Solstice & seagulls
A meandering through early summer
We’re grouped on the grass by the lake, somewhere on the periphery of jazz fest, planning a solstice party. Musicians unknown to us enchant and move the crowd, but we are neither enchanted nor moved, mostly because we are plebeians who throw around artless smiles (ty Chekhov for this phrase) like Oprah on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Still, we try to move anyways. We bob and sway and kick and swing and move but fail to dance with swag. Now our artless smiles are accompanied by artless moves. We’re vibing though, which is what counts I’m told.
I like this, kind of. We like this. We are happy enough and buzzing because we are surrounded by boats we cannot afford and music we don’t normally listen to and sunsets we get to catch every day and each other. A wolf spider perks up from his den in the crack of a lamppost and joins us. We welcome him and name him something important I know I won’t remember the next day. Our problems are held by the company and music, transformed even, made lighter for tomorrow.
And then the Stump game is proposed. E promises the stump will be easy to find and transport to the party. She knows a guy she says. This amuses us and settles the discussion. We’re amused at how easily amused we are. Our smiles are no more nuanced by the end of the night, but they continue to beam as we dream.
It’s actually there, one week later, in the backseat of her scrappy Nissan, a full tree stump, heavy, thick, and aged, perfect for our purposes. I’m reminded of hands and the way veins contort like bark. The only thing E says about it is that she forgot to put a blanket under it before lugging it into her car. This strikes me as something E would say but not do. She isn’t afraid of a little dirt, is she? It’s so thoughtful of her to think of it.
We drive to the party with no further questions. We talk about the weather, which ends in the philosophical musings of amateurs and the lightness of unencumbered laughter. I’ve got my guitar, a hammer, some nails. When we arrive I roll the stump out as casually as possible toward the others. They are situated around a bonfire, waiting for our arrival to begin.
Hammers weren’t meant to be thrown in the air, but neither were humans. This is how G ends up with a bleeding thumb. A plate follows a similar fate, shattering into more fractions than God can count. We continue at it for awhile, flipping the $10 hammer into the sky like jugglers. Some of us catch it more often than others; an even smaller handful manages to sink a nail into the wood. A crushes us in the first round, his first ever, leaving our mouths agape and my mind full of backstories to explain his performance. Something’s not computing because he is a city boy. But before I can ask he’s gone, claiming that he is a reasonable man with work to attend in the morning. No one mentions that we do, too.
The moon takes its place in the cloudless night, as E steers our attention to Venus hovering right below. We stay and play until we can no longer endure the mosquitoes that have proven they are bolder and larger than life. I’m prepared to sing a song I wrote, but fear chokes me up at the last minute.
In the morning there’s a seagull eating a dead mackerel beside one of the graveyards I frequently walk by. It’s early and he’s alone with me, stabbing his beak into the gill of the lifeless fish with the kind of precision only dreamed of by darts players in speakeasys and statisticians on Twitter. I wonder if he’ll bury it when he’s done, given the nearby graveyard. Surrounding him are the remains of dropped groceries: a half-open can of tomatoes, broken glass, the crispy skin of exposed garlic cloves.
The seagull stutters away from the mackerel when I step closer for a better look. He doesn’t want me to catch him feasting on what cannot defend itself. It’s a gull eat gull world I whisper behind crusty eyes. This one has more pride than the rest, though I notice that, when I turn back toward him and his prize, he has his back toward me.
He really doesn’t want to be caught eating this fish. He’s not some schmuck of a seagull who vultures around humans all day in the hopes that fate will be kind to him. He’s better than this—he’s a pioneer, a self-made seagull who knows how to find his own food, not a freewheeling freeloader with wings. But we’re connected, too. When I move, he moves. When I turn, he turns. We do our dance for awhile, only to find the back of our respective heads when we try to observe the other.
There are others in the distance. I begin to picture them as capitalistic graverobbers with top hats and fancy suits that are abandoned when it’s time to eat. And what they eat, in my mind, are deceased humans. To them we’re wasteful; it’s a simple resource allocation problem, and they’re willing to solve it efficiently. Maybe this is why, Ms. Emily Dickinson, they never - in extremity - asked a crumb of you. Maybe they never needed to.
When I scurry away far enough, I witness him in the act. His beak connects, finds a vein, cranes and twists, until sinew surrenders to strength.
Another summer solstice, another beginning and ending all at once.
I’m trying with all my might to tease apart beginnings from endings because it’s better for the story of my life. But who and what we are is an ongoing process, a tangled knot of beginnings and an endings threaded in a swirl of cosmic hairballs. I’ve had my share of endings recently and want to focus only on this beginning, on one thread. But I know that this wishful thinking, which may never end for as long as I live. The beginnings are the endings are the beginnings.
The heat is getting to me. It’s worsening my sleep and blurring the line between one day and the next. It might be the smoke, too, from my Canadians up north. The U.S. army once tried (maybe they’re still trying) to reduce the need for sleep in their soldiers. This makes me sad because these super soldiers would no longer be human. Without sleep we cannot dream, and to dream is to be human.
And yet, we dream more by dreaming less. We forget what we know in our lack of sleep and memory and rely instead on imagination to fill in the gaps. Summer, then, makes us more human by helping us forget who we were, allowing us to shape who we are and who we want to be. The beginnings are the endings are the beginnings.
I sometimes dream that I’ll be rich enough to fund the dreams and projects of my friends. One friend wants to build a house in Maine where she and her hens can live. She also wishes for an extra 80 years to live in it, which means that if I am to succeed, I will need the folks working on human longevity to accelerate their work for humans and hens alike.
I dream, too, of finding my traveling companions for the longer walk of life. I think this will include a pup, and surely a wifey and children at some point. It also includes friends and people who are dedicated to lifelong explorations. Ideally they are experts in embodied phenomenology and creative goofology, people who can point to a tree or word or song or yam and make me fall in love with it. They are lovers and rebels and artsy intellectuals, people who can challenge me for the sake of deepening my love for the world. In return I can give my hands and words and energy. I can make something beautiful from the messiness of beginnings and endings.