A mood can be a mud puddle to be jumped over. - Jim Harrison

I lean against the rail and think there much be such a thing as beautiful anxiety.

In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.

Shakespeare and a very few others qualified but thousands and thousands of others dropped into the void without a sound.