Thanks. Got your old school cut and paste card. Delivered naturally by the dying empire of the postal service. Too bad about that actually. Taking one's time is not only a regime and a breath against the new empire - the instant archive - but it also comes in as a sensually deep thing, an embodiment, a surprise. And naturally, like a contradiction, this response is being delivered electronically! All the interior arrangements, like thoughts, like your card shows - having a room in the world is like sleeping out in the open - and as such being susceptible to things like lullabies whose childhood rhymes we often remember and those hints of pornography creeping in the shadows we so often desire. What was the best thing you remember about grade school? For me it was recess! When you and I and all the other kids ran like crazy for fifteen minutes twice a day in the school parking lot. The only way in the world to have that taken away would have been to put us all in lock down! And even then, I imagine you, taking all the necessary measurements, staring at confinement, and then potting an escape. Anyway I have a memory. From better days. Back in those days when walking provided me with the most constant reminder of a life I've ever had... was like a kind of lost island to have... in step... and to set up one's own view of paradise. Ah. To walk along. To have thoughts. Or to have no thoughts at the same time. I miss that kind of walking. To be out in a warm breeze with little on and smiling at the chains of light in the air and feeling did the solstice happen yet? Or to be out in cold air and feeling there is no replacement for what might be gone if you don't keep moving when you're freezing. And it all feels equal - from going around the corner to the movies, to taking the journey of a thousand steps etc. But I digress. I was walking in the woods one morning along the familiar contour lines of an old farm road - it's all logical and on the map in perfect sense - now it's an ATV road and a snow machine path in winter - and then took a detour onto a narrow trail heading downhill toward the stream. There was a broken tree where the trail dropped off and several birds were singing in what was left of its crown. A weather worn sign nailed into the tree trunk read Elivra Town in burnt letters. But there were no houses nor barns. Nothing left but way rusted plows like relics. A small graveyard with tilted chewed at headstones and hand chiseled inscriptions like omens of their own short times to try and farm out a living in the hills. But there were runs of these big stone foundations scattered about, holes in the ground now, like mouths like crying where lives once stood. Ferns and birch trees sprouted up in the holes like efforts to reclaim the soils for the forest. You could see into the outline of the things that were a landscape and if you looked out into the trees at some level just beyond eye contact you made out where the old meadows used to be. Imagine corn rows and vegetable plots and a grove of silent apple trees giving it up in the fall. Elvira town was gone, but wasn't I walking through it still? Do you think it's a cinema of petty miseries that makes us look for a game changer? Or are we at the tip of a big soft brush painting in the outlines of the unknown? Maybe there is nothing like unfulfilled hopes to throw you for a loop. But don't we have to show up regardless? Maybe I need to learn and just walk on and mind my own business. But when I look around there's so much wonder... and I fall back upon a notion that I'm an intruder... I'm trying to side step entropy... and am left with many questions and the default of such imaging seems to be where do I belong? When I got down to a landing in the hollow of the mountains where I hoped to get across the stream, the stream was totally swollen from multiple days raining. The water was wicked fast moving and crashed across rocks in the stream bed, rocks that used to be from the top of the mountain back in the glacier days of furry hunters and magic charcoal, and it was hypnotizing to look into the water as it hit the rocks and sprayed against the air like this wild crazy desire to find the river and then keep on going to sea level. That's where it goes. The tintinnabulations from nowhere... Just having an apple then to eat and then surrendering that this was the end of line. The crisp snap and juice from each bite. Bug dope as well as the humidity clings to the skin. Water racing across rocks that you won't walk across less you get knocked down from the knees and swept off like dumbness for the attempt to try and ride nature's ride unharmed. I suppose I might have followed the stream and looked for a better place to cross, but fuck it, I walked back up the small trail and back into Elvira Town. Picked up where I was and continued on. Back down to the stream where I knew there was a bridge in place for certain...
