July 9, 10, 11
A day off, Roy out of the house until nine, & I find myself almost wholly unwilling to leave just because this silence & space is my own to fill. Playing guitar, baking cookies, crying over photographs, cleaning, etc.—it is my time alone & I almost luxuriate in it, even in this tiny space.
***
A perfect morning, 70 & clear, with a slightly chilly northern breeze rippling through the quaking aspen leaves. Went for a long run past Meadow View, past Taiga, & back up the Rock Creek Trail, bear bell in hand, & that entire time passed only one couple. I suppose most have ventured further in on a day like this, the mountain doubtless illuminated & crisp against the cloudless chinablue sky. & then post-run trapped into playing audience to a prolonged monologue on the progress of gold mining north of Fairbanks & on the particular merits of the Fort Knox concern. Roy, to add another bee to his bonnet, first came to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1980. He tried placer mining for a brief time with a few friends before deciding to go back to welding. I recognize full-well that these are entertainments, curiosities the likes of which I would not find elsewhere (excepting most barflies perched in roadside taverns in any given Alaskan town), but even still, I hear it all with a filter of thin animosity, see it through a lens obscured by a filth I cannot seem to scrub away. Enough, though, of that.
Talking last night with my old friend of eighteen years, we touched on the practice of examining one’s life, on how it can become over-much, overwrought, excessive. It has been an odd lesson of my solitude, that I turn to its exegesis over & again as if checking in with some therapist. & so something minor escalates rather quickly when vehicled in purple prose, when cast in the melodramas I put on here under varied names. Perhaps one ought not spend so much time in the head, filtering hours even before they are fully fled. It is a kind of ghost-making, a kind of blind séance of the ratiocentric, some obstinate shaking of a thing in hopes of extracting one last strand of sense. My foot sore already from kicking the blanched bones of a horse too many times. & maybe there is evidence in this, but I find myself now thinking about that; about, in so many words, whether or not I think too much about my everyday, if I ought to go easier through the hours. This compulsion towards sense-making reared as a kind of backlash from dropping my familiars & relying on my own resources. Maybe I am justifying my every move, trying in some sense to obscure transparency in favor of a kindred narrative. Or maybe this is, in the end, merely what I would do with my time if it were all mine to dole out. I refrain herein from falsities, but I, of course, refrain from a great deal more than that. If I should write of my heart what can it mean to you? That I withhold a name, that I do not detail my small hours, what would it change? & so this scaffolding appears, this quick architecture is raised upon a scrolling blueprint, that my eye might again one day retrieve from its bleated generalities its relevant, its enduring particulars. I have committed, leastwise, to a year entire of this same, that I may shore the last few falling leaf-words of autumn against those that sprung up last winter & measure for echo, sound for progress. If nothing else, I am accountable unto myself.
***
This morning that ire in me swells that seems always churning these days, some lulling backwater bred of frustrated patience. I could spell its name but it would be no surprise to you. That lumbering wraith pawing around the refrigerator to drink my beer at two in the morning without comment. After spending ten hours in a closed room with his suffocating flatulence. & his first rotund foot on the floor, how he is already talking about ridiculous things because he has an audience that cannot escape. I notice the depression in the floor where the leg of his chair pivots, the paint flaked, the plywood bruised & distorted. He is telling me about the recreational land program the state government overseas, about land in Kantishna buyable on the cheap. I am regarding his mitt around his coffee cup, some off-white mug sporting a logo from Talkeetna of some place he’s likely never been. He is a too-proud collector of Alaskan merits for a profoundly practiced sitter-on-his-ass. He is informing me that one would need a riverboat to access plots on the plaid that sit on the Kantishna River proper, that one would need to motor upriver to get there if one were not a float-plane pilot. In between words he sputters & coughs & hacks & spits into a paper towel, some consumptive whose blood comes out mucus instead. I note a small hole in his shirt, the shirt he has not changed out of for three days, the shirt that trails a malodorous cloud the way a comet trails a gaseous tail. One could not motor, I suggest, through a fucking national wilderness wherein patrols are still routinely executed via sled-dog. He balks. What he speaks is hardly audible to me anymore. I pretend to have to take a piss, just to buy a moment’s air, a swift exit. & today all over again, home to work, where he will sit & fart & hack all night & shade instantly discombobulated each time the phone rings or the radio cackles. Fuuuuck. Tomorrow I have off, so I will hike until he goes into work. Tuesday & Wednesday, too, I don’t work in preparation for my switch to night shifts, so I plan a trip to Fairbanks for groceries & a night of camping unfettered of this cabin that I cannot seem to scrub clean enough. Until then, I try to breath in calm & breath out calmer. I try.
***
A perfect morning, 70 & clear, with a slightly chilly northern breeze rippling through the quaking aspen leaves. Went for a long run past Meadow View, past Taiga, & back up the Rock Creek Trail, bear bell in hand, & that entire time passed only one couple. I suppose most have ventured further in on a day like this, the mountain doubtless illuminated & crisp against the cloudless chinablue sky. & then post-run trapped into playing audience to a prolonged monologue on the progress of gold mining north of Fairbanks & on the particular merits of the Fort Knox concern. Roy, to add another bee to his bonnet, first came to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1980. He tried placer mining for a brief time with a few friends before deciding to go back to welding. I recognize full-well that these are entertainments, curiosities the likes of which I would not find elsewhere (excepting most barflies perched in roadside taverns in any given Alaskan town), but even still, I hear it all with a filter of thin animosity, see it through a lens obscured by a filth I cannot seem to scrub away. Enough, though, of that.
Talking last night with my old friend of eighteen years, we touched on the practice of examining one’s life, on how it can become over-much, overwrought, excessive. It has been an odd lesson of my solitude, that I turn to its exegesis over & again as if checking in with some therapist. & so something minor escalates rather quickly when vehicled in purple prose, when cast in the melodramas I put on here under varied names. Perhaps one ought not spend so much time in the head, filtering hours even before they are fully fled. It is a kind of ghost-making, a kind of blind séance of the ratiocentric, some obstinate shaking of a thing in hopes of extracting one last strand of sense. My foot sore already from kicking the blanched bones of a horse too many times. & maybe there is evidence in this, but I find myself now thinking about that; about, in so many words, whether or not I think too much about my everyday, if I ought to go easier through the hours. This compulsion towards sense-making reared as a kind of backlash from dropping my familiars & relying on my own resources. Maybe I am justifying my every move, trying in some sense to obscure transparency in favor of a kindred narrative. Or maybe this is, in the end, merely what I would do with my time if it were all mine to dole out. I refrain herein from falsities, but I, of course, refrain from a great deal more than that. If I should write of my heart what can it mean to you? That I withhold a name, that I do not detail my small hours, what would it change? & so this scaffolding appears, this quick architecture is raised upon a scrolling blueprint, that my eye might again one day retrieve from its bleated generalities its relevant, its enduring particulars. I have committed, leastwise, to a year entire of this same, that I may shore the last few falling leaf-words of autumn against those that sprung up last winter & measure for echo, sound for progress. If nothing else, I am accountable unto myself.
***
This morning that ire in me swells that seems always churning these days, some lulling backwater bred of frustrated patience. I could spell its name but it would be no surprise to you. That lumbering wraith pawing around the refrigerator to drink my beer at two in the morning without comment. After spending ten hours in a closed room with his suffocating flatulence. & his first rotund foot on the floor, how he is already talking about ridiculous things because he has an audience that cannot escape. I notice the depression in the floor where the leg of his chair pivots, the paint flaked, the plywood bruised & distorted. He is telling me about the recreational land program the state government overseas, about land in Kantishna buyable on the cheap. I am regarding his mitt around his coffee cup, some off-white mug sporting a logo from Talkeetna of some place he’s likely never been. He is a too-proud collector of Alaskan merits for a profoundly practiced sitter-on-his-ass. He is informing me that one would need a riverboat to access plots on the plaid that sit on the Kantishna River proper, that one would need to motor upriver to get there if one were not a float-plane pilot. In between words he sputters & coughs & hacks & spits into a paper towel, some consumptive whose blood comes out mucus instead. I note a small hole in his shirt, the shirt he has not changed out of for three days, the shirt that trails a malodorous cloud the way a comet trails a gaseous tail. One could not motor, I suggest, through a fucking national wilderness wherein patrols are still routinely executed via sled-dog. He balks. What he speaks is hardly audible to me anymore. I pretend to have to take a piss, just to buy a moment’s air, a swift exit. & today all over again, home to work, where he will sit & fart & hack all night & shade instantly discombobulated each time the phone rings or the radio cackles. Fuuuuck. Tomorrow I have off, so I will hike until he goes into work. Tuesday & Wednesday, too, I don’t work in preparation for my switch to night shifts, so I plan a trip to Fairbanks for groceries & a night of camping unfettered of this cabin that I cannot seem to scrub clean enough. Until then, I try to breath in calm & breath out calmer. I try.
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