I've been a little reluctant to hitch myself back up into the blogging world, partially due to a histrionic resentment of the genre, and partially because I haven't really known what to say. What can one say about Alaska? Too much. But I've been jealously guarding the experience as my own and something I don't have to share or put out there or explain away. I needed something like that very badly for a while.

Simply & Simplistically - arriving out there is having the contours of this body fit the landscape, just like that, a roughed-out version of skin and heart and jagged and brutishness that looms below, out of a thin fog-covered window with drips of rain wind-streaked down, and then closes in and takes the pressed outline of whatever has been denied or hasn't found its place or feels hopeless and pent. And there it fits, over the hills, mountains with snow, vastness, green salmonberry and rainsocked, a body with bones and muscles and just a teeny-tiny brain that doesn't have to account for so much because the brain goes into a new balanced polarity with the other things that count like: who's got your back? whose back do you got?

And sometimes I feel like no matter how many possibilities are out there, they all feel the same, and the wide world is a trap for everybody doing the same action, the same narrative, over and over, and no matter which direction I take, it's the same, and no matter which job I hate, it's the same, and no matter what I write or care about... But in Alaska, I feel like life opens up and there is nothing but what we can do, incredibly huge and possible. And each time, it will be grownupover with lush surprise and people really do got your back, and folks you don't know will see you.

And when I come back, all the radio waves of people's individual same desires and the press conferences of powwow-whatever, jam me up a little although I'm getting better at it, because things are clearer when you don't have so much goddamn data and you don't live just inside your head (with edits from emails and snips from blogs). And so I've been fighting these past two weeks to keep that image there: of all the doors open, and if they close, I open them, and if things seem to shutter up like a gigantic haunted mansion, then I open it, and if I feel lonely while surrounded by people, I open it... and it's just like the ocean, so much like it, completely stretched out and full of route.

To highlight, coming home, the first thing I did was stuff myself with 10 yellow plums off my mom's tree. Yeah, and then I was really sick the next day, but who could resist fruit after the innocence of Alaska? Even though it made me sick, there's something devilishly tempting and beautiful about bursting-ripe plums waiting coiled on bark. Yeah. And then I went downtown (before getting sick) and got myself a parking ticket, and I still think that parking tickets represent 10% of what is wrong in this world... no parking tickets in Alaska, let me tell you. Park anywhere, man: in the ditch, tilted on a cliffside, ontop of bushes, in someone's yard, etc. So, within a day of coming back and passing through Bville, I had some sense of what I was coming towards and what I was going away from.