I wonder about things I can’t see. Wonder if they are really there, present, watching, wanting, needing, warring. . .and I wonder if you wonder also. Other people seem to see shit I don’t see and then I again wonder if I’m making the whole shebang too fucking complicated for my own brain and that there’s shit all around me if I would only simplify it, but we’re not simple creatures now are we? I put a lot of this musing in the book TORMENT (and for those who have bought it I thank you. I realize it’s a difficult read, but I can tell you there was little left of me when I finished the manuscript and some authors spend their whole lives waiting to say that very thing and I just did. You got it all, for four fucking dollars and ninety-nine cents, so yes, that is A BARGAIN. Hahahaha!). Anyway, you nice people seem to be reading the shit out of this blog in “bloggyland,” or whatever the hell it’s called, so back to the subject. I was walking the aforementioned “swamp trail” about two weeks ago in the hell heat and way in the distance was a man with a backpack and trekking poles and he was coming north while I was walking south and I tell you the asphalt was baking. And he wasn’t young. When he got within twenty yards of me I could see he had on expensive hiking shorts and boots and one of those memory fabric shirts that aren’t given away at flea markets. I’m not supposed to walk in brain damaging heat because of a minor “heat stroke” a few years back. But I have it in my head that if there’s anything deep down in my cells or body waiting to kill me I’ll destroy it by punishing the shit out of myself doing goofy exercises in too many clothes and all the bastard cells will die. Then I’ll live to be 140 or 142, or something in that range. So the man got right up to me on the other side of the main road without looking or lifting a pole or saying anything at all so I stopped, which I never do, and stared at him for what seemed to be an eternity. I’m not a good candidate for abduction or to be rolled in a van and sold to an overseas brothel, but I think about it. At this moment I thought, “this motherfucker is a spotter for the underground sex industry and I have been FOUND! This is it! Prepare!” If the van would’ve pulled up the first guy out was going to get the Mexican dagger from the prostitute in Juarez (see previous blog) in his throat or some other organ, but it was just him, another migrant like me, alone and solitary. He didn’t miss a step or even look my way. He said directly and patiently this: “hold fast. Do the miles. Stay coursed.” Then he was gone. Up the road in the hell heat walking and walking and I never saw him again. I do thirty miles a week on this particular trail and this is the only walker I’ve ever seen. Strange to me? Yes, it was. If you’ve had similar strangeness you’re welcomed to send me an email about it at brittsullivan0727@gmail.com. I don’t want to be distant and mysterious and arrogantly elitist and a literary asshole. I write like one, but I’m not in their fucking club. You can read Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville and O’Connor and still fix someone’s sheetrock. Because of you this is my job and I want to be available for your story, because you’ve been buying TORMENT, which is all I could offer just then. JBS