Why Men Don't Call

The storms of the last week have left us, faithful as they came. The Bookcliffs are covered in snow, belying the years and years of sloshing shore water that made the huge, brown temples to the latter days of the dinosaurs. A couple minutes of cold air from the Uncompagre made them beautiful white raiments of a long, tumultious past of upheavals and volcanism. By this time tomorrow, the snow will be gone from the south face of the range and all that will be of this perfect view out my window will be darkened mud monoliths. The snow never seems to stick around when it would do the most good.

Unlike the Spring Jitters that make my gypsy blood boil for open roads and new horizons. They're always the worst when I need to focus on class or work or someone I should have called weeks ago. She's a good girl, I just don't want to stick around and feel the fur-lined straps close over my chest while her sweet company raps around my ankles like the sweetest constrictor ever to kill a man. So, I'm not going to call again tonight.

Well, I tried to call, anyway. Two months too late.

Damn the demons of voicemail. Damn the ignore function on the terrible convenient invention of the cell phone. I don't blame her, really. Hearing the ring trailing off into dark digitally resampled space between us, I knew. She knows, too. For all she needs me, or at least wants me, or at least feels slightly more content when I'm around, she's doing the right thing. I root for her as the phone rings. Stay strong, girl. Don't let someone treat you like this. Stay strong.

Another shot at voicemail. I guess she already figured all that out. Women are such deadly intuitive creatures.

I know she's probably hurt from it all, and I'm sorry. That's the last time I call her. It's a small town, we'll meet ackwardly or triumphantly, someday. Sorry I walked off and left you, Girl I Wasn't Dating. I did it for us. I'm an asshole, honey, trust me. I'm walking off and only leaving good memories, I hope. It's not your fault I didn't call for so long. Blame it on Spring, seasons are the strong silent type; it can't defend itself. I made a lame attempt to give her a small, safe piece what I thought was my heart, and all she wanted was a small, warm space in my soul.

Don't think twice, it's alright.

Oh, well.

Detours

I decided to hit the Lunch Loop on the way home from work today. I figured I might as well, since I was pedalling home anyway. This picture shows one of my favorite parts of that trail. You drop down into the valley below at insane speeds and then it takes a lot of strength and a lot of skill to get up the other side. Loaded with a backpack full of various supplies for my academic pursuits, I knew this was not going to happen today. Today, I had to push my bike up a couple of rough spots and the burn of carrying all that extra weight on my back ignited my lungs and my neck and my quadraceps. The burn in my lungs made me cough and hack until I had cleared my airway of all the wasted pollenous snot that my glands had decided to manufacture throughout the day.

The single track follows the far hogback up into a box canyon where you decide whether you have had enough and want to come down the easy way or whether you want to crash back down into the canyon and end up back in this little temple to fluvian conglomeration.

I took the long trail.

Once I got back to the business of getting home, I tried to hurry . Normally I can really make some time along the Colorado River Trail, but today, the winds conspired against me. Headwinds of about ten to fifteen miles an hour pulled on me and my backpack like a drag chute. Before long, the storms that were blowing in from the alkali desert south of the valley had started dragging their nets across the river and spilling rain all on the trail, and by extension, me. My detour had not been wise. I decided I could wait it out under a gazebo along the trail overlooking a lake. I can think of worse places to have to wait.

After I got back on the trail, the winds had died down slightly. I made the last mile of my 13 mile trip home, the hardest mile by far, with the wind channelled through the deep furrow of 32 Rd. as it falls off of Orchard Mesa and descends into the meth crippled ghetto of Clifton. A lot of my friends I used to have never made it out of Clifton, detoured by the easy rush of pharmocological masturbation. I crossed the river and shook the rain off of my face. Another two hills until I would be home.

My house and old pickup trucks were waiting in the rain. I pulled up to my little white farm house and realized, probably for the first time what it meant to be living across the street from where my globe trotting detour began one October, five years ago.

Forgotten Keys

Some times I forget things. Sometimes I forget keys. Sometimes I forget credit cards and money. Sometimes I forget about people.

I saw someone yesterday that I desperately have been wanting to meet for about three years. Well, maybe not the whole three years, but close. The times where a meeting was not on my mind were few at first and then more and more as years washed and swashed on my tide dominated coastline. At first I wanted to run into him so desperately that I was truly in fear of spending a life of incarceration if I were to see him.

Blood would spill when our two universes crossed paths again. He was a chubby English major with soft scholastic features and a scraggly psuedo-intellectual beard. Destined for the halls of academia or the ivory tower of literaria, his destruction of my life, or at least the aspects of destruction I could lay at his feet, was probably an excercise in life experience. His life experience would bleed out from his lacerations in my fantastical meetings here and there.

I only ran into him once in the time since his transgression onto my life's shore. The rage I felt at just seeing him made me flush red and my muscles pump in anticipation of justice being meeted out in the most respectable way possible: good old fashioned beating of an ass. Luckily for him and, honeslty, me our meeting place was in the venue of a church service. There is no way I could ever spill another's blood in a church. After the service, I walked up to his small podium where his drum set was partitioned off from the rest of the stage and took his drum sticks from his hand. He had a look of intense and terrible fear written all over his soft face. After a brief discussion of the things I wanted to do to him, I left the church house, never to return.

Today, I sat at a bar drinking a beer and watching Swedish curling. I sat transfixed by this sport on the small TV. My mind's upper functions were rationalizing radical numbers in denominators while my hands followed along on my lined notebook paper. My baser aspects of mind were wholly taken by men with stones and brooms. The beer was no help. After a particularly good toss, a voice caught my full and undivided attention. Nasally, a little on the lispy side, a touch of over pronunciation borne of compensating over confidence. I knew it, but my beer and algebra soaked mind would not come back to me and name the owner. I looked over at him as he looked at me. It was in the eyes that I saw the identity of the talker printed out clearly on his face. He lost his intelligent, pretentious edge and became the scared little boy who I had come to know. He said nothing, and a crushing apathy kept me from pushing the subject that should have been silently heating up the air between us. He simply got up from his stool and left.

I sat watching curling. My thoughts completely divorced from the frozen shuffleboard and the pencil heiroglyphs on my page, I sat and tried to remember what I thought at one time I would never forget.

Jim? No.

James? No.

Jeremy? Might be. No.

What the hell is the guy's name?

Preamble

In the course of my internet events, it has become prudent to separate my chest-thumping hard drink self from my nature appreciating, picture taking* self. So, basically, my other website will have the same bourbon rambling the fans of that site have grown to love, while this one will have my calmer notes of life and beauty that they really, vehemently hate.

I live in a beautiful place and I have to admit to being a happy, optimistic realist and there is just no place for that in satire. In fact, I needed an alter-ego to really have that kind of fun at all. This isn't to say a more philosophical ramble of innebriation won't pop up every so often.

So, in short, Hallmark Moments will go here. Next time I get arrested off a mountain bike, it will be on my other site. As well as profanity laced rants, cutting diatribes, and the occasional conversation with my genitals.

Thank you.

*Nature excluding kittens.