Far From the Madding Crowd

I am lying on my back in a field and I see the leaves jouncing in the sun. I see the Teletubbies too, and the slutty jungle cats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mexican wrestlers, the Roman gladiator boys making out. Everyone jouncing, jangled.

Someone hands me a tallboy in a paper bag. Someone in black boots and a black costume that looks very hot, very stiff, makes me pour it out. Someone hands me another.

I'm lost in a crowd. The Panhandle swims around me, beneath me. I'm sunburt and several higher dimensions of drunk and all I feel is joy.

The night before Bay to Breakers I was at my parents' house in San Jose. My brother had just passed the bar and I drove down to celebrate with my family.

"Where do you guys want to go?"

I was picturing thick-cut steak and a big masculine Cab. This was an event.

My mother, father and brother were stretched in front of the TV. "We were thinking of Mama Mia's."

So a cut above Olive Garden, then.

"What about BJ's," I said, "that's kinda fun."

My father shrugged. "It can get pretty busy this time of night."

"Well what about that nice sports bar you took me to downtown?"

"Billy Burke's?" He shook his head. "When there's a Giants game on, that place can get a little crowded."

He said it as if arsenic might bleed out of the walls.

When we had ordered at Mama Mia's, I started talking, rattling, rambling... anything to fill the silence. My brother stared at me, moritifed, "You're being kind of loud."

Looking around, mouth agape, I heard the softness. In this nearly-full restaurant you could hear the pots clanging in the kitchen.

I gawked at them: "Because everyone else is being so quiet."

Am I the only person in my family who loves a crowd?

Don't get me wrong, I need my solitude too. I'll take whole days to go on long, quiet hikes.

But I also need to squeeze into a crowded bar, dance, get drunk, smile at strangers, brush up against warm flesh, collapse in a field while the band plays on.

If I sit in solitude too long, the roar of the ocean inside my ears becomes defeaning. There is a terrible din within and without. I've learned the hard way: the voices on the inside are the most dangerous.

I need to expierence humanity not as an ideal, but as a tangle of sweaty limbs. If you excuse yourself too often, you how do you avoid becoming aloof, timid... haunting this world rather than living in it?

I sat up, dazed. Walked through the frolicking throngs in the Panhandle, found my steps, my bed, and collapsed.

And after a one-hour power nap, I went back out, bought a six pack, and joined another party.