Reference Points

In a barren room with a solid concrete floor, a plainly upholstered chair sits facing any direction.  The dowels in its fanning back have seen better days, with several missing and the others worn through the finish and half detached from the joins.  The planes are wrong and the grains conflict, the stain unevenly applied.  Everyone sits in it because they don’t want to stand.

Questions ring like a phone in the next room, muffled and urgent and demanding action.  I have an answering machine, I think, a predetermined deflection of any pointed inquiries–like a stealth fighter reflecting radio waves.  I guess they don’t understand; when you’re lost at sea, you don’t know which direction to sail.  The soundest seamen’s only compass is home, and all directions undoubtedly converge on a semicircle around a stoked hearth.  A reference point.  We need reference points like we need oxygen and steady, measured doses of whatever medicine cures reality.

Kill, be killed, or bluster convincingly.  Thump your chest the hardest, scream warcries, rattle your spears and vocal cords.  What’s wrong with a cozy igloo on the side of an Alaskan mountain?  A thatched hut in the dark recesses of the El Salvadoran jungle?  Twin hammocks at the top of swaybacked sycamore trees, a copse nestled well beyond the sight of ordinary men?  We could sleep and sway the sunny day away.  Why not?  Yes, yes, I know it.  We have things to do, lives to lead, wind to catch and inevitably let go.

I’ve found myself lamentably lacking in apt words lately.  The times have taken their toll, and the price has been eloquence and confidence.  Thusly begins the desperate search for terra firma, the right words, the magic words.

Jackrabbits.  When hounded, they will almost always flee uphill–counter-intuitive, truly, until one remembers that their hindlegs are longer than their forelegs.  So, when pressed, when in mortal danger, they go uphill.  I like that.  You see so much further from up there, anyway.

Colorado in March.

Ohio in January.  This one strikes me as hilarious.

A staged photo from February:  Two shocked, saddened people, with the random dude (who we knew) in back.