i forget the occasion, and there may not have even really been one.. but one of my favorite memories is of playing volleyball at red river outdoors in the red river gorge.
actually, it only started with volleyball.. bourbon volleyball, that is. see, our friend, fluffy, really loves bourbon and takes advantage of any chance he can get to get as much bourbon as possible in his friends. accordingly, he invented bourbon volleyball: a game where every mistake (read: point) is penalized with the player(s) in error taking a shot of bourbon. on aces, the whole team took a shot.
now, i was down there with y and she doesn’t drink very much.. ok.. at all. and while she wanted to play ball, she didn’t want to pay the price. as a compromise, we decided that she could play and that i would take her shots. after the second game, rhino stepped in and helped out.. but only because my liver screamed out to him.
needless to say, the lot of us were quite intoxicated by night’s end. we turned off the cars and their headlights.. and that’s when the first signs of trouble showed themselves. the warning came innocently enough: a green disc gliding silently, gently through the inky night sky. it stopped, made a fast, blurry loop, and was back on its way from where it came. then a pink disc joined it.. chuck had brought his glow-in-the-dark frisbees (leave it to the hippies to think of such things). so far, it was just innocent tosses.. the occasional errant throw came a little close a head now and again but it never seemed provoked. the night drifted on warm and soft.
suddenly, bright blurry green sticks crashed down next to a some of us. and like that, a neon war was declared in the night air. the enemy – the dark shadow “over there”. the objective – pelt them into submission with any glowing orb, stick, or disc you could find.. and the occasional stealthy, non-glowing volleyball. that was the best actually: i’d sneak off towards the edge of the woods, walk slowly and quietly becoming a mere shadow myself, and then, when this shadow an arm’s length away, i’d pelt nail you in the small of the back with the “missing” volleyball and scurry away before you could retaliate. i always wanted to be a secret agent man.
at one point, a grand plan occurred to me.. it was time to capture an indian princess. i sighted the target in the distance with her flowing white dress on, now spotted with grass stains from the evening. making like i was going for a glowstick, i ran across the imaginary line in the sand.. and then made for the mark. i picked her up, threw her over my shoulder, weaved, stumbled, and laughed the whole way back to the vw bus where i threw her in and shut the door. we had her! and since she was bent over double in laughter, she didn’t even fight it. still, a small border war ensued. despite the best efforts of the coalition, her now fiancé and the rest of the glow stick launchers freed her from the bus and the brown terror was loose again. (by the way, i say brown only because she would say the same herself and proudly. she truly is one of the most beautiful people i know, inside and out.)
after her escape. the night moved on filled with streaks of neon gel and we all grew tired eventually. we collapsed in the grass around 2am, exhausted and drunk, watching the stars spin in the inky sky faster than the universe even envisioned. y and i stayed up and talked with don for an hour or so, amusing ourselves by how much alcohol and general abuse that poor man’s body could handle and still function (that’s a relative term). by 3am, dreams of mattresses danced in our heads and y and i made the trek back to lexington. thankfully, she stayed up with me, chatting it up the entire time. needless to say, the next day we didn’t get an alpine start. 😉
i’m still amazed that no one lost an eye.
a week or so ago, i was 
way.. but to fight a little for something he wanted instead of helplessly watching it slip beneath the dark waters yet again. would it really be that awful to show some emotion, some passion for what he desires? all that ever happens to a stoic is, in the end, 
i was on the road and heading to asheville, north carolina. it was friday afternoon and i was looking at another weekend of babying my finger, which still felt tweaked after six (or was it eight?) weeks of rest. but then r and va starting talking some sense into this anxious boy. rolling hills, crisp rock, good food, cold beer, plenty of laughs.. i needed it. and around 8pm when they came to pick me up, i couldn’t help but feel a little like harold crick when he stopped counting brush strokes..
it’s interesting flipping through here. none of the notes are dated and they’re in no particular order: i’d usually open to whatever page fit my fancy and start penning away. i don’t know in what context most of them were written, what state of mind, what state of heart. howfun.. strange, incomplete snapshots of a developing character..
why is it we search so hard for purpose but we often feel happiest when pursuing no purpose – silliness.
he fondled the keys to the car and stood chilled looking back at the dark red door of the house he just left. white shirt, black pants, a tie and fleece hat. but nothing would keep him warm at four a.m. this friday morning in november. not so long as he stood quiet and alone outside on the dark side of that red vault door, though he wanted nothing more than to..
tangerine haze of the sierra nevadas tempers to taxi cab yellow and finally to shades of blue that even crayola couldn’t capture. birds of steal feathers shake the air and the ground beneath my nomadic feet. the hustle and bustle, the smoke and smog, the clammer and clatter that is