my life in reyes

A few of us went up the parkway to camp out and watch a meteor shower.  One of my friends brought her Chihuahua which turned out to be a mistake. I'm actually fond of the dog because one time he drank a cup of coffee and took it like a champ. But that night under the meteors he barked and barked and just wouldn't stop barking.

I'm being technical when I say that we were under the meteors. Yes, they were up there in space shooting around between all the dead starlight, but we didn't actually see any of them. That's because around 11pm a cloud swept onto the mountain where we were sleeping, so we didn't see at thing. Well, we saw a beautiful sunset. Okay. We didn't see what we had come to see, how about that.

The owner of the Chihuahua is my best friend here in Asheville, and I have a great time with her always, but I don't think she really likes camping as much as she at one point claimed to. We were all seated around the campfire (more accurately, the ring of stones where the camp fire would be, there was a burn ban in effect) sharing some laughs and a bottle of whiskey (full disclosure, I didn't have any of the whiskey because I have an immediate and tremendously painful reaction to alcohol, also citrus, tomatoes, caffeine, and all fruit other than pears and blueberries, but someone had a bottle of Jack Daniels and was passing it around) and all of a sudden my friend starts to sneeze.

And sneeze! She couldn't stop! Something up on that knob was really irking her. Unfortunately, my dog Hometeam was also present at the time, and Hometeam throws a fit when anyone sneezes. She's done this her entire life. She gets hysterical, barking and writhing and jumping up into the air. It's annoying, but by this point I've gotten used to it. In fact, if I'm around a dog and someone sneezes, and that dog doesn't go nuts, I wonder what's wrong with the dog, like maybe she's lost her hearing.

So every sneeze was accompanied by a great frenzy of barking, and then the Chihuahua, who was already on edge, just lost her mind. Eventually my friend gathered him up and they both retreated to the tent. That's when the cloud came and sat on us. So the rest of us went to our tents, maybe read a little bit of a book, and fell asleep. Someone did bother to set their alarm for 3am when the meteor shower was presumably at its peak, but later reported that there was still nothing to see.

At dawn, my friend was hovering above my tent, begging me to leave. "I can't take it any more!" She said. I'm fairly certain that she sneezed all night long, and then, when the cloud turned to rain sometime in the middle of the night, there had been some degree of precipitation within her tent. The rainfly had malfunctioned. We packed up and hiked down the mountain, drove the hour back into town, we both ate a bagel, went home and fell back asleep.

Lately, everyone is using the Reyes filter on Instagram, you know the one that washes out all the colors and gives life a sort of muted, elegant minimalistic quality? Like this:

I keep trying it, I mean I like the idea of it, the idea that your entire house mind body soul car family pets attitude outlook future bedspread bookshelf  have been tidied up to within an inch of their lives and all that remains is air and a single succulent that sparks joy, and life is nothing but a clean white sink with a meticulously placed tube of face lotion with one of those incomprehensible names, you know- Pure as Driven Snow Body Polish in Jewelweed by Dry Goods & Provisions n' Things.

I'm not kidding around here, I WANT that; I'd enjoy the hell out of that existence. But I just, I don't know, I just can't keep up.