Day Ten... Finding Nuts

I need to do nothing today. I sit and catch up on some writing and settle in to the campgrounds at the state park at Lake of the Ozarks. I make friends with Linda the host and her husband who switch me over to a site with a perfect view of the lake and the trees. And then Sadie and I decide to drive into town for an explore. There must be a town. The closest thing to pass for it is called Osage Beach and it’s a horrifying selection of tourist traps and time-passers and chain stores. Lowes and Wal Mart and McDonald’s and Long John Silvers (who’s got an oversized presence in the midwest.) Putt putt golf with freakishly large plaster pirate faces and skulls next to go-kart race tracks and lazer tag facilities and dealership after dealership hawking bigger and bigger boats. Somehow it’s not enough to have all this waterfront, more waterfront than any reasonable quantifiable measurement, something like the length of one of the coasts. Somehow that’s not enough. We gotta go and fuck it all up too. Because it is also in our nature to get bored with nature. Makes sense for Vegas, there’s just sand and nothing around, but Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, Lake of the Ozarks, I’m looking at you. What’s your problem?

We get cursed out by a biker. My fault, I was being indecisive. Couldn’t decide whether to keep going into a dead end street or get on an Interstate to nowhere. The concrete screams, “Get out of here!” The only view of the water appears to be from the bridge. Man, the water is huge. It’s beautiful. It’s right there and it can’t be experienced from the road. We follow a rental sign into another section of the state park all the way to the marina where I dismount and descend the dock to the tanned up, tank top wearing crew on the waterfront. “What do I gotta be to rent a boat?” 

They’re happy to sign us up for tomorrow morning since everything’s all out for the day. I may have to set an alarm for the first time. I doubt it. 

We retreat back to the forest where we’ll hide out the rest of the day, tidying up the van, fixing small meals, taking little naps, generally shrinking for a minute. It’s a good day to sit and watch the water. There are deer here. They’ll walk right up to you, entire families, babies that don’t even look real. It’s a good day to sit. I swat two flies circling inside the van. I spy two more, but they’re copulating and I just can’t bring myself to murder them in flagrante. I live that dude fly’s last thoughts and it’s just too brutal. He’s chased this moment his entire three day fly life and just when he’s got it, when he’s having it, I can’t take it away from him. Those are the actions of the vengeful God of Roadkill. I have the time so I find a plastic cup and trap them and release them outside. And on my throne of benevolence, I sit.

I’ve been transferring voice notes all day and I still have to write up the notes from my note pad which have so much more to do with the people I encounter rather than the thoughts in my head while driving. I need the balance. I need the combination in order to find the right sound. Without the characters then it’s just me going mental. 

A leathery-tanned neckless dude named Matt in a purple Meyers Manx with a yipping shaking dog rolls by and tells me I gotta check out this lake. “See what this lake is about,” are the words he uses. It’s not like other lakes. It’s a party lake. He tells me to see the strip up near the dam where the whole thing got started, where the arcades are at, where people show their cars on the weekends. I want to listen to this man who’s driving my first dream car, the champion dune buggy of the 60s and 70s that became the Mel Blanc-voiced, Hanna Barbera legend Speed Buggy. Matt’s got him on his keychain. I will listen to this man. Eventually. 

But for a while I will sit at a picnic table by a lake and watch squirrels fight over nuts. In a month it’ll be my birthday and I’ll be in the middle of the Nevada desert and the Man will be Burning and I’ll probably be trying to make out with everybody I know so until then… I’m gonna watch these squirrels. A little girl walks past me and stands underneath the squirrel tree with a phone clutched in her hands. “This is where the internet is,” she mutters. A teenage boy built like a brick shithouse loses the pedal on his dirt bike while doing laps with his sister and I help him put it back on. He’s lost a nut, I tell him. He finds it in the dirt. The theme for the day is finding nuts. 

After the fabulous lakefront darkness descends upon the campground, a great big fire calls me to call out, “That’s a great big fire,” and I end up meeting Joaquin and Donna from Kansas City. She’s a letter carrier with a Pillsbury Doughboy giggle, he’s a landscape designer with a round face and they’re both burgeoning rockhounds since the government shutdown in January sent them looking for someplace warm they could get to quick. They ended up in Hot Springs, Arkansas which I can’t quite grasp from their description and then Jesseville (!) where they discovered they both love crystals. She’s making jewelry now. He’s incorporating large pieces into landscapes. She’s hoping they can get some more time off in the future. Joaquin shares some tricks for pulling bass out of the lake, he's been out fishing in a plastic kayak. Until I assure her all my friends are hippies, Donna's sheepish about describing how she charged her crystals in the light of the Blood Moon the other night. They give me a cold can of Miller Lite and one of her handmade necklaces and I contribute the rest of my firewood to their pile. The Road is generous. The Road is grateful.

I catch a rare live signal in my van and connect with my friend at the tv show I left a few years back where he’s now going on his 13th year. This year he’ll be co-running things. We catch up about elections and tv and travels and get into a debate about abortion. He’s a creature of pure logic and he believes the correct argument can counter an emotional stance. We disagree on this tactic, always will. But I’ll keep pushing him to see that logic won’t beat emotion, especially when the subject isn’t even the subject. We go Kirk vs. Spock for an hour or so. I’m spouting that abortion isn’t even entirely about abortion, not to the pro-life community. It’s about community. It’s about the threads in the fabric and the fear that pulling on them pulls the whole tapestry apart. The communities are formed by people who feel similarly or urge each other to feel similarly. The churches are the centers of these towns. The families are the units. Things evolve, but gradually, slowly. The quickest change can be devastation. That’s the definition of Conservative, the traditional definition, slow to change, holding onto values. He’s countering that fetuses aren’t people and given the choice between saving his 5 year old daughter’s life or a 3 month old conglomeration of cells, it’s not a choice at all. 

Anyway.

I should be sleeping, but instead I’m texting with a girl in Australia and joking with my friend in LA and talking about the stars with another friend in Michigan. And reading Twitter. That’s a mistake. Everyone’s mad that everyone else won’t do exactly what they want them to do and instead is doing exactly what they want to do. The fury that other people are interested in their own interests is… farce. The pissed off Liberals that the media expects them to show more patience and understanding and compassion and deference than the Conservatives, well of course they do. They have to. By definition. If you consider yourself a Liberal then you’re saying your mind is more open so why would it piss you off to have to exercise an open mind in order to help open another’s? Why would you refuse to see things their way? Go ahead. See their world. Understand it. Get it. Go there. And then it’ll be easier to work your way back from that perspective. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll come with you a little bit. Stop screaming at them from your perch on a supposed higher plane. Soapboxing high horse shit won’t work any better than shaming your opposition into submission. Practice tolerance. Really practice it. Be around people who think differently than you do. I mean, hell, cities are roiling cauldrons of constant upheaval and change. Persistent motion, destruction and creation, noise and carnage and ambition and dreams and tiny tiny tiny little breakthroughs everyday that hopefully lead to paradigm shifts never before imagined. That’s where you live. And you like it. But not everybody does and not everybody has to. There are other ways and other places. Go there. Find someone. Show each other your worlds. Then meet halfway.

That little girl with a line on the internet suckered me into going nuts. I turn it all off. Again. It’s easy.