Time for a camp fire monologue.
It’s been a ride. I’ve got no idea where it’s headed, next, but I do know where the stops are.
I was getting ready for work tomorrow, and realized I’ve been at this a while and I’ve poorly documented my journey.
Over a decade going since a dark night no one should experience in Maine, and almost a decade on this blog alone, which started midway through my journey, and I’ve only written down a sliver of everything that’s happened. Even that’s heavily filtered to protect the moving interests I had at the time of writing those entries, as I’ve had my share of conflicts against sometimes people who would misuse the information.
I hope one day I can retire so I can explain all of it in better detail, and with more context.
I’ve traveled. I don’t mean in the way some naives say, where they’ve “got a house in Maine and a house in Florida” and they think they’ve “traveled” while being totally isolated to a hollow monoculture full of weak, unprincipled men. I mean I’ve been all over in ways no one gets to experience. I also did not bounce around traveling just for pleasure, where a tourist gets a hotel room in a city of novelty during a vacation, and says they “travel”. I lived in these places. I connected with the people in those places and had adventures, struggles, joys, griefs. Before I knew it, I’d been all over America. I’d lived America.
From every corner of the nation, I’ve made a story.
But for now, I’ll talk about the first time I met the sky, because it’s late and I need to go bed soon…
I am a child of Earth and thunder. I am from the west, between the Rockies and the oil fields. I had my humble beginning in Oklahoma, where on my birth night, I crawled out of a mud hole in the desert sand during a thunder storm; I emerged out of necessity a fully grown man, and stood in the pouring rain, fists pointing upward as I screamed at a purple, booming sky — with desert over one shoulder and mountains over the other. As this sky raged at me to welcome me in the only way it could, I raged at it to declare my arrival: “I exist, and I am here. Come and see!“. And so the storm taught me strength.
That wasn’t the only time I met my friend, the raging sky.
Some years later, I’d say around 2005, during my last habitation of southeast Texas along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, I faced two other great storms, named Rita, and Katrina….