Off I go now on a 10° walk. There isn’t any choice.
My brother-in-law wants to climb Mt. Wheeler this summer. That’s a 14-mile round-trip hike that must climb 3,000+ ft. in altitude from the trailhead. He runs marathons. Well, I want to climb Mt. Wheeler, too, and I don’t. I’m also devolving into a fat slob, and let’s face it, the way to really lose weight and keep it off is gut-busting, puff-and-pant exercise built into your lifestyle one way or the other. Either that or just eat raw carrots and celery, which we won’t even talk about, because I just had a Colorado organic beef hotdog for breakfast.
So I have to walk. There isn’t any wind, though it is 10° F. This isn’t gut-busting, but I usually pant a little and even sweat.
There’s no rest on any other front, either. It isn’t fair. I figured out what happened to me and now I have to fix it. Big whoopy doo. I’D RATHER BE NUMB, and what does a man have to do to generate a little complacency around here, anyway? They don’t make a drug for that, no matter what you may think. Everybody (?) else gets to sit around and watch football on teevee. How can they DO that with the clock ringing in their ears?! Why can’t I get permission to die stupid, too?
Oh good, I’m an artist.
Oh shit, artists never retire.
“Retire.” What does that mean, anyway? Now we’re back to dying stupid. I wanna go home, except I’m there. This is not going to end well, or ever, maybe, and could turn out to be something like a feature.
The last two or three times I’ve driven us back to Taos from Santa Fe, I’ve fallen terribly depressed when coming up out of the canyon and seeing that impossible vista stretching out before me. Yes, depressed. Surprised? Don’t be — it happened to D.H. Lawrence, too. Could be I have vista overload — after taking in all the terrible soul-sucking beauty, something in me occasionally yearns for enshroudment in the deciduous trees of my ancestors, with glistening greenery 10 feet away… Ecological complacency, that’s the ticket! Or does that really represent another womb? Maybe I just want to hide because I feel ashamed about living in a mud hut with half our past life sitting in a storage unit @$75 a month for the privilege of hurting me. I can’t take it with me, true, but letting it all go before I’m dead can justifiably be said to suck doggy dicks. Oh, the perils of breaking free. Taos makes you WORK, dammit.
[sigh]
I am not a saint, nor do I wish to be one. Toward that end and to help suppress self-flagellation over nostalgic misrepresentation, I have ordered a great whopping fancy leather office chair to coddle my ignorant butt. It will be magnificent and expensive, and I won’t want to sit in it all day working on other people’s business. An unlived life at 64 is like an invisible bully making you walk around with dirty underwear pulled down over your head: if I go out into the world, everybody knows, and if I hide away on my own, there’s still a stink and I can’t see where I’m going. No way will I sit on burgundy-dyed cow skin pulled wet and hairy off a bloody hot carcass and not defer to passion, in other words.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I still don’t get no goddamn break, though.
Out the door now…
(Before the mud thaws, that’s the main thing.)
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