Anyway, when I was nineteen, I had my close friends come up for the weekend to stay with me at my college tenement named The Manor. We drank sidewalk slammers and played 7-11 dubs and got burgers at midnight. If memory serves I blacked out on the walk to get burgers (I have no idea if this is true, how could memory have served at a moment like that?) I woke up like trash, we all did — as we should’ve. We drank water and I made everyone tea. Steeped, we sat outside in the morning sun and smoked a joint. We sipped tea and life didn’t exist beyond the dirt lot of a backyard, just like that moment doesn’t exist anywhere except in that exact moment. Where concerns can’t conjure worry beyond the wonder of, what’s the next dumb joke I’ll make?

“Man, my head feels like shit.”

“But the sun right now? Amazing.”

“This is good ass tea, what kind?”

I love my friends.

“Fucker, will you pass the joint!”

And life sweeps by, and I drove to SF that day and was late to see my ex who’d gouged me the year previous. And time keeps passing, it’s been seven years since then and I don’t have anything from that moment except that moment.        

Or it’s at the local café. Nearly too hungover to breathe, I sit on the stiff Adirondack chair on an outdoor patio in the sun, gripping my coffee like some thin chance of salvation while my orange juice, ice water, and hair-of-the-dog beer all sweat beside it. A morning of beverages. My stomach roils from the past night as I watch my friends blow into the café like kicked up debris. Waltzing the thin line between spewing chunks in the one-stall bathroom with the shitty impressionist painting of Paris, I can’t help but laugh. Lounging around a table, the same jokes from last night are repeated rapid fire, the moments are recollected and relived, disputed and amended, hailed and scorned. A friend mentions how the other dropped their Juul in a piss filled toilet only to fish it out, dry it off, and keep hitting it.        

“No, no, no, I didn’t do that,” he pushes back. “I was up on the roof.”        

“I don’t know, man.” He pulls up his phone and starts flicking through it.        

“No seriously, I kept telling people I’d throw em off, or just leap off myself.”        

“And you kept threatening to take people down with you.”        

“Fuck yeah, dude, suplex em and just plummet to death on the concrete like WWE.”        

We rumble with laughter since we all love how stupid and unserious it is.        

“Oh you’re fucked, buddy.” My friend says, turning his phone around. Time stamped 1:42AM, a blurry photo in the bathroom of him sucking down the wet end of a piss covered Juul.

And we all break into laughter, because we know every bit is true. Tearing up at the table in the sun, I gaze across the patio and see something mundane and innocuous, a baby bouncing in his chair drooling and staring at me, or a dog asleep in the sun, or two birds flying close together. Something immense in our lives begins to open. I lean back in my chair as I can’t help but feel that there’s some great purpose lounging beyond the edge of my knowing. The smells, the sights, the sounds – there’s such resounding nothing in this particular moment. There’s nothing of import, beside the concentrated moment that I take in its fullest. Where the tiniest details up to the largest instances, stack together, building a wonderful, unquestioned, complete moment. I always want it to never end, but it does and stomps on.        

I’m walking down a nice street in Palo Alto the morning after a friend’s wedding. All my friends are gone and I’m too hungover to drive back yet, so I take my breakfast and coffee to a park and eat and watch the trees, the people, life rumbling along. It’s beautiful, and nothing about it makes sense so in some way it does and it’s comfortable. I finish my breakfast and drive home, and I have the park somewhere in my mind now — not the name, or the street, or even the want to go back, but I have part of it with me still, happily snuggled away in the folds of my memory.        

Not hungover after work strolling back to my apartment last week, I pass a construction site for the new art center being built in Hanover New Hampshire. The signs promise all the young students the future, the thin avenues of gold, red, brown autumn trees in the Upper Valley blossoming with art and possibility, yet the smell of a freshly laid foundation reminds me of a childhood friend that I’m not in touch with anymore. I was thrown back to late afternoons at his house playing Starcraft Brood War on LAN or Street Fighter on his old Sega Genesis. The feeling of being a thoroughly content adrenaline-pumped-nerdy-kid is viscerally in reach. These moments, where nothing is on my mind but the joy of the moment, pass like a distant island cusped by a vast horizon. They’re in reach, and then these feelings and memories fade as I pass the construction site, and I walk down the street while my mind moves on to other things.