Sent, I'm Sure, With Only The Best Intentions

I received this message –or these messages– from my old friend Ruckert today, scrawled in his almost microscopic handwriting across the back of several subscription cards for a magazine called Country Living:

Late last night, as I was in the basement digging around for a book on the Black Hole of Calcutta, I stumbled across a photograph of the two of us (taken, if I’m not mistaken, by a now famous actor), from god knows when, but certainly long, long ago, before you assumed your current identity (such as it is) as a transparent imposter in polite society and stopped returning my phone calls.

In the photo we are standing on the tin roof of a trail shelter somewhere in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with the sun collapsing in the sky behind us. We look like two men on top of the world.

How could we have possibly known at the time that shortly thereafter we would both commence the very long, steep climb back down?

I’m not even sure, in fact, that I could properly call the journey of these last many years a “climb.” I’m not even sure that I could properly call it a “journey.”

To say that we fell off the top of the world would not, perhaps, be too much of an exaggeration.

For all I know, you may have an entirely different and far more cheering perspective on the years since that photo was taken, but if so, poor fool, I can assure you that you are sadly mistaken.

At night now I sit out on the porch in the darkness and listen to the chirping chorus of banjos from the surrounding woods.

Surely, you think, those can’t possibly be banjos I’m hearing.

Go ahead and think whatever you want. I’m pretty sure I know a chorus of banjos when I hear one.

What in god’s name, I wonder, made me think I wanted to live in the country?

Often, in the hours after midnight, I see lanterns moving through those woods, and I imagine that some locals –in all likelihood the feral characters I routinely encounter at the Casey’s store in town, buying giant jugs of Mountain Dew and cases of generic Sudafed– are hauling bodies back there to bury.

This is, I’m sure you’d admit, a most comforting thought for an entirely friendless man in his middle years, living alone in the absolute middle of fucking nowhere, to entertain as he makes one more futile attempt to find his way into sleep.

Come on out and pay me a visit sometime. You can help me stalk and kill that donkey (I think it’s a donkey) that’s been lurking around my property and nosing at my windows in the night. (Be sure and bring your camera.) We’ll build the biggest bonfire you’ve ever seen. Honest to god, there isn’t one thing left here that I wouldn’t burn.

It’ll be just like old times.

Happy trails, sucker.