MY CAMP

Human nature, yes. Nature nature, no. I know nothing about it.

- Joshua Cohen

A rose is a rose is my tradition, but then feelings lead us outside tradition, they lure us beyond it, and I feel nature deeply. I feel its lack of interest in me, its lack of humanity jibing with my inner emptiness; I like how its trees come together to make a forest that shows me how to breathe, and how its boulders show me how to concentrate. I'm content with having these immature, idealizing poetic-romantic emotions about the great outdoors and don't want to know anything more, chiefly because I've always regarded the outdoors as a refuge from knowledge a haven of ignorance to flee to whenever the city news runs me down.

In the summer of 2023, this was certainly the case. Though in retrospect that season now seems a golden age, at least a silver age-the last sane season-in the literal heat and humidity of the moment I was depressed. All my friends were out of the city and I had no invitations. It seemed that every one of my acquaintances lucky enough to have a house upstate or in the Hamptons had just given birth and childless singles like me were no longer welcome: Happy summer, we'll catch up in the fall...

I was going stir-crazy in the tarry swelter, and though I couldn't quite get it together to purchase a new, non-leaking air-conditioner or book a hotel or motel or really come up with anywhere climatized to retreat to even for a weekend's vacation, I found myself beginning to contemplate homeownership. That should be proof I was losing my grip: that I didn't dismiss the idea immediately, that I let it grow on me like a prickly rash as the sweat slicked down my back. A place of my own was the fantasy. A little place out in the hinters. As I pigged around my hotbox, crosstown traffic fuming and blaring outside, I kept imagining a wattle fence, a thatched roof, a clutch of loosely mortared walls out in some leafy glade where I could sit cool and quiet and get back to writing.