Quote of the day:

 There's nothing more gratifying than scaring the chickenshit out of someone very close to you.
--Jon Pedestrian
 

10:54 AM Wednesday, June 26

 San Diego, CA

 (Carlitos' house)

 A Carlitos story:

 Carlitos and I skipped school one day in high school; it was a fine Spring day, school would be out in a couple of weeks, but we could not wait; we both rode the bus to school that morning and then sneaked out the back door of the school and into the surrounding woods; we set off down a path that led eventually to Carlitos' house. The day was exquisite, warm, the sky clear as a French horn. We passed a local dairy farm, Sunny Slope, and the acidity of the chicken and cow shit momentarily interrupted the smell of fresh fir and pine in the air. We paused after walking about a mile to get high.

 Carlitos had forgotten his marijuana accouterments at home and so had to scurry around in the art room to come up with suitable equivalents: a large purple piece of construction paper, and a square cut-out of screen mesh; I won't go into the sordid details, but only add that the screen mesh was too large and both Carlitos and I inhaled a good amount of burning hemp.

 We continued along our walk through the woods completely oblivious to anything and everything that did not please our senses; we had checked the demon self-consciousness at the door and we were completely free to be ourselves, we were completely free to live within the moment, and live within the moment we did.

 It would be incorrect to say that we hiked or walked for about another mile before stopping. What would be accurate would be to say: we wandered for a while and then our wanderings stopped for a while; for we had no real agenda, we had no real goal, no destination, no purpose, and it felt great. We did not think about or mention our poor compadres back at school, forced to waste another beautiful day on the planet, bodies confined within walls of Gilford Middle High School, minds confined within the walls of English, Chemistry, and S-o-c-i-a-l S-t-u-d-i-e-s.

 We smoked some more and then lay on our backs and watched the silent stream of the sky flow by and were made silent by its shining blue splendor. But it was not the kind of silence that is imposed by a domineering other, or even the silence of conscripted utterances be they the answers to the burning questions of the day, or the exacted steps of the social dance, nor was it the silence of boredom. It was a silence in which the mind was quiet, but not without thought; the mind had merely recognized that it was time for it to be quiet for a moment so that the body may think, absorb, process, experience. And think, absorb, process ad experience it did.

 I began to see the clouds moving in the sky with an obvious will of their own, sculpting out a variety of different scenes and images; I began to laugh with their beauty, the laugh beginning somewhere within my solar plexus and radiating like an orgasm out through my belly button; the laughter that followed it out served to produce an itch somewhere inside of me that only further laughter could scratch and the attendant pleasure the entire process produced was so delicious that I could not even wish that it would never end because I could not even imagine a time (whatever that was) when I would not feel this pure joy of being.

 Carlitos inquired as to my laughter; I pointed out to him the variety of shapes and images that I was seeing in the clouds, they would form, hold for what must have been in retrospect 5 to 10 seconds, and then they would proceed to morph into another image; Carlitos began to see the shapes as well; some of our shapes coincided as we began to share them with one another, and some were decidedly different; I began to discover that I could actually control the movement of the clouds and the concomitant shapes that were then produced. To say that my glee mounted with this new found ability would be reductive because to do so would orient the experience is spacetime, and what I was experiencing was very definitely outside of the limited configuration of how long, how much.

 May I say simply that this went on for a timelessness and eventually Carlitos and I rolled over on our sides, our laughter slowing to a trickle, and allowed the breath to return to our bodies. While we breathed in the sweet and pungent air, in and out, in and out, everything and nothing caught up in the simple but profound repetition of the life affirming act, a half dozen dragonflies flew into view; I continued to manipulate perspective unknowingly by calling Carlitos attention to the squadron of helicopters that had flown into view; I began to flap my lips in imitation of the sound of a helicopter engine and we proceeded to watch as the helicopters executed their maneuvers in the sky, a couple even strafing us on a time or two; the itch and the delicious laughter returned and after a time, one by one the dragonfly-helicopters went on their way.

 Time did not pass; it just was.

 Carlitos was sitting up now, leaning on an extended arm. I lay on my side, my legs drawn up underneath me. I was playing with a purple Bic lighter, flicking a flame and then allowing it to flutter out, flicking a flame and then allowing it to flutter out, and then flicking it again. (God is not a watchmaker, but a flame-flicker.) I extended the blueorange flame to the grass just in front of me; it would catch for a moment, flame, and then burnout a few seconds later after I released the flame. I lengthened the amount of time that I applied the flame and both the size and duration of the mini-fires increased. I began to look through the flames at Carlitos, who looked upon the small fire totally enraptured. We made eye contact and I smiled at him,; he returned my smile slowly, his eyebrows a furry question mark. Using the grass fire, now approximately 4 by 3 inches in size, to fuel another shift in perspective, I gradually morphed my expression from a smile, to minor concern, to a full blown hysterical panic, peaking with throat ripping shrieks of pure terror. I watched my changing expression in Carlitos face and when I began to scream, he panicked for a moment, the wheels a spin, before he sprang into action swatting at the fire first with an extended hand but then with his jacket. The fire went immediately out with one swipe of his coat. My screams of terror quickly shifted into hoots of hysterical laughter; I rolled back and forth on the grass in a fetal position, literally holding my sides as the tears streamed from my eyes, a salty gratitude. Carlitos slowly realized that the fire had only been the size of a page from a cheap paperback novel, not the raging inferno that he had for a moment imagined. He joined me in laughter, bemoaning first the fact that he had actually tried to put the fire out with his hand and second that he had actually tried to put out the fire at all.

 Later, as we made if further along the way to Carlitos' house, we came to a forking of the path: one went up a hill, the other continued on the same level. Without a word to one another, Carlitos took the path up the hill, while I continued on below him. Carlitos immediately began to sing with his best lounge lizard flair: "I'll take the high road and you take the low road and I get to my house before you..." gesticulating with exaggerated motions of hands and body. I joined him in song as we continued to walk along our quickly diverging paths. Suddenly, I no longer could hear him singing so I stopped and listened for a moment. Silence. Carlitos was gone.

 I continued on until I reached the road that led to his house. The road radiated heat and I thoroughly enjoyed its firm slap against my feet as I trucked the remaining mile to his house.

 I fixed myself something to eat and wandered about Carlitos' house. Forty-five minutes later he showed up; I quickly hid my dishes and ducked into the cellar way; he went right for the cupboards a I was sure that he would: Carlitos always got the munchies whenever we smoked. As he made a crunchy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I slowly opened the cellar door and when it creaked I strode through; Carlitos dropped a glass he was filling with water in the sink and it broke and with it our day, the mother of all days, a day I hold up in my memory and imagination as a day to strive for and to be emulated always, shattered in an array of glass tears.

 Heading up into the mountains for a bike ride with Carlitos and Jon in search of ghost town.

 Mac Pilsner