Silverman lived down the hall from me and was a cool dude, little odd, but we all are yeah so when he invited me, JB, Howie and Cap up to his place in the woods for a day we rolled with him piled five in the car, a box of food, bulky coats, sleeping bags a 30 of Coors and Moosehead bottles and a plastic baggie of weed hidden deep. We get up to his cabin and sort out the food and it is already darkening so we smoke up except for Howie, who doesn’t mind though, and get dinner grilling out on the porch despite the frozen fall air hanging heavy. JB says it’s the first time he has made a dinner with friends and sat down like his parents would and we all nod, stoned, thinking about being adult real people clinking bottles. Dinner hot and meaty off the grill and we switch to the cans each of us with our last bottle in hand Cap challenges me to a game of caps and I’m like, “Whats caps?” so we sit down facing each other feet not quite touching spread on the floor, a glass between each of our legs and he throws the bottle cap right into my glass, the fucker. I gulp down the Canadian brew Cap glowing and I throw, back and forth he destroys me and we decide to smoke again we need to finish the weed before we can go back so we head outside.
Starry black as the homemade piece, bic pen and plastic bottle and metal bottle cap, goes around and we are the cosmos. I feel in accord with the woods winding and woven tight with the group huddled left and right. A slow pulsating strobing begins, time lapsing slowly in a good place as we talk about the stars above and the ground below, JB interested in physics and geology and Cap knows a bit about physics and I just listen in deference to the silent illumination of sky. Silverman and Cap talk some Biochem and JB and I talk some lit, he really wants me to read Parallel Universe though I am more focused on my German, reading Abfall für Alle and Dorfpunks.
The rushing simmering becoming a raging and everything is an –ing verb. Now. Inside we set up the cups, put the 30 under the table and Silverman teaches us baseball, cups in a row and a little one at the very back for the homerun, flipcup on the side for runners and pitchers stealing bases and throwing out. Diving aggressive under the table we stack the cans on the table and toss them away drained almost as quickly until an hour later the box is empty and we are wild men on the 7th inning stretch outside with the rest of the weed in the piece packing packing and messed up beyond our boundaries. We take an ambling stumble through the woods and the driveways around the house. Crazed our conversations of manias and lost moments mixes and blends into its own intoxicated sub-reality we will forget the details of in the morning but it exists a parallel universe of its own, happened but not happened as memory abandons us to our own devices and we are free from her grip gone gone in the ing.
Inside the game is abandoned and we are suns exploding in ourselves and radiating joy into one another beaming smiles as the room madly spins with our loving self-gravitation. We are orbital and epicenters as each of us rotates around the others while no one moves other than rubbing eyes and just holding on to the roller coaster of couch. The carousel is too fast I leave for fresh air but take the spiraling world with me, under the stars again and stay outside for a long time. Breathing, thinking, rotating in joy. When I arrive back in, shaking with cold into the heat Mel Gibson is a child, there are men hanging from rafters like slaughtered lambs. He has been a child for eternities and remains one for eternities. As the first minutes of Braveheart stretch into the second hour, I falter to sleep.
