I take crappy pictures when I’m tired.
Come to think of it, lately I’ve been taking
crappy pictures when I’m well-rested.

Today’s soundtrack: all of my systems are down, down down down
Today at 1:02am: On I-95, doing the clutch-brake-gas dance.


Thursday night usually finds me flat on my ass in front of this computer, but this time I was in Brooklyn, having a god, damned, cigarette outside my car. It’s about 10:45pm and I’m picking up three women from my dojang whom I actually don’t know very well, and we’re about to spend six-and-a-half hours in my little-ass VW.

Mission: Head up to another student’s “farmhouse retreat” in Vermont for a weekend of martial arts training.

Packing the trunk, I develop the firm hope we don’t get pulled over--in addition to backpacks and sleeping bags we’re carrying a variety of swords, blunt weapons and weird, pointy Japanese things sure to make a State Trooper wonder if he can fit all four of us in the back of his cruiser.

We hit the road around 11pm, and FDR Drive is smooth sailing. But we’re only twenty minutes outside of the Bronx when I slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the longest goddamn line of midnight traffic you ever did see. New York: Love it or leave it, but if you choose the latter it won’t be easy.

An hour or so into the trip, Lila, the hostess of the weekend, calls us from the farmhouse in Vermont. “Please follow the directions I’ve given you very closely,” she urges, sternly warning us that based on her previous experience with inviting guests out into the wild, failure to adhere to the directions will result in us driving clean off the face of the earth.

“You guys will be sleeping in the yellow tent,” Lila reveals. “When you get to the house you’ll see a pond, fifty yards downhill. There’s a six-man yellow-and-white tent right next to it. It rained for the past couple days and it’s a little muddy out, so make sure you guys close the fly to keep the water out.” I tell her I’ll do so, and wonder to myself what a “fly” is.

The good thing about traveling with a bunch of thirtysomethings is I can play hours of 80s music and we all know all the words.

Six hours later I know the women a little better and all of us have had the distinct pleasure of urinating in bushes by the side of the road somewhere in Massachusetts. By 5:30am we’re pulling onto Lila’s “driveway,” if you can call it that. “This is some Discovery Channel type of shit,” I mutter as my little urban hatchback bounces and slogs up an interminably winding horsetrack thick with underbrush.

After what seems like miles we reach the top, where a tidy, fresh-looking farmhouse sits placidly atop a grassy hill. Dawn is upon us as we pull our sleeping bags out of the car. The yellow tent and its attendant pond is easy enough to locate, and after stepping carefully down the wet and grassy hill, we’re there.

Miriam undoes a couple zippers on the tent face and enters first, followed by Jane and Adriana. “It’s wet,” I hear Miriam say, though her tone is not one of rejection, but game acceptance. Jane and Adriana seem to have extensive experience with camping, and while I’m not sure about Miriam, she has the easygoing, go-with-the-flow attitude of the daughter of hippie parents.

Wet. I’d already had reservations about sleeping in a tent; though in my twenties I prided myself on my ability to sleep anywhere, that talent, like my memory, and the ability to sustain hard-ons for unreasonably indefinite amounts of time, has gone to pot with the advent of my thirties.

“Yeah, so, listen, I’m gonna try sleeping in the car,” I say, doing an about-face.

“You sure?” the girls ask from inside the tent.

“I’m sure,” I say, heading back towards the hill. On the way I pass an unusual-looking structure made of wood. What look to be fresh saplings have been bent and lashed together into a small dome, roughly half the size of a Volkswagen bug. I wouldn’t find out what it was until later.

Trudging up the hill towards the car, I found my feet coming to a halt, and my brain struggling to ascertain the reason. I looked back at the tent, where the other three would be unrolling their sleeping bags about now, and a question popped into my head:

Q: Jesus, Rain, what kind of pussy are you?

A:

a) a judicious pussy
b) an urban pussy
c) an occasional pussy
d) a big, fat, hairy pussy
e) a pussy who enjoys asking myself multiple-choice questions
f) why, you’re no pussy at all! You’re a trooper!


I chose ‘f’ (even though the real answer is ‘c’) and trudged back over to the tent.

I thought about how episode six of Band of Brothers, “Bastogne,” depicted the troops sleeping in freezing, snow-covered foxholes without proper winter clothing, enduring German artillery raids and what looked to be a miserable cigarette shortage. Perhaps a little summer dampness alongside a placid pond on an idyllic Vermont country farm wouldn’t be so bad.

‘f,’ man, ‘f.’