THE DOG HUNTERS (completed)

32 - DEAD OAKS

The cool thing – or at least to me – the cool thing about really intense hangovers is you don't have to do anything at all. You can't.You can't make thoughts happen, you can only deal with the oneshappening. You have to let stuff be, and then shit happens, which feels like it's real shit, which then can feel profound.

This day, for some reason, the profound shit wasn't about what a horrible,worthless person I was, which is what it usually was about. I lay there smelling everything and just being, and this made me gradually feel better, and when I wanted water, there it was, and I was also comforted by the thought that eventually someone would find me and give me a lot of shit for being such a wasteoid and trespassing. Having something eventually happen, no matter what it was, seemed like progress.

And nothing happened. And I continued to think about my mother without trying to think about her, without trying to think at all.

And soon, it was night. And cool.

I continued to feel better, enough better so when my stomach started rumbling I found myself hopping to my feet and scurrying over to the trashcan on the corner. Pizza boxes with rock hard pizza rinds. Back to the spigot to wash them down, and I was new man.

My mother was an asshole. Was that profound? Possibly; I'd never really thought about her like that before, and I still wasn't sure why it was the big deal in my brain at this moment. But still, she was a complete asshole. She cared more about her drapes and her magazinesthan she did about me or anyone else. Later on she never would have helped me out if there hadn't been a check attached. This was some sort of conclusion, and reaching it made me feel solid, though like I said, I wasn't sure why.

I stretched and realized I'd hadn't been hanging under a pine tree after all. It was one of those California Live Oaks, except this one looked dead. Right now, its sketchy branches looked like dark spiderwebs all around me.

I stood under the dead/Live Oak and wondered why no one in this neighborhood had called the cops on me yet. I wondered what to do. Iwas going to do something, that was clear, and strangely it seemed as though I had a choice. Looking back on things from where I am now I can attest, with almost full confidence, that my life up until this point had been about doing whatever it was it seemed I was supposed to do, pacing the Big Clock, because that's what you were supposed to do, and I thought if I kept at it I wouldn't turn into Johnny Bobo. Because of that strategy, I'd let myself get tangled up in nonsense,which had almost made me kill myself. From there, after I got out of the looney that last time, I'd gotten tangled up in tasks, gettingsucked deeper and deeper into a littler and littler clock. The DogHunters appeared to be free of both little and Big Clock, not just because they had their mission, but because they deliberately choose this mission.

I didn't fully grasp all of this at the time, but it didn't matter because under that dead/Live Oak I decided to choose the mission of reconnecting with the Dog Hunters. It sounds like it was almost really just another task, but it wasn't. And I wasn't doing it because I thought they would continue to take care of me, I was doing it just to see if I could do it. Just because it was something I was choosing to do, and thinking about it actually made me grin.