Late at night, sometime after 12, a car rolls to a gentle inclined stop over grooved concrete. There is tension in the air like pink electricity, and it sits heavy in the guts of each man and woman stepping out of the vehicle. They awkwardly walk down the hill toward a sandy beach; not soft sand from the coasts, but the coarse, rocky sands of the Midwest, which feels excruciating along soft bare feet. They find a patch close to the water that looks dry, and they each begin pulling off their shoes, and then their socks, followed by their pants, one by one. The men don't hesitate to pull off their shirts, but the women glance at one another, crossing their chests with both hands hanging at their collar bones and look out over the inky black water burbling the weft out into pitch horizon. They giggle in anticipation, lifting from their belly button and flipping the shirt inside out onto the sand, then reaching up and unclasping their bras. 

Everyone covers their parts, the men with both hands between their legs, the women with one arm over the top and the other hand like a leaf. They each dip a toe into the chilly ink before slowly, and painfully, sidling in. There's talk, there's always talk; something to kill the jolt of cold through the body, and something to distract from bare flesh hidden beneath the murk. Everyone in the water wants to see everyone else underneath the water... And everyone in the water wants everyone else to see them... Yet this is the dance in which they partake. Perhaps nothing shall take place inside, or outside, of that cold and black reflection, but when the heart begins to race, and when each man or woman has the chance to show another just what's underneath all of those clothes - just what they could be capable of, given the right conditions, lights down, lips interlocked, fevered hands moving quickly - the body suddenly wriggles away from consciousness and slides effortlessly down, down, down into the deepness and wholeness of primal, nurturing nakedness. Everything there is warm. Everything there makes us tingle. Everything there makes us yearn. And we never, ever want to leave.

On the outside of the water, a place between the emptiness of cold night and the loneliness of exclusion, sits those too afraid to enter: the nerds, the uninvited, the cowardly, the ugly, people too mixed up in their own apprehensions and repression. They look out over the churning black tide and see their friends having so much fun. In between glimpses of naked flesh and the trumpeting of singing voices, they wonder what it's like to feel the silt squishing between their toes, or how little plants feel like tufts of hair against the pads of feet, or how, sometimes, a little nibble means there's a fish, or a little pinch means there's a suitor. Yet, they remain outside, they do not enter. Perhaps they've been in once before and they were laughed out. Perhaps they don't understand the use in swimming, perhaps they can't swim. Or perhaps they're afraid of something else...

Those in the water... how they laugh, how they play, how they carry on. Time does not exist around them, worries do not exist around them, nothing exists in that deep, dark pool except reflections of themselves staring back up, holding their attention, keeping them wanting more.

I was born in a time when there was nothing. This is also known as a time before the internet, a sort of prehistory; a time when the closest things to "computers" were secret languages whispered across keyboards at the altar of DOS. Mine was the last generation to know the difference between a miserable reality consumed by hours of boredom, and the fantasy we live in now, strangled by the ever-lulling tentacles of sexual appetite, social excess, circuses of bread and sport, and the Internet. My generation went from making the occasional phone call from a device bolted to the wall, to pagers, to cell phones, to smartphones, to shit implanted into your hands, arms and legs each letting you know there's someone out there commenting on your Facebook status. We went from blindness and anonymity to the constant all-seeing, ever-wakeful self-absorption of an unerasable, omnipotent ONLINE. We used to know the difference between 'me' offline and 'me' online - but we are not wired to focus on all things at once, our eyes are on the front of our skulls. We see what's there on the screen and everything else becomes blurry along the periphery until this "reality" becomes reality. All that matters are the words we're reading, the emotions we're feeling and the potential for soothing pleasure at our fingertips. It is as real as everything else because it exists, and it reacts to us, and we react to it. Whether the magic of an algorithm convinces us to buy an additional shirt, or whether our newsfeed reaffirms our political leaning, it's there, staring us in the face, jaws wide open and smiling. 

Sitting outside of the water, I'm just another ugly nerd that won't swim. I can't see myself in the reflection of that black mirror. I can't understand what it's like to slip down smoothly into the water of ever-self-expression. There is no need, or want, to slide away from the firm ground. There is no draw to stay under, even if it means frantically pulling the hair of those drowning at my feet in a vain effort to not remain alone out here in the wilderness by the lake.

In all of my misanthropic hypocritical majesty, I really do watch from the edge, helpless, dumb, uncertain and often yearning to be a part of the merriment. By no means am I happy with who I am. By no means am I sure that I'm right, or wrong, or anything. By no means do I possess the answers amidst the chaos, the ever turning, ever suffering, ever loving world. Yet when I peer out over the water and I see those beautiful naked people, I wonder if they know what's happening to them. I watch as their identities are stripped away like so many articles of clothing. I watch as they dip their toes into self-pornography. I watch them staking their lives on 'Likes', or tearing themselves to pieces over 'comments'. And once they've immersed themselves into the fantasy, they never, ever want to leave, even when it means peering into their own helplessly lost reflections through exhaustion until water finally fills their lungs.

It is lonely here outside of the water, away from the laughing and splashing and wonderful nakedness. I'm just another post-grunge-post-GenX-post-modern-pre-millennial who thinks he has it figured out, as if I know what's going on and I'm too cool to get involved; the proto-hipster wearing a beard, glasses, and flannel. But then I'm not kidding myself, either. I'm just as guilty of living in a fantasy, driven by the desires found on the internet.

About a week ago, I was hanging out at the UP classification yard, as I'm wont to do, taking pictures of switchers lining up cars and their train-engine brethren idling nearby. I like to post those pictures at the Railroad Picture Archives for other weirdos like me to drool over. In fact, right now, for good or ill, I'm probably one of the only people regularly posting pictures of trains in Des Moines.

So along came some foreign power, a BNSF road engine, leading a UP Big Mac toward a cut of cars to couple up before heading out of the yard. It's a little unusual to see BNSF at the UP yard because BNSF doesn't have any lines, or yards, in Des Moines. So I lifted my hand to my head and saluted a wave - something I typically do as an acknowledgement to the engineer as if to say, "Hi there! Nice to see you." We made eye contact, he lifted his hand, and pushed out his middle finger and thumb. He left it hanging there for a good few seconds, looked in his mirror and continued onward in reverse, trailing out of sight. 

For a moment, I refused to let it phase me - I took the shot without his hand gesture. But as I trotted back to my car, I thought, "Goddamnit, what a jerk. What's his problem, anyway?" And then I laughed. I'm living in a fantasy, too; this romantic idea that trains and their engineers are somehow beyond the weaknesses of other humans, gods aloft the iron road. If it was me, and I'd been having a shitty day, and some dumbass freak is hanging out in a crummy yard at the fringe of Des Moines (a fringe of its own), and this guy waves at me with a camera dangling around his neck, I'd probably have made much ruder, more direct gestures.

Outside of the water, we have to be careful, too. We can't dip our toes in only to slide forward headlong, gulping a lungfull of god. We have to remember that the reflection in the water below is a ghost. It only exists to reflect us back to ourselves; a hoary mirror in which we've been gazing ever since. But those jovial satyrs and nymphs frollicking in the water? They're a long time sleeping, and it's going to be cold, uncomfortable and embarrassing to get out now. Why try? Better to just keep plunging down and drinking in. Because what else is there now, but the reflection? And which direction are we travelling, but deeper and deeper into this lake?

Beware the fantasy. Beware your reflection.