An Unstable Surface

words with friends

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.” - Albert Camus

I tell this quote to my friend Robert after reading it in a Charles Bowden book and he says “Mine is turtles.” Robert is a herpetologist. He introduced me to Bowden on my podcast when we recorded atop a sacred hill in Tucson.

He asks which are the early images I’ve been chasing. I tell him they must be words. I was stapling together papers and trying to write books before I knew copy machines and printers existed.

Robert showed my friend Cam and I a rescued Gila monster. Fed it quail eggs. A cute black rattlesnake. I drive Cam to the airport after a brief visit to fly back to L.A. where he can go be a younger man in a city that makes more sense for younger men. He holds a first edition copy of “Infinite Jest” he scored while in town. It was written two years before he was born. He found big words in it he used for a comedy podcast and we talk about it on mine. Which I still have to release.

Before he left I was chased by bees atop Sentinel Peak and fell and scraped my knees. I fell like an old man. Minutes later, absorbed in our conversation along the wrong trail, Cam put his hand on an electric fence. He felt it jolt up his forearm.

The fence was there to keep in a herd of sheep eating an invasive grass off the mountainside.

The buffel grass was planted by cattle ranchers. It makes the hills fire prone and the desert isn’t adapted for fire so it’s damaging. The sheep are black and white and I wonder how they handle the heat. Robert told me the cattle didn’t even like to eat the buffel grass.

At the sacred hill where Robert works among the past, present, and future I read a placard about roadrunners. It says they are able to fly but prefer not to. What a flex. Most of us dream of what they prefer not to do. They are special when you see them. They chase down lizards like dinosaurs, a glimpse into a past without us.

I usually catch myself before I fall. Skateboarding as a young teenager gave me a lifetime of balance. Little League baseball just gave me bad memories. All kids should skateboard for a few years if they can. I don’t need to play catch with my imaginary child so much as I want to do the snake run at the Venice skatepark with them before my knees fail.

It’s so hot now in Tucson you get the chills walking alone down the emptied sidewalks. Maybe it’s the sweat drying faster than electricity. I don’t soak through my shirts here like I do in mortal heat. It’s too dry for sweat to linger. I smell like the faint aromatic piss of creosote.

We can be perfect alone, we only reveal our imperfections through relating with other people. What are we to do as imperfect beings? Sometimes when I’m talking with people I feel half a step out of rhythm. And it’s fine. We make do with the imperfect in order to enter the grand arena of relations.

After a comedy show in Tucson at the museum I feel high. I write something to the effect of “Before I do a comedy show every fiber of my being doesn’t want to be there then once I’m on stage I never want to leave.” My friend Jesse reads it and tells me to look up Pathological Demand Avoidance. I tell her I am pathologically going to avoid doing that.

I don’t need to look it up after the initial google search results, based on the sound of it, I think she’s probably on to something. The things outside our control are so difficult to meet head on when they aren’t layered in love. I nap today after work next to my wife and dog. She sends me a photo of my dog and I back to back, curled up.

For my new poetry book and U.S. comedy tour dates happening this summer visit joshuaturek.com