-
A Resurrectionist Streak
I’ve always had an uncomplicated affinity with the time of year I was born, but not for uncomplicated reasons. Although my birthday never falls exactly on winter solstice, it’s always within two or three days and feels like the most natural event to attach myself to for time-keeping purposes. And in the past few years, I’ve fashioned a loose mythology to explain (mostly to myself) how the timing and conditions of my birth translated into some of the dispositions that started crystallizing in my adult life. The first I noticed was a clear attachment to the opposite solstice. I didn’t…
-
The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeois Workplace
This past week a year ago was my last at my old job. If I can help it, it will remain my last ever in the bourgeois workplace. I’m a year removed from that gig, and I feel like anything approaching a full recovery is going to take another year or two. That’s like two to three years of rehab for every four years at a toxic job—the last three months of which I even worked remotely after relocating. If I had to start this process from the top, even if I could somehow survive it a second time, nothing…
-
Born in a Bar
I visited Montana for the first time in over 13 months in September. Somehow, it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without setting foot in the state, and that despite living some 1,500 miles closer to a Montana border than any time in my adult life prior to 2019. I have a lot of feelings about traveling out of state on any non-essential terms these days. So, a September voyage to Montana was something that I had been wringing my hands about since June. I didn’t want to be a vector tracking in coastal cooties that the landlocked parts of the…
-
The Snags
I’ve been spending a lot of time with past versions of myself this year. It’s not a new development by any stretch, but it has taken a surprisingly healthy twist in 2020. In 2019, when I knew I was coming up on the end of an eight-year stint on the East Coast, I recall expressing to a friend that I’d be leaving behind a lot of dead versions of myself. At the time, the tenor of that statement was similar to the kind somebody would use to describe an estranged person in their life as dead to them. The implication…
-
Carrying Capacity
I still tend to fare better when there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
-
USFS 2019
USFS 2019 is what it is. It's a love letter in overt terms to pop culture and dad jokes, and in sneaky terms to Montana (if you know, you'll know when and how). It's a recovery story and an attempt to narrativize family history under the guise of a century-later update of Norman Maclean's "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky." It's neurodivergent and millennial as hell and I sorely hope this machine kills fascists. It's an affirmation of the Mister Rogers maxim that feelings are mentionable and manageable. It's a Sagittarian proletarian comedy in…
-
USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 1
I was 26 and I thought I was expired and I knew that was irrational, but I also wondered if there was a reason I was still alive and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I said it wasn’t a big deal when a guy apologized from the window of his pale Isuzu Trooper for running down the pathetic estate sale sign I’d just pitched. That was before I realized I was talking to Pete.
-
USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 2
We cached Dad’s Sasquatch trove in the garage, deciding that was the best spot to stage it so Pete didn’t have to haul it around in Mindy until he was headed back out to the Peninsula. Though there was plenty of daylight left after migrating the boxes downstairs, Pete and I called it a day soon after. We tried to battle furniture for a while, but didn’t last long on that detail. We’d gotten as far as inventorying all items that would be a two-man job and thought momentarily about moving those bulkier pieces toward the door, but lost motivation…
-
USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 3
I left the house around 6pm, still without any sign of Pete and Elliott, but I knew they couldn’t have been far from Challis at that point. Normally, I wouldn’t have felt the need to let anybody know where I’d be in the event that we might miss each other. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary in this case. Pete and Elliott were both acute observers and knew as well as anybody what to look for to guess at my whereabouts within a reasonable confidence interval. When I was at the Challis house, my running shoes and hydration pack lived…
-
USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 4
“What if you had come all the way up here and I was like, ‘Oh man, I forgot the ashes?’” I said it as Elliott offloaded his pack and began to crouch down next to me. “I mean, I would be pretty fucking irritated, but since I’m sticking around Challis, it would just be something stupid that you’d never live down.” We’d each done Borah many times in our lives, together and independently. Proximity had made it easy from a logistics standpoint. The drive was about 30 minutes since our house was closer to the trailhead than Challis proper. Finding…
