mine one won 3rd place for ACC's annual collection!

I see my generation

in need of identification.

We are pioneers

directionless,

and without destination.

Our world is a snow-globe:

Unnaturally compact.

We look in, are cozily detached.

Our frontier is mental.

We take our love inside,

where we take our meds.

There's an App for this,

there's a pill for that.

I am too new

to feel so old.

I want to know a world

without excess.

Diagnosis: Blindness,

our eyes trained to screens

instead of to each other,

our faces illuminated

by laptops

instead of by

the brilliance of compassion.

Keep 'Being Back In Staunton' Weird.

Here's an aerial image of my hometown. It's on the list among Durango, CO as one of the top twenty small towns in America. So it goes.. 

Went to the usual bar downtown with a book the other day.

Girl from my high school graduating class was at the bar with her boyfriend of a few years. I’m sure we recognized each other in a flash, and both decided to ignore it. 

She was being shrill, loud, and at least seemed fake when she saw another alum from the class of ’03. After the ‘hello’s and ‘You-look-so-good!’s, the girl from my class started out on a rant about how lame and weird her [our!] class had been. She went on about how our class just wanted to get through high school and sell drugs, and how most had been to jail. Haha! Then she raved about the woes of adulthood and missing the freedom of being a kid.

I was sitting there in grungy garb reading the memoir of Gail Caldwell, a woman who dropped out of college and traveled and spent a night in jail… and she, this drop-out author, she won a Pulitzer prize.

I’m a literate drop-out jailbird nomad, and I’ll probably never win a Pulitzer, but I’ll also never be an accountant and I'll never stop examining my life.

At this rate I’ll also never have a boyfriend-of-three-years… but my patchwork romance quilt is forever brightly colored with the very real love I hold to myself for a small handful of people, TX to CA to MT.. even for Austin’s M.P., because I got to see him through the gauze of his triple-Aries confidence. I knew I saw him, and so did he, and that’s a secret that will remain unstated between us forever probably.

I hope that girl from my class is happy in her world. Listening to her judge our class (and taking it personally), and just being around the judgmental culture borne of Valley boredom… I hope it doesn’t turn me into another gossipy who’d-you-see-them-with? kind of girl.

When someone at the other night asked what my goals in life were, what I want to do, I explained how I’m only concerned with going back to MT next summer. I don’t have any goals beyond that. I just want to live a happy life, and so far so good.

PS – How do the birds know how to quit chirping, all at once? In flight, how do they move in unison? They’re the epitome of a collective consciousness, and proof that everything is one, and that we can work together to benefit the whole.

Did that just happen?

Here I perch, at a smoking bar in my hometown. Virginia again. The last time I posted was from VA.

I have come back from a summer in Glacier Park.

How can such a season be summarized?

A too-close encounter with two galloping Grizzlies...
an adolescent moose crashing through the brush in front of me...
black bear with a cub on an afternoon stroll behind my cabin.

Bonfires, beers, a ride in the bed of someone's truck after midnight coming home from one of the only bars out in the plains on the eastern side of the Divide. 40 degrees, wrapped in a blanket.

First cliff-jumping experience while floating down the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Sleeping in a snuggle-pile in the back of a friend's Jeep, crossing Going-to-the-Sun Road after midnight.

A mountain lion 50 feet away from me as I went to work in the eerie dark of 5AM.

Forcing myself to wade out and dip under the water of Iceberg Lake, the sense of my capillaries seizing and my lungs seemingly collapsing in the cold.

A couple good-hearted and easygoing love interests.

A few nights drunk and thumping down the hill in the darkness to my place on the bear trail. Such quiet nights - thickly quiet, like you could hear the wilderness watching you. I'd reach my door, place the key in to unlock it, and breathe a sigh of relief.

The Wind.

Twice in the middle of the night, the wind was wild enough to blow my locked door wide open and wake me up.

Granite Park Chalet.
Staying there overnight on a walk from Logan Pass to Swiftcurrent was the realization of a dream.


I arrived in MT too timid of the wild to go 15 yards into the woods.
I needed to fix that, and I did.

I learned a lot about the wilderness of the northern Rockies, and about the wilderness of my heart.

The people I met became my family, in an undefinable way.

"I'm going to Kalispell today, do you need anything?"

I became familiar with Single Shot and East Flat Top, knew their ways, and knew them to be coy on the days of low-flying clouds.

Tourists' comments: "We've been here five days and haven't seen ANY animals!"
"When do they let the goats out?"
"Is there a car wash around here?"

I am now 'home', in Virginia, and this past summer feels like a dream.

Rick Bass wrote in 'Winter' of north-western MT, that, It takes a long time to feel like you belong here.. but once you do, you don't really belong anywhere else.

I got a phone call last night from one of my best friends from this summer. He's a Montanan (lucky!) and mentioned that he was outside of a bar in Whitefish. From my place here in VA, I was melancholy to realize how far I am from that place. . .
. . . but I'll be back.

2013, I'll be back.