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Today I sat around and reflected on the lack of direction in my life. But really, I just ate a lot of food and watched the entire first season of Californication, which iTunes so nicely gave me in return for 24 of the dollars that I’m so desperately lacking lately.

So, in a way, I did more than just reflect. I actively participated in that lack of direction. And they say hands-on learning provides the highest rate of retention. Lucky for me.

But somewhere along the line, I do think some thought took place. Duchovny in Showtime’s sex-love-drugs drama gave me a lesson in what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. Believe in love, yes, but don’t expect it to come to you. Seek it out, fight for it, revel in it when you have it and sock a guy in the jaw if he gets in the way of you getting it back. Always remember what’s important to you, even if you only have a vague idea of what that is. Use a condom. And so on.

Duchovny’s Hank Moody gives me another compelling personality from which to pick and choose, if I ever decide to let pragmatic presentation win in the eternal internal battle between authenticity and, well, pragmatic presentation. Just imagine all that would be possible if I weren’t so anchored to this thing called “me”. All the things I—or anyone, really—could become if we let our selves be packed into neat little boxes with cute little locks, and keys that we’d swallow for safekeeping. The personalities and behaviors and obsessions and possessions we could all take on if our selves didn’t get in the way, if they (we?) weren’t fighting for dominance and selfishly shouldering the inauthenticities they think are ready to take over their role and make life funnier, or wealthier, or sexier, or drunker.

If we could throw our assumptions and morality and upbringing and history and memories and sentimentality and habits to the wind and say, This is going to be me now. This is who I am and it is all I have ever been. You will know me as this and you will know that this is all I have ever been. And this is everything I am going to be.

I’m not sitting up straight right now. And you know, I’ve been slouching for weeks. I blame it on this chair, which has arms that can’t be pulled under the desk and a back that leans too far back to be comfortable while typing. But it’s not really the chair. Another character flaw to add to the list, my man. Another mark against authenticity. I like to sit up straight; slouching is for losers.

I’ve been out in the yard cleaning things up a bit; mainly raking. Well, that was yesterday and the day before, anyway. Today, it poured like a motherfucker all day long. I woke up (early, no less) to a big crash of thunder shaking the house. That big, ballsy roar that rattles the plaster and the windowpanes, that makes you wonder if the worms in the ground are thinking, Earthquake! That makes you wonder—or wish, really—that there’s something more to that vicious clap than just sound waves reverberating through the atmosphere… that maybe, just maybe, it is your grandmother up there rolling a strike and sending all those pins into the air with a loud and decisive crash. The memories…

It takes a contemplative mood to match raking with the soothing similes of parents explaining away scary claps of thunder to two young brothers. At the start of a thunderstorm, on the back porch of a house, on a wicker sofa with a black-and-white TV in the corner.

But raking, raking. Oh, the raking. What does the raking matter in the face of death and bowling? What does anything matter in the face of such things? Death, death and bowling. On my grandfather’s side, it would’ve been death and trumpet. Though I don’t know of any sounds in nature quite like the smooth notes of a well-worn trumpet.

Through a text message of little consequence, Erica found a way to inject herself back into my life. Or maybe it was that I found a way to inject myself back into hers. I’ve given up on the certainties, those little pieces of time and date and place that supposedly make up the things we like to call facts. I was thinking to myself the other day as I drove past her house that I’m probably as over Erica as I’ll ever be. It seems like it’s always the good ones that leave the biggest hole when they go. I don’t think Erica was any exception.

When I was little, my best friend lived two doors down. Her name was Danielle, and we did practically everything together. Probably our favorite activity was working in the “hideout”, our system of paths and bases and explorations into the woods of the neighborhood. It began with a flurry of construction in my backyard, roughly behind the big dining room windows, between the big boulder and the flat rock with moss on it and the little boulder that we used as a stepping stone to our future lookout post. With our brothers helping and our moms in the grass looking on, we raked up that area and started laying down the rocks we’d collected in beautiful interlocking patterns to make a rock floor for our entrance.

In the coming weeks, months, and years, we’d expand our territory, eventually establishing paths and bridges and rivers and communication systems and residential developments and water filtration systems and diplomatic relations with the territory we half-ceded, half-lost to my brother and his friend, Danielle’s brother, Colin. They had a big, flat boulder with a little panhandle on it, on the other side of the backyard. We allowed them some surrounding territory but reveled in the fact that our hideout was far more extensive and prosperous than theirs.

Back in those days, the Naval Air Station was still operational and the big military planes would fly their big loops, which seemed to curve right along the spine of trees that made the border between our backyard and the woods. Every time one flew over, the roar of the engines clattering through the trees, I’d pause and look up and try to find it. Sometimes I’d get scared that it’d scare the animals and one would come out and bite me. Danielle was a year older and I liked her to be around when the planes flew over.

In the winter, the big depressions that were normally our ponds would become our ice skating rinks. School would be canceled and we’d walk into the woods—a world of white—and go exploring, trudging through the woods all the way back to Hancock Street, where they had yet to sell those lots and it was still an abandoned field with tall grass and cool junk. We’d chase the tracks of rabbits and take refuge under a big pine tree we’d call our “Christmas tree” and chart new paths through the neighbors’ woods. We came across another big depression that had iced over and declared it our official skating rink. We found giant old trees with their giant old trunks and rusted metal that we took for railcars. We’d climb over the snowy mounds that signaled the old rock walls that signaled the end of the old farmers’ fields.

Trees would fall and we would mine the upturned trunks and the soil that clung to them for rocks we could use to line our “roads”. We’d have bridges and tolls, and cans connected to strings connected to trees. A depository for rocks, one for long sticks and branches, another for composting all the leaves we’d collected while clearing off the roads. We had maps. Our rivers were charted and sometimes we’d try to mitigate the effects of heavy rainfall, when the floods overran our roads and flooded Hideout Homes, the real estate development we hoped to open up in the little-explored section of woods between the old hideout and Mr. Quinn’s yard. We drew up proposals to sell our water filtration systems, which were really just weird contraptions of felt rug and pieces of wood that—we were sure of it—cleaned up our streams and knocked all the silt out of the water. The buyers? Hideouts across the country, of course.

I haven’t talked to Danielle in years now.

I haven’t talked to my brother since he left.

I haven’t been talking to my parents too much, either.

It seems that there just isn’t much to talk about. You know? Maybe you don’t, but I’ve found I’m not very adept at explaining things like this. Or maybe it’s that I’m not adept at explaining much of anything. Maybe that’s my problem. My brain has all these grand ideas and closely-held beliefs and they are all well and good up there, but when it comes time to articulate them, the ideas run away. Or maybe it’s that they were never there in the first place, or never as complete as they should’ve been.

But there just seems to be not a lot to talk about. How many times can you sit at dinner not really saying anything before it just feels awkward? How many times can you walk into the kitchen and answer some frivolous question and then just go about your business without saying anything before it just feels awkward? And why can’t I talk to my family as I used to? As I should be able to? As I should?

And why have I just lost all ability to examine this more deeply?

… You know, I really planned on making this a cohesive entry. Oops.

NOTE: This was going to be a Private entry. But now it’s not. All the same, comments are disabled.