hey body

Hey body...

One high-priority action output from last week's Brand Me retreat is that I Found A Project. When my dad came home at night, the first words he said to me were always some variant on "What's your project? What are you working on?" On those rare days that I was fed up with business and rebelled by Not Having A Project, my assigned project would be Finding A Project.

I didn't take my holiday in Romeria last week looking for a project. And it's not like I found Tony Robbins out there to coach me to a breakthough. (Though I'd have a hard time faking surprise if I did.) It just popped into my head one night. I had spent the whole day in a dry, grassy clearing about 20 yards in diameter. Wandered in. Sat. Went to sleep.

One of they things they never mention on so-called "reality" shows like America's Next Top Model is that all a Body can dream are nightmares. I don't know if Romerians have dreams at all, but if they do, they must really, really suck. Because ours suck. Until they don't. They actually stop being unbearable after the first few weeks. They don't get any less ugly. They just start to be, what's on.

I was watching something about skin just before I woke up and discovered that the hissing sound from my dream was actually seven or eight "residents" wading through the grass pool in the moonlight. It was like a slow-motion rush hour. There were a few fender fractures, but nothing  deambulating. I was narrating the traffic report when one of them, a female, broke down and was still and staring right at me. She looked kind of embarrassed, like one of us was indecent.(7) And that is when I Found My Project. I'm going to look for Ibu.

Hey body...

As it turned out, no one got bit during the Underground Festival. Most of the tunnels and doors leading out of the performance spaces were blocked by equipment or supplies. Some were actually closed and locked. I think it was more good luck than good planning, but still. After the festival was a different story.

Apparently, someone cleaning up on Monday morning opened an iron door under the Torensluis and uncovered five semi-dormant stinkers in a kind of canal run-off chamber. I don't know how Timo found out so fast, but he texted all three of us to come down and help them "move out". Like they were homeless guys being evicted from a flophouse.

So last week I was in the Veluwe. Relocating stinkers is not fun. They don't like it. You can really only do it at night. You need a secure van and even then we can't safely move more than two at a time. (Not that they're interested in us bodies, but you have to outnumber them to keep them under control.) And did I mention the smell? There are an infinite number of reasons why it makes absolutely no sense. That's infinity to one, the one being Timo's belief that it's the right thing to do. Teaching pigs to sing.

We released the last one just before sunrise on Thursday. It was a male in what was left of a pretty nice suit defaced with absurdly thick pinstripes. Part of the gauche neo-80's revival from London that's now shambling through the streets of Europe, so it couldn't have been locked in that canal space for too long. We dropped it off in a sandy scrub area outside a finger of forest. D figured that the sunlight would make it head straight for the trees. But it just looked back and forth between the van and the sun, like it was trying to figure out what one had to do with the other. Then it kind of vertically collapsed, like a controlled building demolition where the charges were in its knees. Sometimes the knees are the first thing to go.

We couldn't leave it out in the open, so we dragged it by its ridiculous collar into the woods. I think it was the smell of the wet pine needles on the ground that made me decide to stay behind for a few days. It smelled like my memories of family vacations camping in the Sierra Nevada. And I suddenly felt like I could use a vacation.

Hey body...

Friday the 13th was kind of a family holiday when I was growing up. Dad would pick me up early from school and we'd drive to the Exploratorium. There's at least one F13 every year. Sometimes two. The year I was born, there were three, including my birthday.

Any month that starts on a Sunday has one. Yet there's no superstition around Sunday the First. "Why Friday the 13th and not Sunday the First when they're perfectly coincident?" That was our bottomless topic, our zen koan, on those F13 drives. We rubbed away at superstition and other forms of  self-deception until we got to the museum and parked the car, when he would turn to me and repeat what was practically our family motto: Just see things the way they are and there will be nothing to be afraid of.