Denton

Fairly recently, I went to a party and had the cookies and the chocolates, realizing not that the two were under no circumstances to be mixed. The cookies settled me into a philosophical and protracted state of turbocharged brain function. The chocolates made sweet, sweet love to my optical nerves and romantic, silky lust to some various other neurological processes. The most powerful image, with the exception of the pillow constructed Hebrew Gollum sitting next to me in the jungle chair, was when I was sitting on the porch watching the mellow flow of sodium light dying the universe mute orange.

Two people walked up to each other and out of their heads, a disc expanding in infinite distance, was a beautiful galaxy full of all the beauty of the cosmos. When they walked up to each other, the small girl in her red sweater and short skirt and the man in his baggy jeans and hoody, the galaxies overlapped. As they said their small hellos and shared a word or two, a new constellation burst into the overlapping discs. As they smiled and parted ways, the constellation split and followed the two galaxies away, bound in centerfield by the two neuropathway machines inside the heads of the two.

I stayed in my stupor of peace, feeling the need to connect to someone with touch and galaxy collision. I needed to see someone else's universe. I looked towards the living room and saw the object of some earlier inspiration. The chocolates made me perceive her in Platonic idea and pagan, pantheist bliss. Not short, not tall, flaming locks of auburn hair. I saw her in statuary and driftwood idols. With her smile, the universe decided to be a happy, golden place. She was to be respected and worshipped. I wanted to sit at the temple of her femininity so we could worship each other as celestial god-beings. We were after all, children of the dust of stars. Gods of small universes. The cookies made me lazy. I decided to sit on the porch a little longer.

Gradually, the reality I knew and repected returned. The green leaves were no longer the living testament to hydrology. The stars were just balls of gas far away. My friend, my good old friend, came out and sat next to me. We heard the repetitive, boring music of the stoned and saw the flashing blue and green of a light show designed to keep the mind from turning on itself in states of pharmos. My friend was over his chemicals as well. We sat in the cool breeze, smelled trash and something dead in the bushes, and looked at each other, no longer mystical machines, only biological miracles.

"God, I want to fuck the shit out of that chick."

"Fuckin' A, dude."

Rethinking

I've been considering, lately, my choice of vocation. I'm not making any changes to my major just yet, but I have trouble considering a whole mess of similarities I have with this ball of predominately slow moving silica and oxygen. While I understand that geology is a science preoccupied by the past, I sometimes wonder at its effectiveness in understanding myself and others, as is the goal of any science or art when the stuffy academics drop the pretense. So, here am I, rethinking life choices based on not much at all.

While men and women the world over find little parts of themselves in their jobs, great or small, I plan on going into a field that pretty much negates the worth of a person's miniscule time of inhabitation of the rock. While we have destroyed and repaired ecological left and right in the last few centuries, no man has ever fought terrus and won. Sure, there was some ingenious and frantic redirecting of lava flows in the last few decades, but even that is nothing more than dodging a half-assed eruption of slow, felsic lava.

When I lived in Hawaii, I saw a lava flow. As we sat and watched it encroach in small foot wide transgressions, the fauna that didn't burst into flames due to proximity of the silica melt was simply covered, forever and ever, by the impartial flow of new rock. Trees would stick out of the lava for awhile, a sick spectacle of melodramatic, teenage need to be accounted and acknowledged before the slow death of burning. The tree fought the crushing wait of the lava until its heat weakened stem buckled slowly, sinking into the red-hot mire. Not even the dignity of a quick snap or tragic holocaust was given to the pitiful pest in the way of the advance of the Earth.

See, life has been around for only a brief time, and even then, the massive variety of flora and fauna available to study at this point is even more recent. I think this lends it a gravitas in a way. The quick explosion against all odds and whatnot. Maybe I'm going into the wrong field.

I wonder if littoral biology should be my focus. Possessed of a voracious appetite and libidinous to a fault, I share primary motivations with many animalia available for study in warm, shallow water.

Getting wet and dirty in the compulsive search for good food and good copulation suits me.

Half There

The metal was hot enough.

A little red around the edges, but mostly white, the fire of saffron acetylene and cobalt oxygen reaking havoc on the poor Fe atoms. Beads of sweat rolled down my forearms and exploded sizzling in the white noise of thermal expansion. I had the tongs grasping it as I hooked a Vise-Grip jaw plier on to the 2X6 and clamped the strap to the board. I took a hammer and beat the iron around the perimeter of the wood and the small 2X3 stud. The metal was pliable and supple in my blackened hands. The strap wrapped around the board, cajoled into perfection by a combination of gentle engineering and brute force. I drove spikes through the holes I had blown through the iron with a torch into the douglas fir. Good. Not too much burn through. I was almost done with this timber leg. I doused the metal strap with cool water and winced away from the steam. The steel turned green, then blue, then finally the cold rainbow of temper as it shrunk in on itself and the wood, condensing them both into a stronger unit than either could be on it's own. A few more of these to go.

"...so, then the guy was like, telling me that his friend was dating this other girl the whole time I was out there, and I really should be upset, but I'm not, it was like, 'I don't care', you know?..."

A New York accent. Incredibly fast and very modulated. Girly. Very girly. Gilmore Girly. Electronically filtered. Piezo distorion of some kind. It fell from the burning blue sky on to my bare, sweaty shoulders.

"...I mean, come on, right? I guess they were in counselling and the relationship was on the rocks and everything, but its still kind of screwed up. So I said...Oh wait, you went to sleep..."

"No, I didn't. Well, not really. I was dreaming, but I still heard you. I was building a forge."

Fuzzy house. I'm laying on the recliner with a phone buried in my ear.

"What?"

"I was building a forge. It was a nice one."

"See, this is why I love talking to you."

I whine, "Now I want a forge."

Critical Thinking

I spent a good portion of Saturday sitting on a cliff, staring into the past. I don't mean this in some weird, melodramatic way. This was no Dark Night of My Soul, it was just a restful break from the grinding activity of employment and civilization. I wasn't looking into my past. My past is insignificant in comparison to what I was seeing.

I was sitting on top of a formation known as Grand Mesa Basalt. Named with the whimsy geologists are loathed for, it sits predictably on top of the Grand Mesa. Basalt is volcanic rock. The Grand Mesa which towers over the Grand Valley in regal snooty contempt, is formed, as most Mesas are, by a cap of erosion resistant material sitting on top of softer, more mutable material. The Grand Mesa is very young. The cap is around ten million years old in mythos du jour. Under the cap, the largest formation is Cretaceous Wasatch.

I sat on the edge of the cap, a cliff section of the western bout appropriately called Land's End. The shale formation know as Mancos formed the low point of my vista, almost seven thousand feet below me, but only twenty miles away. The Mancos formation is the mud bottom of a littoral sea that stretched from Northern California down to Mexico City about 90 million years ago.

To the West of my show was the massive cliffs of two different deserts, millions of years apart. The Jurassic had seen the formation of a brilliant red sand desert with dunes reaching three hundred feet in this area, which a few million years later would be covered by a river much like the Mississippi. Under the blood-red Triassic Chinle, the dark stain of precambria pushed up out of the ground, exploding to the surface hinting at the great forces grinding away in the Lithosphere. This section of rock was 1.7 billion years old.

From my perch, I could see from the very recent history of upright walkers, through the flowering plants, Down through the ages of Mastodon, Stegosaurus, strange amphibia, protozoa, and finally to the very origins of life. It was stretched out like a scroll with tick marks millions of times the span of my years.

My friend engaged me in conversation. As I usually do, I engage in incredibly small talk when I'm thinking massive thoughts. I mentioned camping out on this rim in my old 1975 International Harvester Scout. He looked at me funny. Not at the waterfall right next to me or the towering cliffs, ten million years old. The far Uncompahgre with its claim to age in the billions did not raise a pulse of thought on his brain. He commented flippantly, "Man, that Scout that was a long, long time ago, dude."

"Yeah, six whole years," I laughed, "Dude."