If you are reading this, know that I am in all likelihood still here.  Before the scratches on the wall had decayed to a circular mess of crossed marks, I had counted over 20,000 days.  I am not sure that the new jailers know why I am here, only that I was condemned to die before the government, so I am told, proclaimed a permanent moratorium on executions.  And so I have dwelt here, condemned to die but not yet put to death, for at least 60 years.  

The guards who pass by today seem young.  They laugh, they speak nervously.  They seem quieter lately than they were years ago, and I must admit that I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether there are others remaining.  I do know that the sounds from the cells to my left and right went silent long ago, before the wall behind me lost the definition to show one year from the next.  But the meals still come and water still flows in this plumbing they’d given me.  There were once books in here with me before they turned to dust.  Everything has turned to dust, and when last I tried to ask for more the guards had just maintained their silence.  That was many years ago.  

I am not sure that any of them remember my crime.  I am not sure, anymore, that I fully understand it.  I could never quite understand this system of laws that I one day found myself bound to.  As a child, life was simple.  We hunted with bows and spears and we consumed the whole animal.  We roamed across plains and stayed on the sunrise side of the mountains, for reasons that I never thought to ask.  When the white men came from the east, things changed, and those of my people who were not scattered to the winds were herded into camps, reservations.  I was among those scattered to the winds, and I wandered for a century before there was no longer a place left on earth where I could avoid the rule of other men.  When they found me, I was told that the place was called Saskatchewan, and I believe it may well have been the last remnant of my homeland, what they call America, to have escaped from the “civilizing” influence of man.  

I remember that I was asked for my name.  I remember that they had guns.  And I remember the sounds that they made when they entered my home, that little cabin that I’d hastily built over only a decade as I settled down into the tundra in my last attempt to find some solitude.  I remember the disbelief, the anger, when I told them my name and where I was from.  That I could predate their civilization was, apparently, too strange a thought, and I was branded a liar.  Again and again they asked for some proof.  I am certain that they thought I was someone else, but upon reflection now, I wonder if they simply didn’t know.  

As I begin to grow old, alone with my thoughts for all these years, I can’t help but think of all that I miss.  I am too old to remember my family.  I suppose I can never know with certainty whether there are others like me, but I am certain that I have never encountered another who spoke of memories of the time before cities.  But I do know that as the years wore on, the men that I saw seemed ever more urban, ever more refined, ever more manufactured.  I believe that when they caught me they had never seen someone so old – so far beyond the cutoff.  

I see that they guards are new again today.  

If you are reading this, then perhaps you are among them.  Let me tell you briefly about the time before you were born.  Before the cities rose to engulf the full surface of this continent, there was endless forest.  For a thousand years I wandered this land, from the desert that they later called Mexico to the tundra, here in Canada, and between the seas on the three sides that I could trace.  It was all forest before they began to build.  And of course I had tried their ways, briefly.  It never quite fit.  The clothing, the confinement, the monotony.  If I could have only grasped the irony of that!  For ultimately my punishment for avoiding that life was simply more of that life.  

When they finally left me here, they told me that it was for the failure to rehabilitate.  They came to my home and built a city around me, they captured me and demanded that I conform to their ways, and for twenty years they locked me in a room far brighter and softer than this one.  They paraded before me a series of so-called doctors, learned scholars who’d studied for mere decades, until finally the last of them declared that there was nothing to do for me – that, as I could never be “civilized” that I must die.  

That was so very long ago.

I have to slow down as I pass mile 5.  Around here, the traffic always gets a little thicker at about this time.  At 2:30 on a Sunday, all of the church families have just finished their lunches, and the hipsters are all due for their turn on the path before drinking time begins.  The path is still clear, mostly, but I have to tread lightly and I ring my little bell a few times.  It’s not the time for a training pace anyway.  

What have I been thinking about this whole time?  Money, I guess.  Goals.  All these mistakes I’ve made, my little hourly regrets, the nagging sense of shame that at any moment some other error will be uncovered.  But I arrive, and I know that the local dalai lama will set me straight in due time.

His name is George, and today he is wearing horizontal stripes.  I think that his mother should really know better than that; if nothing else, it clashes with his freckles.  But it’s clear enough that he doesn’t care.  Higher, faster, he pumps his legs and whooshes forward and back.  “Hey George!” I call out.  Somehow I can’t even say his name without breaking into a smile.  I can only imagine what a challenge it must be for his parents if they ever need to discipline him; I know that I would never be able to.  “What’s the word this week?”  

“Banana!”  

Profound, I think.  The swing to his left is vacant, jiggling rhythmically up and down as the entire swing set bounces back and forth on George’s pendulum swings, a quite jingle emanating from the loose chain.  I take a seat and let the inertia start me on the slow back and forth path.  The brown patch below the seat, woodchips pushed aside to reveal raw earth, is too close for my grown-up legs, and I have no choice but to either kick them fully forward or tuck them back entirely underneath me like that yoga pose I could never quite master.  I opt for forward, and automatically lay backwards to counterbalance.  Slowly back and forth, and the sun and clouds fill my eyes.  Suddenly the sun is eclipsed for a moment by George’s passing torso, and as suddenly it blinds me again.  As he approaches the apogee and perigee points of his orbit, I feel that classic “thump” as the tidal forces ripple through the steel tubes of the structure.  

“Hmm, banana.  I hadn’t thought of that one.  Why banana?”

“Because it’s yelllooooooow!” he called out, stretching the sound in a strange doppler crescendo.  I wonder if he knows what it sounds like.  Clearly, for science, I must return the favor.  I lean back and let my bottom swing forward as my center of inertia shifts; and when my shoulders are centered over the dirt patch, I lean up again, folding forward to a situp position lest my feet drag through the shallow patch of ground.  If I speed up, George can tell me what I sound like.  Pump, pump, lean, pull, I accelerate and the thump thump of the swing frame fighting momentum grows stronger, beating out an irregular rhythm as George and I swing just a few degrees out of phase.  I am swinging higher now, nearly as high as George but I’m not sure whether I should.  I wonder how much weight this is meant to bear.  But George wonders no such thing.  

“Go higher!  You’ll never catch me!”

He’s right.  It’s simple physics, I suppose.  He’s smaller, lighter, unburdened by the mass of adulthood.  I pump harder and faster but that thump thump gets louder until I see at the corner to my left, one post seems to move a little bit against the ground.  I have to slow down.  But George does not.  “Ha ha, you can’t go as high as me!  Betcha can’t jump as far either!”  

“No, no, George, don’t… you’ll break your leg!”  But I’m too late.  He’s already begun the countdown.  He swings forward, “Three!” and back again.  “Two!” and starts to visibly loosen his grip on the chains.  “One!” with a final thrust of his legs, and on the backswing tucks his torso into a ball, propelling his legs forward… and on that final climax, just before the moment of zero gravity at the peak of the swing, he lets go, tumbles forward and where a parent might utter panic or fear, exudes sheer joy.  “I did it!  Now you!”  

I forget sometimes why I come here, but in time he always reminds me.  The swing sometimes tries to tell me that I’m too big, too heavy, too slow, too old.  But then there’s George and he will have none of it.  “Jump!”  In his bigfoot voice, each word slow and isolated, “You can do eeet!”

I suck in my breath and concede to George’s sage guidance.  “Three.”  It somehow seems that the first step of the count is the hardest.  “Two.”  I start to feel a sense of freedom.  “One.”  For a moment there is no job, no traffic, no money.  “Juuummmmpppp….”  and gravity itself lets go.

My languages are “sailor” and “professor.” I can speak eloquently and professionally, diplomatically even. I can tell you to fuck off without telling you to fuck off, but I can also just tell you to fuck off.

Seriously, when I don’t think about it, I drop at least forty eight eff bombs per day. But I also use words like “per” and “quite” quite a few times per day.

Really though, I’m not sure this is a good thing. Donald Trump does it better, honestly, at least if you compare his 2011-2022 style of speech to his more formal presentations of the 1980s. He doesn’t use swear words particularly frequently, so he doesn’t offend anyone who cares about just that sort of thing, but he doesn’t use words like quite and per all that often, and quite a few people eat it up.

I am no Jason Mraz. I do not have wordplay to sing about and if I did I certainly couldn’t brag about. No, I’m really more like a low grade New Yorker columnist who just never had the courage to mail a piece in to a magazine like that, and in the age of internet I don’t even know how one would do that. Blog I guess. The thing is, I do genuinely have access to the best words, and now look, thanks to AI, my competition for that particular job is any idiot with a one dollar app on a smartphone.

I have started writing more again, though. Well, let’s clarify that; not more, just different context. I’m about three posts into resuming the blog I used to try to maintain at whitewaterlawyer.com. I’ve got it linked up with an app to make it easy and everything. And yeah sometimes that’s just gonna be moving content from here to there, or reposting my old stuff from Reddit. But, take a look, let me know. I wrote there slightly less casually than here, and I’d appreciate your input about what you think I should add there.

The books I’m piecing together – right now it’s a general memoire and the one of stories that I’ve mentioned to most of you – should I put them up on the blog in categories, or their own sections? Should I be raw there, and hope for feedback, or publish nothing that isn’t edited and polished? I need feedback on this please. I think I disabled comments on WordPress because of spam. Do you agree?

Anyway, I would appreciate your thoughts on this.