One of Us

If I were to tell you the story of a man who fell off a kayak in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, minutes before he set his friend’s cabin on fire, with his own belongings in the middle of it all, you might plausibly think that I was overly elaborating on some incidents in this man’s life. This is too much of a Keatonesque or Coen Brothers–like series of events. Or, you might tell me that I have spent too much time with Richard Prince’s joke:

Fireman pulling drunk out of a burning bed: You darned fool, that’ll teach you to smoke in bed.

Drunk: I wasn’t smoking in bed, it was on fire when I laid down.

Thankfully for my friend, the lake was not on fire … but thankfully for the story, the rest is all true.

Life, at times, can be better than fiction, if your attitude toward life is aimed at crystallizing, in a Stendhalian move, the beauty, the serendipity, the horror, the conflicts, the elegy of your everyday stumbles. It is a fair and charming paradox that my friend who fell into the open waters is named Richard Flood. Mr. Flood survived both the water and the fire and lived to tell the story; he lived to share many stories.

When not swimming toward a fire, Mr. Flood is known for his peculiarities. He hates adjectives and is the inventor of the word “gravitas.” He invented a time zone named Fooly Time—a no-man’s-time in a work day that unleashed irrational streams of consciousness informed by bad television, the fashion police, word play, and salon jousts.