The brush is a stretch of scrub and rolling dune and tucked away sandy open space all connected by shoddily paved interweaving roads. The only way to approach it is to lose yourself immediately in a general haze and replenish the fluids lost to incessant sweat under the high sun with beer after beer after rum drink. The madness inevitably sets in as haze gives way to drunkenness to cigarette to haze and on through the swirling vortex. But the bottom never comes in the brush. That is really the thing. Down, down, down you go but you’re always going. Going until the golden orange sun breaks the surface in that pink and purple soft blue sky over the green grass dyed golden across the rolling hills and peaks of sand breathing forth from the sea to the south that gives a heaving sigh of life to the breast of the whole thing.
So there were Modelos and local NC brews and Yeunglings and an entire bottle of eight year aged Bacardi chased by Capt. Morgan White, kind enough to include a flag that was burned and bled on throughout the mess. We didn’t sleep the first night and Cwiss received his first tattoo with a stick and poke by my hand, breaks taken for cigarettes and swigs of beer to stave off the blur and unsteadiness of hand. We grilled fresh caught tuna and mahi and ate it over a bed of three-cheese pasta. We live savagely but we aren’t savages, come on now. There were long periods during which I pondered how life could possibly go on, but then it was time for a long swim and body surf lightheartedness, or a simple return to the haze and accents acquired in that sweltering jungle heat that fried bits and pieces of our brains until we were beautifully medium-rare on the scale of insanity. Strange encounters at the local markets and never-ending center line blurs accompanied by background jams and wind through the window blowing the cigarette ash irrevocably behind, always behind and immediately gone. That’s how time really moved. It was all slow and in a way it stood still for long periods, but it always maintained an awareness of itself in the present moment, and that is to say that the past was shed with a constant ease; there was no attempt to claw at the dead thing with nostalgia. Life was ahead and though we may have stumbled and blurred our vision in the haze, that horizon was always there in the distance, stretched out over the world to a point and beautiful.
The brush is out there and away and society and all its little nuances and the do’s and the don’ts are irrelevant. You are not living amongst a defined culture with norms and parameters. You are in the wild and the only realities are the sweltering yellow golden sun high in an empty sky and the incessant humming buzz of cicadas that sets the tune to the rhythm of madness. Everything else is left to your mind and hands to create, to draw out as the two deem fit. The brush will allow you to lose yourself.
SEE SUM MORE FOTOS FROM THIS JOURNEY IN THE PHOTOS SECTION!!! YEAH!!!!