Review: Banana Peel Slips on Itself by David E. Williams

Earlier today I was reading a Graham Greene novel and came across this exchange between two fictional high level administrators of a British intelligence office as they lunch together at club near the office:

“I like the food at Travellers just as much,” Hargreaves said.

“Ah, but you are forgetting our steak-and-kidney pudding. I know you won't like my saying so, but I prefer it to your wife's pie. Pastry holds the gravy at a distance. Pudding absorbs the gravy. Pudding, you might say, cooperates.”

Upon reading this sentiment, I thought of the songwriter David E. Williams because it is the sort of thing he might say were you to have lunch with him at one of the many gastropubs in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown where he resides. Although, to be honest I don't know of any such establishments that serve kidney pie or pudding and I couldn't say whether Mr. Williams is a pudding man or a pie man. The point is that he is a contemplative man who practices the type of mindfulness that would lead one to make such an observation. This becomes clear to when you pay attention to the lyrics of his songs, quite a few of which happen to include food descriptions or metaphors involving food.

Perhaps the quote above would not have immediately led me to think of Fishtown's dark balladeer if he weren't on my mind today as I prepared to write this review. As I mentioned in my piece on Thomas Nola's Pacific Palisades, I discovered that particular album after having just pre-ordered the upcoming David E. Williams record, which is due for release on June 21st. Since I said I would likely review it, I've been given a preview copy of all the completed songs in digital format. The title is Banana Peel Slips on Itself and it will be issued on CD by Old Europa Cafe, an Italian label specializing in various types of experimental music. You can currently listen to three of the tracks at his Bandcamp site, where you can also pre-order the CD or the digital version.

Cover for Banana Peel Slips on Itself

Although David E. Williams has certainly dabbled in the experimental, I would not classify most of music in that way, but it is always undoubtedly...different. He is a troubadour of tragedy, but in a funny way. This is especially true of the small tragedies, life's little nuisances that plague our every day existence like foot fungus or sunburn. He takes a subject that most might find absurd to even think about at all and presents it with a sinister twist. Nearly all of his songs include a blend of sorrow and a kind of humor that, while morbid, is more commiserating than cruel.

His musical style is somehow both a little too conventional and incredibly strange to the degree where some listeners might be put off. In recent years, he has recorded his songs from his home and performs most of the parts on his keyboard with an occasional guest musician contributing to a track. These are not merely “keyboard songs” though, but complex creations with a variety of different effects and layers of sound. The most notable aspect of his music is typically his vocals, which can range from softly lilting to violently growling with an ever-present dramatic gravitas utilized to demonstrate the character of the narrator.

This new album, Banana Peel Slips on Itself, fits all the descriptions I've written above. I think it to be top-form David E. Williams, on par with some of my favorite work by him. Probably my favorite song is called “Margaret Sanger Lives in Heaven” about the founder of Planned Parenthood, in which she goes to hell but then through prayerful intervention by persons unidentified she is able to be redeemed by fighting her way into limbo where “the souls of every boy and girl whose ever been aborted” now reside and she takes them with her into heaven. It's an intense song and lyrics are amazing. I would quote them entirely here but it doesn't seem appropriate in an album review. I'll just give you the first stanza:

Margaret Sanger died while dreaming things we take for granted:

her bold abortuaries in every corner of the planet.

Murder factories for modest means and even smaller

for children of three inches with no need for need for growing taller.

For as unpleasant as this is, it is a song about cosmic redemption; about looking straight into the darkness of ourselves and the world we live in and believing that there must some path back to God, “however you define him” to paraphrase the people at Alcoholic Anonymous. Undoubtedly, people who believe in Heaven and Hell will question the theological soundness of the scenario presented but that is kind of missing the point.

From strictly a musical perspective I think the song “Chiropractor Arrives by Helicopter” offers the most listening pleasure. It's on the longer side of all the songs, a little over five minutes, and unfolds a slow meditative audio experience with synthesized rhythms and little synthetic bird-like chirps. The lyrics are simple and short. At first I didn't understand them until I searched the internet for “chiropractor helicopter crash” and found a news story about a chiropractor in Florida who died when a helicopter he was riding in crashed into a mobile home, so I assume this must be the basis of the song. It was “ripped from the headlines” as they say.

(UPDATE: I've learned that "Chiropractor Arrives by Helicopter" is not inspired by that news story I've cited. It's just an odd coincide.)

Actually, the ambitious listener may be inclined to consult the internet to understand lyrics from other songs on the album. One such example is “Marquis de Sade was a Sadist”, which name-drops twelve different seemingly unconnected historical figures. I don't think there is actually a connection between all of them, but even understanding the way they are described might require some research for the uninformed. For instance:

And Georges Bataille

boiled eggs with his eye

He enjoyed them most

on thanatoast.

I'm not sure I get this.

You might remember me mentioning foot fungus earlier. Well, that gets brought up in the first song on the album called “Song About Being a Foot”. This is a perfect example of the contemplative mindfulness I mentioned that brings about a different way of looking at things. Here's how the foot introduces itself:

I am a foot.

Meet me at the end of your leg.

Meet me where your soul meets the floor

stompin' on a hard-boiled egg.

And what about food references? Well the best example on Banana Peels is called “The Clambake at the End of the World.” This song is apparently about environmental catastrophe and is sung with the exactly the opposite of a gusto, a helpless malaise about how there is simply nothing to be done to avert the pending disaster.

All of the songs that I've mentioned so far are pretty catchy to me, but there are a few that just don't do it for me musically. Even among these, there are amusing things to be found. “Sun Cracks Through Black Cotton” clocks in at just one minute and fourteen seconds long. It's just really odd, but it has a food metaphor. There is a particularly discordant cover of the old song “One Meatball” with guest vocals by Jerome Deppe, a frequently collaborator with David E. Williams. Go listen to a more traditional version and then listen to this one. Personally, I like the older version better, but it's another food song so...

Not every song needs to be beautiful to be interesting, and “I Dreamed I Caught a Cold” is a good example. The lyrics consist of just three couplets. First they are sung through one time in order, but then the couplets begin to overlap each other. While listening I couldn't help but feel that this felt exactly like dreams I have had where I seem to be trapped in some kind of loop that I keep living over and over. This is more like song-designing than song-writing. It may not appeal to most people but it is not without merit. Another song's design I liked was “Pets Will Eat Their Owners” which is seemingly over when the music suddenly explodes in an exuberant melodic breakdown that lasts another minute.

I'm not going to go into all fourteen songs on the album, but I think I've mentioned all my favorites and my least favorites, which are just okay. The songs falling in between my arbitrary standards of mentionability are good and I like them. I do want to point out one more favorite called “Lou Gehrig” with lyrics that were excerpted and re-arranged from the great baseball player's farewell speech. There is something special about the song because it picks out these quirky little moments from the speech and then ends with some of the most life-affirming words ever heard from a dying man in American history. Both the piano playing and the vocals are incredibly uplifting.

That's all fine and good, but my quibble is, why not a song about someone from the Philadelphia Phillies? All we ever hear about is the damn Yankees! You know, I once saw a baseball game in Philadelphia where David E. Williams drove a golf cart for the team mascot, the Philly Phanatic, while said mascot shot hot dogs into the crowd from a specially designed gun for shooting hot dogs. Who does that sort of thing? After you listen to Banana Peel Slips on Itself, I expect you'll know what kind of person does that sort of thing. A guy like David E. Williams.

Related: See my 2013 interview with David E. Williams for a discussion on his personal motivations for his songwriting among other things.

A Review of Pacific Palisades by Thomas Nola and The Cedar Groves

Earlier this week I received a notification from Bandcamp that the new David E. Williams album is now available for pre-order, so I went to Mr. Williams' Bandcamp site, listened to the three songs that have been released from the album and made my pre-order. While I was logged in, I also looked up some of the other artists that I follow and "low and behold" I saw that Thomas Nola had released yet another album in September 2019. I was late to the game.

The album is entitled Thomas Nola & The Cedar Groves- Pacific Palisades. The thing about Thomas Nola is that he changes his backing band pretty often. I already had something like 13 albums or more by Thomas Nola and a number of compilation albums on which he appears. He has previously released albums that are just by Thomas Nola, and albums by Thomas Nola et Son Orchestra, and albums by Thomas Nola and the Black Hole. This is the first with The Cedar Groves as a backing band.

So who is Thomas Nola? Well, I've been a fan for years ever since I saw him perform live in a show that included the above-mentioned David E. Williams in the line-up. I suppose Williams was my neighbor in a way. He lived in Fishtown at the time and operated a small bookstore there. I lived in a small sliver of land called East Kensington about five blocks away. You can read a 2013 interview I had with Williams.

Anyway...that bookstore also had an art gallery and there were occasional events like music shows, and somehow Williams became acquainted with Thomas Nola and released an album on Nola's label called Disque de Lapin. So because of this association, Thomas would come down and play in Philadelphia. That is how I first saw him, in a small book store. I learned that in addition to running his own record label he is also and independent filmmaker. I believe that he was initially based out of Boston, although I can't say for certain.

After seeing him at Germ Books, I saw him many times and in many locations. He looks like Nigel Terry from Excalibur without the goatee, but most times he performed in formal attire, most memorably a brown pin-striped suit. For me, the best shows I ever saw him play were when I went outside of Philadelphia, my favorite being in Manhattan at a tiki bar called Otto's Shrunken Head, and second when I went up to Brattleboro, Vermont for the ten year celebration festival of Disque de Lapin, where many artists played in some old theater Nola had rented for the day.

Nigel Terry

Despite my frequent contact with Mr. Nola, I can't say we are friends. I always remained in orbiter fan status and at some point I became persona non grata with him, which I discovered when I noticed that our Facebook friendship was terminated. I don't know for certain why, but I suspect that it was due to some political disagreements we had on Facebook. I try to avoid that sort of thing but occasionally it gets the better of me.

Let's talk about Pacific Palisades! I think it is Thomas Nola's greatest album to date. It is amazingly cohesive and creative. It induces a trance-like state of mind and is incredibly cohesive throughout in terms of audio fidelity, yet each song is unique. In this day and age when the entire concept of a musical album has gone by the wayside, when most artists simply issue one song at a time, and most people simply listen to their favorite songs and nothing more, Nola has constructed an experience that needs to be listened to entirely, and it's a joyful experience!

Pacific Palisades album cover

Pacific Palisades opens with a brief instrumental prelude entitled "Pacific Coast Theme." It harkens back to old surf rock days. This ends and immediately we are introduced to a different more sophisticated sound in a song called "Back to the Sky" which elevates the listeners mood but isn't exactly high-energy music. It's more of a mindfulness meditation. You are here. You are observing your environment. You are rising above the thoughts and emotions that hold you back from pursuing your full potential. You are going back to the sky.

"Back to the Sky" sets the mood for the coming songs. As I said before, they are all a little different, creatively, but they stay in this steady flow that has you nodding along. I'm not really an expert on audio mechanics, but each song utilizes this echo-type reverb effect, which is used very well. I've heard other cases where it was used badly but this isn't one of them.

One of the stand-out songs is "The Sun Reaches Out" which is about how our existence sort of blends together with all of reality. Take for instance, this lyric:

"You saw yourself in the face of the sun, you never knew you were a phase of the sun."

The song ends with the sounds of a child, reminiscent of Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely" (but far less cringe) and I can't help but think that it is the sound of Thomas' own son, and that he is sort of interchangeably using the homonyms "sun" and "son" to discuss how life is a continuum in which we transfer what we can to the next generation and then we are lost and gone to history, or memory, or legacy, or what? Like waves lapping upon a beach.

Another song I want to highlight is "Chasing a Feeling Down" about deconstructing one's self to the essential components of one's identity. Nola literally and poetically identifies every piece of our identity in this song and then seems to ask the question, are we any of these things or are we a feeling that transcends all of them? I have to say, this is how I personally think every time I visit the ocean and observe the tide going in and out, and this is why I think the title of the album is so astute.

There is another instrumental track on the album called "Undertow," which continues with this steady beautiful theme. It's slow and mostly monotonous, with little chimes of life. It is not painful to listen to, like other monotonous music I've come across. I always appreciate a random instrumental track that is well-executed.

The final song, "Free Seals of Big Sur" begins with a combination of surf rock guitar and tribalistic drumming that has been with us for ages, probably the first type of music ever written. "Where is your dream?" asks the lyrics. "We've been here all along." is the answer. And this completes this work of genius that extrapolates from the lived experience a mood and tempo symbolic of what really matters and gives us purpose in life. I have not focused much on the poetry of Thomas Nola, but the guy can definitely write a verse.

If you've never heard of Thomas Nola, this is the place to start. You can listen to the album online here: https://lapin.bandcamp.com/album/pacific-palisades, but why not buy it and download it onto all of your devices? He is only charging five dollars!!! That's like the same price as a double mocha chocolate latte at Starbucks, but you can own these songs forever. It's a refreshing and energizing drink you can keep going back to instead of sucking up and exstruding in a 24 hour period. I'd say it's the best album of 2019.

Sorry. I'm not a sales rep for Mr. Nola. We're not even on speaking terms! I will say that because I'm a weirdo, I like his earlier albums as well, but not all of them are as accessible as this one. I once played my vinyl version of the "The Rose-Tinted Monocle" for some friends and their faces twisted as they said, "Ewwww, it's like a really off-key imitation of Nick Cave!" But I swear to you. This time it's different. Pacific Palisades is different and you can listen to it before you buy it. But you should buy it if you like it. He's a hard-working and prolific artist and he deserves your support.


(Oh, and I plan to review that new David E. Williams album that I pre-ordered when it comes out in June. Probably the best album of 2020...we'll see!)

Two poems from 2011

I wrote the following two poems in 2011 during a brief "fling" with a Mennonite girl who couldn't bring herself to meet my fawning adoration with like affection. She was a poet and she inspired me to write a number of poems, but only these two stand out to me as being any good. After the Mennonite girl severed ties with me she moved back to rural Pennsylvania to be with her family. Good for her.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011- Officer's hands

On a family trip to Plymouth,
we visited the Mayflower,
or a replica of the Mayflower.

I was eight years old and liked
to read books about seafaring,
books about cabin boys.

After the tour of the ship,
my dad and I were sitting
under a tree near Plymouth Rock,

looking at the vessel from a distance,
when one of the actors
dressed as a sailor walked over.

These actors wandered around town,
playing people from another time,
never breaking their characters.

“Do you like boats?” he asked me
in his gruffest sailor voice,
but I was shy and didn’t respond,

so my dad informed the “sailor”
of information recently confided,
“He’d like to climb the rigging,”

which is something I read about
not too long previous
in a book about a cabin boy.

The “sailor” glared at me sidelong
as if speculating before bellowing,
“Let me see yer hands!!!!!!!”

I held out one hand to him.
He grasped my wrist, turning
the appendage different angles,

scrutinizing the boyish skin
for several silent moments,
before releasing it dramatically.

“These are an officer’s hands!”
he said, almost in disgust,
“You have to have hands like this,”

holding out his own calloused palms
“if you want to climb the rigging
or you’d never make it to the top!”

In my subsequent childhood years,
I would re-imagine the encounter,
and what might have happened

if I had been really tough.
In this version my response would
have been to take out a knife!

and slice open the palm of my hand,
hold out the bloody gash to the “sailor”
and cry, “You call these an officer’s hands!”

This fantasy replayed in my thoughts
for far too long, until I grew out of it
by realizing the “sailor” was correct.

I have an officer’s hands and always have.
I work in an office, where my hands
are never soiled for very long

before I wash them in the restroom
before going back to type letters.
I’ve never been much of a manual laborer,

thinking it didn’t matter, because
that was the point of my going to college,
the upward mobility my parents sought for me,

to work in an office and keep my hands clean,
but now that I’m here it doesn’t feel right.
I don’t belong in either place it seems,

laboring in sweat covered days
or wearing a collared shirt and tie,
getting places by sending out résumés.

It seems that I have been deceived,
something that became apparent
not too long ago in a conversation

with two female friends as we walked
to a breakfast and they talked
about men they were dating lately.

The first one said she liked this new guy
who is a plumber and a carpenter
and the second made a noise of approval.

Not a word, just a noise, almost instinctual,
a soft moan from deep inside of her,
harkening and calling forth usefulness.

This was only two weeks ago,
yet that noise brought back to me
the fantasy of my bloody palm,

held out in defiance to the “sailor”
who said I would never make it
to the top of the rigging,

a prophecy that my upward mobility
would take place in an elevator
after pressing my spotless finger

against a button reading “4”
every morning, five days a week
without an end in sight.

These officer’s hands will never illicit
a soft noise of approval
from my kind of people,

the people I left behind
chasing a promise we were told
was certain to deliver us.

Deliver us where? I now ask
each night alone in bed
after setting my alarm

for another day at the office.
And now I sit at my desk
thinking about that day in Plymouth

when I was eight years old.
After we left the Mayflower,
we walked through a small park

and came upon a natural spring
right in the middle of town,
cold water bubbling from the ground.

I put my hand into the water
but no blood was washed away
because it is an officer’s hand.

Friday, November 4, 2011- Running Away

1.

Morning light would
always wake me early
when I was four years old.

In my footie pajamas
I sat in the front room
of our trailer in the country,

looking at the lawn grow bright
as the sun passed above the treetops.

Soon my mother would rise,
prepare for work and leave
after the arrival of Mrs. Harding
who watched my baby sister,
my brother and me.

My morning vigil
was a quiet time,
a secret time for me,
before the day began
with its activities,

mostly playing in the woods
with my little brother.

My father would leave
for work much earlier,
usually before dawn,
to drive the school bus.

Time on a clock ruled
the comings and goings
of my parents,

when they awoke and
when they left the house
and when they returned,

but my schedule was
determined by morning light.

Late in October the time changed,
the sun came up an hour earlier,

I woke up an hour earlier, unaware,

I went and sat in the chair
by the window, my usual place.

I saw a thing I had
never seen so early in the morning,
a car leaving the driveway.

My young mind
had never comprehended
this part of the day
when my father
left for work
long before my vigil.

Due to some confusion,
my dreamlike child’s perception,
I saw two heads in the front seats
of the departing vehicle,

both of my parents running away.

I went outside
waving my arms and yelling,
but the car turned onto the road.

I ran to the end of the driveway,
into the middle of the road,
saw red taillights disappearing
beyond the horizon of a distant hill.

Still I chased it, running in that direction
down the road, tears now streaming
from my eyes, as cold asphalt chilled
the soles of my pajama feet.

Soon I realized it was hopeless,
they were gone, but I kept running,

the cornfield stretching out to my left,
a patch of forest to my right and then
old Mrs. Bailey’s house which I passed,

continuing on past more trees to
the house of my parents’ friends,
the Wickstrom’s,
nestled back in the wood.

I pounded on the door
until Deena Wickstrom
opened it to see me
standing there in pajamas.

“My parents drove away,”
I told her,
“They’ve left me all alone.”
She looked confused.

We got in her car
and drove back.

Deena knocked on our trailer door,
there was no answer,
so she tried the knob.

We went inside and down the hall,
to my parents’ bedroom door
on which she softly knocked again.

Moments later my disheveled mother
fresh from sleep emerged
and Deena explained her presence.

My parents had not run away,
I wanted to be happy,
but I was still afraid.

2.

My favorite childhood movie
was about a girl named Natty
whose father crosses the country
for a job cutting trees
leaving her in the city.

She doesn’t stay there long,
catching a train west,
setting out on a journey,
perilous in nature,
she takes up with a wolf
who seems sworn
to protect her,
until she reaches her father.

This movie affected me.
I watched it repeatedly.

3.

At the age of five
I went to school,

no more mornings
playing pet dog
with my brother,

now it was letters and numbers
and standing in line,

it was waking up on time,
ruled by the clock.

I learned to read and write
and with my brother
a plan did I concoct.

The first letter I ever wrote
to my mother said:
“I’m sorry mommy,
we are running away
from home.”

I made two copies,
one to go under each of our pillows.

The plan was this: in the middle of night
I would rise before the dawn
and take my brother away,

I did not know where,
not to a father that had abandoned us,
but into the woods,
on a journey of adventure,

my brother running beside me,
he had played pet dog,
now he would play pet wolf.

The plan was perfect,
the notes were under our pillows
but in the morning I slept too late.

The sun was up
when I crumpled up my note,
put it in the trash,
and went to get my brother’s,

where I found my mother
making his bed,
no note in sight.

She must have found it,
but she never mentioned it,
and I never tried to run away again.

4.

My sister did,
maybe five years later.

She was another convert
to the gospel of Natty Gann,

the good news of the woods,
of escape and of freedom.

I don’t remember the circumstance,
only her deciding to pack her
small child-sized suitcase
and walk into the woods
behind our house.

Of course she left a note.

After a few hours of her gone,
or maybe only twenty minutes,
my brother and I went looking.

We found her
sitting on the ground
pretending the branches
of a fallen tree
were a shelter.

She looked bored.

My brother and I decided
to make her a better shelter
by dragging large branches,
arranging them together,
lined up and leaning against
the fallen tree,
making a space that
could be crawled into.

We left my sister there,
and a few hours later,
or maybe twenty minutes,
she came home
and unpacked her suitcase.

The structure we had built
remained for years to come.

5.

Our practice pets were bunnies,
really we wanted a dog,
but really we wanted a wolf!

But we got bunnies.

The first one, Wiggles,
lived in a pen outside
in the summertime.

We came home
from church one day
to find the pen
ravaged by a dog.

Wiggles was nowhere in sight.

Then we had Brownie,
who lived longer
but died prematurely
due to a giant tumor
on his chest.

Finally it was time to get a dog!

In the classifieds we found
a “pure-bred” Siberian Husky
(papers were not included)
for a hundred dollars,
paid for by my father.

We named him Rocky.

Rocky never lived to be fully grown,
the wolf in him made him
prone to wander,
and though we lived in the woods,
it wasn’t too far from a busy road.

We buried him in the yard
next to Brownie.

At last there was Heidi
the yellow lab with blonde hair
like everyone else in the family,
who lived until us kids moved out

and a few years after that too.

Rocky was the closest we came
to running with wolves
but he couldn’t guide us
through the wilderness
because it was gone.

6.

My sister ran away with a man
when she was eighteen.

Not really a wolf in sheep’s clothing
but maybe just a wolf
the way he robbed the lamb
from my parents’ flock.

They got married.
They bought a house.
They had a baby.

Then he felt the call of the wild and left.
Now she’s coming home.

7.

My brother ran away to Alaska,
the nearest to the dream.

He always was more serious
about life as an adventure,
the one who likes hunting,
extreme sports, the outdoors,

and flying helicopters,
which took years of training.

He pursued danger as a lifestyle,
soon he will go to war.

8.

I ran away to Philadelphia,
not exactly “the journey
that realized the impossible”
or however the trailer for
Natty Gann’s movie says it.

I had to get away after
crashing my car into a ditch
while drunk,

and spending the next six months
in programs designed
to make me a better person.

When the programs were over
I left home, sometimes I go back.

A few nights ago I watched
The Journey of Natty Gann
for the first time in years
and found myself asking,

“Could Natty exist today?”

A child driven into the wild
for the sake of love,
protected by a savage
and majestic creature
against what humans
she encounters.

Out of reach of the so-called
“civilized world”
she finds her father in the woods.

Sometimes my heart still seeks this,
to run away with wolves.

Notes from a family trip to the beach

Arrival


I arrived at Myrtle Beach airport on Sunday morning. My parents picked me up. They had talked of going to a local evangelical church directly from the airport, but thank the LORD this did not happen. I had woken at 4am that morning, showered, shaved, packed, and walked through the ghetto to Temple train station to catch the 5:19am to the airport. I was somewhat tired and didn't feel like singing praise choruses.

We went straight to the condo my parents had rented. We took a walk on the beach and at some point waded out into the water. I body surfed and my knees scraped against the pebbles near the shoreline. We went back to the condo and my parents went back to the airport to pick up my sister and nephew.

Erika

The hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever it was, called Erika descended on Monday. It was not terribly powerful. The rain was soft. The wind was steady but not strong. It lasted all day. Still,  it was our second day at the beach so we went for a walk in the morning. We walked along as the waves rolled in, my 4 year old nephew stopping to dig into the sand every so often. Making sandcakes in his hand he would dip them into the water and the waves would dissolve them. My father (Pop Pop) said that the ocean was eating the sandcakes. I imagined our ancestors along the shores of Europe telling similar stories to their young ones twenty thousand years ago.

I was seduced by the ruckus of the waves in the storm. I couldn't hold back. I entered on my hands and knees, crawling backwards letting each wave crash upon me and push me forward and then the next one drawing up the receding tide would pull me back deeper. Deeper and deeper I went, basically operating to the bare minimum, letting myself be tossed and turned by the glorious power of nature, waves, fractal chaos, perfect order, all in one. From time to time I would exercise my leg muscles, pushing off forward to the shore and being completely taken, still not in control despite my thrashing limbs. Salty water entered my nose and mouth and eyes. I rose to my feet looking up at the rain falling, allowing it to clean the stinging liquid from my face.

In the afternoon the storm faded, the sun seemed to come out, but every time we went back outside it started to rain again. At some point I stepped out onto the balcony and yelled, "Hey everybody! There's a rainbow out here!" They all came out and marveled. "Where do rainbows come from, Wesley?" my mother asked my nephew. "From the rain!" he said, but she chided him: "Noooo! Rainbows come from God! It's his promise that he will never destroy the world with a flood again." Wesley seemed confused. I said nothing. The ocean eating the sand makes more sense.

The Nice Young Lady

On Tuesday the weather was sunny. The ocean was calm. My parents went out the earliest it was legally allowed to set up umbrellas on the beach. An hour later, I went out there with my mother and my nephew. My mother was watching Wesley dig in the sand so I said I wanted to go out into the waves. It was nothing like the storm. There was no passion. No power. No being drawn into a trance. This is how it would be for the rest of the week whenever I went into the water.

A minute or so after I was chest deep I saw a woman wading out toward me. With my glasses off, I couldn't tell what she looked like. I thought she was older than me by a decade or more. She came close, about 20 feet away. I still couldn't see her face. I said nothing to her. What was I supposed to say? She floated away, northward about 50 feet and then came back. Then she floated away again.

I went back to shore. My mother asked, "Did you talk to that nice young lady who waded out after you?" I said no. I couldn't even tell that it was a young lady without my glasses. "Oh," said my mother, "It looked like she wanted you to talk to her." I was somewhat taken aback. I guess being a 30-something bachelor, people just expect me to talk to strange ladies in the ocean, even my own very religious mother. I had no idea. My general self diagnosis of being a failure in all social situations descended heavy upon me. And as I sat on the beach with my glasses on and watched the nice young lady come ashore and saw what I had not seen before, well...it didn't help much.

I would continue to see the nice young lady throughout the rest of the week. I even passed her on the street while wandering the near dead town of North Myrtle Beach by myself. But we never spoke. Perhaps we could have spoken but I suppose that it was up to me and I supposed that I had already blown it. Later that day, I was drifting in the ocean with my mother and she informed me that down in the South was the place where I would meet a nice conservative Christian girl. I agreed. Down in the South. In the ocean.

Pizza Shop Location Screw Up

Wednesday was pretty much the same as Tuesday. The ocean was calm. We went down to the beach twice; once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In the evening my parents and I went into Myrtle Beach proper, to check out the board walk. This board walk was only a few blocks long, the section with actual boardwalk-type attractions was only two blocks long. We had been told that the boardwalk in Mytle Beach can be very seedy, but as we walked down the two block stretch with the stores, all we saw was families and thought it wasn't so bad.

After the boardwalk ended the walkway continued as a cement promenade. We continued on it, but there were no more stores, just hotels about a hundred feet off of the promenade. Things were very dark and quiet. We encountered a beggar, begging for money. We saw small groups of shady looking people drinking from bottles in paper bags. My father asked if I thought we were safe. I said I thought we were but I could now understand the "seedy" description. We walked to the end of the promenade where there was a pier with restrooms. Then we walked back.

At the section of boardwalk with attractions we went into an arcade looking for pinball, but there weren't any pinball machines. We all got ice cream cones at a concession stand. My parents both got black raspberry and I got peanut butter fudge. Things had changed in the last hour. I have to admit that it felt pretty seedy. We went back to the car and drove home.

Up until now, my mom had made dinner every night. But now my parents were talking about ordering pizza for dinner on Thursday night. That would be my last night in Myrtle beach, as I flew back to Philly on Friday morning. Various options were discussed. On the ride back from the boardwalk to the condo I made sure to point out pizza shops as we neared our destination. But my father had thought it best to order from Papa John's.

When we got back to the condo I used my phone to look up reviews of the different pizza shops I had seen on the way home, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was impossible to tell whether or not they would be better or worse than Papa John's. When my father looked up Papa John's online he found it strange that he was being told there was a location at the exact address of our condo. This was obviously wrong. There was no Papa John's so close by. But when I looked at the results he was getting on his laptop it clearly showed that there was.

I decided to go to the Papa John's web site and do a location search by entering the zip code of the condo. The results showed that the nearest Papa John's was about a mile away on highway 17. For some reason, when I showed this to my dad, he become enraged, thinking that I was somehow claiming that he did the search wrong. I explained that I wasn't disagreeing with him, but that I just thought there was a mistake on Google Maps. But he insisted that he had also searched the Papa John's web site and that's where he had seen the incorrect location. I didn't know what to make of this. My father said "You're really pissing me off!" and stormed out of the room with his laptop slamming his bedroom room.

Later, laying in my own bed, sleepless, I took my phone and looked up the Google Maps erroneous location of the Papa John's and submitted a report to Google saying that the location was incorrect.

Turtle Feed

Thursday was yet another calm day on the beach, for the most part. My father drove me to Kinko's to print my boarding pass for my flight back to Philly. Then we went out onto the beach. Then we came inside and had ham buns like every other day that week. Then we went outside to the beach again. But it started raining. And soon it started raining very hard. We packed up all the umbrellas and beach toys and went inside. The storm got worse and worse.

My parents had decided that they no longer wanted to order pizza for dinner. Instead we were going to Ryan's Buffet, a franchise owned by the same corporation that owns Old Country Buffet. When we thought the storm was subsiding we all got into the minivan and headed toward Ryan's out on highway 17. But the storm was not nearly over. It was like we were driving in a river. All of the roads had at least six inches of water flowing over them and sometimes over a foot. We overshot Ryan's missing the driveway and had to turn around and come back. A huge hassle in the storm.

Inside the food was both delicious and horrible. I think I gained 15 pounds from that one meal. There was four kinds of fried fish, two kinds of fried shrimp, a salad bar with four kinds of lettuce and every kind of salad ingredient. There was meat loaf, tacos, chicken teriyaki, pizza, black eyed peas, collard greens, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, tater tots, buttery "Texas" buns, three kinds of soup, and about forty other options, not counting dessert. It was Kids Night and my nephew got two helpings of cotton candy from a middle aged lady dressed in a mediocre clown costume.

After leaving the buffet, we went to an outdoor shopping center situated on a lake with floating wooden bridges. We walked around looking at the different shops and discovered a small pond filled with carp and turtles. For a quarter you could purchase some kind of food to throw in the water. My father and my sister each bought handfuls of the food and doled it out to my nephew. We knelt on the the artificial stony shore of the pond and dropped brown nuggets in the water in front of turtle faces. They were so eager for more they climbed out of the water but then became afraid and immediately dove back in. After four handfuls of food, my nephew was bored, but I was still picking up scraps that had fallen on the edge of the pond and tossing them to the turtles.

We looked at a few more shops. Wesley threw a temper tantrum because my sister wouldn't buy him a camouflage colored snake plush toy for $16. I was the one who had to grab it away from him and place it on a shelf above his reach. We walked back to the car parked near a pizza shop called Ultimate California Pizzeria, and drove back to the condo and went to sleep.

Something Is Coming

I awoke at 7am. My flight was at 10am but we were leaving at 8am. I took the last of many showers in the condo that week. I sat with my mother eating cornflakes. "Make sure, when you get back," my mother said, "that you read your Bible every day and get ready, because something is coming. Change is in the air. We know not the time, but it is coming." I assume she was talking about the rapture, but I said nothing. I just ate my cornflakes.

My parents dropped me off in the airport. I had two beers in the bar before the flight, even though it was only 9am. In a few hours I would be back in Philly.

An idiot in the land of the midnight sun

Can I make a confession? There are times, many times, when I suspect that I might actually be an idiot. I mean this in the old sense of the word, as in dim-witted, retarded, slow. When I have these suspicions, it occurs to me that maybe everyone around me is actually aware of my disability and they are really just humoring me. Oh sure, everyone’s so nice to me on the surface, because these days you can’t possibly tell a person that they aren’t normal. That’s just too mean. So society lets idiots like me grow up thinking we are like everyone else, just keeps on patting us on the head and telling us we’re special and deserve all the things that normal people get, a house, a wife, kids, etc.

My housemates probably think of themselves as very altruistic for living with and tolerating a mentally subnormal person. My company probably gets a tax break for keeping me employed. My former church no doubt thought of me as a perfect token example of their kindness and a welcome addition to the diverse congregation they are attempting to foster. I’m not so helpless that I can’t do simple tasks like bathe and dress myself, take the subway to work, push buttons on a computer all day, and thus pay my rent, and buy food and clothes. But more when it comes to more cognitively difficult challenges I’m stunted, and thus stuck in this particular existence. Still, all and all, I’m a relatively easy idiot to interact with, so people have been fairly successful at keeping the truth from me. I realize they’re just trying to be nice, but I still find it somewhat cruel that they won’t be honest. Fortunately, I’ve figured out my disability for myself and I no longer feel so bad that women don’t want to mate with me. I understand ladies. I wouldn’t want to mate with a retard either.

The fact that I have the mentality of a small boy was made doubly manifest to me last month when I took a trip to Alaska to visit my younger brother who lives his life as a full-grown man with normal, perhaps above average, cognitive abilities. It was a good trip. I had never been to Alaska, even though I’ve had family living there for over a decade. My reasons for not going were financial. I never had enough money to buy a plane ticket. This year my brother had accumulated a bunch of Sky Miles and got the ticket for me. Luckily I had enough vacation time stored up to actually take off of work and go on the trip.

My flight was booked with Delta, but when I got to the airport it was cancelled, and I was reassigned to a flight on Alaska Airlines. Everything was delayed and I missed my connecting flight. I wasn’t due to arrive in Anchorage until 2:30 am, I told my brother while laid over in Seattle, so he texted me his number and told me to cab it, which was a good thing because I discovered upon arriving that my Virgin Mobile phone could not get any service. I wouldn’t have had a way to contact him. I did not have access to phone service for the entire 11 days I spent there. Not that it mattered. Nobody called or texted me while I was away.

Although it was 3:00 in the morning when I left the airport, the sky was starting to look as if the sun would come up soon. I got in the first cab in the line. The driver was an old grisly white-haired bearded guy who had no idea how to use the GPS system installed in his car. He made several attempts to use it before deciding to rely on his vague sense of where he was going. After several wrong turns we found the street but couldn’t find the address. He allowed me to call my brother on his cell phone and he emerged from a house without numbers on it, apparently the exterior had been freshly painted. When we got inside my brother tried to make small talk, but to me it felt like 7:30 am, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep during the trip.

The next day was Saturday. We went to Talkeetna, a small town to the north where most people who climb Mount McKinley start from, a journey that usually takes 2-3 weeks. There were a lot of sunburned people walking around who had recently gotten back from their climb. We didn’t do any outdoors stuff while there, however. Instead we met up with my brother’s girlfriend, had lunch, and went to visit some of my brothers' friends. Since my brother is a pilot, he has a lot of friends who are pilots. One guy lives on a lake, where he keeps several planes, the kind with floats for taking off from and landing on water. We hung out there for a while, slapping mosquitoes and drinking beer, and talking about the oil industry, since most of the people there were mud engineers. One guy, visiting from Texas said he could probably get me a job as a mud engineer in Pennsylvania, on the fracking sites presumably. All these guys seemed to be pretty well-off so I fantasized about that for a while, even thought about giving him my resume, but in the end I don’t think I would be interested in it. Plus, as I’ve already disclosed, I’m an idiot. Can’t do math.

We went back into town with all the mud engineers and went to a bar where we ate chunks of deep fried Halibut and chicken quesadillas. The power went out in the bar. It was 10:00 pm, but no matter, light still streamed through the doors and windows, so we stayed there for a while before heading to another bar where a 90s cover band was playing. I danced a bit and everyone was so surprised. “Look at the retard dance!” People always say I’m a good dancer, but again, I know they’re just being nice because of my disability. Still, a lot of the girls wanted to dance with me. None of their boyfriends would dance with them, sitting on the side instead. Eventually my brother did go out and bob his head a bit at the insistence of his girfriend. One girl really danced with me, I mean, like, grinding up and down my leg. Then she walked away and started hitting on a German mountain climber. There were a lot of Europeans there.

We stayed in the smallest hotel room I’d ever seen. On Sunday, after looking at a piece of land my brother is considering purchasing, we headed back to Anchorage and in the evening had dinner with our Aunt and Uncle. Basically, I sat and listened while everybody talked. Our cousin had gone off to the Air Force Academy on Colorado for the week, for some kind of prospective cadet experience. His sister was at home, but she was going to volley ball camp this week at one of the local universities. I got to tour their giant house and gym they built for practicing basketball and volleyball. Pretty impressive. That night we rented and watched the movie Captain Phillips, recommended by our uncle since my brother is going to be deployed to Djibouti next year, pretty much to deal with Somali pirates I suppose. 

On Monday, we drove south to Girdwood, where my brother’s girlfriend needed to clean up her apartment as she was moving to a less expensive place in Anchorage. While she cleaned the place, we went and hiked part way up the north face of Alyeska mountain. I had been warned by one of the mud engineers that it was no fun hiking with my brother. “He’s a phenom. You’ll be huffing and puffing.” This actually made me feel a little bit better when I did start huffing and puffing to an embarrassing extent. Meanwhile my brother patiently waited a few yards up the trail. It was pouring rain the entire hike. As we got higher there was snow on the trail. We caught up to a Scandinavian family who marveled at my brother hiking in sandals. The trail ended at a ski resort restaurant with a tram that we could ride back down the moutnain for free. The hike took a little more than an hour, but my brother told me that he usually sprints up it in about 30 minutes. The phenom.

We all had lunch at a burger place in Girdwood and watched the U.S. defeat Nigeria in the World Cup. Then we headed back to Anchorage to pick up supplies for our rafting trip, which was to last from Tuesday to Friday. I needed wader boots, since my feet are so dang big we couldn’t borrow any from my brother’s friends. I also needed a fishing license. My older brother paid for all of this since he’s the grown-up and I’m the older sibling with a child’s mind. While he went to REI to get a dry bag, I checked out a used bookstore our aunt had recommended to me. She said I should get a job there and move to Alaska. Sure enough, they were hiring “long-term employees,” but I didn’t want the complications of moving to Alaska so I didn’t inquire about the position. My aunt promised I would like the store, and I must admit, it was an impressive operation, exactly like a Barnes and Noble, but all used books. Personally, I prefer small specialized bookstores with unique personalities. I didn’t buy any books. My brother came a got me. He has no use for books himself. The week before the trip I had asked if he wanted me to give him Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men, since I thought he might like it. “Send it to me when I’m deployed,” he said, “I won’t have anything else to do. Maybe I’ll read it.”

On Tuesday, we had breakfast and waited for the arrival of Wayne, my brother’s hunting companion who would be going on the trip with us. I had heard a lot about him, mainly that hunting and fishing was all he cared about. We were all packed up to go. We had two duffel-sized dry bags, one filled with camping gear, the other with clothes, four cases of light beer (Coors Light is my brother’s favorite for some reason), and a rifle. Wayne was going to bring the food, the tent, and the raft, as well as his own gear and clothes. He showed up around nine, but we weren’t supposed to meet the pilot at the airport until eleven, so we sat around for a while and they talked about hunting and fishing, which were to be the primary topics of conversation for the next four days.

Finally we drove out to the airport and eventually the pilot arrived, a friend of my brother’s who had agreed to fly us up to this lake somewhere southwest of the base of McKinley. When he opened the hardtop of the pick-up to see how much stuff we had the first thing he said was, “Only four cases. You need more beer.” The pilot and my brother went off to pick up the plane which was parked at somebody’s house (on a lake). My brother drove the pilot’s truck back to the airport with two more cases of beer. In a little while the plane showed up, we loaded all the stuff in and took off. At first I was having a swell time looking down on the wilderness landscape, but soon started feeling incredibly motion sick. The flight took about an hour, and by the end I was sure I would vomit, almost did as we circled the lake before landing, but managed to keep it together. 

We dumped all the gear on the shore of the lake, the pilot took off and we started blowing up the raft with a large handpump. Immediately we were swarmed by mosquitos. We busted out the bug spray and covered ourselves in it, and suited up in our waders, which was basically what we wore for the next four days, except when we went to bed. The raft didn’t take long to inflate. It was 14 feet in length. In the middle there was a chair where the person who handled the oars sat. The back third of the raft was filled with our gear, and front third was where whoever wasn’t rowing sat. We pushed off into the lake and my brother rowed us toward the southern end where it let out into the lake stream. The plan was to float down the lake stream for 54 miles until it let out at the much larger Yentna River where the pilot would pick us up on Friday. My brother had brought a GPS device with various coordinates programmed in for good fishing spots. 

The beginning of the trip was very exciting. We all had beers cracked open. The water was slow moving and there were mountains all around, but the tops were cut off by dark clouds and we could see lightning in the distance. Fish were jumping all over the place, so Wayne broke out his fly rod and started casting from off the raft. Every few minutes he’d catch one and release it. The speed of the water started picking up and we started seeing rocks jutting out of the water and some small rapids here and there. At the next relatively clear stretch I tried my hand at rowing but could not control the boat at all. I kept steering us into the side where we had to duck low-hanging trees. Apparently, rowing is one of those skills that requires high cognitive abilities. It occurred to us that I should have had a rowing lesson back when we were in the slow water, but unfortunately the river got more dangerous the further we went, so I never had a chance to row again on the trip. 

We floated about 10 miles down the stream on that first Tuesday afternoon. It rained about half the time, but when we found a nice gravel beach to camp on the sun came out and for the only time during my trip I could see Mount McKinley unobscured by clouds. It rose magnificently over the horizon with golden sunlight falling upon its snowy peaks. We had moose bratwursts for dinner and did a bit of fishing before settling down for the night. The next morning we fished some more and I finally caught my first fish of the trip, a medium sized rainbow trout.

On Wednesday,  we anticipated finding a good spot to stop and fish some more, but the rapids were rather tough to get through and we didn't really see any decent beaches along the shore. We saw several moose. Wayne wanted to see a bear and shoot it. Apparently it was open season on bear, but we saw none. Most of the day it rained and was rather miserable at times. We had several close calls going through rapids, smashing into large rocks that were unavoidable or getting stuck on rocks underneath the raft, particularly when going through a stretch called "the canyon" in which large towers of silt rose up on either side of the stream. My brother and Wayne alternated manning the oars throughout the day. By the end of the day it was getting late and we still had not found a suitable camp site. We were starting to fear that we would come to the end of the stream. We must have gone more than 30 miles before we finally found a sandy beach with enough space to pitch our tent. I was determined to make a fire, although the other two did not think it was feasible. I gathered as much driftwood as I could and started it myself and it was a truly comforting addition to our evening, having been cold and wet all day, to finally stand in front of a blazing hot fire and dry off. We ate moose burgers for dinner.

On Thursday we figured that we only had another 10 miles or so before we reached the end of the stream so we decided to fish nearby our campsite. A few hundred yards downriver the fishing got really good. Even me, a complete novice using a fly rod for the first time during this trip managed to catch ten fish that day, all rainbow trout. In the process, I discovered that when I waded into the water up to my thighs my waders started to leak. This was fairly disheartening to me, since I have this obsession about keeping my feet dry due to a tremendous battle against foot fungus a few years back. But I tried to grin and bear it and not complain. Sure enough, as soon as I said something, Wayne began to coo, "Aww, poor baby" in a mocking tone. This is how men interact, I told myself and sucked it up. 

The fishing at this stretch of river was exceptional. Wayne probably caught forty to fifty fish, and my brother did fairly well also. All of the fish were released. As evening began to approach we decided we should probably float down the river further and find a new campsite. We went a ways and we started to see signs of giant fish jumping out of the water, king salmon, who were just starting to make their ascent to breeding grounds upstream. Every time one jumped and slapped against the water, Wayne would mutter under his breath, "Fuckin' kings" with hunger in his voice. 

We came to a spot where a helicopter had landed and someone was fishing with an incredibly expensive fishing pole. We stopped on a gravel beach upriver and watched as he caught a few kings and threw them back. After the helicopter flew away we floated through the fishing hole they were using and Wayne dropped his lure into the water. It was immediately grabbed by a giant fish that almost pulled him from the raft. He handed the rod to me so that he could reposition himself, but as I was holding it and bracing myself the line broke and the damn fish jumped out of the water as if mocking us. We stopped for a few minutes and Wayne tried to cast into the hole again, but we soon moved on thinking that we needed to find a camp site. 

As we continued to float downriver we saw other signs of people. We assumed they had come up from the direction we were headed but as we passed one group a guy yelled out to us, "Hey, where are you guys going?" 

"To the mouth," my brother yelled back. 

"Have you been down there yet? Nobody's come up."

What did that mean? we wondered. In about a half-mile we knew. The river seemed to spread out and widen and was filled with logs that we had to maneuver around. The correct passage was unclear. And we came to a place that seemed very narrow with log jams on either side. We didn't know if we could make it through with the raft, and the river split off to one side in a direction that was clearly a dead end. We stopped on an island of gravel and weighed our options. When my brother got out the GPS device we found that we were no longer on the main stream but had somehow come to another side stream. Yet we had no idea how we could have made a wrong turn. The worst part was that our raft was parked in a place where the only option was to go downstream, but if we got caught in the log jam it could be fatal, and we didn't know whether the log jams continued like this further on or not. 

At this point it was about 9:00 at night, still light out, but we were all pretty tired. We were able to wade through the stream to other islands connected to logs but we could not reach the mainland, the river was just too wide and too deep. My brother was mainly concerned about why the GPS said we were on the wrong river. He got out the satellite phone he'd borrowed from the pilot and called a friend who knew the river. He was informed that a major flood had caused the river to shift and that the GPS map we were using was no longer accurate, but we were in fact in the correct place. We were also informed that we were probably the first people of the year to float down the lake stream which is why it was still so clogged up. 

Basically we had no choice but to go forward. But if the log jams continued we might find ourselves in a worse situation. Wayne began to argue that we should pack up all our gear and carry it to the mainland. But this proposal seemed absurd to me as there was no way of getting to the mainland by simply wading let along carrying hundreds of pounds of stuff on our backs. We also contemplated the possibility of calling the Air Guard to rescue us, but this would require leaving the gear behind, and considering that this didn't seem like a life or death situation it didn't seem appropriate. Things got a bit tense. Finally around 11:00 we heard a jet boat coming from down river. In a few minutes we could see a man and woman on the other side of the log jam we had been contemplating. 

We asked how clear it was beyond the log jam and they said that this was the worst of it. If we could get beyond this it wouldn't be too bad. We said that it was pretty clear on our end as well. The guy with the jet boat decided to go for it even though his female companion clearly thought it was a bad idea. But when he passed through the jam he made it look easy, so we decided we should try to go through with the raft. 

My brother rowed as hard as he could toward the narrow space we had to get though because when we finally got there he needed to pulled the oars into the boat, but if we didn't have enough momentum then we would be sucked down an alternate current toward the dead end that would have been a nightmare getting out of. As my brother pulled in the oars, Wayne stuck his legs out of the raft and started kicking against the logs to push us toward the narrow opening. We started crashing against the logs on my side of the raft and I thought to do the same thing as Wayne but when I began to stick my leg out of the raft Wayne grabbed me and pulled me back in. "Don't even try it. It's more dangerous than you realize." 

Needless to say, we made it through, and once we got to the other side of the log jam we pulled onto the first spot we could and made camp. The campsite was horrible. It was covered with tall weeds and infested with mosquitoes. We were all exhausted and in a bad mood. We had moose bratwursts and I burned the heck out of the top of my mouth on the first bite. I scarfed it down and immediately went to bed, sleeping badly because of the incline on which we'd pitched the tent. I was ready to go home, tired of being in the wilderness. Meanwhile, my brother and Wayne were talking about the next sheep hunt they planned to go on, deep into the mountains, with only enough gear they could carry on their backs.

The next day was beautiful. We spent almost the entire day fishing out of the hole near are camp site. At first it seemed promising because my brother caught a 30 pound king on one of his first casts. But as the day progressed we didn't catch nearly as many fish. Still it was interesting, because we were now in tourist territory. Fishing guides were taking clients from the lodges on the Yentna River up the lake stream and we were located at the point furthest accessible before the log jam. So we got to meet a lot of different people. One guy and his father spent most of the day fishing with us. We ended up giving him a case of our beer so we wouldn't have to take it back on the plane. Towards the end of the day we floated down to the Yentna, packed up our gear and the pilot came and picked us up. 

As soon as we were back in Anchorage I was thinking that this had been the greatest camping trip of my life. For all the hardships I had perceived, it was well worth it. My last two days in Alaska were very easy going. Saturday was the summer solstice, but it was gray and rainy so we didn't do too much. We had dinner at our aunt and uncle's again and then went to a friend of my brother's house and played cards. On Sunday we went and saw a glacier from a boat on a lake fed by the glacier that first began to form exactly 100 years ago in 1914 (the lake, not the glacier). It was an amazing site. That night my brother dropped me off at the airport and I flew home without any delay or flight changes. 

It was good to be back in Philadelphia, in the comfortable little room I rent were nothing is expected of me but the bare minimum. I can keep living my retarded life a bit longer. But for some time now, I've come to realize that I must stop being an idiot and grow up. For some time I've realized that I will soon be leaving this place and seeking a life of challenge and struggle instead. The time is coming. It's almost here. By November I'll be gone, moving to the country. It won't be as hard as a four-day rafting trip, but it will be hard enough for a boy like me. I'll keep you posted.