But accept we must, as the day winds down again. A slow spin for the ages/ a demonstration of fate, if you will, in which even the dumbest thickest stupidest sons-a-bitches out there can figure out that what is natural is also hard to swallow. The fucking sky turns over and over, it appears to me, like a pig on a spit. Nothing to do with anything any man or woman ever said or theorized. Or purple, purple, purple, violet, stink bug silvertone. When you must understand that you aren’t ever going to be the one that knows the ins-and-outs of why the sky is the color it is. There comes a time when you need to just let that shit go. Like postcards or index cards magnet’d to the fridge, (some old, some fresh) eventually now, they just all seem to overflow down out of my head as if it were some partially crushed red solo cup of root beer in the sticky booger hands of a 3-year-old punk. My scissor-cut Dickies shorts are stained with piss dribble and hot sauce, but also with bird-shitty splotches of things that, up until yesterday or whatever, they lived up in my mind. Every time I swing to catch the door closing at Sheetz/ every time I bend to tip gas into the mower/ turn with the quickness to see myself in the reflective glass/ slip into my car seat/ or roll over in the cool night sheets: I spill things I was trying to hold onto. Even now, I’m sloshing around in the gravy tipping out of my boat. The science behind firmament temperaments and all that is fascinating, I’m sure, but my goddamn cup is full, you know? I don’t have any more space, I don’t think, up in my skull. What inspires the sky to move like it does? To be azure one day and gun metal the next? There are so many questions I will never get answered. I lift the can of toxic as fuck bug spray from Walmart and I stare at it a second and then I lift it to my face and open my mouth and I pop down on the button with my trigger finger. I look at Henry out there in the high grass, throwing a spinnerbait, hoping for a bass. Go to hell, all of ya’s, I think to myself. All the people filling me in on what they have learned. I douse myself in it because I know that somewhere out there there is someone chomping at the bit to talk down to me about how dangerous this spray really is. I spray myself down with the OFF! and it smells like summertime, like sunscreen lake sand blazing hot afternoon-ness/ ocean beach/ amusement park/ baseball game/ backyard bbq/ fire pit cologne. All around me, all the time, the embers of death barely glowing, but glowing nonetheless. Jet chem trails misting down on you disguised as midnight dew. Maybe- over time- it causes tumors or makes your wang into a sad wet noodle. Days like today, me and Piper and Henry, just the three of us, spread out here by the boat launch/ fishing/ looking/ breathing easy/ unaffected by the whole world out there fucking shit up. That place doesn’t deal in too many ‘safe’ alternatives to keeping bugs off of your ass, and if it does at all, I don’t know about it. They don’t sell a lot of organic shit where I shop. Not much of it is organic or anything like that, I’m sure.

I don’t know what ingredients they put in that stuff. I smell of those chemicals so that bugs ignore me, but in a moment standing there at the lake, by the parking lot, I have this realization that I have come to associate the odor of this bug spray with peaceful things/ beautiful things. Even if it knows that this bit of possible food might be a front/ a hoax/ a sham/ a scam. Even if it knows that there is something awkward about the whole scene. If the freshly torn hunk of gas station nightcrawler slips down at just the right speed, at just the right time: a fish could inhale. Piper sits on the edge of the dock where people launch their canoes and their kayaks and he looks down at the sunfish in the deep clear water and they see him. Above the mountain lake another mountain lake, but upside down and called a sky. William Maxwell The blue is backed by blue then backed by blue. “I have liked remembering almost as much as I have liked living.”

Little giant hole baby pig feeder