An afternoon idyll. How to listen to the language of the lakeshore plants, as they ripple in the mid-afternoon light? The story they have to tell – of collaboration, cooperation, contamination – leaks into their merely human observers. Everyone is a boat. Floating on the larger dream of manufactured consent, all of my friends have become internet addicts, lacking time or sustained attention, ensuring the solitary necessary for neoliberal capital to roll over us. And yet, in the midst of the riptide, there is another calling from the onshore plants, the possibility of opening and resistance.