Zabi Muz

I'm caught in a whirlpool and am waiting to be spit out. It is dangerous and the chances are that I won 't be spit out at all, that I will just circle here until I am pulled under and drown. But sometimes, often enough, I hope, in the variations of water pressure and movement--POP!--out you come. I can see the faces of the people on the shoreline, fascinated, horrified, like a series of snapshots as I twirl 'round and 'round.

I need not have been on the river, I tell myself. I need not have been so brave or silly at all taking my chances so close to danger. But it is how I like to see myself and once in awhile you must take chances if you are to continue to hold the image, however real or false. Swirling for so long, even a potentially drowning man has time to think, and I flashback to all the close calls from which I've escaped before. They have taught me bad things, those experiences, I think realizing how much I envy those spectators onshore. Performing for the crowd. That is what I've done. And not even a large crowd at that, most people neither noticing nor caring for the outrageousness and the antics. "That's what he wanted," I imagine them saying in voices tainted with revulsion and exhilaration when they hear the news. "I never cared for his behavior."

I don't have a photo to post this morning. I've looked. I'll post something from someone else's site that I have downloaded for reference. This is probably from one of Jim Linderman's blogs, but I'm not sure.