Meditations Overlooking Youngs Bay

It is good to be around a dog on a daily basis, even if it’s only temporary.

A hummingbird just visited me.

I read an interesting line about constructing and reconstructing one’s personal myth. Had I constructed one for myself? Now that almost everything about me has been annihilated (except my heart) how do I go about reconstructing a new personal myth? Or should I even try? Am I trying right now, subconsciously? Is it such a bad thing to have a personal myth? Myths are powerful forces in human culture. I need to think more about this subject and discuss it with more people.

I recently read Tim O’Brien’s 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods and found the experience a revelation and almost supernaturally relevant to my current state of mind. Incidentally, I found it in the garbage. Think of that: I basically found supernatural relevance in the garbage. There out to be a word for that.

Here is one passage from the novel that I can’t get out of my head: “One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history…All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe.”

Only maybe is a powerfully ambiguous phrase. I am living that phrase right now. I grow weary of it.

In the novel, the lead character’s wife disappears into a wilderness around a great lake. A short time later, the character disappears into the same wilderness.

Nobody knows what happened to them. Their bodies are never found. The author speculates and offers a lot of maybe this and maybe that, but the reader is left to imagine what happened. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The idea of disappearing is intriguing to me. I would say very intriguing. Pull an Ambrose Bierce, a Rimbaud or Eddie from Eddie and the Cruisers.

You just can’t do that sort of thing in the age of the Internet and the rise of the Digital Police State. There is no real way of vanishing and reappearing later as someone new. You can’t be Jason Bourne in the real world.

A crow is cawing madly in a cedar tree above my house.

I am eating pie for breakfast. I believe the crow wants my pie.

I can hear drumming in the distance, the Astoria High School marching band at practice, sounds of my former life.

I just freed a bumblebee from a spider wed. It flew away into the rosemary bush.

I saw the perfect job for me to begin rebuilding my life. It truly is what I’ve always wanted to do for a living. There is no way I can ever get this job.

The creative mind remains strong within me. If that goes out, I’m done.

I am thankful for my friend Caroline for getting me work that allows me to write creatively and protect Oregon’s future.

Humbug Mountain is calling me.

I once wrote an essay about being in the Rock Zone. I’ll never be there again.

Winter ale in summer?

It felt so hard to be an American last weekend in light of the hate and murder in Virginia. But I am buoyed by the fact that so many fine Americans did take to the streets to counter hate and white supremacy. There is hope yet.

A murder of crows is sending up a resounding racket. They are preparing to strike for pie.

I am going to wash my car today.

It feels good to tell someone how you feel about them.

I wish I would hear from you.

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