Serenity

I want serenity.

Some of my favorite lyrics Bob Dylan ever wrote are as follows: "Build me a cabin in Utah. Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout. Have a bunch a kids who call me 'Pa.' That must be what it's all about. That must be what it's all about."

I need a bench on a porch to sit on and a hammock strung between two tall trees somewhere on my acreage and a few squirrels around.

I used to be a Boy Scout. One time our troop went to a week-long Scout Camp. There were hundreds of Scouts out there for a week earning merit badges and putting on skits and buying junk food at the trading post and making leather pocketknife sheathes. The main thing we were supposed to do was earn merit badges.

At the time I went, I didn't have any aspirations to become an Eagle Scout. So that week in the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I watched the fire burn, laid (layed? lie? lied? lay?) in a hammock, played a lot of chess, had a nice break from my parents, and that's about it. I didn't earn a single merit badge. Ha ha ha. My Scout leaders probably would have done something about my laziness, but they had bigger fish to fry, what with some of the other boys smoking pot and killing rattle snakes. Ha ha ha.