Hurt

Miles, hours. Every time out I wonder: What'll the cost of reflection be today?

I know I've told you before. I'm sure I'll tell you again. But still: This hurts. This hurt takes time to process. And process I angrily shall, all through the miles it appears, until I've no more to process at all - or at least until the fatigue blurs it all to apathy.

I'd never been fired before. But then I'd never worked for such incompetence, for such a sad sack of human garbage, either. The irony of a fervent Bernie supporter who in so many ways more clearly resembles Trump, for truth he cannot tell, for ethics he does not possess, for morality he's never held.

So, yes, I'm still angry.

The miles are coming back around, and if I've still an extra fifty-pound pack on all these adventures - yet another piece of baggage from those 2 1/2 years that now feel increasingly lost - I'm doing my damnedest to lose it. Maybe as the pounds come off, so too will the emotional baggage? We gave our everything, and nary a thank you in return - just betrayal and the loss of our jobs.

"If you've nothing positive to say, say nothing at all," so my words remain silent, and that too, feels like something that's been taken away. Maybe that, too, will come back only as the fat melts off - I've hope, still, of finding my voice again, anyway.

I've ideas, at least - two different collections I want to work on, and a whole number of writing prompts besides. Just not the words to go with.

I know you know this feeling. We've each our respective silences, and I respect yours, understand it, even as I'm trying not to embrace my tendency these days to the same. I'm trying to remember and embrace the power of community, even as I realize how much of this community we gave our lives to cares only about themselves. But, then, that's their right, isn't it?

Caring only about yourself might be the most white privileged American trait there is, and trail runners are nothing if not largely homogeneous - large groups of privileged white men and women, trading one addiction for another.

I'm not as bitter always, I don't think. I'm okay, or close enough to fine to fake my way through most days. And sometimes faking it through just has to be enough. You understand, of course.

But yes, I'm still angry, even as I'm tired, even as I'm sore, even as the miles (slow, painful) are beginning to pile up once again, even as trail food theses days means huckleberry patches and mountain streams, even as the high country is wide open and free, even as our apartment feels each day more like home, even as the alpine lakes feel less like ice and more like comfortably cold - I'm still angry.

So here's to embracing the fire, feeding the flames, and making something of it. And here's to brothers who understand - understand the masks we wear, why we run, the sweat we stink. And here's to breaking the silence.

As a wise friend once noted: "I'm not sugarcoating shit anymore." Neither should we.

Cope, or worst case scenarios that make my head heavy and my eyelids light

I've been fighting this frailty as of late, it feels, morality and mortality intertwined. Missed milligrams always seem to lend to this malady of melodrama so overblown, alliteration be damned. Still, I hear the difference in tenor, a slight tremble, over space and time. Bravado and stubborn pride can only cover so much, and the smallest of cracks can cause the most devastation. It all depends on how sturdy a foundation you're working with. "We built our house with straw, with timber, on the sandy coast; remember us". And the wolf stalks us all and the wind blows (and we all fall down).

The spirit catches and the Spirit catches and the spirit (of ghosts, of memories, of nostalgia, of the wild youth) catches. All of this is to say that while men and women and the inner children of most of us were running in loops up and down and around and around and on the Sound, I'm thinking of the both of you and simple math and the last phone conversation we had. I don't know how to talk about these sort of things. (I can only drunkenly stumble over parchment, butchering the beautiful truth of a blank page, consonants, and the peaceful allocation of spaces). And even then,

May 11, 2010. March 22, 2004. June 3, 2001. October 10, 2005. July 15, 2006.
Frozen, spliced, perverted moments in time. There are train tracks of thoughts constantly colliding, creating atoms of doubt, fear, joy, unfettered chaotic misunderstanding. And this cluster of stations, of passings, blot out the light at the end of the darkest tunnel. Pushed farther in, dumped at the outskirts, they persist, pushing on, punishing any sort of sense and my attempts at sensibilities.

We tip-toe around these gross imperfections in the ovals we masquerade as circles, the Emperor duped out of his very own venn-diagram. ??? ??, ????. Siah's father. And the hushed voices, the questions that I have never asked, the truths that I really don't want to know. And the truths I can't know, will never know. (Ker, I'm so, so sorry). Again, I don't know how to talk about these sort of things. (Do any of us?)

So what remains? Selfish fatigue of the word and the wear of years and the failings of the body and the mind and these people are not our role models and they are not our friends and they are not our failing hereos. They are all of these things. And I'm only now starting to know them as they are or as they might be. So what remains? Hyperbole, a headlong trajectory into... anything, and headlamps. Twelve miles in the dark Friday night chasing ghosts, real or not, and the implications of this. Thirteen and a half today and miles and miles of thinking of anything else and nothing. And talking about anything else. Anything but electrical poles, and alcohol poisoning, and a car wrapped around a tree, and the Sawtooth Mountains, and tsunami's, and raging rivers, and cancer, and cancer, and surgery, and loss (of so many things).

It's Monday here now. By four minutes and counting, it's a new day. Did you feel the pull, the sway, the curvature of this large rock as we move forward? Maybe there's some truth in knowing what we're missing right in front of us. How do we talk about the absences, the imaginary numbers, the illusive fog right in front of us?

I'm Simply a Pyromaniac With a Whimper.

It's what we talk about when we talk about masks. It's a lack of practice, equal parts anxiety and apathy. It's the weight of unmet expectations and a week of stressors, straining the complexion of this ceramic facade. It's ninety twenty-milligram tablets of chalky white hail mary's that go for just short of two hundred and seventy five dollars. It's the (perceived) numeric value of that whole sentence. It's the conversation the next day that revolves around the words benefits and halved coverage. It's the growing grinding that continues to emit from my brake system. It's the imagined implications of a self-imposed pseudo state of solitude.The taunting absence of touch and tactile comfort, hallmark or not.  It's the eight or nine or ten days of flying solo, of being without my imaginary (or not) bitter saviors. This is my body, take and sallow, and become whole.

A jigsaw puzzle with frayed pieces. (The puzzles at KinderCare are worn and weathered and always seem to be missing a piece. Just one, solitary segment. That would, that does make the difference.) It's a portrait of a man in a room. Simply sitting in the dark, listening to hushed pleas of communing spirits, pretending to ignore another missed call. Another missed moment.

It is not indifference or ignorance or illness (perceived or not). It's what we talk about when we talk about cracks in the veneer of my steady flow of verbiage. It's a long-winded commentary, an apology asking for time and a misplaced hope of change. It's this, try again and keep trying, and I'll try too. It's the knowledge that none of us (here's my hope) know what the hell we're doing, but that your wrinkles become mine. It's the whisper that what is can and will get better, that jobs and journeys come quickly and smoothly. It's the smallest haze my smoke signals can yet produce, and the embers remain.
 

So this, can I try again tomorrow?

A Line In The Sand

 -

 Love, love is a verb

Love is a doing thing

-

I heard about the smoke, the blaze, the sequel and my mind wandered to costs. Maybe these fires are the punishment for such beauty, the haze blocking out the gorgeous vistas your pictures (and mine, definitely mine) could never hope to fully realize. Maybe this is a trade-off of sorts. Yes, you can enjoy my beauty. You can scale my peaks, ride my rapids, chase my deer, but you will pay. We will not sell you Manhattan for twenty-five beads again. Fool me once, shame on me. Tread on me again, and I will show you my righteous fury. 

This way of thinking, is of course, ludicrous. Incredibly stupid. Flames catch, tinder burns, smoke carries. And I fret away hopelessly. Delusion and imagination have their place, but understanding the potential for another lost summer is not it. 

-

Teardrop on the fire

Feathers on my breath

-

I stare into my Marshmallow Mateys, your 'bad oatmeal' weighing heavy on my mind. The folds and rivets sway, construction in the summer. Minnesota roads, they say, have two seasons- Winter and Construction. I'll hold onto my miniature hard hats as long as I can, my gray matter constantly in flux.

Still, you write about backsliding, and I'm wondering about tightropes. We walked across bridges at work on Friday, imaginary lines of balance. Four-and-five year olds children with nothing to lose but everything to prove, pursed lips and furrowed brows. I closed my eyes and made it two feet. And then fell over. Which says something. But what? Maybe we burn not to polish our edges but to sharpen them. Maybe we never, ever reach the burn line, but spend a whole life reaching. Maybe I'm spouting nonsense, like a leaky tap that got accidentally nudged on.

-

You're stumbling into all

You're stumbling into all

-

This is the West that I remember, this is the oldest story I can seem to tell. I read 'The Oregon Trail is The Oregon Trail' again recently and decided to try my hand. I should leave my hand to it's better uses perhaps, like quiet back-rubs at naptime and the hardest high five a three year old can muster. 

-

The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, but I’m stuck in ruts.

I remember, like scars, wagon wheels drug across your

dry skin. Broken axles etched across your shoulder, as I

trace history. Your freckles, my stars, your flesh, my map.

This trail is treacherous, and we have everything to lose.

(A thief stole an ox and our extra rations and the words

that edged between us.) That floated.

-

But we burn to ash, and all I can think is that this is the West I know. And that this is the oldest story I can seem to remember.

Trap the Fire

The smoke isn't that bad. So the numbers - which can't lie, won't lie, directly reflect the quantity and quality of particulates hanging in the drifting air - say. This is nothing, not compared to last fall. Not when we've topped out thus far at a WAQA value of 120, not when last fall took us well above 800. But, then, this is everything: This is now, the present.

It hurts, the smoke. It stings my eyes, offers as a gift only phlegm, a mucky liner for my throat, nose, sinuses. This haze obscures our fine valley, offering not mystery but grime, removing any and all peaks from our skyline. These vistas fade under the air's weight, turn to grey mush, bad oatmeal, all the sharp lines gone soft and empty.

We remember last year, how compromised we were, bench ourselves nearly immediately from outdoor activity. How endlessly sick I especially was, lungs and throats and eyes and ears all shutting down even as I kept running through the diseased haze. We won't be so stupid again, won't let ourselves. We can't afford to get sick - not with a wedding in two weeks, not with a hundred in five. Nor can we realistically hope to wait it out: containment's slow in the upticking, made slower by limited visibility, smoke-induced. Our hearts are on fire, and the Colockum is too.

******

But: not all is sadness and disappointment. Before the smoke, there was summer, infinite and broad, stretching out for weeks before us. There were trails to explore, old friends to re-acquaint ourselves with, hours spent lazing beside high alpine lakes. There were fish, freshly caught, to clean and cook, whiskey bottles to drain, full if sleepless nights in a cold tent beneath a full moon, gin rummy and hearty laughs and the company of chosen family. Team Everclear's third annual trek into the land of lakes at the end of rainbows and goats, goats, goats; fuck-it trees and all these vistas. It was good; it was very good, and all was well with the world.

I had so many snippets of things to shape and form and give to you, so much happiness and adventure yet finding their way into words, all of this. So much, this much, all of it love, and how I wish I could just focus on the good; surely we've plenty of it. Our vows written, our friends soon traveling, and our family'll be here soon enough. Besides, we've just held these mountains as home. But I've this tendency, I do, to look more readily at the damaged places; though it's surely grown stronger, at times this grip on the present remains tenuous. I backslide, into all this grey sky, and feel such happy portraits slip away.

So the three-word drafts I've stored away don't hold their weight; I don't know how to turn the nuggets back into the happy they represent. I don't know how to accurately translate the weight that settles when the sun's routinely blotted gray - not by weather, but by the product of fire. My words aren't enough.

*******




As we drove out Sunday, after five days of sweat and dirt and swimming in lakes, after beers at Uli's and meatballs and re-acquainting ourselves with the seemingly endless fatigue we'd so easily accumulated, a single cloud framed the eastern sky.

"That's a fire," I said. "The cloud's in the wrong place to be the only cloud in the sky." Our weather flows west to east, Cascades to Palouse; if ever there's a solitary cloud, such weather'll rest in the mountains, the high places we'd too rather fly, rather than beside the Columbia. "It's a cloud," she told me.

And then we drew closer, saw the red streaked through the grey, and both knew, absolutely, that it was fire and it was large and our summer was changing, dying, growing into something we dreaded and feared and already knew far too well last fall. Only hours old then, this fire, and still already 10,000 acres, growing quick. In the days since still she grows, ever feeding; we've already approached and quickly passed a hundred square miles. The air hurts and we hurt for it, and then there are those evacuations, the ecosystems already struggling after last fall's fires. Where do we burn past hope? Where's that fire line drawn?

*******

Our lives are coming together, apexing - a wedding in just over two weeks! - and still feel as if they're falling into disarray. This is the helplessness of fire, but also of circumstance: our car, dying; she sick, a kidney infection; my hours chopped at work, a political poison; smoked in, we can't even much exercise. Reasons for joy come easily - a wedding in two weeks! the bulk of our favorite people and chosen family, here, in our fine valley! - but slumping comes easier yet, as does sleeping, struggling through motions that don't carry their usual weight. We're overwhelmed, sinking in the sky of smoke; we use each other as floaties, and still it feels as if we're slowly drowning. The blankness of such a haze feels ancient, a lifetime ago, but no less familiar; we've slept at least ten hours each of the last several nights and still wake tired. This feels like such an old story, the oldest story in the West. You've heard it all before.

The sky's aflame with lightning, a storm in the potential making. Our hearts are bursting with potential, this future stretching out before us. And still, everything's burning.

Images via NWHikers.net

All Terrain The Tenses

I'm reading back in time: 1884, the text first published; August 2010, this sense of being adrift. I'm not as chronologically confused as that sounds. There is, though, this sense that if I've not mastery of these first three dimensions, I've at least firm comprehension of their trappings and uses. (Remember: our volumes, no matter how verbose, shall always be composed to the tune of length by width by height.) Time, though? Time betrays me.

I drift in time. Think of it as a pool sometimes, swimming to and fro, past and present and future, as if it were a opportunistic trout. (Being clever, extending the analogy: we were all just fishing for a chance at greatness - or something - here, in America.) I think of a question once asked, a lifetime (or two?) ago in a dim Portland bar. As I explained: I struggle sometimes in differentiating past and present. I lied earlier, when I said I wasn't chronologically confused. More telling, perhaps, is that I remember the conversation differently each time.

Related: I admit I have less difficulty now than once I did; I'm better grounded, and float less. I'm less prone to swimming sightless, or putting weights to lyrics to which I've no right. The music I no longer steal and make my own reminds me I'm getting ahead of myself. That's another conversation, another debate, another circling 'round and 'round, the edges each time muted towards hushed understanding.

I think of how you and I talk. A step forward, I think, remembering this morning's runners and walkers. I remember something you said to me once, or I said to you, one of us being clever in a moment of mutual self-deprecation: A step backward can be a step forward if we change the way we face. Something along such blurry lines. I'm a little sad for the people we were in the habit of becoming then; more so, though, I'm glad for the people we're finding we are now. Perspectives. Time shifts in the shadows.

We talk in the quiet of night, she and I, and more so in the still softly shaded dawn. I'm thinking backwards, and sluggish, in ways that are less than true. Communication is a street paved with practice, and practice alone.

I don't now what to tell you, how to talk about this week's prompt. I mined the archives, found a piece to rework, resubmit: a city of trails, and how fitting the terrain seemed. She'd made loving edits and suggestions and then we'd gone to bed, sedated with Nyquil. From thence I've no recollection, though she's since filled me in.

This is what happens when I take Nyquil: I get grouchy and crotchety and upset her. And then I fall asleep. I've told you the rest of the story since.

I love relationships, I said. She asked me to clarify. I think I did. Now, then, for you: relationships are not easy. They are not stable. They are the mountain trails that are so busy kicking your ass these weekends; this relationship is no less bereft of potential land mines than any other. What makes it different, though, is how we talk. We tell each other where our explosives are buried, try to help each other in unearthing and disarming such munitions, our bent and aching places. Most of the time, I would say, we're at least modestly successful.

You downplay the things you mean, a friend told me. This is true. A change in that trend, then: this speaks of magic. I don't know what else to say. Deleting old Facebook posts reminds me I've probably already said the wrong thing too many times to take chances now.

I think of an article I read once about a research team determined to quantify the calculus of love, interactions between pairs mapped and slopes plotted. Derivations were taken, of course - positive for growth; zero for stasis - but it strikes me that either the article over-simplified the nature of their research (which is, admittedly, quite possible) or the research team did not fully appreciate the dynamics of couplehood: simultaneously concave and convex, all ebb and flow, we cannot be charted. Relationships are not regular in their tides, nor in their anger. Nor in forgiveness, nor in love.

We are boulder fields in the middle of alpine meadows, the dip in the middle of a rise, the table top ridge beset by sheer basaltic face. We are worn down even as we are renewed. We run dry and find a spring; near drowning, we find ourselves suddenly ashore. This is grace, I think, that we are better when things are worse. She is that for me, and I hope to be that for her, and no math could ever map such a terrain, I don't think.

I couldn't be happier about understanding less.

Lagan

Originally written a year ago in August. Trying to make up for lost time.  

Everyone's right and no one is sorry
That's the start and end of this story

Orientation is over. I'm on my way to another official position of employment. Another job where I work with children, with the smallest of individuals, with 'actual people' I swear, with pre-schoolers this time around. I don't know my hours or schedule yet, just that I start working at my center with my kids on Tuesday. My, my, my. My short-term solution, my stop-gap, my total lack of future plans. And so it goes. I'm sitting, freezing- vessels restricting, taking on a darker hue- in a Caribou Coffee shop in Woodbury. Hub of artificial air, calm conversations filling empty spaces, suburbanites in suburban attire reaching for what? Clear cut consciences? Questions of convenience? I don't fit here, though looks can be deceiving, in my work polo and khaki shorts, computer keys a-clacking. First-world problems, and I'm so removed from my kids at Hall, it stings through my chattered teeth.

I feel it deep, smothering, holding me and whispering in my ear, "this is who you are." Though I argue, I fight, I think, 'I lived in Africa, dammit. I volunteer. I worked at an inner city treatment facility. I worked at a North Minneapolis public school. I made a goddamn difference.' this middle-class legacy clings to me like a blanket on a Midwest winter's eve. Is this my birthright? Will this characteristic of cautious convenience define me? Lacking clarity, I search for veins of truth, twisted and tangled branches from my past, memories of who I've been. Of past, present, possibilities. Everything's an inkblot, and Rorschach resonates. Or in other words, "We are our own meiosis, past lives meshed in blurry Punnet squares, this faulty biology that could leave us any one of a number of freaks, depending on the day."

I hear strings in the park
I don't like to call or write
Except when it's too late at night
I mostly just think in the dark

Is it strange that I'm fitting, stealing the formatting of your words? Pilfered words amongst us is the norm I know, but architecture and foundation, is it too much? Either way, you speak of pictures from the past, of the past. In between cryptic collections of Bon Iver's litany and poorly translated Hemingway and Neruda, I remember the red dirt of Sa Leone. (Was it really red at all? My body rebels, playing tricks on me from afar, from within; and these memories are no exception. What can we say about the line between fact and fiction, real and imagined, experiences and dreams and illusions and wishful thinking and secondhand lions or lines? What else but poorly penned pieces of a puzzle, portions of passion?)

I remember the red dirt of Sa Leone. A porch, a piece of concrete, a landing outside of the first floor of the place I knew as home. We were on a ship, on the water, the specific knowledge of this sea-going surprising to me now. (That this memory lasted this long, that this happened at all). We were on a boat and I fell off into the water. "Man ahoy, land overboard!" Maybe, I don't remember most of the conversation. Except there I was, sprawled in the dirt, waiting for a rescue that wouldn't come. Waiting for something that none of you could give me, would give me. "Why do you have to be so ______?" This I remember, clearly. Melodramatic, perhaps, though the word seems several shirt sizes too large for the context. Though you always were the little teacher. Dramatic, maybe. Or simply, "Why do you always have to be saved?"
I waited in the dirt. In that red clay, in the glaring light of an ever-shining sun, in that dry heat. Did I get up after a couple of seconds? Did I lay there for minutes? Did any of that happen at all? Am I still waiting? (Melodramatic, indeed)

Where does that leave me now?

The full moon makes
Our faces shine
Like over-ironed polyester

Orientation is over. Soon I'll be on my bike, on my way to South Saint Paul. Radio Drive to Bailey down a half-mile decline over the river side-by-side with 494 to a section of the MRT that takes me to a road to another road to a strip mall to a CAP Agency Head Start classroom. To Jocelyn. I'll ride with my duffel bag strapped on shoulders, digging into skin. Carrying this laptop, carrying these words, carrying these letters after letters after letters- years worth of mistakes and musings and misgivings and misplaced hope and desire and fear and depression and memories and memories and memories. My back will bend, strain from the weight. We carry so much with us. All of us, I suppose. But it's easier for me to see our luggage.

I'm trying to go slow, dropping off letters, scraps, snapshots, opening up the smallest scars to show to Jocelyn. Of course, I gave her the ascribed warning, the obligatory so-you-know statement of depression and anxiety and entropy. Plain language fails me so often, but I have this- 'I really like her.' Perils aside, we spend words, time, energy, plans, possibilities with each other. And so it goes- the constant, the truth- and words fail.

I was unafraid, I was a boy
I was a tender age

I've been forgetting things. A staple of simplicity, I know, but this seems more than a high cost of time.