past

I definitely don't want to live in the valley again until I can build my own place for everything artsy, on the property of the red house (now burnt down, knocked over, and sinking back into the earth)

for that is the finale of a story I'll tell about walking up for a Mug, seeing Jason talking in the distance to people I knew I wouldn't know, being deflected by the little stone bridge: a path across the valentine's day field. to cross the river I had to deliberate before a bending tree with two branches, inviting my heroics. It was too far a reach and I stood for too long thinking: had I just lunged and lifted the seat of my pants with the rest of me, I could have scaled successfully across. Instead, after a moment of hovering (amid a depleting energy source unbeknownst to the arms supporting me horizontally in air) my ass sank directly into the water, which I had begun to consider a faintly shifting pool: we'd become familiar, this river and I. Luckily there was another river directly after the first; and lest I think that since I've already wet feet I can just walk across, a broad fence of angry briars detained me. I was now ready for the frontal attack against a nature that never cared whether I was poetic or that I belonged to a romantic project; this walk was unnecessary in the eyes of the landscape, which I felt forbidding me as I stepped---angling my shoes to cut at the thorny sticks growing like ossified blades of grass, betwixt motherly batches of more! Even pestilences have relatives.

They, the entire witch-brew of nuisances, were...the closest I've come to the Real; the horror of nature, the unlimited range of uncaring torments it holds for an ambler! But I had a destination, a place to check up on. Go there I would. Of course the land that supported two equal-sized branches of the same river (neither appearing a tributary of the other) is one obviously at a low level; the flatland equivalent is a marshy field traversable thanks to tufts of hay, growing wild, already dead-manila colored, and providing no single place to stand. Only temporary dryness; but you've got wet freezing feet already. It's not that warm out: it's only a few early days of March that got me out like this!

The only view of the red house must have seemed like the top of the hill far beyond the shit I'm slogging through now; and once I'm on that hill I have had time to consider how to step against a of porcupine-quill mountain. So now I'm mostly okay to do just that.

Fine. Of course I'm out of breath.

There's a sniper's booth 3/4's the way up. I rest by climbing up and staring at a bunch of nothing. more brambles. a field of fucking empty.

Red house? The place to be on a sunny day in the valley? Musing over past lives now all messy and useless yet still, enchantingly grody? Quite, and precisely. I'm going there, yes I said I was and yes I will yes.

Finally I see there's been a path nearby for the duration---very short---of my precarious perch 9 feet up a tree, should have been 10 but I did not fancy sitting on a wobbly aluminum frame. Couldn't let it dictate how I'd see the rest of my stupid little journey, since only one who's out to shoot deer from a high place he cannot get to alone---such was the company that preceded me more immediately. I was after the ancients of the valley, the truly old-school occupants of a strip of land destined to be considered haunted.

But again, nature didn't care, ever.

As for how my finally descending upon the ruins resembled far too much of my oft-repeated dream, why that's too weird to get into right now...