Tent #1

I wake up with no intentions of where I possible could be.  Vinyl fabric surrounds me and I’m laying on a wrinkled gray tarp covered in un-zipped sleeping bags.  The sun was radiating my fortress and I when my common sense started coming back to me I wondered where Joe was.  Well he left the zipper door contraption open and ants were beginning to march towards our collection of munchies.  I could trace back the line to the origin of entry.  It felt like bugs were beginning to become everywhere.  I saw a spider stare at me from the corner of the slope right over where I woke up.  And I felt the mosquito bites still stinging me from last night. 

    I take another look around blindly and wonder whether not where I am because that would eventually come to me but where my friend Joe was?  He is a nineteen year old, very short, black buzz cut hair and usually in a wife beater this early in the morning.  It was 9:44.  If he has gone missing, I probably wouldn’t be able to spot him.  He’s only a hundred pounds and with the weight of nature encompassing him, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a shadow and a person. 
    I begin to worry because he is the one that drove here.  We are in the middle of Wisconsin, waiting for our other friends to eventually get off work and show up.  We had no electricity, no internet, and nothing that would pass the time effectively but ourselves.  And he’s been kidnapped maybe.  We went on a walk late last night through the camp ground to see if anyone else was here.  We spotted two other parties but what really got our attention was these really bright lights surrounding, what looked to be a wide open field.  I heard this camp ground had their own personal run way but the area didn’t look like the airports I was used to.  Why was their a barrier between us and them if it actually was for airplanes and pilots?  Oh, there is barbed wire and it’s a maximum security prison.  Jeez, I need to find Joe.d
    I begin to look for my cell phone in this mess of a tent.  We have different kinds of Doritos, pull n peel cherry Twizzlers, jellybean Starburst and all the other great road trip foods.  Next to the tent door, was a bowl that we never finished.  I decide the best thing to do would be to take a hit.  At least one that’s for sure.  I pick it up, a black bowl that has a lightning blue and creamy white squiggling throughout the piece.  It’s much heavier then it looks.  I fit it in my hand and light my bic and grasp the choke and inhale. I wait for the smoke to foam out of the end that you pack and I continue to inhale.  I look back down and where the bowl used to be was where my cell phone was.  I swap objects for one another and get back on this scavenger hunt. 
    I sift through my address book on my Blackberry for his number.  Joe Carole and dial.  I wait standing awkwardly in a tent, slightly slouched over and weak from the exhausting sleep on the ground.  It just kept on ringing until I got his 2 year old voicemail.  I hardly even knew him back then.  I decide to leave the solitude of this tent and pilgrimage outside.  Maybe I can find him or at least act like I tried to. I unzip the rest of tent and the sun made everything absorb into their natural white transparencies.  Everything looked a different shade of white as if I was in a box of kleenex. But one blink, as the liquid in my eyes coat my vision, everything returns back to normal.  It’s a perfect day outside.  Blue sky with a breezy gust of wind and I am staring into my own personal lake.  I take a glance at the picnic table and camp fire area, 15 feet to the right of our tent and still no sign of Joe.
    I keep on looking around trying to piece the puzzles to where he possibly could of went.  I’ve known Joe to be an adventurer especially when he has consumed a toxin.  One time comes to mind specifically.  We were at a friends house and Joe and my friend Adam, a blonde hair, stocky kid over drank.  Adam was immobilized and throwing up white mucus so we paid more attention to him.  Joe slipped out the door, threw up on a tree, and walked all the way home at 2 in the morning.  It wasn’t the farthest walk but for any one who has ever been drunk, a mile could take an hour and the slightest unfamiliarity could lead to stumbling, tripping, and be incapacitated in a ditch where no one but a police officer could find him.  So just to make sure you he didn’t travel to far, I looked past our bridge to the left of the tent to see if his Toyota Camry was still parked by the green bushes and by my amazement, it was.
    I decided to walk towards it, walking on the newly built bridge separating us from the crime ridden world to our paradise.  An island of your own can hold all of your imagination but once you get off and have to leave, you lose your fictional perception and need to retain your sanity in the real world.  While I approach Joe’s car, I notice that the mountain dew from yesterday was in the same place.  He has not left yet today.  Somehow that information was groundbreaking.  He has not forgotten about me and that was solely soothing.  But then I heard my cell phone and felt the vibration in my pants and hurried cluelessly to locate the noise with my sense of touch.  It was in my right pant pocket so I bent my elbow and fetched it.  I put the phone in my peripherals and read the caller identification and it was from Joe Carole.  I pick it up ecstatically.
    “Hello. You called?”
    “Yeah dude I was wondering where you were?”
    “Oh, I woke up early and went on a walk.”
    “Well I know that haha, but where are you now?”
    “I don’t know man.”
    “Well what’s around you?”
    I began pacing around by the tent as we were talking.
    “I can see you.”
    “How?”
    “I can just see you sideways.”
    “Are you laying down?”
    “Yeah I am on a bench.”
    I was not familiar with this place at all and the relevance of a bench could mean everything and nothing.
    “What have you been up to?”   
    “Well I woke up about an hour ago, smoked a bowl and decided to go take some pictures.  Dude you have to see this shot I got.
    “Well where are you?”
    “Dude I can see you from where I am.”
    I begin to look around for any sign of life but all I saw was a lake all around me.  But as I look towards the receptionist office for the camp site I see a dock.  With some benches on it and a strange figure laying down on top.  It was Joe and he was just slouched over in a ridiculous, extreme, hanging position while looking through his Iphone towards our island.  He was mesmerized.