Every morning we wake up in our respective rooms when the collar starts jingling. With a toad in my throat, I repeat, “Sit-to-say-hello, sit-to-say-hello.” Willa sits and we go downstairs. I feed her a pound of food: raw, bone-in, skinless chicken thigh along with variations of pumpkin, spinach, carrot, organs, egg and white rice. We walk a couple miles through uptown, by the new roof on the Old Dutch Church, the leafy yard of Senate House, jumping up to strut down the wall that lines Green Street, crossing back over Maiden Lane and then home. We spend from nine to ten on the couch. I have a book and Willa has her bone. When she dozes, her eyes and paws twitch: dog dreams of everything she’s seen and the wide-open wilderness in everything yet-to-be.
Last January, I adopted a rescue dog in Poughkeepsie. She was approximately ten weeks old. I assigned her a birthday I wouldn’t forget. Willa is one today.
She’s named after Willa Cather and the everlasting brilliance in The Song of the Lark. She hasn’t read it yet — she’s only one.
Willa was calm when we first made eye contact, huddled behind her brothers in the back of a cage. When I held her, she shook. She smelled like a goat and I wondered if she’d always be a barnyard beast. Would my small brick castle and I be enough for her?
The calmness was a facade. We spent our first winter together rolling around on the kitchen floor. I had an Infrared Dr. Heater blasting beside us, blankets and towels for a nest. I took Willa outside every twenty minutes, trying to convince her to pee and poop. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t go anywhere.
I quickly saw that my salty moods had an effect on her little life. I couldn’t be sarcastic or ignore her for endless hours. Willa didn’t care about my catalog of songs. She didn’t care about the critics, either. Willa wanted food, and then she wanted to wrestle in the basement. Then sleep, eat, wrestle. Again and again.
Spring came and we left the yard to walk the sidewalk seas and soft earth. Through the rise and fall of the slippery sun, we had simple adventures on the same, repeating square route. We’d visit the dog park at Kingston Point. The dogs were incredible, the human beings were animals.
In the summer, we went to New Brunswick to see my mom. Willa would sprint to the Passamaquoddy Bay and return to a desperate whistle and these flailing arms. Back home, we swam at Awosting Lake, her small head chasing ducks, my big head bobbing as the caboose. She could eventually beat the current in the Esopus Creek and fetch sticks that would rightfully be defined as logs.
It’s been amazing and it’s been insanely frustrating. I’ve had to consider another existence above and beyond mine. I’ve had to relearn how to concentrate. I’ve had to understand a way of thinking based on unconditional trust. (These weren’t the rusty tools I had used to survive thus far.)
I love her so fiercely, I start to worry when she’s not barking or bothering me. If you drive too close to us, I will pick up your immaculate fucking truck and throw it across the Hudson River. She’s my Goof, she’s my Little Girl. She makes me nuts, yet somehow, every pee and poop she releases into the world is a multi-platinum hit.
Passing through autumn, she lunges at falling leaves. We run through the woods, at least thirty miles a week. She ignores the sounds of shotguns in the overgrown brush along the rail trail. She keeps pulling me forward, pressing against her collar, leading me on.
Elpis was the last one out of the box. It was so sudden that she couldn’t remember anything that preceded her fully-formed consciousness. She rose out of the Hudson River, coughing and sputtering, conceived completely from nothing.
Elpis changed her name to Hope because everyone at school called her Elpis Presley. She started with the “o” that uncontrollably fell from her mouth when she first spoke. Elpis added the “h” to signify laughter, the “p” for the real pity she felt for humanity, the “e” because Hop sounded stupid.
Through her compassion and after classes were dismissed, Hope tried to help everyone. If you were thirsty, she’d show you how to draw a picture of a soda can. If you were lost, Hope whispered to pull over and stop shouting at the steering wheel. If your heart was broken, she would hold your hand in silence until the sobs ceased. Hope never slept on Valentine’s Day. She gulped No-Doz and froze her face into a gentle smile while listening to the world continue to cast off and cast on, the shared sadnesses that somehow make us all feel alone.
Hope couldn’t give you what you wanted. But she could show you how to connect to the feeling of what you might need. A conduit, a catalyst. Hope evoked a sense so real that it made anything that was reasonable and modest a genuine possibility. In the pure form — dirty blankets in summer fields, soft snow at midnight, drunken streetlight dancing — Hope built brilliant sand castles out of emptiness.
And for a while, it was plenty. Hope unabashedly believed in all-out corniness, the uncomplicated idea that we can all be happy, that eventually we can all have enough. Hope wanted to show you the way there and then move on to the next person who was arguing with the sky.
Then More showed up. Once a single-celled organism, initially divided on a plastic bus station bench — everyone wanted More. The slicked-back hair, straddling a backwards school chair with a toothpick in his mouth, preaching that enough just wasn’t enough. More turned into the only way and the children of More pledged allegiance to the code of All-You-Can-Eat Buffets and bright yellow Lamborghinis.
Demoralized, Hope split to California and returned to her maiden name. Elpis doesn’t respond to requests for interviews. Her words get taken out of context, she’s mocked for her simple frocks. Critics call her maudlin and sneer at her unpopularity. The scarcity of her followers is the hard-nosed proof that she is meaningless to most.
If you dig a hole in the ground, bury your hand and leave it there for a half hour, you can feel Elpis’s heartbeat way up here in the Catskills. Hope will live forever. She simply doesn’t know how to respond to anyone right now.
There are small forests burgeoning between the north- and southbound lanes of Interstate 87. Rock cliffs jut out from overgrown tufts of grass, small meadows hide behind thin tree walls — red maple, white spruce. Drainage culverts feed fake waterfalls, thickets thrive, paths twist, secluded dens under the overgrowth filled with a community of creatures. All seemingly nought from a speeding car.
If you choose to live in the highway forest, you can only go in two directions. This binary, black-and-white existence distills thought and necessity into its simple truth: It’s the highway forest way or the highway. This, while the rest of the world waltzes to a false of sense of individual infinity.
Some animals can’t handle the limitation. Nevermore, to race in frenzied nested circles, to stare at the sky whilst mindlessly stumbling. Some animals see this as the way of love — the open movement supposedly leads to the center of the soul. Dion and The Wanderer for some, Roam for the rest.
But there are loads of ways to love and countless crows, chickadees, possums and chipmunks who worship the lines. Living in the rugged loop of Bob Dylan’s Shelter From The Storm, intentionally lost in the middle of it all. The passing cars tell stories of different states, different seasons occurring simultaneously. From Quebec, frozen snow crowning luggage racks through April. From Florida, dusty, bug-stained windshields speak in husky, humid drawls, the people inside laughing, crying, singing along. All their flashing, zoetropic stories of smuggling drugs, surprise mid-drive divorces over chintzy blueteeth, the sincere devotion in the simple passenger-to-captain neck massage.
It’s a fifty-fifty chance to make it out. Or to make it back in. Teenage groundhogs often struggle with the narrow borders and head for the wider world, only to realize that there are always limits. Fences, sidewalks, swimming pools, abandoned mega malls. Mostly, man.
In the highway forest, there are no predators or prey. Even when those cigarette-smoking coyote cross the lines, they know the rules. Hidden pools are for everyone and each acorn is symbolically split in two. Wispily whiskered mice are revered for their elderly wisdom, their field study stories, the softness of their dreams, until death’s sweet embrace.
Did you know that half of the animals lying dead on the pavement were not struck by a car? Tossed into the street by their feathered and furry friends — a carrion tribute to the maligned yet noble vultures, the humble red tailed hawks. Bloody pancakes completing the true circle of life.
An argument about the competing beauty of deciduous and coniferous trees cannot escalate into madness because there is no way to survive the ultimate self-destruction of ego-driven madness. All disputes are settled over fermented apples and wild honey from unselfish bees, waggling their light-weight yellow and black behinds to an ungulated beat. In the earliest corners of the morning, when almost all the cars sleep, the highway forest serenade echoes against asphalt. An epic ode to an uncomplicated life.
If we can make it to other side — climb the shoulder, avoid the tires, bumpers and grills, cross the yellow divider into the passing lane and past the final white border line onto the highway forest median — then we might be able to see. (Nothing follows the last line. This is the last line.)
In the heart of spring earthworms writhe on steamy streets through white and pink fallen blossoms, primitive confetti announcing noiseless parades, birds sing and swoop, small-town wolves stretch and posture, the gentle chaos highlighted by Saturday morning drivers who use traffic signals as mere suggestions, gliding past the glaring red.
Beneath the slow blue curve overhead, there are people flying above Kingston, New York. They largely remain inconspicuous, dressed in slate and and navy, sweatshirts and jeans, humbly blending in with heaven.
Nobody below notices. They don’t see or they don’t want to see.
Most people found out they could fly while cleaning their gutters or falling from the top bunk. The forest ranger who chased a raccoon off the top of Kaaterskill Falls and laughed all the way down to the Hudson. A headlong, middair acceptance of fate. The trusting innocence of a bad trip, transformed.
In winter, icicles spread quickly on outstretched arms, too heavy and stiff to soar. Summer heat burns right through light cotton. Most people prefer to keep their nude red moments to themselves. The autumn weekenders invariably throw rocks at anything blocking their photographs of the foliage.
But in spring, human shapes escape their frigid incarceration. The ice lets go and after the last slush seeps into the ground, those who can fly let loose in the sky. Sometimes, the celebratory raindrops are mixed with wine, sometimes a light drizzle of dry gin.
It’s not entirely perfect. Every few years, someone gets strung up in the power lines. Or minced beneath a windmill. Still, what a way to go!
Last year, a sophomore from Wallkill staged a show-and-tell interpretation of the Icarus myth. In perfect form, he flew so high he passed out and shot down like a limp rock, splattering across the blacktop. The whole tenth grade gasped and simultaneously whispered, “Epic.”
From below, barely anyone notices. They don’t see or they don’t want to see. The flight brings fits of fear and envy. It is the work of wizards, it is the primordial beacon that another being has more. The heavy weights and gears of civilization that drive us down and further apart.
I am mowing my lawn with headphones on. Aloft, a young couple serpentines through the tops of contorted pines, through the dead spots where the woodpeckers knock. They are scowling, silently arguing, flipping on their backs, making figure eights and sailor knots with their limbs.
Above, below. Those of us who are affixed to the earth are capable of weaving anxiety and hope into small, talismanic figurines — vague impressions with resolute souls. Behind closed eyes, faceless and capable of thinking anything.
I only left the living room long enough to grab a cup of coffee in the kitchen. In that brief moment, the dog must’ve licked my laptop’s keyboard, loved and lifted the question key. I noticed the empty space immediately — I live in “the why” like a way of life and I’ve learned to follow the forward slash as if it were pulling me through the woods, through arrowwood and maidenhair fern, leaning into a sprint along dank spring trails.
But now: All my questions declarations, all my running rendered with awkwardly perfect British posture.
By my feet, the key was broken and adrift on an oak floor sea. I looked into her mascara-lined eyes and asked why. Then we both laughed.
I don’t want to blame anyone else for what’s wrong with my life. Yet there are broken threads in my pillow that I know weren’t there last night. There are lemon juice admissions from an alternate dimension written on my Home Depot receipts. Some higher force has stolen the symbol that I rely upon the most.
On the ground, a chewed-up remnant. I pick it up and try to push it back in. The key does not fit in the same way most wooden block puzzles are impossible — the jamming and hurling I generally administer, the smashing and the stuffing that has continued to make me perennially special. An empty space where my right ring finger used to disbelieve with passionate clicks.
The question key was my everything. It defined the search with its rotund top, it welcomed the answer in its periodic dot, always begging for more and never responding until 3:30 am — when the final Tuesday night stragglers get all they can from the wasteland of Wednesday morning. Soft rain on falling white blossoms, lush new leaves borrowing the glow from weatherworn street lamps.
I now leave my questions in the air, a skein of wool unraveling in the guest bedroom. Or old leaves caught in fresh spring breezes, floating by the window — terrified, wrinkled and free.
Whispering the wonder, shouldering my soft accusations on Bob Seger’s thunder. The question key is gone, yet these examining, intrapersonal conversations go on and on and on — My lips moving from a memory building in real time.
(I was running across a baseball field, allowing myself to be comically afraid of an angel dog chasing me. The undiluted scent of snowless dirt. When time freezes between telephone poles.)
I bathetically want words that last and matter. I want my search to come up empty, coughing and laughing by the side of a swimming pool.
I want to start an army of people who say stupid shit. The oath is an eternal apology. We plan our picnics in the rain. We swear to always be in love.
This probably won’t work out. I once had to stay after school to control the chaos of my coloring. The heavy strokes exploded between the lines. So I was specifically coached to keep my crayon moving softly and in the same direction. The new, perfectly parallel green treetops blew my mind. I remember knowing I was too old to be coloring. But I liked how it felt. Both explosive and as an idiot master. It was who I am and you will always want somebody else.
I’m trying to tell you, I was supposed to be someone else. While we were in the wardrobe womb, someone took my captain’s hat and handed me a guitar. The stage was set, the cutlery placed with love. And now in the spotlight, a cheap microphone feeds back over dining hall silence.
I want my ship back. A fair trade — a ship for a zither.
Doubt, doubt. It’s doubletime for disbelief. Gray mornings, indifferent guitars. I fear telling you the truth because it isn’t part of the new way of thinking. The new way of thinking is sequential, a means to a means. Calculable, quantifiable, irresistible. The fiction and commodity of a curated intimacy. That’s that.
(I was running through the woods naked with a knife. I accepted the dare and made good on my word. Because when the apocalypse arrives, we’ve got to be ready for anything.)
From the soil, I want a chance to survive, a sweet patch abutting your sweet patch. From the sea, I want sand in my hair when I’m falling asleep. From the sky, I want an explanation or excuse for everything I feel. Something official that will withstand the scrutiny of a Massachusetts highway cop.
This probably won’t work out. You aren’t even looking. When I spastically wave, you see me even less.
In real life, I’m a used car salesman, asleep on the edge of a field in Indiana. One half of the sky is blue-black with flashes of lightning, while the other stays clear, cicadas crescendo and decrescendo, overachieving conductors of the afternoon.
The backseat of a red 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Convertible, dual overhead cam engine, white top, white leather interior, intolerable midwestern humidity. Skin stuck to the seat, mouth agape, the blistering fever dreams of someone else.
(The creation of ourselves is really the recreation of ourselves.)
It’s a mix of muggy and cool in the evening now. A goth quiet streams through deliberately bleak streets. It sits still in black puddles — the electrical wires and tree limbs staring down at their reflections, their skinny winter faces wide with smiles — by morning, scarcely dark stains of forgotten ponds on the sidewalk.
Muffled punctuations down St. James, the sustain of classic rock from passing car, a perfect Procol Harum chord progression lifted from Bach distorted and dopplered. At Maiden Lane and Fair Street, unguarded laughter from a second floor window.
This laughter evokes envy.
There is deep longing in the bony branches adorned in emerald buds, the leaves having lived up to the action implied in their name. Now the past is forgotten; a canopy of fervent whispers will soon fill the blacked-out spaces.
At Green and Pearl, a woman smokes a cigarette and coughs on her stoop. Backlit, her hair is white straw — a frenzied, unselfconscious sorcerer’s bun.
This coughing strikes a synapse, the way we seasonally kill ourselves for what we love.
A small salute as I pass, and to all the people who once admired the mythology of shared scars and self-inflicted misdemeanors. Because we will fall, we will misjudge the gaps and the audience, because we will ultimately emit all sorts of errant thoughts and foulnesses that cannot be washed or written away.
A salvation in our deterioration, a disgorging of our rebirth, the rutted soil and the pullulating earthworms, the distracted longing scored by insects making love. An anatomy of vulgar acceptance that thrives in spring’s excellence, in spring’s current quiet.
Everyone is rejoicing with the same restraint. And I am softly singing Patsy Cline to my dog, Willa. Classic anthropomorphic adolescent lupine shame glimmers in her sweet eyes. The night is losing her baby teeth.
There are two five-star reviews for the Ross Funeral home in Littleton, New Hampshire.
The first reads: “Compassionate family business.” The second is just stars.
The effusive reviewer’s surname is hyphenated, sharing half of the same name as the funeral home itself. (As an amateur sleuth, I sketch suspected nepotism with cartoon drawings of wafting aroma.)
Further searching reveals that this individual seems to leave a star rating and succinct review for everything that happens in his life. Every single outing, every single experience. He seems to be alive — and consequently, I am fascinated by the celestial totality of his reviewing a funeral home.
From science to songs — it’s true, it’s true — we are all made of stardust. Perhaps this is how we get back to the garden: by applying stars to our mortal confines. Fine, count me in.
My coffee table gets two stars. (It’s better than the one-star table I built when I first moved to Kingston. Unsanded plywood top, four-by-four legs. It couldn’t hold onto anything without shaking in fear. Frankly, I wouldn’t have even given it one star, but apparently that isn’t an option.)
Jim and Cass from down the street gave me my two-star coffee table because of my one-star abomination. I’m not above a free anything. But then Jim and Cass brought it up every time I ran into them. It became a loose yet repeating monologue, beginning with how they always tried to nurture struggling artists. And then they would veer into talk of their magic children, their magic dog and their magic life.
After pushing it one speech too far in the farmer’s market I quit using coasters, the white water stains illustrating my silent, chickenshit protest. (I participate in a variety of personal chickenshit protests every day. Thank you.)
A few feet beyond, the fireplace. Three stars. While I have enjoyed some amazing evenings lolling on my stomach and watching the Philadelphia 76ers, morning brings the reality of soot and debris. Some point out that this is the give-and-take of our fair universe. Some prefer to bicker in cockney accents.
I’ve thought of reviewing funeral homes. But I’ve never had the nerve. I feel like the only people who could sufficiently rate a funeral home are dead. We still hold this passing as something sacred. A long life is full of survival and secret knowledge; a short life is a hydronalium flash bulb, sorrowful and brilliant. There is a plane of existence or non-existence where nothing can be defined, no science or opinion or class can establish rules or boundaries. It is incredible that we get to have these lives. It is perfect poetry that we don’t get to keep them. That is, until the stars take over everything.
This morning, the entire forest held its baton branches up to the snow-gray sky. Before the birds began. Before thawing drops slapped wet pavement and beckoned the inept all-season tires up top, untangling wind chimes, the drip and crackle of a melt and shift.
(Slim sticks with the satin sleeves of greenery removed, ready to cue warm rain on crusty ice, the clouds and ground with their unbreakable bond, a modest yet essential give-and-take that allows us to expand our lungs and sometimes even love.)
A Viewmaster mind, still frozen in the upheld symphonic moment, prior to the first note. I have to put extra pressure on the lever to flip through the film, to see my life through houses and apartments dotting the state of New Hampshire. The sprawling yellow clapboard in Jefferson, the little cottage in Franconia, a two-story green rental down the street with hidden spears and fake vomit beneath the piano pedals, gratitude for our instructor’s impatience. In North Woodstock, I was mostly afraid of the odor. It never waned, it was always strange. Dying cedar, damp leaves. In Hanover, we hopped between spots until settling on Wheelock Street. The basement bedroom flooding and the same moldy wood smells following from across the state. This, the corresponding way I’ve learned that infestations of mice will travel with you to your new home. Colonies hidden in bags of needless tennis shoes, a portable nest in the mothball sheets. Always ready for a ride.
There was danger in all these places. No matter how many Granite State county lines were crossed, I was always looking over my shoulder.
I continue to wander around these rooms and the grounds surrounding, under eyelids, before dawn. Unlocking rusty gates, casually passing through time and space.
There was a way out when I got to where I am in Kingston. In these rooms, I’m the one holding the lantern. I scrub the floors and tell most of the stories. These rooms have to listen to me as much as I have to listen to them.
We are an audience with the blinds open. An audience often uncomfortable without a spotlight weaving overhead, crowding out and sometimes even shouting down love. Outside, the batons are still slung up high, waiting for something more than spring.
A frigid, naked foot awakens outside my blanketed slumber dome. The white noise machine and penguin humidifier, matching green lights constructing a runway to the distortions of evening.
My powers were never that strong, invariably accompanied by an extrasensory echo or delay. I could hear murmuring thoughts once the body had left the spinning barstool behind. Cracks in the red naugahyde, decrepit and warm. Vague, faceless feelings with no name to address or identify.
I might’ve met your mind after you were gone or before you got there. You were worried about the cat licking the walls. You were pretending to be a drunken spy. The fear of an unopened envelope or the blinding blizzard of a blank page. I was there for you at the wrong time.
These days, I fly low over cold ground to stay clear of the deviating feelings.
At first I heedlessly clipped power lines, no second thoughts, snip-snapping my way through small towns, the dragon tails sparked and flailed.
Now, I’m careful and slow in my innocuous crimes. The flag of my destiny is a black sock tied to an evergreen branch. Sailing alone, late at night, in and out of billowing laundry clouds, the sleepless and their quest for clean clothes. Snow covers white and yellow lines below, vague suggestions to guide the automobiles, while I flirtatiously deride the sublimating crystals building on my eyelashes.
We used to be proud of our weaknesses; our powers and their frailties were the foundation of our personalities, unedited, real. The flickering light behind my eyes used to make you laugh. As if I were ridiculous for being unable to follow your pointless, bewitching stories. The spills and thrills of an evening spent playing Scrabble on the washroom floor.
I keep flying with an eye out for the ice stumblers, the diner coffee drinkers, the sentence regretters, the midnight listeners. Apologists and the strange force of our unifying shame, unite under this crescent moon, release us all from this flimsy sheet of self-aggrandizing snow!
If I can stall the seasons, I can control my brain. If I can control my brain, I can grind myself into a better person. A conductor, a pilot, a nurse, a dictator of my own island country, plunging through the winter, drinking virgin piña coladas inside frosted windows, an elaborate coat of arms on my tired and wrinkled robe — so you’ll know it’s all official.
There’s got to be a few more feet of endless yarn up my sleeve. These words are my shroud. I undress them over space and time and dive in the half-frozen Hudson. I will withstand the grasp of winter.
My hope rolls its eyes at gray skies. It does not come from a bottle of sparkling wine, effervescent and innocent. Rather, my hope lives for unclogged drains and hairless entrees. A wispy nude figure drawn in eye liner on a paper napkin, ten cups of watery coffee deep, a plate of cold french fries and warm ketchup. My hope is intentionally complicated, contrived and yet stupidly sincere. There is always a little spit in hope’s laughter.
My hope sits cross-legged on the dresser and smokes cigarettes while I hibernate, a deep sea beast in crisp, clean sheets. My hope writes bad poetry and worships Winona Ryder, Daphne du Maurier, Grace Jones, Lauren Bacall, Anna Karina, Zadie Smith, Theresa Russell, Tippi Hedren, Louise Glück, Greta Gerwig, Marpessa Dawn, Kristin Stewart, Mitski, Kathleen Turner, Thandie Newton, Jean Seberg, Liv Ullmann, Joan Didion, Nina Simone, Hedy Lamarr, Scarlett Johansson, Larisa Shepitko, Rihanna, Ingrid Bergman, Marie Curie, Lupita Nyong’o, Sibylle Baier, Brigette Bardot and Willa Cather. My hope hasn’t slept in weeks.
I’ve wandered out to the edge of my bed, waiting for the light. The literal light, not hope’s light. Hope’s light is from a zippo or a par can. It is the light under the door in the middle of the night, the light of fear, the light of love. My hope still secretly loves mediocre magicians, all the clumsy sleights and overstuffed sleeves.
My light wrestles clouds while fixing a flat. The sound of a high-pitched standard transmission shifting gears, passing by on a remote Mediterranean highway. I raise my head from the blacktop but everyone has exited the scene, back to the gray sky above and my religiously unpredictable hope.
Night arrives and in the bluest moon, hope and light harmonize. The embarrassing, arrhythmic sway of the last two people on the dance floor. Fake candles flicker across crumbling parquet. Fabric and flesh move as one bobbing heap. Unto themselves, unabashed. A proper hunk of burning love.
Within this corny combination of hope and light, I want to evaporate, drip from a branch and drizzle down into the soil so I can sustain the cold roots and huddle with the fungi, gossiping underground until the other side of winter, until the spring fills my left cheek with one more full-on slap of reddening green.
I’ve done it again. After mindlessly trimming my beard, it has become an animal unto itself. A fuzzy duck tentatively sipping the surface of a black Maine lake.
I lose focus when I’m grooming the topical topiary. Mesmerizing clippers, tiny shimmering scissors, the packaged plastic blade contraption gliding over hills and valleys of my bestubbled neck-scape. A one-legged porcupine relaxing on a dusty cliff in the umber desert sun.
Rorschach-ian razors. I wish you would stop distracting me and making a mockery of my thoughts. I do not need a poorly constructed shovel protruding from my chin.
After the digging is done, my mug rises through the atmosphere, a detachable module, leaving my brains and body behind, searching oceans of impact on distant moons. In the meditative silence of outer space, my beard may be the most honest representation of myself. Magnetic impulses, interstellar obstructions, trajectorial disturbances. Crashing down deep into the jungle of an unknown planet, my face encounters an indigenous alien tribe. Except for their green jeans and telepathic empathy, they seem similar to me, as I raise my unfeigned eyebrows and follow where the future leads.