Long Weekend

It's funny how some people can manage to live their lives in planned and sensible ways and never seem to be troubled by demons or ever even experience that thin, sharp edge between the world we know and the abyss, but others are always right there, right on the boundaries. I've spent some time staring into that black hole myself and that's probably why I'm drawn to other people like me, who know it all too well. Which is what happened to a good friend of mine - he slipped off the edge and was holding on by his fingernails. So I rented a car on Saturday morning and drove up to Baltimore and picked him up and spent the night on his boat and then drove him back down to Asheville yesterday where now he is asleep on my couch: thin, spent, shaky. Hopefully a bit wiser. Hopefully he will feel better soon. Hopefully he won't do this again. Hope is a strange and wonderful thing.

Driving 1100 miles in 36 hours is always interesting. There are all kinds of vignettes in my head right now, from the patient cat by the Virginia Burger King door to the clouds and deep sky of the Shenandoah Valley. My ears are still ringing a bit from the good stereo in the rent a car and I'm still swaying a little from the night on the boat. I hadn't slept on a boat in oh, about 10 years I guess, or more, and lying there unable to sleep, listening to the stays clang on the mast and the water and wakes shaking the bow up and down made my head go into overdrives and layers of memories and old senses.

It was a pretty heavy weekend. I'm tired. I'm putting up a few pictures on Flickr soon. I didn't take very many. It wasn't really a picture taking trip. Things are all in flux again and that, I think, is the way it goes when you make that choice to live a little closer to the edge than many do. But I wouldn't have it any other way and somehow, I think I did something right, since I was able to do what I did this weekend.