There I am, in Ireland. I’m on a hill, and the sea stretches past my small cottage and disappears into a smudge of white. The stone walls and other small cottages are all behind me a ways off, almost like they aren’t part of the picture. The scene is cute, neatly uncluttered and green. Panning right and from above there is me standing, looking over the water smoking a pipe and wearing a captain’s hat and an Irish fisherman’s sweater, alongside wool pants that appear to be tucked into the tops of my boots. There’s a goat in a stone pen beside me rooting for something on the ground, so maybe I like to trudge around in the mud and shit in my off time, so that’s why the boots are there. There are no boats, not one that I can see except for the overturned dinghy down the beach a bit. There’s a chair out front the cottage. It doesn’t look too comfortable. It’s just a wooden chair that looks like it is about to fall over, but which has probably lived longer than this version of me has. The whole thing, beautiful as it may be, seems pretty cliché really. Captain me is a long time divorcee or widower ex priest turned demon hunter or exorcist or some other thing, and maybe they are are all kind of the same thing. He inherited the place from his grandfather who left it to the family after he died in a war. The goat is really the smartest thing in this picture. Jack London would be proud. And sooner or later a mermaid or some other siren-like creature will emerge from the foam below his quaint and stoic homestead and approach him wearing a bit of seaweed and promise him something that comes with a price he’s all too willing to pay, since he thinks he has nothing to live for, not even for himself. But what he doesn’t know is that the alluring creature, the goat, and even the sea is also him, so to think he might be the one seducing himself with promises of eternal pleasure, after what he thinks has been a lifetime of eternal pain, never really crosses his mind. I take a seat in the chair and watch them make love in the pen, with the goat licking the toes of the siren, and occasionally jumping up and down, like a child who’s about to get money for the ice cream truck. They never see me, no matter how close I get. I could be standing right over them, and they’d still be going at it. But screwed up as all this is, it’s all still so beautiful here. The scene is perfect in a way I can’t describe. Maybe it’s perfect in a way I don’t want to describe. Descriptions are always so lacking anyway, so I’d rather not try. Instead, I’d rather reduce myself to simile and say the place feels like me in my small yard at my unforgiving childhood mobile home waiting for an imaginary crush to come over to the house and start teasing me, while my cat Corky parades through the chive garden, occasionally stopping to nibble on a few stalks in between hopping over honey bees that have been hogging the purple clover that have been popping up all over the yard and resemble a countryside of churches.