If capacity were not a question, this would be one valid: who couldn’t write a book about a weekend?

On the beginning of the trip, the saturation and difference is the most remarkable with persons in contexts and contexts in persons.  That is to say: take a speck of red paint from a wall and transplant it to a wall that’s all blues and greens and it’s awfuleasy to observe the difference of the speck.

So send that little red speck in some white Explorer one Friday and at the first it’s difficult to see that anything’s different.  When after one weekend, it can seem that everything is, where forgetfulness is blending and the remembering is sharing.

The inverse is true, too. The greens and the blues of the humid country can see the red city hues, silent declarations of demarcations and the unmentioned mysterious, while the perceptions are equal from each of the other.

It’s a remarkable thing, and what it takes is no more than a few miles south of the city, though even more apparent some 200 miles east in a city still unexplored.

So I spun my tires exactly that direction, the drive no less similar to my drives north to Arkansas than the 10-digit difference between interstates 30 and 20.  Cedars hang over the asphalt, humidity steaming up and fogging the windows where the temperature of the air conditioner doesn’t match the exterior’s.

Gain a little more road on into East Texas and you begin to see some hills and bridges and unoccupied territories made of mossy pines and muddy riverbanks and the mother Mississippi, not too far east of there. And the clear traditions of the Second Great Awakening and some Southern drawl steeping its inhabitants can be painfully endearing if only for a shorter bit.

Throw in some darts and some American Honey in a coffee mug on the cobblestone edge of a midnight pool, and the distance seems to license one to be lost in passion and emotion without apology, some adolescent adults aloof responsibility with good reason — to be in order to be.

And much like it was once in some younger Arkansas summer, the welling in our stomachs is intense and spirals, and we can begin to understand, both comparable and contrastable from the most comfortable of contexts, the persons we most truly are to become.

A. Everything about Lousiana reminds me of Arkansas (Cedars, MeWithoutYou, Beards).

B. Arkansas is a wonderful place with wonderful people.

C. Therefore, Lousiana is a wonderful place with wonderful people.

Over the past month, I’ve been running at least six out of seven days of the week, and have found it very rewarding on a number of levels.  For the better part of my existence, physical exercise has been a pillar among my disciplines (of course I don’t think it can be called that in the years before eighteen).

Today was like any other.  I found my running shorts (which I hope none of my friends should ever have to see) a tanktop, and those running shoes which are so graciously buoyant on a great variety of surfaces.

After suiting up, I set out for Westshore Drive — which ultimately leads past a few stop signs to White Rock Road and then Lawther — the famous road which circles White Rock Lake and plays host to some of the most expensive homes in Dallas.  But of course that’s not the matter.

Just beneath the willow tree I began my run on towards the spillway, which, indifferent to my changing and growing person remains as constant as I remember it in the late winter months of 2007.

My strides are becoming more confident, my breathing more consistent, and my resilience ever-increasing. Since I don’t run with my head between an iPod, I’ve developed in the past three years all sorts of little games to keep me occupied while my mind explores things deeper, systematizing what might and leaving afloat what shouldn’t.

The most common among these includes one aural — namely on the sometimes symmetrical connection between breathing and steps taking, and I think this particular game will perhaps never be loosed if only for the short-term focus it provides.  (Another which involves the specific numbering of steps between each division of the concrete barrier above the spillway is a less-practiced type, but no less helpful to the fulfillment of specific goals.)

Recently, a few rowing teams from a few select private schools have been paddling and pacing along the side of the spillway during my afternoon runs, and on top of my once-established rhythms of breathing and counting steps has been superceded by a race with those in the water.  Much of why I’m able to keep up or even consider it a race is that they are a bit far off and the distance provides the illusion that our speed is comparable, though I know theirs is much greater.

It’s 100º today, and I’ve mustered the courage to continue in the discipline regardless of the heat (while taking special measures towards to find the equilibriums among hydration and rest.  Of course I shower more often too, but that’s beside the point, I think).

Each lap on the top of the spillway is somewhere between 3/10 of a mile and 1/3 of a mile, and so I usually round up in this regard, which essentially means I allow myself to believe 3/10 is an equal portion to 1/3.  I’m able to justify such an allocation due to the fact that the wind is at my back on the first lap of each round and blowing fiercely at my front the second lap of each.

Finishing sweaty and not a little red from the Texas sun, I walk through the only place in the path around White Rock Lake that seems a maze, and carry on up the hill, where my car is parked in the grass, perhaps too close to the fire hydrant.  Of course any rules I’d be breaking would never be enforced by the security guard on duty who is mostly concerned with guarding his own air-conditioned comfort.

The drive back is about 4 minutes.  I’ll usually reward myself after a long run — and especially as we come deeper into the summer heat — with some sort of chilled drink on the trip home.  Ultimately I’ll return to Vickery some 45 minutes after I originally left, covered in saltsweat and a certain sense of accomplishment.  The first thing I do when I step into my apartment is make an effort to reach the shower.

Trying to remove the layer covering my torso, each day I recall that the very thing which makes the removal of the piece from my body so urgent is the very thing which keeps it still so fastened and snug.

A few weekends ago a band who I’ve been connected with for years (if not directly) came to Dallas, their home town, and played a show in a peculiar setting: The Dallas Arboretum.

After living in LA and playing shows across America in theater venues and dive bars, I wonder about what sort of change it might have been for them to be playing outdoors on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by flowers, a sunset just over the lake, and a great number of children occupying what System of a Down fans might call a pit.

I found a few images from the day and wanted to have them somewhere on the web as a reference point for the memories they['ll] embody.

Before the Arboretum trip, my very very good friend John Daniel was in town one last time before he moved all the way to Chicago.  We souped up a French Press of Italian Roast for his drive north to Russelville, AR, the place from where he’d depart for grad school the next day.  These, I think, are the only photographs I’ve ever published of Vickery on thispresentsojourn.  Welcome.

After the farewells, I headed on to the Arboretum.

Shaun doing biz.

Can’t remember what he was doing here, but it definitely didn’t involve biz.

The majority of the audience for the show:

We relocated when we heard Eric was on his way:

Turns out Shaun (pictured above) had bottle openers on the bottom of his sandals.  Pictured below is Eric successfully removing the bottlecap from a Corona Light with Shaun’s shoe.

I’ve somehow returned from a remote lake-space with Family which I wish might have had a longer last, and while my shin-skins are red and swollen, much was understood and illuminated and these things.  More is to be said, but this post is not the place for the more. I mind this a placeholder, the bent-up yellowed bookmark just before a final chapter of a book preceding the next book and the next book and the next.

If anything, I can affirm now that Ryan Adams’ Demolition is a dangerous listen, and to add within a related framework if any a time to feel human this is that. Until writing fully about this next, I’ll rise with the Dawn, hand off a guitar amplifier through which six years of music has passed — the meaning of this transaction something gargantuan, and my time with dear friends at the lake only serve to reinforce this very transition has been inaugurated but of course has not fully come to pass.

Another year, and I am the child my mother is nursing, and I am the sixth-grade child whose baseball games my dad never missed once, and I am the high school child who wishes to be anywhere close as cool as his older sister, and I am the college child (child, child, child!) with a girlfriend I’d obviously marry, and I am the intentionally single child living in the Upper East Side of New York City, and more fully of all I am the child who returned from a remote East Texan lake with sunkilled shins, laying in a bed at the city-center with the whole of each of these parts combined for seeing. And I am the man in forty-two years who will more truly be yet will not most truly be.  This is the land of “yet” and “not fully,” and I know this isn’t my residence if in terms of permanency.

Lake-lays tend to do terrible things to a person, which is our hope.  And of course I can’t agree more that we are being created by being destroyed.  None of this is at all negative if above the narrative, which we really aren’t.

I sat in a parking lot, or at least it was a lot of sorts, perhaps it was my act of parking which appended the parking’s to lot, trees hung and swung green or grey, but either way, I spoke with my mother about my father and his surfboard, about my brother-in-law about his tuba, about my sister and her care, about my mother and her finches and her knitting, [Staralfur song in the parking lot and an overture of sorts to two years past], weddings and travels, baking on lakes and thinking of it. You’d never call it stalling — you might say it’s what’s afternoon or a Sabbath if liberal with the language, but I was stalling, stalling and couldn’t circle this neighborhood or really any neighborhood more times. Not because of a fuel shortage! I’d only gone Mile 46 to Mile 68. Mom and I carried on a bit, she was on her way to I can’t right now remember where, and my dad and I were sorting through birthdate plans of Rangers Games and other things no less careful of my childhood.  I started up my car, pushed the song to Ára Bátur, (which sounds like not much else besides a summer drive back from a remote lake location), made Mile 68 Mile 70, and this is how it was required.

Whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, King of kings: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.