-as-fuck piece of yesterday’s tech. And I’m not entirely convinced it doesn’t leak. You know those lines of rivets or grommets or whatever they’re called? Yeah. It seems a little too wet there for how long I’ve actually had this thing in the water. There’s this sludgy mixture of sand and water just slip-sliding back and forth every time I move. I’m just sitting here in the goddamn canoe, and if I barely breathe, the brown sludge moves. The sun feels good on my shoulders, though. It feels like it wants to make love to my fawn-speckled freckles. Dude, where the fuck is dude? He’s the idiot that wanted to take the canoe in the first place. So why am I sitting here, *in the canoe that I didn’t want to take in the first place,* getting macked on by the goddamn sun, while he is off somewhere at some grocery store or some goddamn place, doing god knows what, and not being here? I mean, we had a time. We were supposed to be here. Why *did* he just *have* to go to the grocery store right then? [In (4) you reveal that he works there.] If I know so much about canoes, why did I sound so retarded about them in (1)? How can we revisit and clarify the geography of the put-in point? Cuz your convoluted directions don’t make it clear whether he’s approaching along *this* river or a different one, and if it’s this one, whether it’s from upstream or down. Why *does* that happen to me more often lately? • You said here that the sound of the water *changes* with evening coming on, but I believe later you said it *doesn’t* change. i say i’ve never been able to figure out what it is that finally makes you ready to go over the high dive. Well...? it’s not really neotenous if they’re only in 7th grade—is it? (along about 19ish) sometime soon are you going to address how he used to hate the canoe but now doesn’t seem to? maybe a dialog episode? and also what about dude’s girlfriend/the grocery store. yeah but whatever. There’s so many rules you’re supposed to follow, and so many of them are contradictory, and it’s like the road map of the soul was designed by the comment section of a tech blog, and everybody says their thing as if they’re just so right, as if they’ve just said the one thing that’s going to make everybody go “Oooooh,” and go masturbate in the eternal rightness of these final, sane, all-seeing, good-humored words, and everybody who doesn’t say their thing like that pretty much goes to so much trouble to not sound like that that it comes off as sounding even worse, until basically your brain becomes a potato chip and there’s no way to keep track of all the catch phrases, mantras, and moderately sensible reminders, I mean there’s just really no way at all to know how to exist in this world. Dreams? I mean, what does that even mean? What am I supposed to be doing? But I’m driving, that’s what I’m doing now. My knuckles The sound of ice clunking out of the ice maker. The sound of ice clinking into the glass. The sound of a shot being measured. The sound of the shot being poured. The sound of the drink being swirled. But it was just a commercial, so I kept driving. That reminded me of something he used to do. Sometimes when we were playing cards, or also when he was working on something in his garage, he would pour himself a drink—usually Canadian whiskey for some reason—but then he would just let it sit there. The ice cubes would slowly melt into little fuzzy bumps, and disappear. I don’t know why I never said anything or asked him about it. It just seemed like the un-drunk drink was a part of the picture, like a gun-black wrench hanging up on the pegboard, or a I had a conversation lately with my wife about him. Weirdly, it didn’t go so well. I don’t know how to explain it. I mean, on paper it looked good. She invited me to invite him to visit, to stay for a while; she was the picture of open and inviting enlightenment, but maybe that was just the problem. Maybe her sympathy—her *sympathy*—was so telling, so indicative of his becoming a disease, a sad nostalgia, a wraith of an imaginary Peter-Pan past. If I succumb to her sweet graciousness, I accept, I sign on the dotted line, I agree that he—that we, dammit, that we—never really existed. That the river never really existed. Doesn’t flow out there still, in the dark, under the pollution, through the years, in stealth and horrifying silence, darkly, darkly, downhill, persistent, always, neverending, the river, the river. How it calls me. How my soul aches. I am old, I am old. My hands look old. Not quite liver-spotted yet, nevertheless they’re veined and white and blue and rough and red and I haven’t figured out yet just what has happened to get me here. I know. Ridiculous. Pathetic. Clichéd. And yet. And yet. And yet. I still think of him standing up foolishly in the bow end of that stupid canoe. I still think of that, and the way every tree and pebble glided by, every rush, every minnow, every lost bracelet now glinting under history’s sun at the bottom of a swimming hole that no-one swims in, the kids, the kids, do they do that anymore? Does anyone get naked in the river now, the way we did? Of course they do, you fool. I laugh at myself, thank God. One has to laugh at oneself, right? And yet. Is the river even the river anymore? Have they digitized it? Do they know the fear of the limestone and granite? Can they feel the massaging punishment of rock against bare sole? I have an idea to go down there and see. Throw together an elaborate scaffold of excuses, get in the car, spend all day and all night in the zero zone of the highway. Just go and see. Then the idea disappears like an imaginary minnow. Ha ha ha—but I follow it down. “To the curse and the blessing,” he says, and we clunk our mugs together. Just enough coffee spills; just one elongated blob slips over the lip of my mug. A universe implodes. He actually stood up in the canoe and said all that. He actually said that as he stood in the bow of the canoe, making the whole thing wobble crazily, holding his paddle above his head like a barbell or a trophy. I wanted to punch his face in. I actually wanted to ball up my white knuckly fist and whip it towards his smugly gloating grin. It was just so fucking typical of the shit he was always saying. He was always dragging out philosophical clichés and delivering them as if he were a hundred percent sincere and as if he had been the first person to ever think of them. I hate that. And yet. And yet he also said, as the canoe started spinning languidly around as he was standing pointificating and I was sitting, paddle dripping radio waves onto the surface of a slow, deep, snake-green pool, he also said, “You know, you don’t get a scar from a wound. You get a scar from healing.” \#roach That was this morning, in the pellucid post-rainstorm sunshine, before we stashed the canoe and tromped up the hill to this little town, the only part of which we’ll probably ever really see is this little cafe in this little square; this little slice of someone else’s whole reality. We’ve got more clothes on than we’ve had in weeks, and I still feel half naked, and it actually feels pretty good. I feel nut-brown and elastic after all these days of paddling and portaging and splashing around. I feel tight, alert, cohesive. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve ever felt this physically whole. I feel young but capable—it’s a golden moment, and I’m realizing it right now, and that makes it a platinum moment. Cause let’s face it, most golden moments sneak past incognito and it’s not until a year or a few or a decade has passed that you look back wistfully and say, yeah, I really had it going on back then, that was really where it was at. How often do you get to be aware of gold while living in it? It’s like waking up in a dream, lucid dreaming, isn’t that what they call it? And you know you can do whatever you want, *because it’s your dream!* I think, I’m just realizing this now, as I stare a little too long at the gorgeously indifferent waitress as she sets down coffee—coffee!—in robust white mugs the perfect weight, the perfect shape, I think that’s the definition of freedom. Holy shit. I’m free. I’m a free man. My mouth’s partly open. I look at her as she walks away; her white apron’s so printemporally clean. I look back across the blank, energetic field of this table at my friend. I think that’s what I need to do. Every time my friend breathes wrong or throws his shit all over the bottom of the canoe or not only fails to notice an orange root but also refuses to understand why I’m pointing it out or that it’s a big deal, why it’s a big deal— Avoiding? No, I’m not avoiding anything. I just want to feel good. I remember him saying that at a party one time, when some girl in a halter top and a big blue hat had cornered him and accosted him about drinking and drugs, etc. Then of course we left--funny how we always never stayed til the “end” of parties--and on the stumble home we passed one of those little corner bars that used to dot the landscape of ordinary life in those days. Or when he recognized the muskrat tracks—even identified them as female, if he can be believed—but then stomped his big clunky human tracks right over them when we were portaging— It’s hard to explain. People just have different things they get excited about, I guess. I mean, sometimes I think he has this word “nature” in his head and it’s just shorthand for a big playground for socially awkward misfits. To me it’s more than that. Whatever. He has a strong back, at least. He can hold his own paddling, that’s for sure. But right now we’re walking. The canoe is stashed under some grapevines and a scrawny little clump of silver maple that probably won’t even be here after the next big flood. As we hove the hull, his hand curled around the bow deck plate, mine around the stern seat, in one satisfyingly muscular swoosh over the whisperings and scrapings of weeds, a fluttering of samaras ticked and tapped into the bottom of the boat. Most of them didn’t have far enough to fall to even begin helicoptering. Somehow their presence in the boat, all tan with feathery striations, some with a pulse of green at the seed end, made the boat and all our gear look already half gone back to prehistory; like maybe if we wait a moment too long to come back here, there will be nothing but a faint mound, maybe the dull shine of some long-buried aluminum poking through, less noticeable than an ancient soda can. We won’t be gone that long, of course. But somehow, after hours and hours of butts glued to those narrow, crudely contoured seats, to walk away always brings a strange sense of finality, of abandonment. But now we’re walking, a couple of reedy rats in an anonymous old downtown. These little towns all look so familiar. All so endearingly square, with just a touch of the sinister lurking beneath perception, just enough to keep them from devolving into quaint. I always wonder what it looks like and sounds like inside the heads of the people who actually live here. Are there any young people here? How do they live? Where do they work? They can’t all work at this diner, whose bells clatter and clang as we open the door and face the cool, quiet not-unfriendliness within. The rain drops continue to pummel and pelt. Some of them mingle with what’s left of our sweat, curl off the ends of our noses and plunge into our mouths if we open them to speak. And of what do we speak? As usual, of nothing. Rain falls down from above; the river falls down from above. We are always somewhere in the middle. There is a subterranean world, access to which we are disallowed; there is an atmospheric world elementarily alien to us; is there no world to which we can legitimately claim citizenship? We are lumpish apes molded and fabricated by a specious veneer called civilization. We belong nowhere. We shove our rude planks into the sinuous body of the river. We hurtle downstream as if being hastily digested. The relentless rain washes our worries and our secretions into the rest of the environment. We are poisonous sticks; we are polyps; growths; we are a cancer. The sullied rainwater that does make its way into my mouth tastes like iron. It is as if we breathe underwater. We are an anomaly. Grey dissipation of water and air surrounds us in infinite randomness. The canoe glides over several snails in peaceful slumber under the protection of the six inches of water they will never know are all that protect them from the searing fierceness of the utter universe. We are as vulnerable—more vulnerable than those snails. We are ridiculous animated corpses inhabiting a cosmically undetectable membrane between two states of being. We are imperceptible pulses in a slender layer between two edges—between a lump of aggregated stellar dust and the unavoidable shoulder-shrugging nothingness of everything else. We are nothing. I am hungry. 072203 #eel I was sad, it was a sad thing but I said goodbye to her. I said goodbye. I sure could use two cheeseburgers with extra mustard. And a pepsi, with rectangular ice cubes with little divots in one side, in a textured plastic cup with a corporate logo embossed on the outside. Maybe a napkin with quilted edges, some factory-practical flatware, rolled up and tucked in by a slip of paper and a dot of glue, served on a linoleum table top by a frabjous waitress in her early twenties or late thirties or who knows how old she is—seems like maybe you’ve seen her somewhere before? “Thanks,” I say. “No problemo.” 090813 #dog I was in McLean at Christmastime; there wasn’t much to do. I took a walk around the block along with you know who. Do i feel a little foolish to realize that everything is less slightly sinister now? That canoes aren’t so bad really, once you get used to them and stop trying to act like you’re totally in control; that it’s okay if it gets dark and cold; that the relentless mezzo-forte rush of water isn’t really a harbinger of deepest, darkest uncertainty and aloneness in the vastness of space? Can a cup of roasted bean juice really do all that? It seems as if, at least in this case, it can. So I crunch with my friend back over the weeds and reeds and puddles and rocks, and wait for him to get his gear stowed. One moment you’re an albatross with gravel shoes, and another moment you’re a curl of cream across the surface of a cup of coffee. Your body heaves like a bulldog against a leash; the beached vessel roughly nudges. One moment a canoe is a lump of lead that moves inches in exchange for exceptional effort, a grunting encumbrance only fit for purpling your shins; another moment it’s the grace of galaxies and symphonies and silence. How incredible it is to glide—or the river glides under you—you touch it—it responds—you’re making love to water—this is suddenly the most artistic, civilized invention of all time. There’s always one last drag. The penultimate shove invariably leads to one last gravel scraping—a sandpaper tentacle caressing the hull with one last goodbye—an almost foolish, tender gesture—the gravel knows it cannot keep you; knows you will always return to the water, as long as you can. No land can compete with water in the hearts of men; it realizes this, and yet—and yet— Then one last push, not quite so jerky anymore, aided by the man in back poking with his paddle, and then that’s really it, you’re really gone, you’re really floating, and you’ll never again be as young as you just were a second ago. But it’s okay. It’s okay. The best parts are coming. You’ll see. The sadness of the shore also lives in the hearts of men, always. Water in a river laughs more, because it’s never far from shore. Always running, never too deep, with a surprising wiry strength—kind of like my friend! who happens to speak up now: “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw bigfoot?” “No. What happened?” “Nothing. I didn’t see him.” And then silence returns for another three, four, five bends past muscular deep blue pools; green, leaf-dimpled slow flats; ribbed tan rivulets; and clear, sweet, sandy-bottomed shallows. I’m hungry. Why are you afraid to go up tributaries? Why are you afraid to go down the main stream? Why did this whole thing fall apart? Get me a drink of water, will you? The tributary rushes toward the main stream as if it has nothing better to do, as if it can’t help it. As if it is pulled by passion, by pure, watery lust, to dump itself into the permanently falling embrace of its downhill future. The tributary is youth rushing green and golden in the sun and dappled shade toward inevitable dissolution. Paddling is watching his shoulder muscles, rolling steady in the sun. Matching his perfect rhythm, watching his perfect back. The tributary stream is narrow; trees abound on either side. The cool blue-green of tributary shaded by the hazy green of overhanging vegetation—we’re thrusting up a sluice we’d have to stand up in to turn around. Every time the paddles pause, suspended, drips leave trails of circles, tiny waves of history, expanding, colliding, interfering, disappearing. Thick roots sticking out of orange dirt are saying something. I can see but cannot hear. My buttocks rock against the stern seat as my midriff twists. It feels so good to rock and twist, heave and lift, watch the drips, repeat, repeat. Watch the V-shape of his perfect back as he does likewise in the bow. No speaking, only this perfect rhythmic factory of liquid motion. Up the tributary ever narrower, side exploring, off the main stream, looking for some answers to the questions we have never asked. At least in a river system, you never can get lost. Everything is two-dimensional, one-directional. Frees your mind for other concerns. It is the railroad of the forest; passing through each dirty little world, but remaining an elite world of its own. Touching all, enslaved by none. Connecting all, remaining everywhere, but staying nowhere. Every tiny piece of water is the track. Even now, here, as the tributary narrows further. There’s barely room for paddle strokes between the gunwales and the banks. Grass and weeds as much as water swish with every stroke. Slower now, with reverence. The blue-green turns to green, gets colder. We must be near the spring. The channel’s almost square, the turns almost right angles. The trees retreat a dozen yards or so on either side. Swaying grasses line the edges of this chilly run. The sunlight penetrates the green—half opaque and half transparent, the water holds the gold in delicate solution. Finally we reach a bend we cannot navigate without a portage. Wedged at angles to the stream, we pause. He turns around. I look at him. He looks at me. His belly’s flat, and rippled; mine’s a little pooched. He’s dark; I’m fair and blond. He’s short; I’m tall. He’s tight; when I’m around him I feel gangly. 030696 #squirrel Jackie and I have formed a writer’s group called Oddletters. Total # of people is four, we’ve met twice so far and it’s really incredibly fun and tingly. To go to a coffee house, a warm, gently orange-lit place and be near people, scribbling and talking and not caring about anything else right then and there for a little while. I am proud of having done this. They all look to me for leadership, and this makes me feel more human, too. Green water just keeps rushing back the way we’ve come. Aluminum glares beneath our asses. Well? She picked desultorily at some primary colors in a bowl. Tangerine, banana, what’s the difference? her chipped nail polish seemed to be saying. I was glad I didn’t live here. But he did. This was before we even had the idea for the trip. This was when the idea of the two of us being in a canoe together, without her or anyone else, would have seemed like a corny shtick, a huck-finn parody, a fantasy. But he has the message, so now he can finally put it in the right folder on the right desk. His supervisor picks it up, but his supervisor is some kind of artist, so he spends a long moment just holding it, between thumb and four fingers, admiring the sturdy feel of the stock, luxuriating in the way it holds itself upright under the yellow light of the incandescent bulb he brought from home to obviate the chilled fluorescence of industry’s preoccupation with reliable mediocrity. What’s that about? Suddenly I almost feel cold under my shirt of burning sun. the first ¶ is utter nonsense. Then the tone is way more cutesy-chatty-fakey than it becomes not that much later on. I didn’t want to take the canoe. It doesn’t even have air conditioning. It’s not an automatic. I’m pretty sure it’s a stick. And *I don’t know how to drive stick.* I never learned because I never had to. How fucked up is that? I never learned because I never had to. Welcome to the Internet age. What is it about sitting in the ass end of a canoe, that’s sitting three quarters of the way on a gravel bar and one quarter of the way into a slowly swirling current of a vulture-guarded, frog-dotted, gnarly-rooted, snake-infested, long-forgotten elbow of an unimportant little ditch of a so-called river somewhere in between the most anonymous acres of crops and weeds and prickers and clods of turned-up earth with roots of fallen trees for homes for rabbits your uncle and your grandpa shot at long ago, that makes you want to stay completely still and listen/not listen as a dragonfly glides by atop another dragonfly, and the sound their tandem wings make fits the color of the sun so perfectly you almost go into an actual, honest-to-goodness trance? Yeah, what is it about that? I almost wonder as my jaw hangs half-slack, sun kicks down my back and pools in the waistband of my loose-fit, dorky-plaid cotton shorts. want to know why I hate canoes? it’s like one and seven eighths. I’m pretty sure. Great. So this thing definitely leaks, most likely. Pain in the ass, is what that is. The river is mostly shallow. I mean it’s not like we’re going down in shark-infested waters, but still. fucking watch. How long have I been sitting here? A crawdad swims backwards in a sandy little puddle just a few scattered stones away from the main stream. If I reached out my right arm, I could probably just almost get him, if I was fast enough. Somewhere away off to my left, a woodpecker smashes his face into a tree over and over and over again. Somewhere even farther away than that, the sound of a chainsaw—I realize I’ve been hearing it rise and fall for some time. be having a beer in my goddamn *pants,* not sitting here like a pansy in a nervous boat, looking down at my own legs sticking out of cotton shorts like a little boy would wear, wondering why my legs look suddenly effeminate. No, seriously. What’s wrong with me? above the short sharp bank that’s growing from, a rutty path, some wispy weeds, and corn. An actual corn field. Just the tip of one, actually. Because ridgelines come in almost perpendicular to the riverbank both upstream and downstream from the field, hemming it in. It’s a slice of agriculture wedged in between chaotic tumults of trees and scrub. at exactly the right time before midmorning starts to seem like late morning, but later than the throes of early morning—when you’re driving into but just enough under the sun; when the long grass that only lives near freeways is lit up with the kind of light designed by fairies whose teacher said okay, say “green” but shape your mouth like “gold,” through the exquisite steam of orange pekoe and cut black tea, with just a little sugar for the road. It must be somewhere around ten o’clock, and it doesn’t matter. That’s just it. It doesn’t matter. That’s the time for tea the color of the black earth just now being warmed by the secret sun of only this time on only this earth, outside your rolled-up windows as you drive, just now. I have just eight words for you, buddy. But I can’t remember what they are now.