This weather, this place, has a way of making a man feel thin. Drawn out, like a tightrope walker constantly walking the edge. You leap from situation to situation, realigning yourself, putting on new faces, recovering from last night’s drunkenness, elation, or strain. Eventually you reach a state of continual anamnesis: you read a book and wonder why you don’t read more, listen to Oscar Peterson and wonder why you don’t know more about jazz, walk to the park and wonder why you don’t go hiking more often.

What you need, boy, is a thing to crack your skull open. You’ll never become a hedgehog, even though your cousin is shipping your clarinet back to you and you swear you’re going to learn every mixolydian scale ever invented. Your closet is already full of the evidence from your thousand passions. That brain of yours just don’t work like that: you’ll never be a Miles Davis, eating sleeping drinking screwing music, or a Turner sitting out in fields for eight hours a day sketching and watching. Though you admire single-minded men intensely, the closest you’ll come to being like them is in love, where your passion is as much of a liability as an asset. Face it, there’s only about four women in the world that can burn you down like that, and they’re all crazy or out of your reach.

What you need, kid, is a thing to crack your skull into about seven hundred pieces. Now some would say that a man needs to be scared shitless every so often, but there’s no call to go looking for the devil, conjuring up a death wish, or putting on a new wardrobe. But you gotta shut that nattering voice up, you need to drive out to Bishop or Tahoe and start thinking like an animal: what’s here, what’s there, what’s that sound, where can I get water, where can I camp, do I have enough food? That’ll set you straight, cowboy, that’ll remind you where your bones go and what your muscles do.