18 April, 2010
Not quite night and no longer day, not quite spring and no longer winter… I step outside into crisp mountain air, greeted by the faint sound of running water somewhere down slope from my cabin. Running water?! This is high desert; no water runs on my land.
But it was a “good” winter: Over eleven feet of snow, all told. The water table has risen and the springs which the Ute Indians relied upon only a century and a half ago are flowing again, having retreated underground for a multi-year drought that has only recently shown signs of abating.
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15 January, 2010
I was forced into child labor at an early age. I blame my parents. Denied more traditional outlets for pre pre-teen angst like vodka, cocaine, leather & rubber fetish porn, etc. I submitted readily to the opening chords of gag & novelty addiction’s sweetly seductive siren song. Every boy needs a hobby and while some eight-year olds on my street dabbled with classics like spray-painting “eat me” on stray cats, I opted for the exciting cosmopolitan lifestyle of mail order shopping. Unfortunately this required money, rather elusive stuff for most grade-schoolers.
The Johnson Smith Company’s gag pushers sunk their claws deep into my budding psyche with fresh musty-sweet scented newsprint catalogs beckoning me with “hours of fun!”, urging me to “fool all my friends!” and “get even with my teachers!” Enraptured by the dulcet tones of my first whoopee cushion I tripped on paradisiacal visions of “so lifelike” severed fingers, rivers of fake vomit and dog poo, a land of milk and honey where Billy Bob hillbilly teeth grew on trees, where shy third-graders armed with hand buzzers and dribble glasses miraculously transformed themselves into “life of the party” demigods.
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25 November, 2009
Morning. Coffee. Sometimes I wonder if my primary motivation for back country exploration is the morning joe. Coffee tastes better out here. It is my meditation. Sitting in camp and sipping, present to the all-encompassing darkness while the rest of the world dreams their anxious pre-work dreams, my mind is renewed, unburdened and clear, a canvas swept clean with sleep upon which the sun will soon paint radiant hues of fresh inspiration.
First light slices through the crisp pre-dawn air. A sliver of brilliance cracks the canopy of gray-blue over an eastern mesa, the sun’s warming rays shattering the few remaining vestiges of darkness, highlighting the desert’s starkness and reminding me of my own mortality. Light and dark, night and day, life and death. Our time is all too short, my days are numbered. I hardly ever miss a sunrise anymore; there are far too few in any man’s lifetime to let even one pass willingly unnoticed.
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4 November, 2009
“This is it.” My voice startles me, as though it’s not my own. Any noise out here, any sound not native to the land seems a violence at worst, a disrespectful intrusion at best. There is a silence in the desert so profound, so deep, so far beyond an “absence of noise” that I’m certain it will swallow me whole if I let it. So dense it’s palpable, so thick that any sound I muster is immediately enveloped by a nothingness so rich that I’m left doubting whether I had said anything at all.
I’ve come to the edge of the Great Basin desert, canyon country, to find something that first called to me two decades ago in the most unlikely of places, perched thirty-one stories above the canyon of materialism known as the “Magnificent Mile”, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. A young commodity trader pursuing that most elusive prey, the Big Bucks, my newfound quest for Something More, something real led me to a series of spiritual writings centered in the southwestern desert. There was magic out there for me, I could feel it. But it’d be another twenty years before I’d have sufficiently bled myself of the Lust for Stuff, the artificial World of Man, and deemed myself worthy to trek through its polar opposite.
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29 September, 2009
As luck would have it, at nineteen I happened upon my first real girlfriend ( defined as “the kind you get to see naked. Totally naked. Sans fluffy turkish towel.”) and all my old self-inflicted conflicts high-tailed it out of my psyche to make room for an entirely new, upgraded set of college-level neuroses.
Lexi was a tall, thin blonde with the kind of ass a fella’ doesn’t even begin to truly appreciate until he’s at that age where he can’t get one anymore. ( At least not for free.) In the carnival funhouse mirror of her hang-ups and issues, my problems looked like a wet Maltese shivering next to Rosie O’Donnell after three weeks locked up in a cake shop. But who was I to complain? At least I’d found a willing and suitable lab partner for Organ-ic Chemistry 101.
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18 September, 2009
Adrian was a only a year older than I but at that age, a one year disparity is fully ten percent of a lifetime. A lot of shit can happen in ten percent of a lifetime, particularly to studs like my eleven year old cousin. Youngsters like me didn’t question the wisdom of our elders, particularly elders who lived on the hipper, way more happening east coast where the word “no” was pronounced as an exotic and melodious “neeeeeeeeh-oooooooo” as opposed to the drab, uncool, plain vanilla “NO” that immediately identified us as mere midwestern suburban dorks whose biggest thrill was brain-freeze, headaches incurred from sucking down Slurpees too quickly. We simply listened and learned.
Adrian was the sophisticated out-of-towner, my mentor in coolness, my own personal Fonzie who taught me that wearing a belt with shorts was totally uncool, a lesson I mention only to highlight his obvious credibility in sexual tutelage, as though his frayed cut-offs imprinted with images of tiny hot dogs encased in tiny buns, warm apple pies, and phallic baseball bats & balls could possibly lead a perceptive human being to any other conclusion.
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16 September, 2009
My sex life got off to a fairly inauspicious start sometime during sixth grade. I’m not sure what day, month, or even season. It might have been September, it might have been May for all I know. Elementary school is a blur to me, mostly just a whirlwind of unconnected events and memories.
In those days, time was organized into four distinct seasons: School, Christmas break, More School and Summer Vacation. I suspect it might have been either late School or early More School as I have a vague recollection of getting the shit kicked out of me for wearing what is now referred to in trendy “Look at me I shop at REI” circles as a “Sherpa hat” but back then was more affectionately known as “some dumbass retarded winter hat that Stinky’s mom makes him wear so he doesn’t catch the sniffles.”
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16 September, 2009
I lick and stick fifty-eight cents worth of postage on every envelope I mail despite the fact that forty-four cents is sufficient. I’m not in the habit of showering undue generosity upon bloated government bureaucracies nor am I trying to impress my letter carrier with an ostentatious display of postal excess. I just have a lot of twenty-nine cent stamps.
When my father died, I inherited a veritable cornucopia of postal commemoratives to hobbies, music, and history preserved indelibly on sheets of scored, gummed paper. (For the younger readers, “gummed paper” is a phenomenon of a more primitive age, before the overindulged MTV generation grew into whiny, self-absorbed impostors of adulthood demanding self-adhesive stamps to save the whales, horses, shoe leather or whatever it is that manually operated, saliva-activated glue comes from.) Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, marines on Guadalcanal, scuba divers, bloated puffer fish and grinning dolphins: if there’s a “29” in the corner, I’ve got ‘em. A lot of ‘em.
My postmaster, a hardnosed librarian-esque overlord of all things bundled, sealed and stamped has assured me that I can’t exchange them for new stamps. And I mean “assured” in the “if you ask me just one more fucking time I swear that as certainly as I’m cloaked in this something-vaguely-akin-to-paisley mu mu, I will call the sheriff” sense of the word. So I’m forced to use them two at a time, which is undoubtedly all part of some sinister plot concocted in the shadowy linoleum-clad halls of Post Office Central to extract more money from simple, unsuspecting glue lickers like me.
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