When I finally reached the dunes, I didn’t need to climb them. They gathered around me, bearing me up.
My eyes watered and my nose ran all through the Murfreesboro night. I woke up in the early morning in the dark, soundproofed band room – next to my amps and the beer I had spilled on them – to steal wireless and update websites for work. I was swimming with Patrick and Mike in the 3am Susquehanna two weeks earlier. It may have been that morning, after making a panic-stricken left into a Kentucky Waffle House, positive that the local sheriff several cars ahead was displeased with my pushing through a yellow light, that my mother called to tell me that someone had drowned. A ninth grader, she said, who was fishing with two friends off of the island, swept away by the river. I can’t stop thinking about that poor kid and how he couldn’t float. I think about him every time I jump.
I swam in a pool for the first time this summer. It was yesterday, in West Chester Pennsylvania. Late last night I swam in it again. The sky was clear and the moon bright and full.
Susy and I are driving south to Asheville tomorrow, by way of Richmond and back through Columbia and Savannah. With any luck, this will be the first year I see fireworks since 2001. With a reasonable amount of luck, an orchestra will be playing the 1812 Overture while they explode. With inspirational levels of world-bending outluck, an orchestra will be playing either Sister Ray or your choice of songs from Versatile Arab Chord Chart.
I had elevator dreams last night and another set of dreams from “the worried castle.” The elevator had no roof and no apparent suspension, like a floating ski lift chair with an open back. It flew diagonally through a room that slanted upward, somewhere between a nubby carpeted floor and an invisibly distant, black ceiling. Tall white windows, each hundreds of feet high, let in gray light that didn’t illuminate any more than the texture of the carpet. I could see from how high I was that the floor was shaped as if in a gigantic staircase, with each step at least twenty feet high or more. Four other people were in the elevator with me when it left, down a shaft that seemed like a bucket into a well, but there was only one with me in the room with high ceilings. I can’t remember who it was; we didn’t speak. I found a notebook from early 2005 while I was emptying my room on 49th Street and it had early references to The Reservoir. These new-fangled dreams have nothing on The Reservoir or the dream-locales of yesteryear. I hope I finish with this indoor crap and can get back to the waterways before I leave for camp.
Life.