April 09, 2005

When the mood strikes me, I can be romantic as fuck:

“Wanna go down to the river and pick up garbage on a Saturday afternoon?” I asked.

“You’re crazy,” she said looking at me strangely. I thought she’ll finally tell me to go fuck myself, but instead we got into her car in the hot, noon sun and followed the river as it circled the city. She giggled uncontrollably as I told her about garbage and rubber boots.

Today the river looked cool and blue and everywhere on its shores we found places of death. We stopped at the junkyard first to marvel at dead machinery, and then hopped a fence to get into the pet cemetery where we held hands and read plaques:

“Muffin, my treasured companion”
“God bless Possy. We love you forever.”
“Princess Gutz, loved and missed.”
“May you lie in peace Silly!”

“That’s what I want on my gravestone,” I said as we drove away from the pet cemetery. Her smile was full of understanding.

And she was still smiling ten minutes later when I made her put on her rubber boots and wade through the river in search of beer cans, plastic wrappers, and other mementos of summer nights. Rivers are alive and dying. To preserve life, we splashed in the cool, blue water and argued about feminism and postmodernity. Soon our bags and heads were full of garbage.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a garbage man,” I said. “But I guess I have to do some freelance work to break into the profession.”

Smiling and smelling like sewage, we left the river behind and trod down a country road with our bounty. My hands smelled of rotten earth and rivers and my socks were wonderfully wet. To dry them, we headed towards the gravel pit. I yearned to run around shoeless and play in the sand.

The gravel pit looked like a meaningless postmodern playground. We saw plastic swans and mountains of sand that reached the sky. I immediately took off my clothes and rushed to the top of the sand heap in my rubber boots. I reached the top of the world and waved frantically.

“Take off your clothes and come up,” I screamed, but she shook her head and laughed.

“You’re crazy,” she said. Again.

I leaped towards her, falling, falling from the sky, and made her rush the mound. I ran after her, and together we threw ourselves into the air with shouts and flailing arms. “You can’t fall off a mountain!”

Lovely, lovely, lovely are the deserted industrial places where we travelled naked dragging with us the garbage extracted with great toil from our river. A stranger and a wanderer I’ve been all the days of my life.