The Present

Coming out of the woods near the end of a lovely meander through melting snow, sun out, I hear a dog fight up ahead at the bend. I still the dogs, hoping that a short wait will afford us a window: just after the dogs heading up hill and just behind the ones heading down. But no such luck. The first dog drags his master our way. Then, when we step out onto the doggie thoroughfare, there seem to be dogs everywhere, barking and snarling, and I get pulled down the hill like a fool. I relate this mundane scene not to gain sympathy, nor expose myself to the brand of ridicule quietly snickered by the two walkers coming up behind me. It is what it is. I write about it because, just before the fracas ensued, I’d been thinking about living in the present. More specifically: how much lately I have been living in the past and in the future, regretting one and anxious of the other. How such behavior wastes time, that ubiquitous commodity, and saps vital force. Better to walk confidently into the moment, ready for what comes your way. Which is what I did; I walked into then through its comedy of errors. My stiff back a reminder still of the splendiferous occasion.

Deliverance

Reading in the Times how for years Bowie walked down Manhattan streets un-accosted, so unlike his many on-stage personas he was nearly invisible—just a baseball hat, a pair of cargo shorts and a fuck-you finger pointed to the ground. Maybe some aging hipster flashes a thought: “That guy looks a lot like David Bowie.” But maybe not even. Davie Jones turning the corner into sweet oblivion. I feel a little like that here at the Cataloochee ski lodge, crammed against a wall, inhabiting my small cube of space. Except for one face at the other end of the bar, I don’t recognize anyone here. Not my scene. Hardly anyone looks at each other, an occasional nod or a smile. And it’s a holiday, and good ski weather, so everywhere I turn I vie for space with bundled up teens, snowboards, trays of french fries wheeling by at eye level. When the Panthers score on TV, the place lets out a collective, gleeful yell. And I like it. I like this warped anonymity, which feels so right, right now, here in my little bubble, looking out on the great escalator lift rising up in the bright sun in sad parody of spiritual ascension. Barkeep, bring me another beer!

Changes

No wonder we search for it

All our days. No wonder

We seek just a glimpse of it

And, catching that glimpse,

Are changed.

Gregory Orr

The first man crossed over the road quickly—a brief head-turn to gauge my distance and speed—and onto the other side in plenty of time. The second man, not looking up, rushed awkwardly into the street just as I was approaching, causing me to tap my brakes and slow—not so much that I came to an abrupt stop, just enough to shoot a small jolt of adrenaline into my body. I turned my head to watch him as I passed, flushing in anger, surprised to see he was lugging a full grown raccoon on a pole; it was hanging by its neck, caught in some sort of noose. The raccoon was twisting back into the man’s body, both of them disappearing into the quicksilver of sunlight gleaming off the corrugated metal warehouse and the river behind. This explained the awkward rush and urgency: he was focusing on the matter at weighed-down hand. The next ten minutes spent navigating this on and off blaring light, made trickier by the narrow road, the approaching trucks, and the small frozen puddles laid out like mats at every driveway, turnoff, side road. There was just enough heat seeping in to keep me warm but awake. Awake enough to spot, coming upon a turn, another man tightrope walking along the railroad bridge. There he was—hooded, bent forward by a heavy backpack—suspended over me like an angel, backlit by sunlight, his breath puffing out of him in little train engine puffs. Then he was gone, and I was through the arches, and for a moment I lost track of what just exactly I was doing and where I might be headed.

The Generalist: A Romance

A young man sets out to catalogue the entirety of subjective experience—an inherently impossible, encyclopedic task that requires him to both act out and witness a series of encounters increasingly outside his usual, mundane routine. The young man focuses the project inside the small city he lives in, working out a schedule that allows him to explore its streets and alleys in the morning, write in the afternoon, then go “night crawling” in the evening. No brothel, bar, meatpacking warehouse, telephone marketing center, or gambling joint/sandwich shop goes unvisited. So as to not miss specific swaths of experience, the young man wakes at three to join the dockworkers beside the hulking ocean liner, rises again at nine to accompany the secretaries on the bus, then arrives at noon to sit with the janitors on their break, playing speed chess with them in the back alley. Each afternoon he types up his elaborate notes. Every four months he heads out into the country—spending a week at the beach, another in the woods, another atop a mountain, another wandering the back roads. He enacts this routine steadfastly for twenty years, at times losing hope in his project (convinced that all attempts are futile and useless in the age of Google and YouTube) and at other times becoming lost in its grandiose mission. His notebooks stack up as high as a barn roof. Rumors swirl around his masterpiece of living, though no one ever reads a page. Everything changes one day when the man—now middle-aged—gets approached by a young woman desiring to become his apprentice. She has been dogging his steps for almost a year. (He has suspected as much but dared not believe it.) He spends three years sharing with her everything he has noted, opening his notes to her, giving her tips on her stalking skills. Together they penetrate cabals of experience previously unobserved. It is on her prompting that they head out on a road trip that will take them further and further into the world, across oceans and over deserts. The day they embark, the man burns everything he has written. (They say a pillar of smoke can be seen from miles away.) What they experience next, the man hopes, will both prove and disprove the results of his decades-old experiment.

New

The reason why we love lists so much, Umberto Eco posits, is because we are so afraid to die. Sounds about right. On my walk this morning, I spotted first a “Chipmunk Crossing” sign posted at ankle height then a handmade “Cat Crossing.” The bears in this neighborhood need no such signage; they just plow on through. In the last six months four old friends have reappeared in my life—and I don’t even do Facebook—one since committing suicide and another’s marriage dissolving like a child’s sandcastle. Unfailingly, the odds are not good. Close to home, and for the second time, a pair of buzzards flaps up into the chill sky, startling the dogs with a sound like a box of mail order catalogues falling through the branches of a tall tree. Such mundane portents no longer surprise me. Just part of the dance. Nothing new.