The · River

There are times when I am sitting on my dock, smoking and waiting for the phone to ring and for drivers to call in that I begin to compose a post in my head about this or that or something seminal and life-changing that happened to me as a kid. I do it more to pass the time than anything; I don't think one of those posts has ever made it to the actual ElJay. Bits and pieces of memory manage to be just that, bits and pieces of memory that show their face and then pop back down like a game of Whack-a-Mole.

I was never good at Whack-a-Mole. Or Skee-ball. I managed a respectable average in bowling, and my pool playing skills were slightly above average, but playing pool is not like riding a bike. You forget the feel of the cue in your hand and the motion of making your forearm a pendulum and when you return to the table, you look like an idiot who has never picked up a cue in his life.

Before the drugs took hold in Fairbanks, I drank on occasion and played lots of pool. The first game I played up there was with a kid named Forrest. Not Gump, but Roth. He was from Buffalo and had a Kafka fetish. Both his parents were academics and he, too, was on the path to academia. We had a class together and he was a rather conventional English major as I look back on it. I also beat him three games to two. I never saw him down at the pool tables again. After that, I would play the Eskimos. Eskimos are excellent pool players. You would be, too, if it was dark half the year and you had nothing to do but sit around a pool table. They'd come down in packs, you see, and one of them would challenge me to a game, and I would break. While I was setting up my shot, they would consistently jabber in Eskimo to each other about the silly ass whitey on the other side of the table. Sometimes I would play for money, and sometimes not. Sometimes I would lose, and sometimes not. Eskimos talking in Eskimo while you are breaking does not do wonders for your game, by the way.

What was I going to write about this afternoon? To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. There is a Harry Potter coffee mug on my desk here, sitting on top of an aluminum plate that I use as a coaster, and it is full of last night's scotch and melted ice. It's still got bite, and I could probably get drunk off of it if I drank it. I could probably use a little hair of the dog this morning, and since it's Saturday, that's acceptable.

"Tell me something I don't know about you, Charon," read K's e-mail to me.

"For three weeks last summer, I was in love with you."

"I didn't know that. Why didn't you tell me then? What did I do to make you stop loving me?"

"You didn't love me back. I hung around for a while to see if things were twisted in my head, but I realized you didn't and it hurt too much, so that's why I disappeared."

We shot those back and forth for about an hour and a half. It's the longest I have talked to her since the middle of April. Her life has gone ahead and changed, just like mine, and I am not altogether sure we belong in each others life anymore. I also alerted her to the existence of this thing I have here, but I didn't give her the coordinates. She was going to Phillip's birthday party at Nye's last night, and I figured it would give all my old friends something to speculate about.

When you are in your 20's you worry what everyone thinks about you.

When you are in your 40's you don't care what anyone thinks about you.

When you are in your 60's you realize no one really thinks about you at all.

The thing is, I know them. They always talk of those cast adrift. The fact that I have a blog will be an endless topic of conversation, from "Oh my god, how cliche," (Phillip, with a dismissive eye roll and tongue wag) to "I wonder what he's written about me," (K) to "now I want to read it." (D) They are smart people, K and Phillip and D. They'll find it eventually. The thing of it is, part of me wants them to find it. I want them to read the parts that pertain to them, because in my experience, that's all people really care about. How much they affect the life of another. I want them to read it and see what I really think of them. But then I don't because I know it will be a giant hassle.

If there is one thing I hate, it's a hassle.

There will be the endless comments from them about the way I remember things. I make no claims to the truth or falsity of what I write. All this is is what I know. Things may not happen exactly as I write them and the subtexts of the situations are all reportage as I perceive them. Hell, half the time, I'm probably dead wrong about what exactly is happening. But all this is is a window to my perception of the events that have brought me to this point in time. Nothing more.

I really need some coffee.