This is something I hope to talk more about later: a town hall of mountain rescue


Actually, will you tell me what you think it means?




addendum: I happened to have these two things come into my life today


Spiritual Mountaintops, Jack H. Goasland, October 1995 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint General Conference


Salvation Mountain is missing its guiding spirit

How did you celebrate Presidents Day?

(or, Dreams really do come true)

I was Lumberjack George Washington and went around with Daniel Boone and William R. King delivering cookies.

uhhhhhhhhhhh.......hi

99% of my conversations are about weather. This is just the way things are when you work outside in North Dakota, particularly in the winter.


The other 1% are with friends who are not here which means they want to hear how my life is going. I don't want to talk about how my life is going. It's not so bad as all that but I don't know anything and I get tired of sharing the current hair brained idea only to recant a couple of months later. There is a very long list of things I don't want to talk about which all happen to be things that are frequently brought up. Although, it is kind of funny when someone asks you about your Valentines plans and after a pause you respond with, "hand out parking tickets and change the light in the garage..."


Mostly I would like to talk about abstract subjects with people, since the things that make me happy these days feel even more difficult to cover in conversation than esoteric intellectual concepts. Please, partake of this excerpt of a hypothetical example conversation:


Someone else: So how is life?
Me: Well, there was a particularly beautiful sun patch on my bedroom wall this afternoon.
Someone else: That's nice.


Ugh, and just writing that example excerpt makes me feel extremely self-centered. I hope I am not and that I continue to show my very real interest in your lives. This is the worst. Because I am living a question mark I am hyper aware of myself. I'm afraid it shows. It obviously shows here as this is a blog. Blogs are the worst. I didn't want to keep writing in this one but the thing is, I do. Partly because I'm still not certain that I would remember how to talk about anything out loud if I didn't practice by publicly publishing some of my thoughts. I am a backwards person. But that's ok, semi-shy backwards people are people, too.


this is it. I quit trying to say anything today. I'm not sure if there is a reason for this. Will someone dress up like a president with me on Monday? (I will probably just wear my regular lumberjack-wannabe wear but maybe with a cottonball wig so I can be Lumberjack Washington?)

Someday I'll  be making a living and sometimes I think that as soon as that happens, I will buy a plot of land in Montana and build a tiny home. But right now I really want to be lost in Germany. O nicht mich lieber. I'll go to Belgium later for frites.

source

I can't stop listening to this song (thanks, Nebraska Jones):





Also, recently I can't stop dwelling on the fact that the US has declared war on terrorism and drugs and is now going after companies in other countries for pirating media but has no significant, widely publicized campaign to end human trafficking. This is why I had to quit listening to Democracy Now! It turned into an exercise in masochism.

I'm used to repeating myself.

I kind of like my voice now. I didn't like my voice when I was little and I would try to call my friend on the phone and her dad would hang up because he couldn't hear me. Or when my 2nd grade teacher told my parents I was the only child she would encourage to yell in class just so she could hear me.


Now, I think it's hilarious. I just answered the phone and the woman asked for my Mom so I handed it over. Then I hear my mom's half of the conversation:


"No, that's my daughter.....Yes, she has a fairly high voice.....She's 24."

malcom crise malcom

Once, a girl in my class inherited her grandfather's old car. While cleaning it out she found a crumpled grocery list which she saved to show me. It was beautiful.

There are rooms here we don't know what to do with. We planted them, and they grew and now there are rooms all around us and we don't know what to do. They're beautiful rooms, I'm amazed, we only planted them on a whim. We had this room, this first one we began with, we were cutting out the flesh, it was just time, you know? And we found the seeds. We laid them out to dry. In the late August sun. Maybe that's why these rooms have so many windows, they loved the sun. I've filled these three up with things I found on the ground. That, yes, that plastic toy there, I found him on the floor of a sushi restaurant. Spotted him immediately while waiting to be seated, a nice hidden joint in a section of downtown, saw the little plastic guy and thought, Maybe a kid'll come back for him? Sometimes I find something on the ground and think, Some kid must miss that, so I leave it. Sometimes I hope other people will see it and think about the kid who must be missing his toy car. I'll set it on the yellow parking block next to the grass at the edge of the parking lot and hope other people see it and think about all of the people who have seen that toy. Then I hope the little kid gets his car back. 


It's snowing outside now, you can see it well out of that east window in the back room. One time I was watching the snow fall in that room and I wished I had a wood burning stove and then I had one. I had to go outside during the snow–it was ok, it was a light snowfall, more like a haze of flakes gently falling, you know–and cut down a tree. Then I thought, what have I done? This has to dry out. This has to dry out just like the seeds for my rooms did, in the late August sun. So I placed the tree parts on the coffe table and I sat on the empty wood burning stove and watched the snow fall until late August. The the tree and I laid outside in the sun together and when we were both dry we curled up in the ground and grew.