This is how it's been today:
Woke up in a small town in the mountains.
Looked out at the ridges, watched the vultures turn on the updrafts, and the ravens stand as monitors on snags in the park.
There is a paucity of things in this land lately. It's all been overdone.
Got to Eureka, walked it. There's new construction there, along with yuppies and tourists. Looked at the bay. Egrets perched in the cypresses on Indian Island.
Stopped in to see a friend. he told me how his daughter had overdone some kind of cactus from South America. Something like peyote.
Now she hangs out with guys who collect bottles and live under bridges. Strangely, she is always happy, or seems so, he told me.
It made me really wonder about the nature of happiness.
Then we say out in his yard and smoked weed. Everything in his yard has been colllected and arranged over a lifetime of working as a tree planter and menial laborer. He has a nice garden with a willow fence that grows.
A lot of herbs growing near the benches he made from some rejected chunks of redwood from a driftwood-milling operation. There was an eccentric integrity to the apparent randomness of things there. We smelled the mint and the rosemary and the different kinds of sage, and admired his cala lily, one of the lushest I've ever seen.
People dropped by every few minutes and said hello.
I fasted all day until I had a sauna in the evening. I felt clean and solemn once that was over. I made it so hot my head pounded, then dumped the buckets of cold water on my head.
After that, ran into my old fishing buddy. He wondered how I can survive without being on the ocean with him. I now have an invitation to come back this summer and stay with him and his family for a week or so, mainly for the fishing
It really made me feel good to know that some people up here really miss me. My experience here was so fundamentally depressing that I forget some of the really good things I did.
I went to a bar and had a burger, but the idea of staying there did nothing for me. I'm thinking I might drive to Eureka for a nightcap.
Tomorrow: East.
Some pictures from today and yesterday are going up in my folder.
Woke up in a small town in the mountains.
Looked out at the ridges, watched the vultures turn on the updrafts, and the ravens stand as monitors on snags in the park.
There is a paucity of things in this land lately. It's all been overdone.
Got to Eureka, walked it. There's new construction there, along with yuppies and tourists. Looked at the bay. Egrets perched in the cypresses on Indian Island.
Stopped in to see a friend. he told me how his daughter had overdone some kind of cactus from South America. Something like peyote.
Now she hangs out with guys who collect bottles and live under bridges. Strangely, she is always happy, or seems so, he told me.
It made me really wonder about the nature of happiness.
Then we say out in his yard and smoked weed. Everything in his yard has been colllected and arranged over a lifetime of working as a tree planter and menial laborer. He has a nice garden with a willow fence that grows.
A lot of herbs growing near the benches he made from some rejected chunks of redwood from a driftwood-milling operation. There was an eccentric integrity to the apparent randomness of things there. We smelled the mint and the rosemary and the different kinds of sage, and admired his cala lily, one of the lushest I've ever seen.
People dropped by every few minutes and said hello.
I fasted all day until I had a sauna in the evening. I felt clean and solemn once that was over. I made it so hot my head pounded, then dumped the buckets of cold water on my head.
After that, ran into my old fishing buddy. He wondered how I can survive without being on the ocean with him. I now have an invitation to come back this summer and stay with him and his family for a week or so, mainly for the fishing
It really made me feel good to know that some people up here really miss me. My experience here was so fundamentally depressing that I forget some of the really good things I did.
I went to a bar and had a burger, but the idea of staying there did nothing for me. I'm thinking I might drive to Eureka for a nightcap.
Tomorrow: East.
Some pictures from today and yesterday are going up in my folder.