the habit of being

At the Camp:

While I sat and read all of Miller’s slang words for vagina and other theories on life in Paris, the pink-faced man returned and sat in the same spot he’d occupied the two days previous, speaking to the sales woman about her shoulder surgery but never a word to me. James went out to do signage only to return a few minutes later with a huge plastic bear once filled with six pounds of animal crackers. The head’s worth had already been eaten. He presented this to me as a birthday gift in the best of humor, though it was all he’d been given before a cop had told him to “get off my road” on a loudspeaker. We spent the rest of the day reading, both finishing our books about five minutes before closing. The bear sat between our chairs, and we munched as we read.

J’s found himself a biography of a buckskin-wearing trail-hiking naturalist who was once saved from falling off a mountain by a frozen mule. This, entitled, The Last American Man, meshed well with J’s sorrow and fears… how he does not live by his ideals and no one would write about him as anything brilliant or extraordinary, but simply a mean or bad person. I said I would write the book he wanted, and he said if I wrote it that way it wouldn’t be the truth. He hated himself earnestly with tears in his eyes for a long, long time. I tried to help, but could not console him, and every once in a while he’d stop crying and tell me a story from the book, or contrast the hero’s point of view to that of Henderson, or even give me the wild burro treatment, wherein he jumps around on all fours, kicks, and says “I’m a wild burro” or “I’m stubborn” in the funniest way, and I laugh as I try to hold on to the bucking creature from beneath. Finally, I gave an agonized J who could not keep listening to the thoughts in his head a long blowjob, and he said it felt like he came three times. He praised me for a while and eventually we fell asleep.
. . .

Now, I’m supposed to be gathering firewood.

. . .

Katharine-wood-gatherer! Me make big pile! We make FIRE! When J gets back from grocery shopping anyway. Also, we don’t have enough water. Someone’s going to have to walk all the way to the mall to get more. We have brown rice. J is geting tomato sauce or spices or something to cook with the rice - maybe soup?

. . .

Southern Style Blend tomatoes, okra, and corn. Striking surface of matchbook smooth with candle wax.. J looking for more. Rice in pot. Water from EXPO Design Center. I should read the last Amer. man. Maybe we’ll stick around here a couple more days. We only have $5 though. New Asian at the bookstore, always talking loudly on his cell phone, asks me about St. Jude necklace. Do you travel a lot? He has one too; he’s a pilot. That’s St. Christopher though. I don’t say that. I say I travel A LOT. There are bug shadows running around my arm. I think the bugs are IN my arm. A spider crawled off of me in the bookstore yesterday. Yuck. James calls woody areas with lots of old camp places “homeless hotels.”