What’s been happening, you ask? Man, I wish I could tell you. Too much has been happening for me to keep track, too many different places and different people with different things to tell me and it all blends together into a strange dream-puddle. Yesterday I was opening up some clams I found.They were mica-blue on the outside, but became more and more white as I scrubbed them down with a bristly brush. Inside they were moist and juicy and delicate, like the end of a penis. I sucked them right out of their yonis-like shells that were rimmed with a deep imperial purple. They were delicious, tasting of pure salty ocean, unspoiled, never having been touched by a professional clammer, shipper, grocer, fishmonger, or anyone else other than myself, except perhaps by some small innocent child who found a clam one day and with a blessed heart let it live and grow up to be my lunch. I wondered what the life of a clam was like, and whether, if I were a clam, this is how I would want to go: making someone very happy. This was one of those moments in the past few months that I’ve thought how wonderful things are these days. The path my life has taken is filled with a degree of randomness and uncertainty that isn’t easy to understand, harder still to trace, almost unfathomable to measure in duration (though a few moments in time stand out like bits of land in the middle of the seemingly endless dream-puddle); it is certainly impossible to find any meaning in my existence, my actions or their effects, or to calculate my total net worth to the rest of mankind…but sometimes it’s much better not to ask why and to simply accept these bizarre little gifts. (If that last sentence doesn’t make sense, it’s ok: those kinds of meaning-of-life sentences never really do anyway, just because of what they’re trying to talk about.)

These last few moments I was jacked up on a one-man elevator to an observation post where I could see the top of the rocket I’m working on, minus the nose cone. The NASA guys can be really kind of slow about stuff. But that means that I get to live in a beach house for a month and look for clams. Did you know that clams are amazing? You wouldn’t know it by reading their name, or even eating their chowder. But they are. As I started looking for them with my clam rake, scouring the sandy sea floor, finding vintage Pepsi-Cola bottles and lots of empty shells, much more than any clams, I wondered if this was what it felt like to pan for gold in 1849, waiting and looking and hoping to find a solid nugget. But then I thought, this is more like farming, because I’m harvesting my own food. But then I thought, a farmer doesn’t not know if his food is in his field the way I don’t know if my food is in this ocean floor, so this is more like hunting, except my prey has the functionality of a rock. So it was like hunting for rocks, except, hidden and possibly scarce or even non-existent rocks. After I found my first one I was very pleased that I wasn’t going to be disappointed, and after I found my second I was happy to know that it was probable that it wasn’t going to be hard to find more. And after I found eight I became worried that I was depopulating the ocean and that I had better stop with this more-than-enough amount. It was a clammy clamming day, only sunny and 70 degrees with clear cool water and a slight breeze. Strange perhaps for the last day of October, although maybe not so strange for an island off of Virginia, but certainly strange for someone who has spent the last four last-days-of-October in either New Hampshire or Scotland, without the sun and without the clear cool water, and without the 70 degrees. But maybe with the slight breeze. I can’t remember them that well.

Oh yeah: the last day of October is Halloween. I could have just said ‘Halloween’ instead of ‘last day of October’. It would have made things simpler, more concise, cleaner, more eloquent, and more pleasant, as it would have immediately inspired thoughts of fall leaves and jack-o-lanterns and children in costumes with candy in orange jack-o-lantern buckets, and wonderful memories of when you were 9 and dressed as a bumble-bee or a dinosaur or Spiderman, all without you knowing that I secretly and intentionally inspired you…sorry. Sorry I missed such an awesome opportunity. I can’t help it, I suck at writing….Man! Wouldn’t it be cool if every day of the year had a special name, and you wouldn’t need to describe any day so abstrusely the way I just did, or give it a number? If I had a day in mind I could just give you the name and you would automatically know which one it was, and probably have a really interesting memory-response hardwired into your brain because you associate a name much more clearly than you do a number. I would call the fourteenth of May ‘Blue Day’. I don’t know why exactly, except I think blue deserves its own day, and not a depressing day the way some people associate blue with like the twelfth of January or something, but a fresh, warm day that makes you think, ‘man, blue is such a sweet color!!’ I don’t know, it might be cool, or it might just be silly-talk. But let’s think about it and come up with some more cool names for days before we decide whether we should do it or not. And it should be universal and not open to debate by politicians, who come up with dorky names for dorky holidays like Columbus Day or Labor Day, that remind us about things like a goofy Italian who claimed two continents and something like 20 million people for a couple of silly monarchs, or labor unions from the 1950s and Jimmy Hoffa.

Or maybe that’s just what they remind me about. But the names could be a lot sweeter, even if that’s what we wanted people to be reminded of. Like it could be ‘Claim Some Continents’ Day’ and children could celebrate by walking around and pretending that just by pointing at and/or grabbing things that they are the rightful owners of anything or anyone they point at or grab. Or, oh, maybe that’s every day in the life of a child. Maybe, I’m not sure: some children can certainly be that way sometimes. But we could at least make it official for them once a year. Ok, well, we should think about it and get some cool names ready for when we decide to change calendars.

Hmm, alright, well, I’ll talk to you all later. Or at least write emails. And hopefully I’ll hear back too. But for now, I hope you guys are all having a wonderful, magical, experimental time. I think that’s the kind of time I’ve been having. I think anyway. I might be wrong or the experimental might become hackneyed and accomplished and boring, with an old and salty flavor to it like a pair of worn sneakers. But hopefully it won’t. Ok, good luck everybody.