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.