outbound traffic

-Salt Lake City

this time of year, the sun sets pretty far north. from the south end of salt lake valley, high on the bench above the aluevial plane, it’s just past the smokestack near saltair, far beyond the darkened slopes of Antelope island.  this morning it seemed so cold, so odd. Frost gladed the deck at margaret’s in jackson when I left, and as I headed south I realized the cold and snow and gropple of the last few days wasn’t so incrogruous becuase of the date. That’s an abstraction.

It was the angle of the sun.

When it’s as far north as now, when the days get this long, my body just senses the days should be warmer. there should be no snow. the dissonance came from the lattitude.

And now, here, back in the home that’s not my home, where the smells are the same, and nothing and everything is different, where the person I was and the woman I loved were together, sleeping out on the porch this time of year, grateful for the leaves blocking the slanting heat of the afternoon sun, don’t live anymore, there’s still something of home here. it is the place most in the world I feel I belong, in the same moment as I feel like I should be anywhere but here. The light is right, the angle is right, the smells of the russian olive are right… and yet, it’s wrong.

Not to wallow in suffering over, just to acknowledge. And, perhaps, a chance to do one thing, once, the way it should be done. It’s good to be home, God, I miss it so.

-Jackson, Wy.

yesterday I took a break from scanning approximately one gajillion images for some to use for this documentary that’s MIRVing into either (a) a groundbreaking work of cinematic journalism or (b) an obscenely complicated mess, a sort of over spiced curry stir fry deconstructing itself to a palid lumpy paste, to have a chat with a friend named, appropriately, Chaos.

In addition to his many other remarkable attributes, like an unflappable constitution, penchant for torching shipping pallets, and ability to drive for 14 hours without apparent effort, is that he’s a mortage broker.

More to the point, he’s my mortgage broker, and is working to get me a loan for a house I’ve had an offer accepted on in Salt Lake City. During the middle of the seemingly endless process, while he was crunching some numbers, I took off to the skate park to work off some nerves. And there, standing on the little steel rail, with my helmet rattling loose on my head, my right foot tabbing down my skateboard, pointing it up like a flagpole, I lifted my left foot, swung it forward and onto the board, and for the first time since I started skating again dropped in. It was a small drop, two feet, but that’s not the point. As with the mortgage, something I’d long wanted to do, and not done, and feared, suddenly was something I’d *already* done, a part of my past, not a piece of the future to fear and dread and worry about.

I fell soon thereafter, bruising my hip, but got back up and went again. and again. and again. then i came home to hear Chaos say things were looking good.

And I admire the times people I know have dropped in, that a little bit more, and understand it, and realize just how small, really, a decision most decisons are in the end. Stop thinking about it, and what might happen, and preparing to deal with it when it goes bad, and just. drop. in.

-Jackson, Wy

there arrived here yesterday, at my temporary mountain aerie/editing studio, two dear friends from Mississippi days, Eli and Matt, along with my long-suffering Honda, and the remains of the life i’d lived there.

Plastic bins, full of small items, whose individual value is limited, and any one of which I’d not mind having it gone forever, yet of sufficient worth i’m somewhat proscribing myself from just tossing the shit out, to whit:

-Fistful of sharpies, black and green

-half used bindle of blank CDs

-half empty box of colored sleeves for same

-tempurpedic pillow I never really used

-overpriced brown embossed hipster belt with double D-ring clasps bought on Haight to carry my radio @ Burning Man, worn out to uselessness from overloading with tools

-telescoping Ikea lamps, blue and green

-blank clipboard

You get the picture. That it was all carefully, loveingly hauled from Pearlington to New Orleans to me here in Jackson, where I’ll ignore it till hauling it to Salt Lake for storage, thence to Oakland till at least this fall….there should be an Ebay for this kind of thing, the sort of stuff of too great a value to just throw in the garbage, but too random and used to pass muster at the goodwill shops.

instead, it’ll just drag around my heals, a reminder of how little we all truly need, and the tax we pay for forgetting that