The Game

Five entries now. Five times on this trip I’ve stopped whatever I was doing to log a moment of serendipity before I lost it. You start to wonder if the system was there first or if you called it into being by just keeping the log, the way a handful of stars isn’t a ladle until some shepherd on a hill decides it’s a ladle. Deja vu I never could catch. Recognition without a clear source. The certainty shows up but the memory it belongs to never quite comes with it, like a key in your pocket that doesn’t open anything you own. Nothing concrete enough to write down.

My last moment of serendipity was finding an old friend on the west side of Ireland. We hadn’t seen each other in years. We grew up together, preschool through high school, one of my sisters I wasn’t related to, from a graduating class you could fit in a pickup. I had known her since before either of us could read. She had a friend traveling with her, someone she’d known for a while, a new face to me. Neither of us knew we would be in Ireland at the same time. We met up in the town of Dingle. We both appreciated the name Dingle. Then drove to Kenmare for food and beer. We caught each other up on life and told the good childhood poop stories. Talking to her, I kept catching versions of myself I’d lost track of. We’d talk and there I’d be at six again, at twelve, at seventeen. She’d seen each one. She was there for all of it. Their trip was coming to an end, and so I saw them off and went back to being alone.

Back in London, I had watched a presentation on the form of montage. It resonated. I think in montage a lot, often reaching for that feeling, the fragmentation that builds on itself, meaning bleeding out sideways.

There is a YouTube video I keep coming back to. I don’t know how to put it except that it makes me feel the whole world at once. I watched it four times in a row in an alley behind a library, stealing their wifi.

I’m sleeping in the back of my rental car each night or under the stars if the location allows. A few nights ago I lay on a hill over a long spill of farmland with the ocean cutting across it and watched the sun go down slow. One by one the houses came on across the dark, little windows catching fire. A whole valley of lives blinking awake as the day was going to sleep, and me up on the hill with none of them knowing I was there. Sat in my sleeping bag after dark, printing stickers off a tiny bluetooth printer.

Not every place I’ve slept has been like this. A few nights it’s been a parking lot outside some pub, kept awake by the sound of people filing out, fighting, laughing, the whole drunk racket of it going on a few feet from my head while I lay in the back staring at the car ceiling, none of them knowing there was a grown man in the hatchback eating crackers. The car and I are both going a bit feral. I don’t smell great, I haven’t been showering much. I’ve let my beard grow out, and the car is starting to fill with sand. Nights I unfold myself out of the car to piss in a ditch and then I just stand there in the night for a long time.

I have a beer bottle I have been carrying around in the back of the car for the last few days. Every time I come across a beach I stop and play The Game. The Game is that I throw the bottle as high in the air as I can and try to catch it. When the bottle breaks I’ll push the glass into the ocean and make sea glass.

It goes wide and then it goes close, everything cut against everything, and then one moment with nothing cut against it. One morning I hiked up into a thick fog and the trail was giving out just a few yards ahead of me. No valley, no houses. Just the white and the wind coming across it into my face. The world not in fragments, just me and the one place I was.

Serendipity #6-----------------Two men in wetsuits were watching me play The Game, drinking the same beer I had in the air.