A blue-bird day, no doubt, dashed cool with mad pow-pow. We got four inches blanketed fast on corduroy pack. Wondrous. Like totally ripe for soundless carves. Now our waxed sticks are sweeping virgin headwalls and B's prodigious nose leaps ahead, leaps downslope. A monster snout this bro's boasting! Fully dwarfs his goggles, no?
          Still though, his mental sketch of glade lines can't pale concentration's blush—check those drawn cheeks, that sense of data going fakie in some heel-side method verification. He's obviously thinking, Dude, how to navigate this next stretch of gnar-gnar bumps if freshies mound in no mathematical certainty?
          It's a roller in my gut, sketchy, man. We're an uneasy pairing. It's a feeling I don't exist. I mean, even when we're cozied on the quad, wrenched skyward again. Our board tips, check how they're touching in some Gödelian force, like totally. And I want to tell him. Want to point out our ground and squelch our tension, but B's adjusting his helmet, he's fiddling his glove straps, he's making sure to black-cloud me with mutter after mutter, going, "I treated you like a son—like a son, so who's vomitive now?"
          When I lay down the kybosh with a punch to the bicep, he shuts it. So it's right back to copse contemplation for the withered bird. Or his eyes on a swooping magpie... watching, watching, but B's stare's locked so surely on the flit he wipes his lift dismount, nollies a hard toe-edge, snaps both wrists.
          Ten minutes it takes Patrol to cart the emotionless slab to the base. Serves him, I want to hiss, but I'm a buddy system guy, for sure. So after a couple more shoots and knolls, I go lodge-side. That's right, B and I get our après on, and way steezy-style. We're talking five crisp pitchers of winter ale and it's Ogle Central on the ponytailed bunnies. Next thing we're smoking twig after dizzy twig until the suicide notes straight evaporate from B's foliated brows. Seems homeboy's back to his muted best, back to tweaking atomism. Maybe it's a good thing. Or maybe it's the twinning of hydrocodone and fat fermentation—disaster recipe.
          Suddenly he's on his boots. He's flapping both casts and barking nonsense. Frail hair static-flyed, he's demanding the local bros and bras pay heed. The Zealand chicklets, the Marley-stoned lift-ops, he's growling they need to knock-off their poser jabs. "Bring it!" he shouts. "You have no idea who I am, do you? No goddamn idea! Go on, posers, call me a Rubbernecker, a Texan, a Tourist, but I dare any one of you punks to point out the hippo in this lodge!"