Two For One

I've been riding for days and my horse is gettin tired. Horace is his name but he prefers to be called Hank. Don't ask why, that's just the way he is sometimes. We took a wrong turn somewhere in New Mexico and by that I mean that we thought it was our turn to have the bank's money. Turns out they thought otherwise. It seems like I've been wrong a lot lately. Hank thinks so too.

I don't know when it was but somewhere between awhile ago and a little after that Hank and I crossed paths and decided to travel the same one for awhile. He was old then but I guess I was too so there's really no reason to talk about that. Now we're just older. I think his age shows more than mine. He disagrees but what do horses know. What I know is that our saddlebags are full of money and if we can make it to Montanna then we'll both give up the old life and start an easier one. Open a lodge for fishin and huntin maybe. We've got a long way to go.

Right now we're winding our way through the Sangre de Cristo mountains and all I can say is thank God Himself it's not winter. I didn't think we'd make it this far but even Hank knows this would've been the end of the road if there was snow. Lucky. It's still a little early in the year and the trees are still holdin a few leaves, but not many. You never know with these mountains. I guess you never know with anything.

There's a pass just a few miles ahead that I know of but not many other people do. A friend of mine showed it to me once. You could say he kinda hides out up here now and then. That's all I'm gonna say about it. If he's still up here I'm thinkin I might see if he's up for Montana too. Maybe we'll make it across the state line this time.

They call it the Land of Enchantment. Capital letters and everything. I don't know much about enchantments or things of that nature but I can agree that there's somethin about this place that's hard to explain. Sometimes I wake up in the mornin and watch the sun come up thinkin that places like this are why people write poetry. I've never heard any that could do this place justice but I'm sure people have tried. I don't think they've got the words for it though. There's just too much to put into letters on a piece of paper.

That desert down near the Guadalupes doesn't care for men one bit and it'll kill you if you're not careful but you'll never see a sunset like that without believing in God. I don't mean that might offend Him either. There's just no other way to explain it.

If you wait till the snow starts falling and come up into these mountains you'll understand silence. Purity. Beauty. It's like a beautiful woman with her best dress on and all she wants you to do is look at her. She won't talk and you shouldn't either. If you close your eyes you can hear her breathe. Barely. Her cool touch takes your breath away. When you're with her it's like no other place in the world or if there is then it doesn't really seem to matter anymore. She doesn't care who you are or what you've done. She doesn't even care if you look or if you know she exists. She's hard to leave. Every time.

If you ride through the north part of the state like you're comin from Durango do it in the spring. Not so late that all the green is finished coming back but not so early that it hasn't started yet. Do it sometime in between there. If you time it right you'll see some of the best reasons to be alive. You can watch storms roll off the mountains or crash up against 'em like the sky and the earth or goin to war with each other. The lightning comes so close together that the thunder never stops until well after you've fallen asleep despite the noise. Sometimes there's so much lightning that you could imagine it's day and the sun is just flickerin a little. The storms are the best though when they're just marching across the plains right at you so that there's no mountains to block the view. Sometimes the clouds are so black and ugly that you think you may not live through that one but sometimes a man just gets lucky. It's amazing how some of the most terrifying things can be the most beautiful. That's the time of year the wildflowers are just gettin started, the rivers and streams are startin to swell, and everything that's been sleeping starts to wake up. Go out there sometime, someplace where you can't see any people or any of the things that they made, and just sit on the ground. Stop thinkin, stop listenin, stop trying to do anying. If you just sit, and just feel, you can sometimes feel yourself wakin up along with the world all around you. It's hard to say much better than that.

The truth is that Hank and I get into trouble pretty often and find ourselves headin to Montana almost as often. We almost never make it past the border and if we do then usually we just stop in Durango for awhile and wait for spring to start up again. This place gets into your head and grabs ahold of your heart and just won't let go. She won't let go.

After an hour or so we get to that pass in the mountains I mentioned earlier. Hank stops walkin and starts grazin. He won't go any further and so I guess he's tired of walkin. I guess I am too. We never do get very far and besides all that the law stopped chasin us days ago. We just like it up here.

If you hold your head just right and wait for a breeze you can smell snow on the air.

Who Am I?

Who am I to judge people? Who am I to decide what's right or wrong for someone other than myself? Never knowing the whole story and never knowing the motives I still catch myself constantly judging the acts or inclinations of others. Whether alone or going along with the mob it seems almost like a gut reaction. I see something happen and emotion takes over as if it has a will of its own. It's either good or bad. Right or wrong. Fair, unfair, just, unjust, exciting, pointless, it doesn't really matter what the judgment is so much as the fact that I do it. Why does it matter?


I don't know for sure. I know that I feel great indignation if I find that I have been judged. I know that I have met no person who I feel has a right to judge me. Yet I do it constantly. I think everyone does, but that doesn't make it right. We are quick to jump in with the masses, the mob mentality being what it is. Bands get booed off the stage. I line of cars drives 20 miles per hour in order to get a good look at the wreck. A person commits an offense and the masses unite to cast him, or her, down. We are a herd. This is what we do. It's an instictive reaction in order to protect a great many from the undermining of a few. Right or wrong, we see this every day. It does not, however, expain why I do it on my own.

Sometimes I think that maybe it's a superiority complex. Maybe I think that I'm better than other people. I get angry when someone cuts me off while driving, but I've done it too. I hate it when someone tries to force their beliefs on me but I also do this, often to the very same person who did it to me. I take offense easily. I try not to, but I do. I also have a quick temper which means that if I feel attacked, I retaliate in kind. I escalate. That doesn't seem right does it? It's what I do. It all seems very hypocritical. I know that these are things that many people feel about themselves. I realize that I am probably not alone in this. I not really worried about why other people do it though.

That last statement alone has an egotistical ring to it. Other peoples problems don't matter, only mine do. I often wonder why I frequently feel I'm sitting on both sides of the fence. Why can't I just pick one side or the other? Why can't I stop pretending to be right and actually be right, or better, or smarter? Could I stop doing all the things I hate and then be justified in judging people for doing these same things? I doubt it. That's life. Nor do I think that I could stop caring about what other people say or do and just live my life without caring about my obvious flaws. That seems highly unlikely. No, I think my destiny is to be both the jerk and the victim. Woe is me.

The best part is the conversations I have in my head about these things. Here's a hypothetical.

"That guy is a jerk!

Why?

He just cut me off!

So, don't you do that too?

Well, yeah but not recently.

So I suppose this means that he's a jerk more recently than you? Does being a jerk have an expiration date?

Well, no, but you're just not supposed to do that.

Right. True. But isn't there quite a long list of things you do that you're not supposed to. Shall we list them? Shall we stop that man and compare notes? It could be fun. It could be kind of a spitting match to see who's less of a nice person more often. Do you feel like you could win?

Maybe.

Ah. Not so indignant now are we? Not standing up on high any longer judging all the flawed little people. It's humbling to be grouped with the masses isn't it. Even more so to think that maybe, just maybe, you're a bit more flawed than normal."

The point of this little self inflicted exercise is that maybe we should all have a little voice in our head that lists for us all the bad or stupid or hurtful things we've done before we do any of these things again. Maybe then the world would be a better place. The problem with my little voice is that even though I really enjoy the british accent it has, it always seems to turn on about 30 seconds too late.

So who am I? I'm the guy who has imaginary conversations with the imaginary voice of a british woman in my head about things like no matter how angry I was, that thing that I did was still probably not a good idea. In fact it was probably a bad one. Probably a thing that I'll pay for later.

Probably...

Just as soon as I finish paying for all the things I did before it.

She Comes and Goes

Where does the desire to write go when it's gone? Why does it leave? Sometimes it's here for months at a time. Sometimes it only sticks around for a few hours. It's been gone since my last post and it still is right now. I suppose that maybe I shouldn't call it a desire, but more of an inspiration. My muse has fled me if ever I had one. Maybe she just has a short attention span. Maybe she likes to travel. I wish she'd visit home a little more often than she has been recently.

I've tried to write a number of posts since my most recent colorful adventure but after a few sentences I just get disgusted with what I've written. What had meaning to me five minutes earlier becomes transparent, empty, plain. I read what I've written and wonder why I started on that topic to begin with. It feels like digging in the mud looking for gold and only finding a different type of mud. It's a little upsetting after a few sentences, but after a few chapters it's hard to want to try again for months.

This is not, however, a pity party. This is an invitation for inspiration, for my muse, to bring herself back from vacation and get back to work. Paid time off is almost over. It's time to write things that rock worlds, shatter minds to their core, scare evil itself back into the dark recesses of reality and encourage good to gather up its courage and take on new fights.

It's time to write the words that make women believe men are better than they are and that encourage men to actually be better. It's time to create new worlds, new universes, and new ways of thinking. It's time to show people the window out of reality and into a different one so that when they decide to step back they'll be better prepared to deal with whatever reality they live in. This will be the bridge to the greener grass. It will be the window to the promise of spring and the door that lets us in from the cold.

Come back my muse. I need you.

I need the courage to write the things I'm afraid of. I need to write fearlessly. I need the persistence to write even when the words lose meaning, the plot comes unravelled and falls away, the characters revolt and become mindless automatons, and the story itself that had so much promise reveals itself to have nowhere to go. I need to believe not only that I can do this, but that someday I will. I need to believe that I'm a writer.

My muse. I know you're close. I can shut my eyes, just for a moment, and catch glimpses of her in the madness of my mind. I can fly faster than thought through time and space, earth, air, water, and nothingness to see the remnants of the places she's been and the beginnings of places she'll go. There's her name stenciled across the nose of a starship. It flies past whole worlds that have her fingerprints all over them. There are whole races of beings, familiar and unfamiliar, that all know her intimately. Constellations appeared at a whisper from her lips. Cowboys on the parie sing songs as they fall asleep inspired by the vast landscapes she inspired. The rustle of the leaves in a vast ancient forest insinuates that she passed here, or that she soon will.

Eyes open. She'll come soon. She knows as well as I do what needs to be done. We'll just put this on the timecard as a bit of field research. Above all we must have faith that she knows what she's doing.

All stories start here.

Soon this one will too.

Soon...