And so we’re all sitting or standing or running around with that little purple football whistling and flying around while those bugs are droning and the air is feeling kind of wet. You can bet I’m not slamming Buds but chilling on a Bud. As is usual, I’m feeling pretty good because I do like me a Bud Heavy and I’m not feeling very bored at all because Crocs is here.
Now thats whats up!
But I tried to pretend like it was all the same, so I just chilled on my Bud and stood by this small grill that had three legs and sort of looked like an alien space ship.
The flock of dudes and chicks seemed alright, and out of the corner of my eye I could peep Crocs sitting in her chair twisting a little piece of grass around with her fingers. A couple of other people were talking about something to her but it seemed like they werent really getting anywhere, nobody was laughing or anything. Soon they stopped and just stood around in the same places, just looking at each other’s faces and then at the ground and at the sky, making grumbles. Crocs just kept sitting there watching and twisting her piece of grass around so that it looked like a tiny propeller.
Then the dudes and the chicks ambled over somewhere else and tried to chill with a different part of the flock but they sort of fell short, like nobody had anything to say. Like the silence had just spread, and soon it seemed like nobody had anything to say to anybody else so that the bugs were buzzing louder than ever and this one dude just had his mouth open and was sort of going, “uhhhh” like he was really close to having something to say but he just kept going, “uhhhh” for a really long time.
We hadn’t been bored in a pretty long time, but the dudes were bored now. Its weird when boring pops up, its not like anything special ‘triggers’ it or anything. I don’t think so, at least. Sometimes we want to be bored so that we have an excuse to do something. Other times it just sort of nods friendly to us like a rascally uncle and says, “You’re bored son, you know that you are bored, its time to go swimming or something.” Other times boredom never lets us know we’re bored at all, so we just keep doing the things that are boring without even knowing that we’re bored.
But it’s the worst when you can see it coming. When we see it coming its like a baby just started screaming and its getting louder and louder, so loud you cant take it, and we start to quietly panic while we’re trying to figure out how to make it go away.
So the whole flock of dudes, all looking sort of blue or purple in the darkening light, starts trying to cook up some sort of thing to do, somewhere to go, something to think about. Most dudes really try their best in these emergencies, trying to see what’s good. But things are looking grim; things are looking pretty dry.
Nobody wants to go swimming because its getting kind of dark and it isn’t really that warm out. Everyone just sort of looks around and down at their cell phones, scrolling around through all the people that they know. Crocs is still doing what she was doing before, I see. I’m kind of glad that it seems hopeless, because if we couldnt find shit to do we’d probably just stay in the yard and that would give me a little while longer to watch Crocs twirl her grass thing and hold her red solo cup.
But then that dude who was making the ‘uhhhh’ face pipes up out of nowhere and starts talking about this ‘natural spring’ that he heard about. The dude said that the place was supposed to be almost like a cave, and there were a whole bunch of different ‘natural pools’ (that’s what he said, like a nature fag) that formed out of the rocks and these pools were wicked warm because they were from underground mineral deposits or some shit.
Most of the dudes turn to me to see what I’ll say because they’re my goddamn woods, like I had to give them permission to go in there. I didnt say anything, but for one, It sounded like bull to me. For two, I just didn’t really want to go, I didnt want to keep going on these little trips or try to have fun, because sometimes I’m goddamn tired and I’d rather just stay in one place and let what happens happen; I’m not trying to force anything.
Plus those woods; just really a place that I don’t want to go at this time in the eve. I imagined us, the whole damn gang, beating through the dark brush. I imagined feeling sticky things with thorns brushing my legs and spiderwebs getting in my mouth. All the dudes flanking me, hacking through the undergrowth with sticks, while Crocs walks along with us and picks slowly but not too carefully, through the broken sticks and ferns, and that thing where you get wapped in the face because the person in front of you pushed back a branch never happens to her.
I imagine the dudes getting nabbed up one by one by things that come out of the ground or drop out of the trees, grabbing a dude and then falling back in the blackness before the dude can even scream. I can see Crocs kicking around lazy in the endless black of the undergrowth, facing away from me, looking bored, while I’m just waving my arms around and sinking in some sneaky pool of quicksand that I tripped into like a dumbass.
But the whole flock of dudes is nodding and looking hopeful about the bullshit natural spring. Everyone, is just like, “Ya cool. Lets do it.”
But nobody moves and I’m just grippin this Bud and grippin this little black grill with my other hand.
And I see Crocs out of the sly corner of my eye sitting in her chair with her red solo cup but no piece of grass and some of her hair had fallen over her face in a way that was so correct it looked fake. Everyone’s just flipping their shit and she just looks easy and calm. She doesn’t know that I don’t want to go in the woods, why should she?
She’ll probably go in there with them. It would be better if she didn’t though, for me. I think I would like that, it would give me a good feeling, like I won something, I guess Crocs in this case, without having to do anything. And that’s a kind of scumbaggy thought, but it doesn’t matter because where she was gonna go was up to her.
I didn’t know what she was going to choose, or if she was going to choose anything at all. I definitely couldn’t make her choose anything, it just wouldn’t seem right. I feel like if I pulled some big romance guy kind of move, I’d end up being a lot less of like Bruce Springsteen (the Boss) than like old ass goofy Rod Stewart.
I should feel okay about the woods, I should go running in there with Crocs and every single one of the dudes behind me, all of us running real fast and feeling really jacked on everything. But I don’t know.
And the dudes and the chicks look at me like whats up and I just say straight up that I’m gonna chill, everyone looks bothered by that; sort of shifty, or grossed out, just because someone, anyone, who happened at this time to be me, had said 'no' to going somewhere. Its like the dudes just didn’t get it, how somebody could stay and just hang in the backyard when it was obvious as hell that boredom was afoot.
Everyone standing around in the back yard is quiet and they look at each other and around in different directions, at the trees waving in the distance, at the blue purple light of the spring sky, at the grass, the very green grass. And the dudes wait like they still haven’t decided all the way. We’re breathing in that air that feels a little bit wet and its quiet, until someone else says,
“Yeah, I heard that theres mad hippy old dudes there
that dose up and get naked. Funny shit, lets do it.”
I can’t deny it. Sounds straight. Nobody can pass up on that.
Or they couldn't if it existed. But it definitely did not exist. Even though I never go in those woods, they sure as hell belong to me, or my family at least, and I would have heard about some hippy commune if there was one. And I'll say it again, there’s no way in ice cold and watery Hell that I’m going along to look for any 'natural spring' in those woods.
Some of the dudes were like, “What’s gonna happen man? Nothing bad, maybe not shit even.”
But I was just like, nah.
So there they go, the whole herd of dudes goes extreme into the forest and I watch them trot along, looking really bulky, really powerful. They go crashing through the edges of dead grass around the woods. Then they all disappear. I could occasionally hear an extreme woop of not being bored come barking out of the woods’ void.
And all the empty trucks were in the driveway, parked crooked with the windows halfway down and the yard looks much more purple than green now, with the grass crushed down where the dudes were, some empty plastic lawn chairs and crushed up cans here or there and I stand there looking at the woods with my legs feeling kind of cottony
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