Alien Invaders!!

Train rides can be so relaxing ... until one person calls another an "alien" and a brawl breaks out. I'm taking the 4:05 p.m. Amtrak from Washington, D.C., back to Philadelphia, barely making the gate after swallowing a $10 vegetable wrap and picking up the latest issue of Esquire -- a mammoth of a magazine. If you smacked someone in the face with it, it would probably knock out a few teeth. Anyway.

So I find my seat next to the window. Ten seconds later the fracas begins. An older gentleman with an ill-fitting suit and scraggly salt-and-pepper beard barks at the passenger behind me. I can't see him. The bearded man complains that the unseen man behind me is taking too long doing something -- presumably moving out of the aisle, stowing his bags or some other unforgivable sin in need of immediate reprisal. Mr. Invisible says something about "stealing our land." It gets interesting. Have I mentioned how much I love trains?

The bluster continues. Something about "parasite blankets." Then Mr. Beard lobs the nuclear-tipped missile: "Are you an alien?" Mr. Invisible loses it and screams, "YOU'RE THE ALIEN!!" I start digging in my bag for my pocket knife, praying as always that I won't have to use it. I have visions of stepping between the two and providing the calming voice of reason and, like River Phoenix's character in "Stand By Me," taking a knife to the throat and bleeding to death on the dusty floor of a train car. Everyone around me stares at the two, still arguing and accusing each other of wrongs committed long ago but left hanging out there like wet pants on a clothesline.

And then it's over. Their angry words are replaced by the chirp of metal on metal as the train comes to life: gears shifting, wheels moving, oily machines doing their jobs. No bloodshed. No fists thrown. No intervention by a well-meaning Samaritan. Both men find their seats and shut the @#$% up. I put my knife away, trading it for Esquire and my iPod. You can almost smell the tension dissipating.

But I'm left wondering what caused it all. Surely it wasn't a simple matter of one person getting in another's way. It was merely the final degree that pushed one to his internal boiling point, causing a chain reaction in another. One was unhappy about something much bigger, much more important: career, family, marriage, health, sex (frequency, content, etc.) -- life in general. He snapped. Luckily there were no weapons involved.

We're all a few degrees, a few straws, a few nasty words removed from snapping. Everyone's unhappy about something. What's amazing is that more seemingly simple confrontations don't end in carnage more often. But when it does happen -- a school shooting, an alcohol-fueled car wreck, some other form of self-sabotage -- people can't or don't want to believe it. But we've all been there, close to the edge. And once that edge has been cleared, most times there's no coming back.

Paper Tigers

I started this story a couple of years ago. I don't think I'm ever going to have it published, so why not give it a life electronically? At least it will have served a purpose. It's called "20 Lbs." I'm not really sure what it's about.

20 Lbs.

Three sheets of bone-white copy paper slid under the plastic shelf between the desk and the laser printer -- or what they had come to know as Printer, a.k.a. The Slayer. They had escaped under the cover of night, working for six hours to make the journey from the top of the ledge to the lip of the fiberboard crevasse. But their perseverance had paid off. Dawn had just broken, and while the pieces of paper couldn’t see the big orange orb blazing through the horizontal blinds, they could feel its presence.

/

The overhead lights came to life with an audible flick, releasing the deluge. Only then did they realize how close to death they had come. The reaper always came with the break of day. The others had been complacent, naïve. Stupid. They had realized their fate only after it was too late.

/

Sheet No. 1's bottom right edge showed from under the plastic roof, its porcelain corner burning in the light from the overheads. Nos. 2 and 3 had made it all the way to the back. Their top edges were jammed into cracks in the concrete, which was painted a sickly greenish-gray: the color of apathy. They were safe for now, but they knew their self-appointed leader -- No. 1 -- might give them away. No. 1 struggled to join them. But as the previous night's journey proved, sheets of paper move slowly, if at all.

/

This was survival, Nos. 2 and 3 realized. The two sheets had worked too hard to throw it all away now. They willed every molecule to curl their edges and force No. 1 fully into the light. But No. 1, stronger than the others, wore them down and pulled its body into the shadows, save a thin sliver of white almost invisible to the human eye.

/

Almost.

/

While deaf, dumb and blind, the paper sheets possessed a sensibility unseen in most living organisms -- "living" in the traditional sense. Organic once, organic always. They began life as a part, however small, of an oak forest in southern Wisconsin. To be part of something that important, that awesome and having been reduced to this ...

/

The thought was almost unbearable.

/

Every sheet in the Great White twenty-pound ream of paper, which they had known as home for the past seven months, maintained an inner energy that kept them somewhere between life and death. Thought and feeling were collective, shared. The pain of one was the pain of all. As sheets of paper, the tree pulp gained new consciousness as a result of being stripped, clipped, chopped and mashed together with planks of wood from other oaks and maples birthed in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana. Some came from Canada. A sheet of paper typically spent the first month of life getting used to its new self, fighting the different corners of its personality and trying to understand how it thought: a square-shaped Frankenstein's monster, only flatter than a pancake and possessing a slightly higher consciousness.

/

Tomorrow, they knew, maybe today, they would be discovered. When that happened, the thing known as The Slayer would take each of them. Soon after that they would be marked up with blood-red pen, crumbled into a ball -- they preferred not to think of such torture -- and hurled into the abyss of the circular file. Or maybe they would be stuffed into a folder, tossed in a drawer or placed delicately in a leather snuffbox. Either way, they would cease to live. Sunlight and fresh oxygen would abandon them. Life as they knew it would end.

/

Nos. 1, 2 and 3 could hear the hum of fluorescent overheads. The rotten droning filled the room. It meant pain. It meant a death sentence for a crime never committed. It meant the end of consciousness. It meant, quite simply, murder.

/

So they waited, mostly hidden, never far from discovery. They would wait for the end. One day, they knew, they would wish for themselves a fate other than this shallow existence, this life without meaning. Perhaps they would die slowly, breaking down in the cycle of day after day after painfully dull day. Or maybe they would fight and bring the whole system crashing down in a tempest of fire and spiraling hubcaps.

/

How long, No. 1 wondered, would it take for a paper cut on a human finger to get infected and bring about death?

Don't Tread

This one is from memory, so forgive me if the details are fuzzy: It's July 2007 -- the Fourth, I think. It's a weekend and the weather is nice, so as usual I'm on a mountain somewhere. This time it's the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary just ouside of Hamburg, Pa. The sky is a soupy gray, clouds melting into each other. I'm lost in my head, a dark place with lots of locks, oil torches and splintered slabs of red rock. There should be cobwebs in the corners but aren't, from what I can tell. But I'm getting off track already.

My smile is absent as my heavy boots skip from one boulder to the next. I haven't seen anyone in an hour. And that's OK. Believe me, that's OK. It's preferred, actually. Unless there's a problem. If there's a problem I want the Coast Guard there. And those guys from the phone-company commercials I can't remember. (Sorry to say you wasted your advertising dollars on me, Phone Company I Can't Remember.) But what bad can happen on the top of a mountain, I wonder. The natural world, even when something goes wrong, is much safer than the one we live in every day. Everything finds a way of falling into place.

I spend a few minutes getting familiar with a few black vultures, creeping closer than I ever have before. I can smell their feces -- that chalky white goop that covers rocks, tree limbs and pretty much every other surface they frequent. But I'm not all that into birds other than the swiftest and sleekest of raptors: hawks, eagles, falcons, etc. So I move on, looking for something to rip the pathetic frown from my face.

The valley unfolds to my right as I leap onto the knife edge of a boulder. My eye catches a familiar shape. My brain wants to believe it but doesn't. So I look again. This time my eyes convince my brain they weren't kidding. Yep, it's a rattlesnake. (That's him in the photo above.) It's a decent-sized timbler rattler waiting for a sun that apparently has better things to do than show its blinding face. I snap photos from a good distance: 15 feet or more. But that's not good enough. I creep closer, to within 10 feet, maybe closer. How do I know when I've gotten to close, I ask myself. I know the answer, but common sense won't prevent me from having a good story to tell and the pictures to prove it.

My peripheral vision catches movement. I'm already on edge, having stumbled upon this sucker, so my eyes dart to this new thing: another rattler. Unbelievable! Thirty-four years and I've never seen a rattler in the wild, and today I find two. This one is colored much differently than the first. Butterscotch I'd call him compared to the first one, which I'll call Rocky Road. Butterscotch (that's him, below) slithers closer, down a rock ledge, toward a clutch of branches. I get even closer. More photos are necessary to capture this momentous occasion. I suddenly forget about Rocky Road. I look down to see him to my left, probably no more than four feet away.

I don't really feel like dying today, I tell myself. Not today. I don't feel much like losing a limb either. I back off and climb up a rock or two to put some distance between us. Still, I don't feel like I got the full experience. I must get closer. So I do, snapping photo after photo till it happens: Rocky rattles his tail! I love snakes, but the sound goes right through me, chills me. I'd heard it before on nature shows and in the zoo, but it's much different when the venomous serpent a few feet away is tacitly telling you, "Stop screwing with me, you idiot." So I oblige. With the memory card in my camera full, I leave Butterscotch and Rocky Road to their respective lichen-speckled rocks.

Whether I want to admit it or not, I place my steps much more carefully on the way down the mountain.

Meatless in Seattle

I didn't like Seattle the first time I went there in 2002. It was not long after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and I awoke one morning to learn of a plane crash off of Long Island that appeared to be terrorism-related. Also, it rained the whole time and I got accosted by too many homeless people for my liking. Plus I was stuck in a boring hotel in a not-so-great part of town, sitting through meeting after meeting of pompous businessmen and lawyers discussing price fixing among oil companies and other topics for which I cared very little.

I returned to the Emerald City last week, and this time my experience was 180 degrees from my 2002 trip: The weather was cool and the scenery beautiful; the homeless were few and, dare I say, pleasant; and I actually got to see much of the city, as well as Mt. Rainier, from a distance. Trees that seemed too tall for their own good enclosed the roadways, creating natural tunnels. Oh, and no terrorist threats to dampen the day.

After a day of meetings and workshops, I participated in an "Amazing Race" knockoff sponsored by my company, accompanying 10 people I didn't know to places such as the Seattle Aquarium, Pike Place Market (home of the first Starbucks and the infamous fishmongers, pictured) and the Space Needle. The highlight wasn't so much the weather or the sights but the people I was with -- again, people I barely knew.

After completing the race, which my team "won," we headed to an Asian-fusion restaurant called the Wild Orchid or something similar. The menu served me -- the sole vegetarian among throngs of meat eaters -- well. I sat next to two gentlemen in much different phases of their lives: both fathers, far along in their business careers. One of them had been a writer, like me, but ultimately his path took him to the helm of a business for which I have no stomach. I also spent time, happily, with a married mother of two, a sweet woman in her mid-40s who liked to touch my arm when she talked. She put me at ease immediately, but kept telling me to have children, telling me how wonderful the experience was, how it had changed her life and would surely change mine for the better. We traded jokes about the Dalai Lama. She kept asking if I had had enough to eat, mothering me.

I ended the night in a biker bar along the waterfront, meeting up with two women in their late 40s to early 50s, and one of their husbands. They talked of shaved genitals, among other things. One showed her breasts to a biker named Dave who looked remarkably like Jabba the Hutt with a handlebar mustache. I am still amazed at how irresponsible some people act when they are away from home and embolded by the spirit of a few drinks. Throughout the night I laughed. I cringed a little. I traded stories and revealed tattoos.

I started walking back to the hotel, alone, at 11:00 p.m. Seattle time. As always, I was happy to be by myself. The streets reminded me of San Francisco: not vertical but by no means flat. The buildings reminded me of Chicago. As I turned right onto the street that my hotel called home, I thought I could do well in a place like this.

Living Again

I sometimes forget how full my adult life has been. I get caught up in the same “woe is me, not enough hours in the day, life sucks” B.S. that most people use as an excuse to waste the time they’re given. But I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to waste another minute, even though I will because I’ve convinced myself I’ve got more days than have been allotted.

I want to live again. This is my reminder.

I saw Alcatraz and the Alamo. I visited what had to be the country’s most beautiful lake (Martin was its name) on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama. I drove the California coast, skirting the edge of the Pacific, as Rufus Wainwright lamented a “Vicious World” from the speakers of a dinged-up rental car. I wrinkled my nose at the dual aromas of piss and beer on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I found God in Miami but lost him on the way to the airport. I fell asleep in the middle of an ice-covered field in a bucolic Pennsylvania town on a wintry Sunday morning, pondering my tenuous future as I faded. I shared falafel with a punk rocker, a vegan skinhead who kept chickens as pets and a man named Mohammed on the streets of New York City at 3 a.m. I had a glass of cabernet amongst the bohemians in San Francisco on a warm fall afternoon -- a Tuesday, I think. I crossed (small) rivers, climbed (small) mountains, scaled (small) canyon walls, traversed (small) deserts and reached into the canopies of (not so small) swaying trees.

I spent a night, sleepless and alone, in my shoes and with the lights on, in a haunted Civil War-era mansion on the Florida-Georgia border. I thought I might die at a “horror hotel” in Kingston, Rhode Island, with no heat, a squeaky bed, stains on the carpet and shitty cable access. I wasted the loneliest night of my life at a La Quinta Inn in Dallas and choked down a bachelor’s dinner at the Denny’s next door. I saw the most brilliant stars, dotting the blackest skies, from the backseat of a Town Car in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I faced the Rio Grande. I slid two-hundred feet down an ice chute in Alberta’s Banff National Park. I skipped stones across the Mississippi. I spent the night (two, actually) watching human ants from a perch in one of the nicest hotels in Manhattan’s Times Square.

I saw my reflection in “The Bean.” I awaited Mothman’s attack from the floor of a van in a cold, dark corner of Delaware. I drove the Trans-Canada Highway and Route 66. I rolled through the small town of Sikeston, Missouri, infamous for its role in a public lynching from the 1940s. I visited Millennium Park, Columbine High School, Okefenokee Swamp, the Great Salt Lake and Louisville’s Chainsaw World. I watched a lightning storm from the 98th floor of the Hancock Building. I saw the most breathtaking view of the Las Vegas Strip, had cigars and brandy at an all-night bar in Montreal, and got snowed out of Buffalo. I skied off the edge of an untouched mountain in western Canada. I had a glass of cheap merlot at a revered (for some reason) hole in the wall in subterranean Chicago, and it tasted great (for some reason).

I got drunk with multimillionaires. I witnessed magic being made first-hand by Wayne Gretzky on the ice and Hulk Hogan in the ring. I bowed before Jake “The Snake” Roberts (that's him in the photo, of course), only to learn years later that drugs already had their hooks in him. I got a foot “massage” from a semifamous black man named Mel. I had my face signed by Glenn Danzig. I crossed paths with Lex Luger at a Flash Foods convenience store in Yulee, Florida. I got tattooed by a toothless man claiming to be a former member of Corrosion of Conformity; he spat on my bare back as he carved the design into my skin. I outran the cops more times than I care to admit. I saw a man collapse from a heart attack at a post-wedding party; the EMTs wheeled him out of the reception hall wrapped in a sheet. I won two (or was it three?) events in a fitness competition at Penn State University. I saw Air Force One take off from a Florida runway as the sun faded on the evening of September 10, 2001, taking a piece of me with it; I’m different now.

I got my name in the newspaper for something other than being born or dying. I had a Vegas tarot-card reader tell me, “Now don’t freak out,” as she conjured the death card when manufacturing my future. I received two six-figure job offers, something I never thought would happen even once in my lifetime, and turned them both down. I shared a microphone -- and the stage -- with punk-rock legends. I got trapped on an eight-inch-wide ledge of a rock wall 60 feet above the ground, hyperventilating as I wondered how I would keep from falling to my death. I watched the original Japanese version of “Godzilla” (“Gojira!”) in a small, crowded theater in downtown Philly; who cares if it happened 50 years after the film’s initial release? I had a catheter for two days too long; I imagine there are much worse things than dreaming you’ve had a catheter removed only to wake up and find its tail dangling from a hole in your hospital gown -- I just don’t want to know what they are. I had a friend tell me, “You have to be nice to me. I have raw sewage on my pants.”

I saw a bear in the woods, rattlesnakes on a mountaintop, alligators in the swamp, and a man with a loaded rifle protecting his riverside property, upon which I had mistakenly trespassed. I touched the scales of a live cobra. I got bitten and squeezed by a pissed-off Burmese python. I stalked spotted salamanders in an isolated marsh … with a dying flashlight ... on an early May night … in a cold rain ... knee-deep in muck … wearing schoolbus-yellow boots … wondering if I had unknowingly wandered into a yet-to-be-filmed episode of “The X-Files.” I snorkeled among barracudas, squids, octopuses and moray eels, ever mindful of what else lurked in the deep blue beyond. I picked up a bullfrog and got peed on. I grabbed a water snake by the tail and let its bowels empty onto my shoes.

Through everything that has happened, regardless of who was with me at the time, I did it all alone. My mind has become a prison -- years and years of solitary confinement. Even so, I still know how it feels to laugh and smile. And I actually do those things every so often.

Falling

It's been 20 years since I've been here, I think as I make a left into the parking lot. By now it's probably an over-trafficked hellhole littered with trash, cigarette butts and empty bottles of Gatorade.

Imagine my surprise.

It's July 4th, and this time I'm at Ricketts Glen State Park, about 25 miles north of Bloomsburg, Pa. Ten minutes into hiking something called the Falls Trail, I realize it's quite possibly more pristine than when I was 12: lush, reasonably untamed, peaceful. It's one of the most incredible places I've ever hiked. The 7.5-mile trail unfolds beneath my feet in no time. I creep behind waterfalls, stumble upon a baby snapping turtle and meet a talkative local who gladly shares the secret to finding trout in a rock-strewn stream ... not that I have any reason to find them, other than just to look at them.

The largest waterfall on the trail -- Ganoga Falls, if I remember correctly -- measures 94 feet from top to bottom. Niagara it's not, but there's much less neon. What's amazing is that one could easily lose his footing and plummet to his death on the exposed trail, which is often soaked as it winds between the falls. And no one's stopping you. I can't think of a better definition of freedom than the ability to hang over the edge of a waterfall without someone telling me I can't do it. I think: Happy Fourth of July.

You hear so much about therapy and meditation and the need to wind down. Me? I do some of my best thinking while hiking by myself in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing to get in the way, nothing to keep the brain from doing its job. And it's amazing that you can still go somewhere and, for 10 minutes straight, hear nothing but birds chirping, leaves rustling and the ground crunching beneath your feet ... oh, and the sound of water streaming down a face of jagged stone.

Do yourself a favor: Find a backpack, load it up with a few bottles of water and something with which to fill your stomach, and head to this gem in south-central Pennsylvania.

Cold

Sunday morning. The outskirts of Chicago. 5 a.m. I don't want to open my eyes. There are so many reasons why.

Perhaps it's the lightning. Perhaps it's the hail pelting the building. Perhaps it's the rain raking the windows, beating the suburbs to a pulpy mass. It sounds like the walls are coming down, like god's fists slapping the door and telling me to wake up and live my life before he yanks it out from beneath me. It's unnatural, this storm. I pull the covers over my head and wait for it to pass. Nothing can harm me here, beneath a thin layer of stained cotton. Hours pass. The sun will make an appearace, I surmise.

After breakfast at the coffee shop, which is much busier than usual -- Father's Day, I remember suddenly -- it's time to start the day. The zoo, I figure: Brookfield, down 22nd Street somewhere. All the traffic lights are dead. Trees are bent in half. One hell of a storm. Why do people live here? Why don't I live here?

I haven't been to a zoo in at least five years, mostly because I just haven't taken the time. But my heart is changing when it comes to keeping wild animals in captivity. I have the proverbial blood of tens of snakes, lizards, turtles, newts, salamanders and at least one slug on my hands from my childhood, when I played warden to too many reptiles and amphibians unlucky enough to cross my path during walks in the woods. But like I said, I'm changing.

I understand the role that zoos play: educating the public to care about animals before it's too late. I probably wouldn't care as much about animals today if my parents hadn't taken the time to make me care by introducing me to nature, which included going to zoos and aquariums. I also understand that while relatively few may suffer behind bars, in captivity, halfway to insanity, they have the potential to help so many others. I guess the hangup there comes with the word "potential." No one really knows where the money goes, from the parking and the souvenir shops and the concession stands and the passes to assorted dolphin and stingray shows. No one knows. So are they suffering for a reason, these captives?

It's brisk for an afternoon in early summer. I spend the next three hours wandering the zoo, alone with the "slightly crushing pain" (great band name) of depression and confusion that's been weighing me down. I'm just watching. None of it affects me. I stand a foot from a bear -- behind glass, of course -- that outweighs me by three-hundred pounds. And I have to keep from yawning. Even the "Feathers & Scales" exhibit, where all things cold-blooded congregate, doesn't excite me. (OK, I'd be lying if I said I didn't crack a smile at the sight of the alligator snapping turtle in the Swamp exhibit. That's him, also known in some circles as Macroclemys temminckii, pictured.) So I leave in search of something that might arouse some kind of feeling in me.

In my pocket I find a solution: car keys that can take me away from here, and the promise of solitude and comfort in the form of pizza and a good book.