Pages Torn From a Travel Journal Read Free

world revolved around matters of base & morbid carnality. Now removed from the squat repair building, I embarked into blazing sun & the sights of sweeping fields to the north & dense-packed woods to the south. Across the narrow asphalt ribbon, I spied the pregnant one waddling cumbersomely into a trail posted with a makeshift sign that read simply LAKE with a painted arrow pointing. Presumably she meant to join the rube fishers. So distended was her belly that she braced it as she walked w/interlocked fingers beneath its considerable girth. She stopped, glanced once over her shoulder at me, then continued & disappeared into the overgrown trail.
    The weather could not have been more propitious, and I found a trail proceeding in the opposite direction & at once let myself be engulfed by it. The woods off the road were redolent w/delightful fresh spring smells, and locusts trilled pleasantly. Scenic strolls, just like scenic bus & train rides, were welcome opportunities for the esthete in me to emancipate my mind of life’s discord & to ponder upcoming tales. But after the queer observation in the commode–& Nate’s harrowing dissertation of local female proclivities—I found creative concentration beyond the realm of the possible.
    Nate’s endorsement of the “creekers” stuck to me like a gadfly. Certainly some women, just as some men, were possessed of accelerated sexual yearnings, perhaps forged by upbringing or environment, or some hormonal imbalance as certain recent scientific journals were known to imply, though I was hardly the expert. I can only speak of my own libido which has always seemed to run on the low side. In times past, when the endless discourse with my New York Group turned to matters of crudity, it was made known to me that certain women exist stricken with syndromes such as nymphomania & erotopathia –hmm. Sonia, during my short-lived term of wedlock, had gone through such spates, for sure. She’d wake me from a sound sleep as though I were a vender on demand! & once Little Belknap, in one of his coarser turns of talk, had referred to a species of woman “hell-bent for cock,” he’d said; & CAS–quite the ladies man–had made similar references in his wild missives: women obsessed with the male privates. If I remember with any accuracy, he’d called them “head-queens,” of all things. I’d scoffed at such talk but then I was admittedly not an authority. For amusement I tried to think of a more scholarly appellation—a sufferer from some acute pudendamaniacal syndrome. Indeed, a genitalus obsessus!
    Truly I am the odd man out in this world of musky lasciviousness–I find most of human nature deplorable & most of the human species cretin-like, people akin to the filling station itself: human hovels; while my cohorts jokingly dub me the misanthrope. I can only hark back to my short tale of the necropolis. I am an outsider.
    Yet an outsider with some pomp. While many men would join in to the gutter-talk as a means of demonstrating masculinity, I know that it was my culture, my superior breeding & gentry that were the admixture which triggered my revulsion. But now, however, I’d be dishonest to refute . . .
    Something about Nate’s foul-mouthed rant left me . . . sexually enlivened.
    My privates verifiably throbbed.
    I let my mind wander as I traversed the sedate trail, shaded by branches of century-old trees. Amid quotidian shelf-fungus, tree boles, flowery vines, one out-of-sort discovery stopped me in my tracks:
    A yellowed mammalian skull–most probably canine–with a hole in it.
     
    Later
     
    In correspondence, August once referred to an associate who’d undertaken side-employment as a seller of lightning rods. This occurs to me now only as an undue abstraction, for I myself feel akin to a lightning rod, not one that attracts nature’s storm-born electrical emissions but instead?
    Human sexual perversity.
    With each step of my walk, it seemed, thoughts overtly sexual rankled