What I am thinking.
what am i thinking?
I was walking through the park today. It was a mildly chilly Spring afternoon with full sun. The leaves were rejoicing in the breeze, their yellow-green hue telling the new-each-year story of revival, growth, and hope. And then I heard the shouting. Profuse swearing cut through the trees with varied death threats thrown in. I continued walking, now wary, and saw the yeller around the bend. He was a man of about 40. I couldn't see who he was yelling at from my side of the bend, but it continued as I drew closer. When I got to about 20 feet away, I saw that he had 3 large backpacks by the side of the trail, that he was quite dirty, and that he was intently focused on a tree, yelling at it. This last fact, that he was yelling at a tree, was unclear to me. Did it make me feel better about the situation, or worse? I'm still unsure.
Regardless, that story has nothing to do with this little poem I wrote flying back from Austin this last work trip. Here's that poem:
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It's a great wide world out my office window. It's beautiful and entrancing, and it's everything I can do to avoid looking at it. Each day is a constant battle - the pushing and pulling of the little mental world I'm paid for and the little mental world I'm not. Sometimes, I'm a little bitter about that, but at other times, I reflect on the way my work allows me to go to wild places in my free time. It is, again, a push and pull. This poem is a bit of that, though perhaps more push than pull.
It's been asked of me again, this time with just shy of two weeks notice. "Can you be in Austin from the 29th through the 1st?" Does it matter that I'll be just returning to the country on the 28th? Not particularly. With red eyes and no juice in the battery, we're off once more on a grand adventure to everybody's favorite vacation destination: Texas-Land. As usual, I've entertained myself by jotting things down along the way. What else is one to do?
Usher had them. Why can't I? Actually, I think Usher had them a few times... Well. Poem, Prose, Short Story, or Anecdote - whatever this is, these are my confessions.
Not too long ago, Jordan and I moved. We made it all of 4 streets up the hill before putting our things in a different home. It's a better home, in a lot of ways, most of which boil down to the fact that it's ours while our former home wasn't. One thing that hasn't changed with our move is our proximity to a large, beautiful local park. Hemlock, fir, and cedar. Blackberries, red huckleberries, and salmonberries. The moss, the river, and the mushrooms. I take walks through the park at lunchtime, looking for a long time at these things, loving that I get to be so close to nature each day. On the more stressful days at work, it's an irreplaceable break. And on one such day this past week, I wrote this.
So I bought a house. Sort of. Jordan and I bought a house. Sort of. The bank and Jordan and I bought a house. Mostly, the bank bought a house. Congratulations bank. It is, in so many unwanted ways, a fixer, and while I'd certainly have liked to wait around for my loan officer to show up with rolled up sleeves and a baseball hat, I knew that I'd be going it alone. For the past months, I've been working full time from 7am to 4pm, leaving my duplex at 4pm to head to the house, working at the house until 8 or 9pm, then coming home to eat and sleep. Weekends have been the same, minus the fulltime job. It's been a foggy season. I've forgotten about a lot of things, and I've neglected a lot of things, a lot of people, and I have simultaneously felt quite alone.
It's over, almost. And thank goodness. I hated the process. Jordan hated the process. It was a trudging 6 months or so, constantly revealing that the world has been specially tuned for people more wealthy or more established than ourselves. And yet, in just one week, the process will end, presumably alongside my griping. We're thrilled about that, and we're quite happy with where we're going, even if it comes with a fair amount of work.
There is one wonderful upside of house hunting though: walking through other people's homes. I've always been one to immediately open the glove box of a friend's car when catching a ride. The contents aren't important, per se, but I'm curious. Is it clean and organized, or is it a minor sprawl? Is it strictly utilitarian, or is there something fun hiding in there? And if glove boxes are a carrot, houses are a low country boil. You see so much of other people in their things and their choices. And sometimes, you see some exceptionally weird choices. I didn't want to forget those things, so I put together this list. I won't claim this is anything other than what the title overtly states. Still, I was on the plane from Seattle to Dublin and found myself mentally engulfed in syllables and reflective thoughts on the cyclical nature my life has followed thus far - what else was I to do? A string of connected haikus, each acting like a stanza, seemed to be the way to capture what I was thinking. Looking back on it, perhaps not... We tried.
I suppose you can guess where I was when I wrote this poem... Yes, it was indeed Garibaldi Lake, amid the high country between Squamish and Whistler in British Columbia. I sat there lakeside, blue-white glaciers easing themselves into the water on the far side and greyscale juts of granite poking into the high skyline, and I watched the mirror finish of the lake lift slightly and ripple with the rising of dining trout. It's not uncommon for fly fishermen to refer to this as "sipping". Up from below, a fish journeys to the surface, briefly breaking into the air with an open mouth, engulfing a mayfly or mosquito or beetle or anything else. It's entrancing to witness.
I traveled to Austin again. I didn't want to again. I had a decent time again.
And that's the brief. Along the way, I wrote down some thoughts as poems - varying, but invariably short. When I initially left for Austin, I'd imagined that there would only be a few, but that was not so. 15 little poems. Apparently, the bustle and din of the airport is my picturesque landscape, the towering perch on which I find inspiration. Go figure. Here they are, topically all over the place, but listed in the order I wrote them, accompanied by no context or title. |
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