The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress, I called to the Lord....(Psalm 18)
 

I.     Mid-October. Black dogs howling at the moon, but I'm safe inside this one-story on the edge of town.  This is the time of year when Grandpa Jeff took me fishing.  Those trips were the best part of my life.
      Shortly, I'll drive down to Western Ribs to see Dara, who never met my grandpa.  Still incredibly beautiful, Dara will not see  me.  Nor will she forgive me for failing Jenny Sparks.  I  have written  Dara letters, explaining that  no one was to blame.  How  could anyone except  God engineer that malevolent turn of events?  But Dara is unrelenting, and so I slowly burn in the dark pit of my own  conscience.
      Allow me to pour myself another drink while  dark things filter out of my mind, and then I'll tell the story and let you decide.

II.      I liked Jenny Sparks.   Jenny Sparks had always been there for me: when I received the science fair award in grade school, Jenny  helped me put together my  a solar-powered flashlight; in the eight grade, we went through confirmation together at Good Shepherd Lutheran church; she  stood with me, tire iron in hand,   when Duke Kennedy jumped me one night after a high school football game;  when I pitched a no-hitter in high school, Jenny cheered my every pitch; we spent the night of our high school graduation together in the suite of a prominent hotel on the Strip;  during our two years together at the community college, we took every class
together. She wanted us to go away to college together, somewhere on the East coast where we could start life over. I think she was in love with me.
      After community college, Jenny dropped out and turned to nude dancing while I continued onto the university. She stayed in touch, calling me every other day.   Finally, when I approached graduation, she invited me to her club  so I could meet  Dara Collins.     That was the night I met Rick Spenser, a tall, thin red-headed  man with perfect teeth and squinting eyes. Rick and I seemed to hit it off;  we both liked hockey, girls, and Irish beer.  And Rick  fell in love with Dara.  A Wyoming girl, Dara was tall and thin with long dark brown hair cascading down her back; her eyes
were wild blue; she had a lizard tattooed on her left butt cheek. Jenny told me that she thought Dara had killed a man once, but I didn't believe that.   Dara was as beautiful as I had expected and that night sat on my lap when she wasn't dancing.
     As for Jenny, she was a medium-sized blonde with a perfect figure and beautiful features that required no make-up.  Jenny apparently was one of the most popular dancers at the club and had taken part in several adult films.   In high school, she had told me she dreamed of being a porn star.
I wonder now if she told me this, hoping I would rescue her.
      On the girls' night off at the end of June 1984,  Rick and I met Jenny  and Dara  at Denny's on Sahara just off the Strip.  I had slept with Dara several times since our first meeting,  and Dara and I had come to view Rick as obnoxious and stupid.  But Rick continued to hang around with me. Maybe he admired me.
      Having aced  my college finals  in the spring, I was headed for graduate school in Southern California, hoping to take Dara with me..  When Rick and I walked into the restaurant, we saw the girls sitting at a table near the back. Dara waved at me, but Jenny didn't look our way.
      When we sat down, Jenny gave me a cordial hello.   Rick zeroed in on
Dara, who couldn't take her eyes off me. After our food came, Jenny drank her coffee and ate her cherry pie in silence,  occasionally glancing at me.   Her hair was disheveled,  and she wore tight blue shorts and a blazing red T-shirt.   Perhaps, her past was catching up to her:   she had been thrown out of her mother's house four years before, she had given up on college,   and  her sister had been shot to death in a grocery store parking lot six months  before.
      "What's wrong, Jenny?" I asked, putting my arm around her and kissing
her lightly on the cheek.
      "I dunno," she mumbled, glancing my way and smiling weakly.
      "Tell me. What's the matter?" I said. Dara and Rick were listening.
      "Everything, Jeff,"  she said.
      "Like what?" I asked.
      "Like,  I'm   sick and tired of Vegas," Jenny finally said, running
her fingers through her long, stringy  hair.  She was near tears.  "Jesus, I'm sick of this town. Is there a point?"
      I paused.  Years ago, we had believed in God. We'd believed that for everything there was a purpose.
      "Maybe not, Jenny," I said.
      Jenny  fixed her eyes on me.  "Y'know,  Jeff, all I ever known was bars, strip joints. My  mom worked in one. Loved to dance, she said. Grandma  worked in one, but I never met her.  Just for once, I want something different.  I don't wanna go to New York. I don't want L. A.  Shit, what is there?   Sometimes I think I'm dying here. Jesus, I'm so  empty I could die."
      We sat in silence.   I knew about Jenny's mom. I didn't know her dad, but neither did Jenny.   We'd had sex on several occasions. The last time, toward the end of our second year at community,  she had told me she loved me.
      "I dunno," I mumbled. "Maybe this is as good as it gets.  Which isn't bad.  I mean,  I'm goin' to grad school. And you got a career."
      Jenny took a bite of pie and drank some coffee.
      "Yeah, I am honestly impressed with you Jeff," Jenny said, looking at a point on the ceiling. "I dunno. Maybe I like gettin' my brains fucked out on the screen. Still, I want somethin' different."
       I said nothing.  I had a career to think about.
      "Whaddya have in mind, Jenny?" asked Dara, who had pointedly ignored Rick.
      Jenny sighed.  "I think  anything but Vegas."
     "Maybe," I ventured. "you should to the mountains. Go to Mt. Charleston."  Mount Charleston was about thirty miles northwest of the city.   Jenny and I had been there together three years before.  "Mt. Charleston is nice."
      "More than Mt. Charleston," Jenny mumbled.  "Mt. Charleston is just more Vegas.  Let's go to that place you and your grandpa always used to go when we were younger. That place I always used to ask you about?  You remember, right? I mean, let's all of us go."
      "Of course I remember," I said. I hadn't talked about the place for several years now.
       I hadn't  visited the place since my grandfather had died of a brain tumor seven years before. When I was growing up in Las Vegas, every autumn,  Grandpa and I would journey to one particular campground in the far northern part of the state, pitch a tent, and fish the stream adjacent to the camp. While I could always feel a brooding darkness hanging over and around the camp, I could only see the place's beauty when I was with Grandpa. The green waters of the stream were always ice-cold, the pools dark and deep and lovely.  At midday, when the fish weren't biting, Grandpa and I would swim those pools with Grandpa always watching.  The night Grandpa died, I had driven over to Jenny's house, and Jenny had held me all
night. My own parents had died in an airplane crash when I was twelve.
       "It would be the perfect place," I conceded. I remembered it  as a place of haunting, almost unearthly beauty. Insects sang in the trees, and coyotes howled  at night.  "It's way back in the mountains,  up north past Wells. Some of the most beautiful country you'll ever see. Air pure and fresh. If you like to fish, there's plenty of that"
      Jenny smiled. "That sounds great.   I've always wondered what was up there.  You and your grandpa never took me."
      No, I had never taken or even invited her to the place my grandpa and I had considered the most sacred place on the planet.
      I looked at Dara.
      "I been fishing before," Rick boasted.  "My brother and I used to go to this little lake out of San Bernadino.  Caught a shit-load of fish."
      "This place isn't the same," I said. I looked at Dara, who had rolled her eyes when Rick had spoken.
      "This place is little more remote than San Bernadino," said Dara. "I'm not sure I  wanna go to Northern Nevada."
      "Why?" I said.  Of the four of us, Dara was the only one who had been
raised in the country.
      "Stories," Dara  replied.
      "What stories?" I asked. I had heard stories long ago, told by locals
grandpa and I had met at the campground, but nothing  bad had ever happened
when  my grandpa and I used to go.
      "Just stories.  About evil.  About wild black things coming out of the woods and killing people," Dara said.
     I felt something twist in my gut.
      "What?" Rick laughed. "That's kid stuff."
      I glared at Rick. At times, I found Rick unbearable.
      "How old were you when you heard the stories?" Jenny asked.
      "Four or five," Dara answered, hesitantly.
      "Jesus," I  breathed, dark images flitting through my mind like bats.

      "But they were just stories is all they were, Jeff," said Dara. "No big deal."
      Rick burst in. "We all got stories from our childhood scare us to death.  My momma used to scare me with bogey man stories.  I say we go."
       "Yeah, let's do it," said Jenny. "C'mon, Jeff. C'mon, Dara."
      "All right," I said, resigned.  I honestly figured we'd be all right.
"But it doesn't have to be northern Nevada.  We can go somewhere else," I commented, temporarily feeling the fear that tales of northern Nevada used to awaken in me. "Dara?" I said.
       Dara smiled at me.  "I dunno.  What do I wanna do?" I suspect that Dara just wanted to be with me.
      "You wanna go," Jenny said, reaching across the table and  taking Dara's hand in her own. "We all wanna go."
      I looked at Dara and smiled, and she smiled back.
      "I guess," said Dara, shrugging her shoulders.  "Let's see what happens."

III.   Two weeks later, at six  am, we headed north.  It was a long drive through an unrelentingly hot desert. I felt good about going; time had come to accept my grandfather's death.  Besides, I was going to have a weekend with Dara.  I wasn't giving much thought to Jenny.
     At one in the afternoon, I turned onto the dirt road that led to the campground. I hoped the place would be the same.   When we arrived around two thirty, following my instructions, we  pitched our tent in the abandoned campground, took our fishing and camping gear out of my car,  and sat on a log to drink a bottle of wine.  As we sat, I glanced at the fire pit and beyond where  I saw the skeleton of a large mammal.
    I remembered that the campground had always been clean when I was with
Grandpa. I suggested that we walk down to the river to fish, and everyone agreed. Picking up our fishing gear,  we crossed a field to get to the forest and the stream.
      The forest was as dark as it had always been; trees grew so tall and thick that you couldn't see the sky.  Creatures who lived in the forest made constant sound flitting through the tops of trees. The creek on other side of this dark wood was  as I remembered it: ice-cold water exploding over rocks and boulders down to the valley miles and miles below. Cool mist  mixed with the fresh scent of pine.   As we stood on the trail looking down at the stream, the water was still high enough to form the deep pools.
      I cast a sideways glance at Jenny, who stood next to me.  She looked
enraptured.
      "Well?" I said.
      "Holy Mother of God, Jeff, " exclaimed Jenny, breathless.  She was dressed in a flimsy gray halter top and tiny tight shorts and wasn't wearing a bra.   "Is this where you and your grandpa came?   Shoulda taken me here years ago, Jeff."
      I looked at Rick and Dara, who stood on my other side. Keeping her eyes on me, Dara hadn't said two words to Rick all day.
      "Jesus, this is somethin', " said Rick. Originally from LA, Rick never seen a stream like this.
      The four of us stood, surrounded by thick dark pines on both sides of the creek, felt the mist against our skin, and let the thundering water drown thought.  I closed my eyes and imagined my grandfather next to me.Then I opened my eyes, slowly, and looked at Dara, who was hungrily looking at me.
      "It's like what you want heaven to look like,  if you believe in that
shit," Dara finally said, moving away from Rick and closer to me. Dara wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. Her hands were stuffed into back pockets.  "I guess  this won't be so bad."
      In my mind's eye, I could see Grandpa telling me to throw my line into the water. It was then that I felt Dara brush up against me and place her hand on my back.
      "Let's fish," I said.
      "God, yes, let's do that," Jenny said.  In a file, holding our fishing poles, we walked down to the creek.  When we got to the water, I said that we'd need to spread out a bit.
        Dara didn't need any help.   I watched her as she walked upstream a bit and  expertly cast her line across the stream.  I took Jenny downstream  and  showed her  what to do,  what kind of pools to look for, how to bait her hook,  weight her line and cast across a pool.  We were like kids again, and she learned quickly and enthusiastically. Across one pool that we fished, I noticed something dark hanging from a tree across the stream. My heart missing a beat and my ears ringing, I avoided looking at the thing.
     As I looked over my shoulder, I saw Rick  walking up the path we had just come down  and  moving upstream.
      "Hey, Rick!" I shouted over the sound of the stream.   Rick turned on the trail and looked back at us. "Let's stay together."
      "I'll be right back," Rick yelled.  "Just going up the stream a bit."

      "I think we should all stay together," Jenny said, holding her pole over the water and looking at me.
      "Good riddance, you son-of-a-bitch," Dara muttered as she crouched and fished along the shore.  Dara's response surprised me, and we smiled at each other. We both thought Rick would return; we just fed up with him.
      "Jesus, why not let him go?" I mumbled.  Rick got on my nerves. Anyway, I  figured that Rick would be fine. In all years my grandfather and I had come to this place, nothing unusual had ever happened.  Of course, I had never been allowed to wander upstream.     "If he follows the stream up," I said, "then he has to follow the stream back.  Don't worry.  I been up here dozens of times."
      While Rick moved upstream and disappeared from view, the girls and I fished for at least two hours,  moving  downstream to the part of the river that had the pools.   By the time the air began to cool and darkness slowly began to fall, I had caught three,  Dara  five, and Jenny  two.
      Jenny seemed happier than I'd seen her for years.
      "If we were in Vegas," Jenny said, studying the water,   "we'd be working now.  Twenty-four hours ago,  we were dancing.  Jeff, you are a fuckin' genius."
       I looked at Jenny, her spirits soaring.
       "Sure is beautiful," Dara replied, crouched along the back land holding her line with her left hand and using the other to drag the baited hook through a dark pool. "Back in Vegas, we'd be dancin' and drinkin' and gettin' screwed up for one more evening."
       The course of one's life can turn in an instant: one minute, you're in heaven; the next minute, you've dropped into the pit of hell.
     I was one the verge of telling the girls about the afternoon when grandpa caught twelve fish when the whole universe seemed to go dead silent and I heard some sounds: a cracking of dry wood mixed with faint howling. At first, they seemed to come from far away, perhaps half a mile upstream, but the more I listened, the closer the sounds seemed. Then, suddenly, all sounds stopped.
      "Jeff," Jenny said,   "what was that?" Jenny looked up stream in the
direction of the sounds.
      "Probably just some deer," said Dara in a hollow voice.  Dara was still fishing but was staring directly at me.
      I struggled to find an explanation.
      "Maybe Rick coming back?" I commented.  "Sound really travels in the forest, particularly near a stream like this."
      "Maybe so," said Jenny.
      As we waited, we heard sounds again, only much, much louder this time: the sharp, hollow snapping of dried and dead wood, the sound indicating  something heading our way. An image of dark wings and pounding feet filled my brain. I heard the sound again and again. The sounds were growing increasingly louder.
      "Sounds like a bunch," said Dara, pulling her line out of the water, wrapping it around her pole, and walking toward me.
      "Of what?" I began,  as low howling began from all points directly in front of us.  The sounds were almost on top of us.
      Wondering what Grandpa would do, I said, calmly, "I think we need to head back. This isn't Rick coming."
     I looked at Dara.
     "That's a good idea," said Dara.
      I looked at Jenny, who stood motionless. Jenny was scared. I was, too.
      When we heard the cracking again, followed by low throaty snarling, this time just beyond the creek, Jenny began to panic.  "Jesus, that sounds fucked up.   I don't wanna be here.  Please, Jeff, let's hurry and get outa here." Jenny sounded like the frightened little girl I used to know in grade school.  She'd already pulled her line out of the water and was walking alone back up the path that led to the campground.
      While Dara waited, I pulled my line out of the water  and wrapped it around my pole.  Dara and I  turned and headed up the path when we both heard the loud cracking of wood just across the stream but this time no howling. We stopped, looked across the stream.  We heard it again, then an explosion of sounds, like quick shots, coming from a wide span on the other side of the creek.
      Fear coursed through me.
      "Feel it?" Dara  asked me.
      "Yes, I feel it," I said, "but I didn't expect this."  My voice sounded hollow.   We knew that we were being watched.   In less than a minute, we had caught Jenny, walking pole in hand, hook and line dangling wildly in space.
     When we reached the tent, we looked at each other. Dara and Jenny were
sweating profusely. I looked back towards the woods. Waiting, I saw nothing
and slowly began to relax. Remembering words  my grandfather had spoken to
me years ago,  I was ashamed of myself for being frightened by forest sounds.
       We decided to pop open some beer  and light a fire as we waited for Rick to return. As we drank, I kept watching the forest separating us from the stream.
     "Maybe I should go back and get Rick," I said. "It's getting late."
     "What about the sounds, Jeff?" Jenny asked, still  shaken.
     "I dunno," I said.  "The forest is  filled with sounds you never heard before."
     "He's right," Dara commented.  "I remember camping when I was little.
There's all sort of sounds in the woods at night."
       "Well, those sounds were pretty creepy," Jenny said, forcing a laugh.  We were drinking beer from cans.
      We drank some more.
      "Well, then, I guess that settles it," Dara finally said.
      "Settles what?" I asked, darkness falling, the night air cooling.
      "That we go into get Rick," she said. Dara's statement took me be surprise. I wondered if she were drunk.
      Jenny reluctantly nodded. I could tell she was slightly buzzed from the beer.
      "All right," I said, "let's go." Even then, I didn't really think we were heading into something sinister.
      It was maybe fifty yards from our campground to the forest. We began the walk across the field.  As I looked  at the point where we would enter the forest, I saw something in the shadows. I could tell it was a man.  He had been watching us and beckoning us to come, and  now he was turning back into the forest.  It couldn't have been Rick.
        I pushed forward. The girls could not know I was afraid. We walked, the day  turning to night, the forest looming in front of us.
     Just short of the entrance to the forest,  we stopped.
      "See him?" Dara whispered to me. "Jeff, did you see that?"
      "See what?" Jenny asked.
      "Something," I said as we all stopped. "Maybe a ranger."
         It was just as Jenny turned to me  that we heard the cracking of wood, the rapid padding of heavy feet on the ground as of something running, and  low growling  directly in front of us. Standing in the clearing just before the forest began, we watched large black shapes slowly emerge from the woods.
      There were six of them: huge black dogs, slinking out of the forest,   silently forming a semi-circle in front of us. I looked back at the campground and noticed that the fire was still going.
      I grabbed the two girls by their arms and pulled them  to me.  I'd been around forest animals before and removed my knife from its sheath.
"We have to stay close," I said. "They're less liable to attack if three become one."  Holding the girls next to me, I watched the great black dogs position themselves, their yellow eyes fixed upon us. The hair on their necks bristled, and the low throaty growl that told me attack was likely.
         Jenny  struggled to break free of my grip and shouted, "This is stupid, Jeff!! This is stupid, stupid, stupid. "  She began crying.  "I didn't ask for this.   I don't wanna die."
      "You're not gonna die," I assured her. "No one's gonna die."
      I kept my eyes on the dogs as they  crept closer.
      "Jenny, please," Dara implored, "he's right,  Stay close.  They won't attack...."
      "But they're coming..." she sobbed.
      The  beasts continued to  creep towards us.
      With a strength I didn't realize she had,  Jenny suddenly jerked her arm away, turned, and broke towards the tent.
      "Jenny!" I shouted.
      I'll never forget this: Jenny sprinting in the twilight, crying hysterically; one animal separating itself from the pack  and catching Jenny in seconds; Dara shouting at me to do something; Jenny screaming and falling as the beast grabbed her ankle in its teeth; two other dogs springing forth and attacking Jenny as she fell, all the while yelling for me; one dog biting her face and seizing her cheek, another seizing her arm in its mouth, the third taking her leg; the blood from the wounds as
the dogs tore into her; Jenny screaming for me and for God, screaming, screaming.
      We watched  as the three dogs  dragged Jenny, her face, arms and legs bloodied and her clothes torn from her,  back in the direction of the forest. Two grabbed her left arm and one her right as they dragged Jenny into darkness.  As Jenny  disappeared,  the three dogs who had been watching
us turned and trotted back into the forest.
       I couldn't move.  I couldn't speak.  I couldn't think.
       Dara broke the spell. "We gotta get Jenny!" she yelled. "Jeff, goddamn it, goddamn it,  Jeff, we gotta do something!" She yanked my arm as she set off to the woods and I followed.
         I wanted to die.   My mind blank, I  moved with Dara into the forest.
         It was almost dark. Pretty soon it would be impossible to walk in the
forest without a flashlight.  So, guided by the sound of the stream, we moved down the path to the stream.  Scaling a small rise just before the water, I noticed that small shafts of sunlight still filtered through the trees, allowing us to see the dark, glistening  stream.  Without saying a word, Dara and I first walked about fifty yards up stream, and then came back down the stream,  always staying close together.
      It was Dara who spotted Jenny, face down in dark shallow  water, her
body half in and half out of the stream just on this side of the large boulder marking the pool where I had caught my fish.    In fading twilight, I ran to her, knelt in the water, put my arms around Jenny, and  turned the body over.  Her face and body were a spider web of cuts and gashes, and her halter top had been torn to shreds.  Her wounds continued to bleed into the water, onto the rock on the shore, and onto me.
      "Jesus," I whispered. Jenny's eyes were wide open, staring imploringly at me.
      "Is she still alive?" Dara asked.
      "I dunno," I answered. I looked into Jenny's eyes,  saw life, and knew Jenny was trying to communicate with me. "I think so."
      "Please forgive me, Jenny," I whispered.
      We both knelt as I held Jenny.  As she bled, her eyes pleading with me, she slowly died, giving one last sigh. Jenny was gone. If Heaven exists, that's when its door must have shut on me.
      After closing Jenny's eyes, I stood, holding the limp body, and Dara stood with me.   It was dark.  "Let's get outa here," I said.
      Dara and I said nothing.  I can't remember how I felt as I walked through the darkening forest, whose trail I knew be heart, and across the field to the campground, carrying the limp body of Jenny Sparks.   Maybe I didn't feel anything.
      When we arrived at the campfire,  Dara moved over to my car, thirty feet away, opened the back door of my car, and I lay Jenny inside.
       "What the hell we gonna do about Rick?" Dara asked, hostile. "Can't just leave him like this."
     I didn't want to think about Rick. I couldn't imagine why Dara cared.
      "Forget Rick, " I mumbled.  "Let's get Jenny back."
      I looked at Dara, who stared at me in disgust.  "We can't just leave Rick, you chicken shit," she said.  "Besides, Jenny's dead."
      "I can," I said. "Get in the car.  We're going down to Wells."
      "You miserable, fucking little chicken shit," Dara said. "You saw what happened. You stood and watched."
      "So did you, babe.  Now, get in the fuckin' car," I said. There was nothing else Dara could do since I had the keys.
       When Dara opened the door and slumped onto the passenger seat, I walked around to the other side of the car, praying that God bring Jenny back to life, opened my door, got in, and started the car.  Reaching eighty at times, I sped in darkness out of the campground, down the mountain, and hit the highway in half the time it took us to get up to the campsite.
     In Wells, when the police came to the hospital, we gave our story, emphasizing that one of our party was still up on the mountain. The officer questioning me gave me a chilling look, reminding me of my failure, and then walked out to his car and called in his report.
      Local police and highway patrol began searching for Rick the next morning, and for two weeks combed every inch of the land for one hundred square miles. In the middle of the third week, towards the end of August, the hunt was called off, and Rick was pronounced missing and probably dead.

      That November, a farmer and his son found a body wedged in between to
large boulders in a river that ran one hundred miles to the north of where
we had last seen Rick.   The corpse was badly decomposed, parts of it completely eaten away, but a dental exam confirmed that the body belonged to Rick.  During the autopsy, the medical examiner determined that Rick had been bitten repeatedly all over his body,   his head nearly torn from his body.  Both hands were missing.

IV.      So there you have it.   My grandfather, the only totally good man
I have ever known, would not hold this thing against me. Yet, to this day, fifteen years later,  Dara  doesn't  talk to me.    We both live in Las Vegas, where I work as a substitute junior high English and math teacher, and Dara owns and runs a spare-ribs restaurant in Summerlin.  Several times a year, I phone Dara to talk to her, but she never picks up and never returns my calls.
      Since Jenny's death, I have read everything I could find related to that area in northern Nevada.  Last year,  I found one article about a group of huge black dogs that roamed with a solitary man through another campground near by for seven straight nights before finally attacking a mother and her three daughters, who were on a summer vacation nature hike.
A witness reported that the mother and two of the girls were mauled beyond
recognition.  The body of the third girl was never found.  In moments of inebriation, I find myself wondering if the man that Dara and I spotted before the dogs were the devil. Sober, I realize that Rick, Dara, Jenny, and I had an encounter with something evil.
      As soon as I finish this drink(What? My seventh? My eighth?),  I'll drive down to Western Ribs, hang around for a while, order some food, and see if Dara will speak to me. Come with me if you want.   I suspect she will look right through me. She's done that before.  I don't know what I'd say to her anyway.  Would I say, "I'm sorry"? Would I say,
    "How've you been?" Or would I get to the point and ask, "Do you ever think about Jenny Sparks? Or Rick?"  Would I ask the question that has haunted me for years: "What do you think Jenny was trying to say to me when she was dying?" Maybe I should shout, "Why don't you blame God instead of me?"
      I like to imagine that Dara thinks about these dark things every night, just like I do.  But, then again, maybe it's better not to think about anything at all.