Pumpkin

I'm trying to imagine the life of this can of pumpkin while I twist the handle on the can opener. I watch the words “Best by: Apr 2005” spin counterclockwise on the lid to the can opener's munching. I'm not sure I can even guess when this pumpkin must have been canned to have passed its best-by date six years ago. I picture the pumpkin as a waxy young gourd, growing up in an era where canning is kind of a new thing to the world of food - off-white and eggshell are the in-vogue kitchen colors. I try to imagine the shock and confusion, the soft hiss of decompression, the light beginning to spill in, Beck playing Hot Wax very loudly in the background to welcome it back to the world. How different the bright blues and pastel red, gold, and greens of my kitchen must look to the pumpkin. I do not envy it. Soon it’ll be muffins, so it goes.

The muffins turn out dry, stillborn from the oven. I have a bowl of Cheerios while I wait for them to cool and then wrap them in cheery green cellophane without removing them from the muffin tin. It’s 7 pm and I wonder what the mailbox is up to. I emerge from my house with about the same viscosity as the pumpkin from the can, punctuating each of my actions with wider, more dramatic swinging motions than necessary. Giving the mundane activities in my day this kind of energy lends them an element of grandiosity that they otherwise might lack.

Bacon Bits

1. Whenever I looked into those flat, despondent eyes of his, the way they always focused on something about ten feet behind me and never quite managing to look like attention had been gained from them, I got that sort of enthusiastic frustration - the kind that makes you force people to fly kites and go on picnics or camping trips, and incidentally, seemed to be exactly the part of him that he’d lost somewhere in the last thirty years of his cubicled life.

2. Brian felt like his relationship with Cynthia was going pretty well, and in fact, if you had asked him, he would have told you so with a smile on his face and not even a twinge of doubt, that is, right up until the moment she hit him in the face with the shovel.

3. It was the first time that she’d ever seen anyone who actually kept gloves in the glove compartment, and this made her keenly suspicious of him.

4. “Well why couldn’t she just take your car?” was just what Jim was expecting her to say, and he had already prepared an exhaustive list of reasons why that was precisely the worst idea she had ever had, so it very disappointing when it didn’t come up.

5. Ellen was just innocently minding her coffee at the bar when Dan asked her one of those questions that you only expect to get when you’re sitting down or not holding anything dangerous, which is why he was in the bathroom wringing $2.75 of decaf house blend out of his shirt and she was trying to see if she could get a free refill out of the waitress.

6. Like most white people, Doug thought that Jesus was a white guy, which is why it took him almost ten minutes to recognize what he was looking at on his waffle, and an additional two minutes to realize that his whole life was about to change.

7. Ashley had a chronic problem of feeling like her life was low budget indie film, and she felt this most acutely whenever she got on the bus and put on her headphones, because no matter what was playing on her discman, it was the perfect song to accompany shots of her with her forehead pressed disconsolately against the window.

Dogs

So I'm a fan of dogs for the most part. Dogs have been a part of my childhood, and while I've had mixed experiences with being chased around a park by an overprotective akita inu and had my face chomped on by a labrador I decided to play peek-a-boo with, the majority of my experiences with dogs have been positive. For a few years in college, I thought that a dog was what would really complete my image, but then I decided that maybe I had better just work on my people skills rather than retreat into some fantasy mountain man world. I can't say I've totally succeeded but I don't yearn for a dog like I did, and I think a large part of that has been thanks to moving to Alaska.

Here in Fairbanks, dog mushing is a pretty popular activity. However, it's a labor intensive and time consuming activity which demands discipline and care from both the musher and the dogs, so it isn't for everybody. However, for those who lack the care and discipline, a sense of humanity, regard for life, or suffer paranoid delusions, there is a second incredibly popular activity that you can take part in that is almost as much fun: dog hoarding! From the sound of things at night, you might expect that the entire city is populated by werewolves. I know the howling and yelping and barking and whining bothers some people, but it doesn't particularly bother me. It is sometimes unnerving to step into the night for a midnight tinkle and suddenly the trees all around you start moaning and howling, but you get used to it and I definitely prefer it over being woken up by sirens every other night like while living in Chicago. No, my problem is not the sound - my problem is with the affect this has on the life of a car-less individual.

Our cabin is up on the east saddle of the, as far as I know, nameless mountain next to Moose Mt., about 15-10 miles outside of town depending on what part of town you're pulling from. The cabin is located pretty close to the beginning of a major gravel road network that spiders about the mountainside and reaches far back into the wilderness like a network of tiny, delicate blood vessels. Unless you know where you are going, and unless you are prepared to fend for yourself, it can be surprisingly dangerous to explore trails on foot. There are of course the obvious dangers of running into a moose or a bear or a wolf, but definitely more likely, you'll either accidentally cross onto a game trail which will lead you onto private property or out into the middle of freaking nowhere (This is surprisingly simple to do, as this part of town is literally on the border of civilization, and if you end up on the northside or down in the valley beyond, you could very easily wander many hundreds of miles without running into anyone. I've heard more than one story of people going out for a jog or a hike and getting mixed up on a game trail and ending up dying in the wilderness miles from town. Game trails have a nasty habit of leading nowhere and everywhere, especially other game trails that will get you even more lost). During the winter it's easier to tell which is which since you can look at the prints in the snow, but during the summer, it's easy to get mixed up and take a wrong turn and end up somewhere you don't want to be.

To give you, dear reader, an idea of how many dogs there are in the area, in the half of a mile gravel road between the highway into town and our cabin, there are six yards that I can see (and more that I can only hear and guess at) directly off the road that are home to anywhere from three to several dozen dogs, only ONE of which belongs to a musher as far as I can tell. I walk very often to get around, especially since I sold my motorcycle and my truck a couple months ago. I hitchhike to work and into town or for whatever takes me further than I can walk. Also, weather permitting, I walk the mile or so down to the general store where our mailbox is every day. I have been attacked by dogs no less than seven times since moving to Fairbanks, and harassed by yards full of them too many times to count. Here are a few highlights.

* * *

When I first moved to Fairbanks, I was living down the road from my friends, Jon and Lou, in an unfinished cabin that Jon was building as a rental. Jon and I had just gotten back from a two week long caribou hunting trip, and after dropping my bag off at the rental, we drove over to their house for dinner. After dinner, I was walking home with an extra pair of tennis shoes that I had forgotten in the truck. Between the house and the cabin is maybe a quarter mile, and it passes by a particular yard with a handful of dogs. Usually they are penned up, but in the dim evening light, I could see as I approached that somehow the chickenwire fencing had come loose at one point, and that a couple of the dogs were milling about just outside of the fence. Now, having walked past these dogs a few times before, I knew they were pretty unfriendly to strangers, so I knotted my laces together and edged my way along the road, hoping not to attract their attention. Unfortunately, there is no good way to get past dogs like these - if you try to sneak past them, then they'll be surprised by you and go ballistic; if you try to be loud and present and march past them, then they will consider any distance closed between you as a hostile action on your part and go ballistic, but having no real option but to go back and bug Jon and Lou, who were very likely already heading to bed (it was quite late), I decided to just behave as normally as possible and keep as much distance as possible. A natural choke point of trees, however, brought me too close, and suddenly I found myself being chased by a very large dalmatian and a nondescript, black dog. I took off running down the road towards my cabin, and whenever the dogs got close, I would turn and flail wildly at them with my tennis shoes. After landing a substantial blow to the snout on the dalmatian, who had gotten his paws up on my jacket but failed to connect on the arm he'd been going for, they backed off a bit, and I stopped running and began backing my way down the road away from them. They lost interest in me once I had moved far enough away from their owner's property and trotted back up the road. I walked briskly and shakily down the road to the cabin and made sure to bolt the door behind me.

* * *

During the winter, Barbara and I tried our hands at skiing, but I failed to find reasonably priced ski boots that would both fit the skis I borrowed from Michael and would keep my feet warm enough to make it an enjoyable activity. After a couple failed attempts at skiing together, I decided to simply be Barbara's photo documenter. Earlier in the fall, I'd mapped out a few good trails around our neighborhood that would make good ski trails once snow fell. One afternoon we were feeling particularly listless and I suggested she go for a ski and I would trot along behind her. We usually ski down at the bog a mile down the road, but it's kind of flat and boring, especially if you're not skiing, so I thought it'd be a fun idea to try the trails.

The main road leading to our cabin from the highway makes a big L shape, and the trail I had in mind meanders about the bottom half of the L, and eventually ends by forking off into a powerline trail, a driveway, or a turnoff trail which parallels the longitudinal part of the L to the highway. Along this straightaway, there are two branches. One leads the ten feet or so over to the road on the right, the other heads off to the left, while the main trail stays true. The left trail is one of the kinds of trails I was talking about earlier. It is a wide, well defined, human traversed trail which branches off of what is clearly a major all-purpose, public, 4-wheeling, sled-dog, skiing, walking, biking, running trail, but it dives headfirst into the heart of a very dangerous property.

I happened to have taken this left path in the fall and ended up on this property quite by accident. My experiences there are a completely unique story that deserves its own post, so I won't get into it except to say that the property itself is an exaggerated extreme of a pretty common Alaskan pastime, which is collecting rusty shit and dogs on your property. If I had to guess, I'd say the property is at least 10 acres or so, and extends directly off the highway back into the woods quite a ways. Unlike the dense black spruce and aspen forest that surround it, the property has been mostly clear cut - save the occasional desperate and forlorn looking paper birch clawing its way out of the heaps of wreckage - and a labyrinth of old machinery, buses, logging equipment, mining tools, cars, trucks, trailers, campers, boats, and tin sheds has been, it seems, lovingly arranged in a sprawling orgasm of human wretchedness and folly across it. When I first turned a corner and emerged out of the trees and onto the edge of this surreal place and gazed down the hillside at this spectacle, I felt like I had stepped onto an abandoned set from Mad Max. Thankfully I was at the back end of the property, and I could seem from a distance, like ants swarming over the rotting carcass of some massive robot straight out of a steampunk's wet dream, hordes of dogs. I won't get into what happened to me on that day, but it sets the backdrop for what happened to us during that skiing expedition in the winter.

We had it in our heads to head down to the highway and across the road to the community soccer field which is hooked up to several cross country trails. I had never actually taken the straight path all the way to the highway, but I thought I knew where it came out on the road, and it was acceptably distanced from the property in question. The trail was undeniably a well travelled one, so I felt secure in saying we should take it straight rather than jump off on the right-leading trail and walk on the road. We passed the turn-offs and I noticed that as we went on, the trail moved subtly to the left. Apprehension started to gather in the corners of my mind, but I had no reason to suspect my guess at the trail's exit was wrong. Suddenly, however, we noticed hulking corrugated plates looming behind the trees beside us, and without warning the forest ran out and we were on a trail which ran right along the front edge of that wretched land. Worst, it was completely open to a little open yard where several dogs could be seen languishing in little makeshift alcoves, like a Hooverville ghetto for dogs. We stopped briefly and considered our situation. I don't know what Barbara was thinking, but I felt like I had led her unwittingly into a lion's den, and I was horrified at the very real possibility that we might be seriously injured, since I knew from previous experience that this land was irregularly tenanted, and that it being tenanted might not necessarily work in our favor. From where we stood and about 50 feet ahead of us, we could see the tree line that screened the property from the road, and the arch-like break in it where the trail emerged. As soon as we stopped and really before we had a chance to decide to turn around, we heard a yelp of alarm, followed by a chorus of answering yelps, and suddenly the deafening barks of what had to be at least 50 dogs were being directed at us. Like a startled beehive, they suddenly sprang from every metal orifice, perched on heaps of oil drums and cranes, seated in molding, doorless cars and leaning out broken and scum encrusted windows, scrambling over patched roofs and bounding over piles of snow covered tires, it was like a scene out of a horror film.

Many of the dogs were content to jeer and howl balefully at us from their positions among the debris, but a dozen at least began moving forward in a pack, coming onto the path behind us, forcing us to move forward. Before they had even started to make for us, however, I had made up my mind that making for the road was our best bet, and I didn't want Barbara to have a chance to assess the situation and become as terrified as I was, so I told her to keep going and gave her a little push-start. My rationale here was that knowing that you were being pursued by a pack of slavering dogs, while certain to incentivize motion, might not necessarily translate into the coordination necessary to ski successfully as a beginner to the sport. It seemed best to give the impression that everything was under control and push her forward. A couple of particularly vicious dogs advanced on me, and nipped at my heels. I jogged behind Barbara and tried to sound encouraging and told her to keep going no matter what, thinking that I might have to actually stop and give them something to direct their attention to while she escaped to the road. A middle sized dog with long hair that looked alarmingly like the akita inu that had chased me around the park as a child took the lead, barking ferociously and bearing its teeth. It bit at my ankle a couple times, and I had to stop every few feet and make - what, in confronting bears at least, is referred to as - "big arms" at it. When it actually connected a solid hold on my ankle, I turned around and punched it in the face. It nipped at my hand, but yelped and backed off, putting enough pause in the pack for us to break through the tree line and out onto the road. We recklessly crossed over to the soccer field and gathered our wits. A couple of the dogs followed us through the trees, but stopped short of the road and barked psychotically at us for a minute or so and then trotted back into the abyss. I think Barbara was shaken by it, but didn't quite realize what was going on behind her as she powered ahead. I screwed up my wits and brushed it off, considering myself lucky for having escaped with just a torn snowboot and a small rip on my right glove. The rest of the day was fun after that, and on the return trek, we gave the path wide berth until we had completely passed the property.

* * *

A few days ago, Barbara's car was in the shop, and after dropping her off at work and it off at the shop, I walked home and played on the internet until it was time to pick her up. The shop was running behind schedule, and with an hour before I had to pick up Barbara, I made up my mind to find Michael's truck. I couldn't get a hold of Michael after a few tries, so I decided to make some progress and call again later. Michael had just left town a week before, and since he had been housesitting Jon and Lou's place while they were on vacation, I figured that was a good place to start looking. I hitched down the highway to Jon and Lou's neighborhood. Their cabin is about halfway down Home Run, a tributary to Line Dr., which runs to the highway. The guys who picked me up dropped me off at Line Dr. and I made my way down the road. I rounded the corner and started making my way up Home Run. I was about 25 feet down the road when I looked up and noticed that maybe 200 feet down the road from me was a very very large husky. Huskies are good dogs, and one of their better attributes is that they haven't been mal-bred over the millennia to be hyperactive barking machines. It stood silently and completely still at the end of the road and watched me with silent intensity. I stopped and watched it for a moment and briefly considered my options.

I had been in an almost identical situation earlier in the summer walking to get the mail where a large black dog had walked out of a driveway and stood in the middle of the road blocking my path. In that instance, thankfully, I was able to call for the owner, who was operating a nail gun, thankfully, without hearing protection, and he called the dog off before it actually attacked me, but not before I was able to learn that even standing still or appearing to walk away did not assuage the dog's suspicions that I was a threat. I decided therefore, that I would not be able to walk away from the husky without signaling to it that I was a tasty treat, nor would I, in any universe, be able to out run it, nor would I be able to wrestle with it in shorts and sandals and a t-shirt. The road was smooth and rockless from a great deal of rain and recent travel, and I didn't spot anything that looked like it would be a useful or practical defense to me. Almost exactly between the dog and me, about 100 feet away, was Jon and Lou's driveway. I made up my mind to act naturally and make a beeline for their cabin.

I started walking forward, and as I did, the husky slowly walked forward as well. I made it about 3/4 of the way to the driveway and we were about 75 feet apart when the husky started showing signs of hostility. I could tell from the size of it that it was a very well trained and groomed sled dog, and I could tell from its jingling tags that it very well might even be a skijor dog belonging to someone nearby. I was surprised that it was being hostile because well-loved sled dogs are usually friendly to everyone. I was hoping that it belonged to someone at the end of the road, but I was afraid that it might belong to the people directly across the street from Jon and Lou, who, I recall Michael telling me, kept several sled dogs. If this was the case, I could believe that the normal reaction of a sled dog not in the presence of its owner and seeing a stranger coming between it and its home might become aggressive.

It made several of those low "huff"ing noises, which are about all the warning you get from a husky, and then started making little hops forward, coiling its back legs and keeping its tail back. I hesitated, but I was close enough to the driveway, that I felt I could probably make it safely. I was at the mouth of the driveway when it gave me a single loud bark and a growl and dashed forward a few feet and stopped again. I backed into the mouth of the driveway, which winds surreptitiously through dense black spruce before ending in a parking lot. I had moved out of sight of the dog and didn't hear it pursue me, so I turned and walked faster. At the parking lot, there is a long path to the house and a shorter path to Jon and Lou's very very large garden and greenhouse. There was no truck or any vehicle in the parking lot, and I wasn't sure how I felt about going in their house without their knowing it, although I'm sure they'd be fine with it if they knew I was being hunted by an enormous dog. I weighed the decision in my mind for a few seconds standing in the parking lot. I decided that the greenhouse was closer, more likely to have the door open, more likely to be unlocked, and would be a little more considerate given that I was on their property uninvited and entirely unawares. As I decided this, I heard another loud bark from the road, and the sudden, furious jangling of dog tags. I bolted up the path into the garden and into the greenhouse. Thankfully the door was open and I slammed it behind me just as the husky veered around the path and into the garden. I checked to make sure there were no openings besides the cutout vents and then sat across from the door amongst the basil. As I sat on the ground in the greenhouse and stayed absolutely still, there came the jingling tags as they circled the greenhouse a couple times, and then stood still for a few minutes somewhere towards the front of the greenhouse. Finally, after at least seven eternities, the jingling moved off into the distance towards the road, and then out of earshot. I stayed put for a bit longer and then milled about in the garden for half an hour or so before gathering some hefty rocks and making my way back to the highway. Thankfully, there was no sign of the husky when I emerged from the trees, and a nice lady let me ride in her truck bed back to my road.

* * *

I don't know what it is, really. You hear about cat ladies pretty often, but dog guys are far more prevalent up here, and far more dangerous to the average pedestrian. I guess that with all the sled dog breeding that goes on, for every one pup that ends up being a great sled dog, there must be four that are better suited for being chained on some dude's front lawn or let free in the yard of an abandoned property to be visited every week or so. There are a lot of people around here who honestly believe that the government or space monsters or their neighbors or Obama personally is out to get them and steal their ammunition, and the answer to this problem is apparently lots and lots of rabid dogs. I don't know why people feel they need this level of protection while the rest of us feel safe enough to leave our doors unlocked and our windows open on a day to day basis, but I know that after that german shepherd down the street got loose from the tree it was chained to and almost successfully managed to wrap its mouth around my face before its shirtless meth-head owner came out and called it off, I have developed a pretty strong dislike for whatever stupid ideology it is that cultivates this attitude in people, and I definitely get the mail less...

Awkward Pause...

I like to imagine that at the end of every other YouTube video when the person leans in and reaches towards me to turn off the webcam, that they're doing something else. Like, what if they were going in for a kiss, or what if they were going to try to punch through the 4th wall and choke me? Did they want to pinch my cheek? Cup my face in their hand? Push the stop button on MY computer? Where they suddenly filled with zombie hunger for human flesh, and I was the first person they saw? It's lucky the video ended just in time to stop them.

Bill, Lord of Nightmares

This post is pretty much just for me. As the topic is primarily dreams, it won't mean anything to any of you, likely. Other people's dreams are the least interesting things to listen to. I don't blame you if you don't read this.

My nightmares are having to get more creative these days. The things that used to scare me a lot still give me a huge adventure rush, but they just don't *terrify* me like they used to. I imagine this little black oozeball responsible for making sure we're meeting my yearly quota of nightmares sweating pretty hard as the new year approaches. It used to be dinosaurs and spooky houses, but now I love my dinosaur dreams, even when they're still chasing me, and spooky house theme doesn't hit quite as hard as it used to since I took up carpentry. Spend enough time renovating actually old haunted houses, and dreams about being in them is just annoying because its like dreaming about having to go to work. I had really terrible falling dreams for a while that would wake me with a start, but I started to look forward to these ones, and then I stopped waking up for them and Bill (which is what I'm naming the malevolent force responsible for my nightmares) had to quickly improvise to come up with what happens *after* you fall off the back of a boat (you drown or get chopped up by the propellers) or off a porch (you just break your arm and it sucks). Zombies worked well for a while, but I got better and better at killing them, so Bill went hyperbole on me and upped the zombie count and power to the point of absurdity. The last really scary dream where I was feeling like I was in danger was set in a city. I was holed up in the 40th or 120th floor (you know how it goes in dreams) of this apartment complex that was U shaped and had floor to ceiling windows. The zombies at this point were a seething mass of undead flesh at the base of the complex. I knew they were working their way up the stairs, but I felt pretty good that I had blocked off all the entrances and made it hard for them for a while. But the zombies where also endowed with flea-like jumping powers, and came leaping 40 to 120 stories up at me. This sucked, but I could shoot them out of the air as they got near. Then they broke into my floor and I was forced to run away. I did this by leaping out one of the windows I shot out and grabbing a rope that was tethered somewhere (I assume) and had a horrible Spiderman battle with superzombies for a while before falling, inevitably into that roiling sea of gnashing yellow teeth and cracked, overgrown fingernails. I admit that one got me pretty good, but I was pretty burned out on zombies after that. Since then, Bill has mostly just stolen ideas from movies I've watched recently. After I saw The Ring, I had a pretty good run of nightmares concerning that little girl. Previews I accidentally saw for The Grudge resulted in a dream where I was being hunted by characters from a movie I hadn't even *seen*, but the horror of that one borrowed heavily from the same things that scared me about The Ring.

Last night, I think the theme was borrowed from that movie The Cell starring J Lo and Vince Vaughn. It's actually a stupendous movie. It has great philosophical issues (although their complexity is whitewashed by the mediocre "big names" they brought in to illuminate them, and the directors - for whatever reason - seemed to have taken a film that could have been hugely successful and made the last minute decision to try to sell it to teenagers instead of adults, resulting in a very adult move with adult level sophistication with this weird veneer of teenage angst and flash-bangery). The cinematography is the best I've ever seen in a movie, ever. Anyway, the thing that was so scary about this one is that it happened in the morning after Barbara's alarm had gone off once. I was sort of in that space between sleeping and being awake, and when the dream set in, the transition was seamless. I was still in bed, Barbara was still next to me, nothing had changed except we and the bed had been shrunk had moved from next to the staircase to under the staircase. I was kind of dozing when this banging started coming from the side of the staircase. It looked like there was a gate under the stairs that was, I rationalized, banging in the wind. I thought this was annoying and thought to point it out to Barbara, but suddenly it started getting more insistent. That's when I noticed that the whole cabin was starting to shake and heave. I rolled and looked up through the crack in the floorboards of the staircase above me into the blackness beyond. I saw a glimmer of light, and then a huge, pulsing drone shook the cabin. It seemed to close on me, pressing on me like thousands of tiny hands on my chest, neck, arms, and pinning me to the bed. The cabin groaned and the glimmer of light throbbed brighter, deepened into a menacing orange and seemed to peer through the crack in the floorboards at me, settling its enormous and infinitely malevolent presence on me. I couldn't hear anything but the horrible, bone conducting palpitations that shook the entire bed and held me firmly in place. It was very much like that scene from Close Encounters with the little boy at the door, except the aliens aren't friendly. I stopped being able to breath, and so I started yelling for Barbara. I guess I must have actually said something because she shook me awake. The weird thing was that nothing changed about where I was. I was in exactly the same position as I had been in the dream, and Barbara moved the same in real life as she did in the dream. The whole alien business clapped shut like a thunderstorm getting shut up behind a door, but it took me a few minutes to find my breath again. You win this time, Bill.

Music Awards

I decided today that Beck wins the prize for best use of the tambourine. Cake wins the prize for best use of yelling random sex noises to their own music. For about two months I have been twiddling my thumbs in response to unemployment. This is not entirely unenjoyable, but America is a nation founded on DOING things, and so when people ask me what I've been DOING and I tell them I've been enjoying the pleasant company of books and good music in the comfort of a nice little cabin, carefully burning my hard-earned capital on rent and utilities, I know their first impulse is to feel a little disgusted. Like Whats-his-face in As You Like It, I like this place and would willingly waste my time in it.

One of the chickens is looking at me like I surprised it, but I haven't moved in probably ten minutes. This happens a lot with the chickens.

The song Seven Bridges Road by The Eagles is meaning a lot to me right now (not the lyrics, just the standing wave pattern that is that song and my brain aligning). The song Loco Wit The Cake by Ace Hood is meaning a lot to me also, but for very different reasons.

Summer Skin

I gasp. My eyes fly open and drink in the stucco ceiling. My mind is slow to wrench the shadows of my dream apart from reality, and I shake my head to loose them, blinking sweat away from my eyes. It’s still dark out. The only light in the room is the pale light of Jenny’s cell phone on the charger, which paints the whole room monochromic blues like a detective comic. I peel myself slowly from the leather sofa. I remember it being red, but now it looks utterly black. I can’t remember the dream I was having, but I feel out of breath and panicked. I suck long draughts of the stuffy air into my lungs, letting the lingering scents of passion sink back into me, calming me. At some point during the night, Jenny relocated herself to the floor with the blanket we were sharing. She’s so beautiful, even though I can only make out the silhouettes of her curves. She’s lying on her back with the white blanket curled around one leg, draped across her belly, and over one breast. Her right arm is lying above her head so it looks like she might have been in the middle of doing the tango when she fell asleep. 

My eyes drift around the room, landing on the hard edges of objects that catch the phone’s pallid radiance. The room is full of the quirky little things she’s picked up on her travels. She’s collected dozens of carved, wooden fish that are painted with the cheerful colors of a slew of different countries. There are carpets, scarves, and sarongs of every hue and pattern imaginable tacked to the walls. They all try to tell stories that I can’t understand. I’ve never been to those places.

 My clothes lie strewn about the room, and I grope about in the dark, trying to tell mine apart from hers. I wrestle my jeans on and sit in the dark, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the palms of my hands. A sigh escapes me. I slide off the couch to the floor, and lie down next to Jenny. There are some women in the world who are so beautiful, it seems like you’re doing something dirty just by looking at them. Jenny is one of those women. I reach a hand out carefully, and trace her forearm with my fingertips, barely grazing the fuzzy, little hairs that grow there. In the soft light of the glowing cell phone her dark skin looks pastel, and her wavy auburn hair is pitch black. I gently rest my hand between her breasts and feel her heart beat beneath her slow, shallow breaths. She’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. My hand slides up slowly to her necklace. It’s made of hemp, laced with black and turquoise clay beads. It reminds me of being at the beach.

I met Jenny in Chicago during the spring. I was in college then, and I was depressed. I rented a small apartment in a tall building on State and 8^th St., only a block away from Michigan Avenue and the riveting sunsets there that paint the lake in brilliant yellows and oranges, then reds, purples, and deep blues. My roommate was a junior at DePaul named Adam, and he was an alcoholic. I found myself taking any excuse to get out of the apartment and away from the stress of partying and drinking as the handful of students living in the building tried desperately to pass the days away. They drifted from floor to floor like gypsies, often stopping by our room to bring news of the other floors and drink whatever we had in the fridge that would keep them buzzed. Beer, vodka, soured milk, whatever.

I started using the CTA to take me places I’d never been before. Every day, I would take the El farther and farther out of the city in a different direction. One day I headed northbound on the Red Line to Evanston, about an hour’s journey I guessed. I took a blanket, a sack lunch, and a bottle of water in my backpack, and passed the time reading some Isaac Asimov book I’d picked up from the library. I got off the train when it ran out of tracks in Linden. I walked to the coast in a daze, and found myself standing on a beach that stretched for miles in either direction. I realized I’d never seen anywhere so magnificent since I moved to Chicago.

That’s where Jenny found me, eating a crushed peanut butter sandwich, sprawled out on my big, plaid blanket, watching clouds march endlessly over Lake Michigan to the horizon, crying over the stress and tragedy of it all, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my wool mittens.

“Hey,” she said, “mind if I join you?”

She wore a blue and grey striped beanie, a sea-green hoody with light blue dolphins on it, loose-fitting, khaki cargo pants, and a hemp necklace with little black and turquoise beads. Somehow, none of it managed to hide her contours, her perky breasts, slim torso, or toned thighs. She smirked sideways at me and raised an eyebrow as I blinked incredulously at her. The wind swept her neck-length auburn hair across her face, and she pushed it back behind her ear, her breath clouding in the cold as she smiled openly at me.

“Sure, yeah, please,” I managed, sniffing back my runny nose, and breathing into a mitten. She lay down beside me and looked at the clouds for a minute. She smelled a little like fresh cut flowers, and I could feel her breath on my cheek when she turned her head to the side to look at me.

“You know, life is beautiful when you get right down to it.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I agreed, resting my sandwich on my chest.

She looked back up at the clouds, “I’m pretty sure you must be gay if it makes you cry though. That’s why I’m guessing it’s safe to sit down and talk to you.”

I looked over and crinkle my nose up at her. She glances askance at me with her eyebrows raised.

“I’m not gay, it’s just been a long day. And what makes you so sure I’m safe to talk to? Maybe I’m some psychopath.”

 She locked her big, brown eyes on mine for a moment, and then hid them beneath long, black lashes and grinned widely at me.

“I’ve been lots of places, and I’ve met lots of people in the world. I think all of us are just looking for someone to hold us. You looked like somebody who needed a stranger to come tell you things would be okay.” I watched her stare at the sky through closed eyes.

“My name’s Jenny,” she said as she took my hand off my chest and held it in hers between us, “I think me and you should be friends.”

Jenny and I didn’t agree on very much, and maybe that was the point, but the sex was amazing. She was a graphic design major at some school nearby Evanston in north Skokie. I was interested in astronomy at that point, although I decided to major in mass communication halfway through my sophomore year. She liked soccer, and I liked rock climbing. I listened to alternative and grunge, and she was obsessed with country music. I would take the express line up to meet her on the weekends, and we’d stay in her apartment and make love until we were too tired, hungry, and sore to do anything but order Chinese food and watch movies. We’d take turns picking a movie that the other would have to watch. It would always end ugly when whoever’s turn it wasn’t to pick the movie said something snarky about the main character and we’d get into a wrestling match over it.

“How can you even say that about Robert Redford?” she says, leaning over the kitchen counter to give me a look of disbelief while she’s pouring us drinks, “The man is a legend! Did we watch Three Days of the Condor yet?”

“Look, I’m not saying he’s a bad actor, he’s just dull compared to Brad Pitt. If I wanted to watch a heist movie, I’d watch Oceans 11 is all. I don’t see how you can even stay awake for all these crappy old movies.”

I hear the bottle of whiskey hit the counter and see her appear in the kitchen doorway. She stands there with her legs akimbo in nothing but a T-shirt and some red striped panties and looks at me like she might kill me. Then she leaps across the room at me, tackling me into the covers, trying to pin my arms over my head.

Robert drones on in the background, “You know me. I'm the same as you. It's two in the morning, and I don't know nobody.”

“Oh my god, bo-ring,” I mock.

“There wouldn’t even be an Oceans 11 if it weren’t for The Sting, you fuckhead!” She tries to say more, but I get her flipped over and stuff a pillow in her face, laughing.

Holding onto Jenny was like holding onto fish out of water. No matter how close you tried to hold her, she’d slip right through your fingers. Rent got expensive, working so much took it’s toll on my grades, and so I began to spend less and less time on the Red Line to Evanston. I ended up moving to St. Paul, Minnesota and getting a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the U of M. I married a woman named Heather who had long, blonde hair that curled and bounced, and framed her face nicely. She made me happy, and we had a lot of things in common. Our love was safe, convenient, and comfortable. We moved to Michigan a year later, and now we maintain a quiet, reasonable relationship in a quiet, reasonable neighborhood. We get along well, despite the thick coat of mediocrity that smothers us. I work as a small time contractor, and she works at a local elementary school teaching 5^th graders. We spend the evenings reading books and quietly describing to one another what slightly out of the ordinary things have happened to us during the day.

When I first met Heather, she’d never even touched herself, let alone been touched. For months after we’d first started dating, she wouldn’t let me see her naked or change clothes in front of me. Our relationship was an exercise in patience and humility. She refused to have sex with me until we got married, and anytime it came up while we were being intimate, she’d finish me quickly and go to bed without another word. After we got married, I grew to resent this quality about her, not just in the bedroom, but in all walks of life, that her sense of convention was so firm. The more I dwelt on it, the more I thought of her as being prudish, and the more my thoughts drifted back to Jenny. The way Jenny smelled when we were trapped under the covers together, the way Jenny tasted, the way Jenny’s hair would spill over her face so all I could see was her smile, how she would grip my stomach when she was about to come, the arch of her back, and the slow, soft kisses she would run up and down my body.

I drove to Chicago in the summer, on business, and called Jenny from the Linden stop parking lot. We met on the beach, but didn’t stay there long. We drove into the city to a Thai restaurant near her new apartment, and talked about our lives. Her hair was longer now, just past her shoulders. She wore brown slacks and a white tank top. Everything about her was still stunning. She worked for an advertising firm now, and wrote poetry in her spare time. She described her position as being a bit of an advertisement for her company, since it was always her that seemed to be shipped off to make a good impression on potential clients. She’d visited more countries in the past year than she had in her entire life up to that point. It’d been hard on her love life, though, and admitted to me that it got lonely.

She bit her lower lip and stirred at her soup, “So are you in town for a little then?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a couple days. I’ve got to pick up an order of special tiles for this lady’s bathroom on Tuesday.” She smirked one corner of her mouth at her bowl and glanced furtively up at me.

“You could stay at my place if you don’t have a hotel or something.”

“That’d be nice.”

She grinned at me and flipped her saltines into my glass of water.

“Real mature, Jenny.” Her laugh was intoxicating, and she tried to hide it behind one hand, while she reached out and held one of mine in the other.

“I missed you,” she whispers in the dark. The blue light touches the corners of her mouth as she smiles. She rolls into me, pressing her warm breasts to my stomach.

“I missed you too.”

“Don’t leave?”

“You know I have to.”

She runs her fingers through my hair, and traces my left temple, “You could stay.”

I run my hand along the small of her back and smile into her dark hair.