Around Here

I did a lot of shopping last weekend, in and out of several stores rounding up stuff for my new Mac: adapters, cables, flash memory. By the time I got to Staples, and it was conflated with the stuff in my head, it looked like all the other stores I’d visited. When I exited to the parking lot, I experienced a momentary thrill when I realized I didn’t know where I was. For an extended moment, I was in the now that Tolle talks about. I clung to it for as long as I could, savoring the vivid disorientation, the presence, before my bearings regrettably returned. That was quickly followed, as I proceeded to the car, by an overlay of rational thought, the chatter of the day’s concerns. I sense that moments like this, connotation-free manifestations of themselves, can be cultivated and expanded. That the tyranny of the inner narrative can be deposed and deferred. For now.

You may be a new species. Or just trick photography. But I have been impressed with both your sangfroid and the resident mosquitoes. Diplomatic relations, according to the tour guide, are rarely found wanting. Task conflict bollixed my standing in the gonch meme. Mnemonic indices have fallen sharply. Didn’t you once take my car without asking? The past is never the past, considering the eventual outcome. Want real action? Get in line. Things are sometimes what they seem.

In keeping with the Paleolithic narrative (to go with my caveman diet) that eschews regular exercise in favor of frequent but irregular episodes of heroic exertion (think wooly mammoth, pit, now how do I get it out of there?), I set off last weekend by kayak for Lover’s Key beach, off Estero Island, a dozen miles south of around here. There’s a small dirt parking lot at Big Carlos Pass at the north end of the island (top map circle), where a short hike with a paleolithically shouldered kayak brought me to the water’s edge. After waving goodbye to Big Carlos, who was fishing with some friends from the bridge, I shoved off. It’s a delicious moment, nudging yourself off dry land into the buoyant glide of the world’s largest domain. I paused, adrift for a moment, to enjoy the sensation, and to look around. The pass, flanked to the south by the key, and to the north by the resorts of Estero Island, opens out to the Gulf. The scale on Google Maps suggests that the key’s north cape (cap, capu...