I used to hang out with a bunch of dudes. They would come over with beer in a cooler and we’d play some music on the speakers if the weather was good. Even if the weather wasn’t good, we’d chill still chill, except under this blue tarp tent and without the speakers. On those days with the bad weather, there would still be enough light to come sickly shining down a little bit through the tarp and make the dudes’ look all blue. I’d sit in my lawn chair and survey the dudes, just watch them hanging around looking blue. The dudes come all the time, maybe every day, but I don’t know for sure. I’m like the shepherd of the dude-flock, even though I’d rather not be a shepherd of any kind. Its stressful work, looking after so many little blue sheep.
Sometimes we’d line up some cans out back and shoot them with the BB gun or find heavy things and see who could lift them up. I have been known to pick some really heavy stuff off the ground. Other times we’d just stand and look in different directions. None of the stuff we did can be called important stuff, definitely not. But it was very definitely stuff; just like eternities of stuff that doesn’t have a taste, stuff that I can’t sift through, so all those days just lay in a lump with their colors running. Those days were all days of the serious afternoon beers and on the warming days we just take the truck to the river, with like fifteen dudes riding in the bed and me in the cab driving. We’d probably stand up on this big rock and do some back-flips into the water or just swing back and forth on this decrepit rope-swing, set up by unknown dudes from long ago. We swim in the rivers and the lakes and the pools all the time, whenever we can, because everybody I know secretly wants to drown themselves. But really, all this stuff we do is all good stuff, it only gets gross if you look for a long time. And one thing I’ve learned is that you should never look at anything for a long time.
Sometimes when the weather is shit and its raining while we’re standing under the blue tarp looking around, we don’t talk and you can see the dirt driveway in front of the house turning into a gross old pond with that color beige mixed with some red from the clay, and there are even faint ripples of white in it, all popping up and swirling around in the puddle before they disappear and the rain drops keep coming down. On those days I get the feeling that the whole flock really would just like to go somewhere and go to sleep, I know that’s the way I feel. But nobody ever says anything about that.
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