Anatomy of a Friendship

"Don't look up," he yells as he strips out another few feet of monofilament. What kind of nonsense is that? You're standing in a small boat being violently rocked by a beam sea, hoping to hell you can get a motor started before the whole shooting match gets swamped and some joker yells "don't look up." Of course I look up. Trouble is, I don't see anything because there's an eight foot wall of water staring me in the face. Vintage Charlie, only I didn't know it then.

Tears are streaming down my face but I am not crying, not really. I finally understand the genesis of the primal scream. I understand its therapeutic value but I am incapable of such demonstration, too tightly controlled. Instead, I split wood. Breaking glass would be better, louder, more destructive, directionless, like my thoughts. Perhaps this is why the quality of city neighborhoods can be judged by the amount of broken glass in the streets. Frustration run amok, opportunities lost before they ever were. Plans made and unfulfilled, unfulfillable . I am swimming in memories, an alphabet soup of vignettes, a quarter century of A's and G's and Z's spread over much of North America. I think in the present, in the past. Sometimes I can't tell the difference. Only I hear my scream. The crows, even the eagles that nest high above our house, are deaf, oblivious. To them I am irrelevant.