Greenwood Lake

A brief moment of kayak consciousness

The last 3 months have been a torrent of change.

GPT-4, Substack Notes, Apple Vision Pro, rumors of the US government in possession of extra-terrestrial pilot bodies, the Write of Passage curriculum shuffle. Big stuff. Weird stuff. If you're like me, your memory has melted into electric goo and you're taking things day by day.

We're due for a re-introduction (and since I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf, we’re going to veer into stream of consciousness territory).

Michael Dean. From Queens. I grew up on a farm of Christmas trees, went to college in a horse stable, and lead an ordinary life in the weirdest time in human history (a statement anyone can make at any time). “What made you start writing?” When I was 20, I was in a car when the driver dozed off and flipped us going 85 miles per hour on a highway in Albuquerque. I remember crawling out of the wreckage and looking back to see our possessions scattered across desert asphalt: philosophy books, splintered instruments, and a duffel bag of bad pot we called “Elephant Dick.” Cars backed up into the horizon, and even the cattle slowed down to gawk at me pouring blue Gatorade onto my cousin’s mangled hand with fingers pointing in every direction. Everyone survived. But that totaled Lincoln was like a ferocious butterfly that sent unreal shockwaves into the future, leading to unimaginable things, like the accidental creation of a nine-figure underground oxycodone ring, but also, the start of my writing practice. Since that crash, I consider every day to be “bonus time.” I could do whatever I wanted, so I dropped out of my finance major, and continued to pivot my life into more eccentric directions until I finally started this Substack and now you’re reading this sentence.

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I’ve been on a publishing break for a few months as I helped revamp the curriculum for an online writing school. Now I’m here for a Welcome Back experiment. I’ve been recently inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, a book of jazz by Virginia Woolf. The whole thing is one stream of consciousness riff that evades the pleasantry of chapter headers, and yet, it’s all anchored in an extremely simple plot: Clarissa Dalloway is picking up flowers for a party she’s hosting that night. She spirals into chaotic riffs about World War I, her love life, and mental illness, but re-grounds you at least once a page by returning to the plot.

And so today is meandering stream of auto-fiction; a vignette of a person taking a vacation upstate after an intense digital spree.

After twelve sessions, 1,551 slides, one molt, and .000000271 yugas, I’m fluent in the silicon arts of “slide making.” I knew I gained fluency when the Cultural Tutor knighted me as a “slide demon” (one of my favorite compliments). As he’d talk, slides would materialize instantly as if there was some supernatural force inside of the Pitch cloud. Fluency comes with a cost.

I ended the cohort with tingling hands, dreaming in slide decks. That’s not a metaphor. It’s literal. I’d toss and turn at 3am and my subconscious thoughts would present themselves through the slide templates I’d memorized. I swear. One time my wife rolled over and on to me, mid-possession state, and I swear I felt 13 years of love channeled through the prism of the Ogg font. My wiring is broken.

The physical toll is potentially worse. The top hand surgeon on Long Island tapped on my wrist to test sensitivity, and my arm flung up nearly punching him in the face. I might have cubital tunnel syndrome, and I’m the one to blame. My standing desk setup costs thousands of dollars, and yet I sit on a $30 chewed up plastic lawn chair for children that doesn’t rise to the right height, causing me to lean on my desk. I failed Ergonomics 101. Now I need a team of specialists to rub jelly and shoot electricity into my forearms in real-time to keep the words flowing. “One more page! One more page!” I need a vacation.

The morning after the cohort, I rolled out of bed, down a flight of stairs, and into a car that blindly followed the navigation over some bridges and up to Greenwood Lake, 90 minutes outside the city, 9 miles long, and longer than the shortest finger lake (yet, still unknown by the average Manhattanite).

My wife and I first discovered Greenwood lake 2 years ago; we needed a meditation retreat during COVID, and since everything was shut down, we selected a town solely based on the best AirBnB listing we could find. Turns out, the place was haunted. Furry animal hides plastered the walls, cobwebs covered everything, a ghost with a hammer lived inside the heating system, and a bird kamikazeed into double-height glass. At least the view was beautiful.

We got a refund, scrambled away, and thought the trip was ruined. But down the road we found another B&B in an old 3-gabled Victorian house; one that came with a Gonzo-sized breakfast, a gazebo, kayaks for lake-time, and most importantly, Maureen, our friendly hostess and guide to Greenwood Lake.

She unpacked all the Yankee Lore of this town: the bars that Babe Ruth would frequent, Derek Jeter’s $14.75 million castle (which has been on the market for 4 years and is now down to $6.5m on Zillow), and the venues where you might spot Bernie Williams playing lead guitar in a mountain jam band. We walked around, and found some locals watching baseball reruns in bars at noon. You can also find Grateful Dead bears plastered around town, signaling places to pick up Delta 9 seltzer. We got some, but I was nervous to try “straight” THC again, considering last time I tried some (stupidly) right before entering a Men’s Wearhouse to pickup a tuxedo, I had an instant panic attack, where I retreated to the bathroom and just stared death in the mirror as my whole body buzzed like barber clippers.

My wife and I see Greenwood Lake as a launchpad to get into nature; it’s nested right along the Appalachian trail, and the entrance features an ice cream spot where hikers and grizzlies get tempted by double-scoops. Maureen gave us a highlighted fold-up map and sent us off to Sterling Forest State Park after breakfast.

It felt good to get off calendar time and into the woods. Instead of looking at my phone to pick a new activity from a glowing grid of 28 options, I’d either look around or play in the dirt with a stick. We did what you would expect city-people to do in nature: hike, kayak, and jump off rocks. But what possibly had the biggest impression on me was the swamp behind the New Jersey Botanical Garden.

If gardens are nature pruned through the minds of humans, then swamps are the nutcracks of the cosmos. There’s a sharp contrast between polished nature and raw nature. There were broken twigs, blocked paths, sludge traps, evacuated turtle shells, and a loose snake that hissed at kids; but my favorite feature was the symphony of frogs.

These weren’t cartoon ribbits. This frenzy of sounds didn’t even sound particularly frog-like: moos, clucks, kazoos, carnival toys, howls, and micro-tonal synthesizers. It’s better than your white noise machine, and it’s been on loop for 400 million years. This was it. This was the general state of things before Language descended on us and hijacked a particular monkey species, triggering the fall into history.

Whenever we got tired, we’d pull off the trail and find a spot to sit or meditate. I’d cross my legs, shoot imaginary roots into the ground, summon a sunbeam into my third eye, and coax the spirit realm for insights into my city problems. Next to an abandoned Lake Mine from 1843, I was shown the dark side of my “architect complex.” While it mostly serves me well, it also drains me when I build premature and unnecessary models of the future. I’m an anticipator.

HANDLE THINGS AS THEY COME. FAITH IN DESTINY. STOP ANTICIPATING. Be. Here. Now.. Fuck! Be here now? Did my most important insight of the last 3 months just resolve into the default insight of the mindfulness movement? Am I now Dean Dass?

I spiraled into a riff on language: all slogans have half-lives. When you coin an epiphany into a meme’d phrase it eventually accrues baggage and becomes a caricature. The profound philosophy of “Be here now,” is actually quite hard to embody, and instead, it’s rationally judged and veiled as a cliche. And so the message fades, until some new memelord discovers a new linguistic pearl to recast the same message.

On the walk out of the woods, I remember ranting to my wife. “LANGUAGE IS A PRISON OF ABSTRACTION!” I talked out loud on why cliches are the bastards of syntax, on why it’s easier to latch to concepts than to de-latch from them, and how meditation, nature, marijuana, and psychedelics all loosen the grips of language in different ways. Then I shut up and we continued our perfect day without clocks.

The climax of this trip was hosing off the spider colony inside the 2-person kayak, and taking it out onto the Lake at 6pm. We rowed and rowed, left and right, avoiding rocks and party pontoons, until we made it out into “the middle.” With bare feet, rolled up jeans, and no phone, my mind was properly vacant for the first time in a long time. There’s no space for thought when you’re surrounded by subsurface algae swarms, white-diamond sun-ripples, and smooth hills under a cloudless sky.

I knew an epic phase of life was approaching, but I felt no urge to daydream or anticipate it. There was no thought to be thunk on this lake at this time that could make any impact on any of that. There will be a time and place to thrash in the center of Candyland, and it’s not in the middle of Greenwood Lake. I remembered a simple, but forgotten lesson:

Seize or savor. Fully immerse, or, fully disconnect. Never stall in the in-between. Either plunge into the digital world and trust yourself, or go find a lake and seep into your ancient mind. There’s no point in planning when you’re mid-catapult into the unknown. Just steer the kayak and take in the view.