Government Peak

The route.

The objective. 

 The approach.

The view. 

 The crew.

The stalling point. 

The descent.

This Town Do Feel Mine

The other day I decided to bike around town. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but the face of the burg struck me as it sometimes does. Holy shit, I live here. I sometimes think that a purer distillation of Americana doesn't exist, that I've hit the main nerve, the wet dream of so many conservative folks who fervently desire to "Make America Great Again" or to descend into a time before, as my Old Man put it, the country "was going to hell in a hand basket". I'm not sure exactly when this was supposed to have begun, as it seemed to be an ongoing process, but I believe it was sometime around when hippies started showing up in large enough numbers to report.

I found a bracelet of Gavin's in one of my cabinets. It was broken and I repaired it with an improvised fastening device fashioned from a repurposed hair tie. I've taken to wearing it around for some reason, at all times, work, home, wherever. He turned 13 over the weekend and I'm not certain he'll want to wear it when I see him again this summer. Something about that seems fitting but also worthy of despair.

I got hella roasted on my bike ride, humorously enough, nearby my work. I then watched people falling out of the sky and wondered at them. One of the parachutists trailed an American flag behind its person while the jumping partner cut furious arcs through the overhead gray. Their bodies descended without incident and I remounted my ride to repair to the bar where I observed the wonders pictured above. The barkeep, Sarah, was grandly engaging and the words issuing from my face sounded foreign. There was little to do save watch the hockey game. It was a strange journey.

I biked around, visiting my local playgrounds. I didn't tarry as I was solo and my appearance was extreme sketch at best. The parks are places where Gavin, Kiernan, and I have spent time and the realization, never far removed, that that window of existence is fast closing encroached. I snapped photos, wishing to record the scenes for reasons tinged with nostalgia and wistfulness, two mind states I regularly admonish myself for harboring - the reality of impermanence demands I do so, but the emotive, ape parts of my brain hold memories of the times in those parks as highly relevant. It's an odd dichotomy.

Later, I sat lotus on a picnic table situated on the concrete park abutting the train depot in town. I faced away from our iconic water tower and studied the storefronts of the main drag, Alaska Street. The wind had arisen while I was in the bar and it tugged my hair, my beard. There was no one on the street and cars, such that they were, passed with abandon. I was there quite some time, watching. A man approached, he and his dog, and inquired should I like to smoke a bowl with him. I declined, with gratitude, and he left me to my thoughts. Later, I saw him underneath some birch trees nearby the depot with all his kit - bike, pack, dog, self - and the nature of this town's characters imposed itself upon me. There are rafts of suchlike people, all living their own crazed realities. It's something to think about.

A arrived with Uly in tow and we all headed out to the recycling collection center who was lately celebrating its 20th anniversary. Some students of mine had been steamrolled into prepping/carrying out the food/security for the gig. I was grandly altered by this point and several of the students admitted to not recognizing me until I had spoken to them. There were hors d'oeuvre of a fashion and pastries and other things on which to nibble and we took these to the collection bay where we watched local artists perform. There was an aged lady barbershop quartet and their voices betrayed none of the creeping ruin of their frames. They sang a few numbers. Tables were roundly thumped in appreciation. The other members of the audience seemed not to care much and so profanity was also employed. The singers concluded and we left to explore the grounds and socialize. The students seemed strangely mystified that I could exist outside the narrow confines of my work and it was good to show them a measure of quirk, to show that staff people aren't all robots, touting the DOL line of "work, work, work...". I like to think it did them some mental favors. 

A shuttled us back to the bar and my bicycle. I told her about the guy at the depot. We talked about the barbershop quartet. I went on about my students telling anecdotes, hopefully of the funny variety. We sat there in our bar, with our boy, in our town and I was swamped by the most attachment I've ever felt for an area, almost like nothing bad could happen here, even though I know this to be untrue as Palmer has all the problems anywhere else has - substance abuse, domestic violence, theft, corruption, teen murder even fails to escape us. Much like the parks' relationship to impermanence, it's an odd interbeing. The place is perfect. The place is simultaneously flawed. It's home.  

Here's the street where I live. I feel fairly certain I've posted a similar type photo before, but this one always jars. There is not one, but two massive intrusions of rock, just sitting there on display. This is Matanuska Peak, the west face, and I see it daily on the short commute to work. I leave home and there it is. I turn 90 degrees right from this view and there lies Pioneer Peak, showing off its north face, massive craggy rock garbed with rags of snow. The tourists have arrived for the season and, weather permitting, they without fail snap selfies or take panoramas for posting on social media no doubt. I hope I never reach the point of acclimating to the views. I somehow doubt I will. 

Home. Evening. A was in the back, getting Uly to sleep. I sat out front and watched the sky and the birch and the pussy willow and the mountain (Pioneer Peak, ill-pictured here if at all discernible). Much like my earlier engagement with the bar, it has been and continues to be a strange journey.

It Hurts a Little Bit

Hey, take a look at this idiot.

I went to my friend D's book launch the other day. He had asked me to do the honor of interviewing him at a local bookstore about his novel and writing process and I had, of course, agreed to do so. After work, I drove into the city, through the spring rain during which I was dazzled by the sight of an eagle, fish in its talons, cruising over the roadbed, on its way home for dinner. Once arrived, the scene was grand - small urban coffee shop vibe with Mexican inspired tapas and beer on tap or in cans. D was on the small elevated stage, signing books. The place was packed, young and old, with friends of D's and those of his son who's no longer bodily among us. Soon, the event's hour came and I joined D on the stage. I felt a total fraud, sitting up there with him and asking questions about his book and recent run of publishing success. After the Q&A, D read a chapter from the novel and I watched him, reading in his characteristic way, the same way I read his words in my head, in his voice. There was something to it, and I stood at the back, taking in the reality that doing such a thing was possible. The reading concluded, I retired to one of the only two seats left available to guzzle beer and people watch, overcome with the deep knowledge of eventual death, but not in a necessarily bad way. The event ended and I drove home to my quiet town, my sleeping house, to sit with myself for a while. 

At work I got a promotion of sorts. The new jam is titled "Career Counselor" and I'm supposed to advise students about their career path and how they can be successful in the workplace (laughable, I know, given my highly non-linear track myself). What I really end up doing is inputting student's time off requests and providing haphazard, at best, mental health counseling that runs the gamut of topics - grief, stress, relationships, substance abuse, crushing existentialism (also laughable due to my inability to grapple successfully with those issues). It's a pretty good deal. I have my own office. I come and go much as I please. I'm generally left alone unless the world is burning down for one of the students. I don't have to put on the song and dance fuckery of entertaining/managing a classroom full of disaffected, low socioeconomic adolescents who would rather be just about anywhere else committing all manner of abuses of the flesh. It's a thing to watch them and to realize that I'm in the pull of a temporal black hole, approaching the event horizon, and speeding farther and farther away from where they are now and where I once was and that soon I will cross that boundary (or may have already). It's a hell of a thing.

I sit here, at home, surrounded by books. Sometimes (lots of the time really), I find myself in a state of wonder at how things have shaken out for me. I'm a skinny white kid from southern Mississippi who grew up in a trailer and somehow I've managed to never work, not really, a day in my life. By rights I should have been a day laborer, gone to prison, been hooked on methamphetamine, trailer park denizen, domestic violence champ, Bud Light swiller, serial bum, homeless, any of the futures that I know could have existed out there. Yet I reside in relative ease and comfort, watching my youngest play with a Melissa and Doug play pizza set as I listen to streaming Lofi beats and watch the world outside turn green once more. I spend my days writing away at things, at whatever shape my life has occupied. Nights I'm currently enthralled with ice hockey even though I've never been in ice skates and have only attempted, once, those of the roller variety. I've somehow managed to get married, three times even. I'm going to have a novel published this year. The entirety of my existence is a mystery, one unsolvable, and I'm drawn to the line from Blood Meridian when the kid spends a night with the hermit in the desert when the old man imparts this wisdom to him.

 "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."   

Winter-Fueled Self-Recriminations

Ulybear turned two a week ago. I know how I should feel about that (joyful, proud, excited, etc.), but I can't say that I fall into that realm. For true, I am all of those things, as another orbit around the sun has made him more robust and engaging and hardier and less likely to die from something as insidious as SIDS but there's all the baggage that goes along with having him become the individual he has always been and the reality that, truth be told, I'm far, far more lenient with him than I have been my older boys. I'm nicer to him. I always say please and thank you. I give him many more choices in things. Very few, if any, knife hands get thrown his way. I have yet to, as I once did with Gavin, force him to hold a heavy stone over his head and run around a house, shouting apologies, in penance for some now forgotten transgression. I'll likely never upend the chest of drawers, much like I did with Kiernan, and strew his clothes about the floor because he's not cleaned his room to the ordered specifications in the required time. 

It's strange to me to watch (my parental progression, I mean) and I get the feeling, unfactcheckable due to mortality, that my old man had the same type conundrum with my development. That smacks of hubris in the extreme but I feel it's a valid thing to explore. I was seven and nine years removed from my brothers and I know, both through their telling and my old man's own confession, that I had it far easier than both of my elder brothers. I can remember, out of context, speaking with my brother, the middle child of us three, about how I'd had it soft because "Pop could lay on a whipping in his thirties" a decade of his to which I was little privy and memory experience of which I had none. 

Uly on the left.

We went up to the mountains the other day for some skiing. The day was magnificent: clear, cold, new snow - the first in what seemed quite a while, and no wind. On the way in I noted the sledding hill in a rueful manner. Otherwise, I was stricken with the place, especially the seasonal attitude of the day and the sound of the snow underfoot and the crisp surface crust of the previously drifted dunes that crunched beneath my weight but held Uly's as he and I ambled about the area while A skied solo. Uly tired, and I booted off some snow from a picnic table seat so he could rest there. We, Uly and I, sat on that bench and watched the turn of the earth and the orb of sun in the sky and listened to the sound of the woods and we were quiet as we waited the final bit for his mother to return. After, we descended and resumed our normal lives once more.

We went down the Lower 48 way this Christmastide. I met the boys in MSP and we copped a cheap motel a bit down the road. There were only two beds and the elevator was sketch af but the television worked and so did the ice machine and refrigerator and we all cobbled ourselves into the room for a single night's rest before the trip out to Winona where Uly and A stayed with my newly minted in-laws. The weather was brutal - polar vortex cold and unseasonable temps. Morning after, we drove back, listening to the newest QOTSA album and grooving furiously to the tracks. 

Once in Winona, the boys, refueled by a night's sleep and despite the chill, availed themselves of the local sledding venues (not ideal but shouldered through regardless) and I watched those boys slide down the frigid and brush covered hills as A's father shoved them and followed after and the cold and the time and the fleeting nature of their childhoods came hurtling down with them into the pit that is me and I watched them go, run after run, yelling and laughing, until it was time, all too quick in coming, to head inside to warm up.

Maybe I'm just repeating myself here as I've said all these things, I know, before but I once heard a wise man say that we, as writers, are "all circling our own obsessions".