#144

What is up, the square root of twelve! A special and super cool number, for a variety of interesting reasons. I shall have to post steadily for another sixty or seventy years to get to the next square. We shall see. It is not a predictable reality.

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My younger brothers and I used to strike out down the creek on mapping expeditions. As the oldest, I have always allowed my brothers what I thought was a normal but have found through comparison an extraordinary amount of license and autonomy while we spent time together and in cohabitational praxis. Basically, I did not act as a tyrant over them nor aggressively curb their behavior through punitive terror or emotional coercion, but treated them as equals under my care and protection, with rights and privileges no different than my own. I'm not saying I am a great brother, or that this made life easy or free of violent disagreement, but they are both smarter, more successful, and way less fucked up than I am, and when my brothers and I cooperate, it is as one three-headed organism.

The oldest of a brood can sometimes fill the role of icebreaker, nautically speaking. In gaming parlance, the tank. Militarily, the tip of the spear.

So really we would just go for walks and use our imaginations together, exploring and interpreting the natural world conveniently available to us, usually using the creek as a funnel for our spirits. We would join its flow into the woods, which allowed us to transform as we left the world behind.

Small woods. Small creek. But for us, an entire continent, laced with otherworldly fevers, and sometimes unspeakable terrors. There's a German word for it. 

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When my parents and my youngest brother were living in a different country for a spell and my other brother was away at college, my first long-term ex and I moved into the house. We made a horrible mess of it and I disintegrated into level 9 alcoholism. I was getting ready to hit level 10 when I got arrested, so I didn't, but I did not stop making huge mistakes, nor was it the last time I would start drinking and eventually lose control of it.

She and I would leave the house to smoke, which is one of the kinder things you can say about how we treated the place. Cohabitational praxis indeed; we were disgusting shitty trashbabies, and it was still better than how we had treated the apartment we had lived in predating this period. I can't imagine who I would be without this woman, respect and honor her to that high degree you reserve for the cream, there is no one like her in the world and she is a down girl and the real business, but we were exceptionally bad together.

Awful. Nightmare shit.

We smoked cigarettes on the back deck more than we should have, especially in the dead of winter, but optimally we'd go down to the wooden platforms by the creek.

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More about the creek...tomorrow! Hope you're digging this creek malarkey. Have a wonderful day.


--JL