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1980

Guy J. Jackson

    In early June of 1980 I am stopping stressing. Since it’s June of 1980 I’m not sure the word has been invented yet. Let me tell you what it means. “STRESS” is an unseen force inside you that doesn’t actually exist but is grinding your mind into powder. You don’t want to be stressed because eventually it causes death or at least something like death. Also, death causes death.
    In early June of 1980 I left San Francisco and went to stay at a friend’s house in the Humboldt Hills. His wife had just left him inexplicably. He was the one who used the word ‘inexplicably’ but once I got there to stay with him I could explain. He lived like there were still caves in those California hills, always making bodily noises and never cleaning a dish if he bothered to eat off one and never cleaning his clothes except once a month where he would take them to a nearby stream and dunk them in, ceremoniously, and then hang them to dry from every available tree, no soap involved. You ever go hiking with these people who come across caves in the wilderness and say: ‘oh, we could live here’? I didn’t mind these habits of my friend and in fact joined in with them but of course his wife must’ve minded because she’d packed up and had left him without a word. Inexplicably. Usually me and women get along okay, but I do feel like she could’ve given him one word. At least one.
    “Without a word,” my friend would say each night in front of the fireplace. She could’ve given him one word so he didn’t say that five times a night, every single night. Ten times a night. He’d say that after we’d have an eternal silence between us, was when he’d usually say that. I read books a lot on those nights, even though books are passé and no one likes them anymore because they smell. I didn’t ever reply to my friend saying ‘without a word’ because it wasn’t a question, and mostly I’d be in the middle of some book, and anyway it was only my duty to sit there and mildly field his misery.
    Me, I let all my stress drain away, even though this friend of mine was in a hell I myself was having a great time imagining what was already imaginary (the stress) drain away from my head like a slow bad hiss of purple steam. I was there in the hills for many months and all through the height of summer. I still smile when I think of those days. You should never feel stress. It doesn’t exist.
    Eventually I discovered my friend had found a cave even though they were mostly all gone from those California hills and I was surprised he’d found one. I’d wondered what he was doing with the trees he’d been chopping done in the environs of our cabin and so one day I followed him when he dragged off a tree. He was my friend and I suppose I didn’t need to sneak along following him but then again following is always more exciting, stalking in the woods especially, it awakens your sense of what it used to be like back in the day. When I followed my friend I found he’d found a cave and built an elaborate door frame and door for the entrance. He was just putting the finishing touches on when I got there, using the last tree for a hitching post outside the door. For a horse, I guess, though he didn’t own a horse but maybe his visitors would. Not me, I suppose I was one of his visitors and I don’t own a horse because horses never seemed to me like they should be owned. But others of his visitors. I watched him from a stand of aspen as he planted his hitching post in a post hole and then de-barked it, which I thought he could’ve done the opposite way around. I sat there in the aspen thinking about how he was probably doing that the wrong way around but I didn’t want to go talk to him about it, it wasn’t my place, it was only my place to watch. I thought about my Mom once telling me how aspens, or anyway one aspen, was responsible for the largest tree in the world. I thought about how with the door on it that you could close shut, my friend’s cave he’d found was going to be so much darker.

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