Autumn Hells

The other day I was out for a stroll, pre-snow. A's family was in town and the valley was in full autumn, gorgeously red and gold and brown and possessed of a certain mustiness that heralds the winter and can be likened to a berry-sort of goodness folded into a kind of muskegg and arboreal decay just before the freeze arrives and arrests most things organic prior to the spring major thawing. A's mom and dad copped a place at a bed and breakfast with full frontal view of Pioneer Peak. The vista granduered and the climate was frisky. All the elements were in place for an adventure. I availed.

This year's holiday time features a few things I dislike. There is air travel, first and foremost. Then there is hospitality-ing and guesting and Christmas partying (both of the corporate and familial variety) and a general feeling that all this merry making could be better served doing anything else. (I could finish the weird novella draft re-write. I could watch some football. I could get a new short story done before the new year as was my end of 2017 goal. I could get out there and do anything else life related that wasn't wasting time.)

Recently, I fell and broke some bones of the rib-cage variety. I was in the shower. The bathroom Defensive Coordinator called a two-gap blitz and came with the linebacker combo of Slippery Shower (TCU) and Indestructible Commode (THE Ohio State University). I was in the pocket. I turned to avoid the rush and was shoestring grabbed by Slippery Shower as Indestructible Commode plowed into my midsection. After the play I was up and calling signals, but the Head Coach (A), came in to call a time out. I finished the drive and was good to play, but had to go out of the game, not on IR, but not starting either.

It's been six weeks and I'm still not 100 percent.

The Real Me

A and Uly gathering blueberries in Hatcher Pass.

"Get me off of this; I need confidence in myself," The Weeknd balefully implores of his newfound lover on the track "Wicked Games". Good Lord can I connect to that sentiment, especially in the wake of the autumn's advent and the crushing apathy that is work and the never ending heartbreak that is shepherding children into this world only to have them go before you onto this stage and render every ounce of the love you pour into them to an unused lard that sits neglected and turns rancid on the kitchen counter of their lives. Sometimes I feel that, if I had enough of that confidence that The Weeknd desires, I could believe the direction my life flowed was good and true and not illusory and fleeting and ultimately false. 

Today we went, with A's mother and auntie and Uly, to the oomingmak farm that resides in Palmer, just up the road here. We walked around the premises and had a tour from a super nice woman named Grayson (?) and saw the beasts and learned about the farm's operation and qiviut gathering schedule and processing. The tour guide let Ulybear feed some of the calves (weighing in at close to two hundo) with a branch affixed with dead leaves. The animals' eyes rolled and the calves called in the manner of bovines and I had the intense desire to face down these beasts on the iced over tundra armed with only a flint-tipped birch spear and draped in stinking hides, screaming into a sub-zero whiteness. I know I'd die in such a scenario. 

We went to the fair this year, as always. It seems that, as I get older, the fair gets more magical as if I were slipping, temporally, into an adolescence that I never experienced for real (as real as this simulation universe can attain). Uly and A and I had all manner of fair food (fried pickles and pretzels with cheese and fried peanut potatoes with real bacon bit infused mayonnaise) in addition to many beers (Uly abstained from the brew). There was all the human noise there and the farm animals and Capuchin monkeys riding border collies and different reptiles in an exhibit and a woman on a mobility scooter motoring down the pathway with an obese grandson huffing along behind at a trot petitioning his grams to slow down and it was a different world altogether, as it is. I wondered about all those souls in that company and how they maintained with their own specific set of life attacks. 

The leaves are turning and falling down and it is at once beautiful and metaphoric and heart-fucking-sundering but in the best of possible ways.

Die, Motherfucker, Die

Here it is folks, a compilation of the summer's photos. I'll minimally word these to give you all an idea of where/when things occurred. It's been cyclonic, to be sure, and it always leaves one with the relishing sadness of experiences that are too meteoric to be contained in the accomplishing of them. Here's hoping you enjoy.

View of the Matanuska, taken from Lazy Mt., July 2017. Hiked with the two oldest. Did not summit.

Afterward, there were darts and drinks at the Moosehead.

Lazy Mt. Second picnic table. Serious.

The boys devo'ing a table-top, turn based, fighting game populated by animal characters gleaned from Ulybear's toys.

In the van, bound for Hope before heading to Homer for camping. August 2017.

Ulybear picking and eating raspberries at the Porcupine campground in Hope.

In the tent. Hope, AK.

K showing off his "Top Chef" inspired s'mores creation, completed by a fire roasted raspberry.

Me and the seed. Land's End, Homer Spit. August 2017.

Kiernan enjoys the campsite fire on the Spit.

They leave on Saturday, then, it gets darker.

Mountain Hop

We went for a hike in the mountains the other day. It was transformative. We didn't go far, nor high, nor was the route technical or in any way difficult, but the hike changed us, in the way it always does. We took a previously unexplored trail and wound up in a mostly neglected cirque where there was evidence of an abandoned mining op and the remains of a rodent (skull, scapulae, fur) and hikers on the ridge above with their dogs and the quiet that reigns up there and water and rock and sky. It was me, my special lady, and my three sons.

It's summer vacation here. I've got the eldest two for a month and a half and its awful in the way that it always is. We have to cram in a year's worth of work into that time and it's not easy. The other day I spent an hour and a half with Kiernan wherein we did some serious psychological work to get to the root of why the sight of a blue painted house on the corner that was visible from the breakfast table conspired to make him cry (turns out a shit-talking ex-friend lived in a similarly colored house and that image brought up painful memories). Before that I parsed out all the reasons my oldest didn't want to play soccer here (a sport he loves), then we relayed that info to his mother (not ideal). It's terrible to watch them grow like this but all the while wondrous.

Watching my youngest with his two older brothers is something altogether destroying. Uly shines to his brothers right away, engaging with them in a way he doesn't do with A and me, emulating them more fully, opening up more, observing, learning. He mimics what they do and enjoys their company differently than he does with his mother and me. He's taken to seeking out his brothers in the morning instead of solely needing his mother for the morning's entertainment. They all jive together, incomprehensibly, beautifully. It's more than I can take. 

We biked down to the river today. She was up, magnificently, higher than I'd ever seen. We went to the bridge and watched the roiling current eddy and gyre and crest the rocks where we normally could have descended and walked. The water rushed along, carrying with it the various driftwood parcels that swam on its movement. Gavin and Kiernan chucked rocks, larger and larger, into the brown torrent to see how large a splash they could produce. The youngest I watched with an unhealthy dose of paranoia, fearful that he might fall into the tumult below the bridge, thinking all the while that they, all three of them, were like the river, untameable, frightening, capable of being observed only. 

In the words of my friend Nick, "I don't know why living exists when you just want to die."

Fuck Everything

Been spending a lot of my free time these days getting stratospheric and staring out the window at the scenery. The birch tree in the front yard is transcendent. Beyond, rows of slanting houses tilt into the earth like absurd phantoms. The mountain that crowds the horizon is another reality entire to itself. The wine in my fist is sustaining on a level I don't believe possible. Birds arrive on evening missions to the feeders, mostly solitary, and spend their time gathering seeds from the spillage on the melting ground. The sky changes; sometimes there is a breeze, sometimes clouds. I watch the evening pinken, then dim, then pour myself the final abuse of that day's mini-bender. I'm going to be dead soon enough.

Last week there was a food truck/vintage shop festival at the fairgrounds. A and I visited with her parents who were in town for the week. I strengthened my morning coffee with vodka and we advanced to the grounds and perused the displays. I found a truck that hailed from my birth neck of the woods and ate a shrimp and catfish po-boy with fried okra as a side. It was delicious - fried perfectly and seasoned with just enough spice that the addition of Tabasco only heightened the flavors of the seafood and balanced the mayo-tomato-lettuce combo. The bread was the right consistency of toothy and fresh. As I ate, relishing, the meal made me think about my dead parents and what they might make of me being in Palmer, AK eating such fare. What might they have thought about having Uly as a member of their number? What about G and K who they likewise did not meet? 

I dyed eggs with Ulybear and fam this past Friday when I'd taken a personal day from work. It was A's parents' last day with us and they were soon to be flying back to MN. We did the usual stuff: put names on the shells, drew designs, dunked the eggs. While the grandparents had a time with Uly and his cuteness, I was drawn into my own interiority of previous, egg dyeing memory-scapes where G was younger and wearing one of my old, white t-shirts stained with dye, hands to match, holding up his creation in a photo I keep somewhere. There was G and K with friends in a similarly messy outing where they'd spent the day gorging on kid-friendly snacks and playing before the egg coloring finale. The scene congealed of a time they went to a secret proselytizing "egg hunt" where they sat through a non-denominational, feel good-ey, Christianity-lite service before being set loose to gather eggs "hidden" on a patch of astroturf at the Menard Sports Center. Of these things I said nothing.

Here's K at a soccer game I didn't attend. He's in the black kit, positioning himself, edging out that other kid and anticipating the drop of the shadowed ball that hangs just out of frame. Judging from the motion of the photo, he's going to get the first touch and ensuing advantage in maneuvering up the field. I received the photo - along with others of report card info and goalie work - on a Thursday morning while I was busy with a field trip with my students to the local recycling center. I scrolled through the photos as the pupils labored through a presentation on waste reduction. It would be four more hours before I was safely drinking secret beers at my local bar then on to home where I'd continue until it was time for window staring and the hoped for/anticipated nightly fade out. 

Fuck everything. 

Brain Problems

Here's a report:

The other day, I found myself out in the driveway, shoveling snow. This shouldn't be that bizarre an occurrence considering my locale, but the past two years have been shit with respect to snowfall and I've lived in places where snow removal has been someone else's responsibility. With the securing of a mortgage (via transferring my balls into the bank's vise), I've been granted the task of clearing said mortgage's driveway. Not to imply that I dislike the work. Indeed, I find the chore invigorating - outside, in the cold, laboring with a definite endpoint - and at the conclusion of which I can indicate palpable evidence of something useful having been accomplished. The driveway was snowy; now it is clear. I did that. Proceed to drink beer in triumph.

In any event, I was out, shoveling and after I'd done the required work, I heard a mewling from beneath the porch. A long haired, orange cat appeared, rangy, ugly, obviously street-worn with frost-bitten ears and matted fur. I promptly told the cat to fuck off, that we weren't doling out charity, and entered the house. The cat apparently took this as encouragement and hopped up to the porch in order to eat the spilled bird seed from my feeders and to lap at the melting snow on my porch boards. He then proceeded to mewl and cry at the door, going so far as to jump onto the bench and peer into my kitchen as if he'd been freshly turned out of the house for the day and was unhappy with that reality. 

By that evening the cat was inside, perched in my lap; by today I've settled on his name as "Captain Lawrence Edward Grace 'Titus' Oates", of the famously doomed Terra Nova Expedition. He's ill-tempered with the other cat, drinks from the toilet, puked on the living room floor, is gross in general, and prefers my company. 

Of course I like him.

I went skiing with A and Uly a week or so ago on Saturday. I don't remember exactly. Alcohol is a hell of a drug. 

In any event, we went out to the old train tracks that snake down the Matanuska river. The tracks are out of commission and run all the way to Sutton, almost 20 miles away, and we headed out into the day in the mid-noon hour finding it beyond magnificent. The snow was ground down by boots and paws and our skis hissed over the already laid imprints. I bid them go ahead and stayed to myself, going slowly and looking for birds.

We went about a mile out then turned back, just before an area where there is a massive and on-going earth slump as the river takes its toll on the bluff. The trail is passable there, but we mostly always turn back at that point as we worry about Uly's (and our own) safety. Returning, I let A take the lead again and told her not to wait for me. She skied on and left me to my thoughts. The river below shushed. My skis murmured in their traces. My breath came in rhythmic rushes. For a moment, things were okay.

A and Uly stopped for me at an overlook near the trail head. A bald eagle coasted over us, descending, until he perched on the snow pack near the stream of rushing water in the riverbed below. We left.

Uly turned a year. He walks now. He's got his own shitter now and has used it twice. Just this morning, he was fussy and yawning and I asked him if he wanted to go take a nap and he nodded his head and said, "ya," before he started down the hallway, without me, toward his bedroom. I followed him back and he crawled into his bed. After I covered him up, I told him I was going to leave him and he should sleep well and long. He nodded again and I left him. Within ten minutes he was out, like a light, as the Old Man would have said.

I returned to the living room, where I had been listening to Pandora. A, who had been at the store, returned but soon departed again to ski solo. Now it's only me, alone, sipping beer and listening to hip hop.

Something about that seems so right.

Work starts again tomorrow. 

I recently saw a facebook article from Cormac McCarthy wherein he gave an interview talking about how the 9-5 workday (I'm interpolating lots here as I only read the headline) is the death of creativity and that's why he's eschewed such a lifestyle. Can't say that I disagree there. Tomorrow will dawn and I'll arise and go to teach children (yes children) how to write resumes and set goals and compose cover letters so that they too might enjoy full employment as that is the endpoint of our current and collective economic delusion. 

What of the cat's example? 

What of the eagle's? 

What of Uly's?

I'll leave with a line from The Weeknd's newest music vid, "All I wanna do is make money and make dope shit."

Kill me.