THE NEWS

The unimproved meadow viewed from the garden outside my aunt's house has often been a resting place for my mind as I've gazed across the flat space of the valley up at the peaks in the evenings

The unimproved meadow viewed from the garden outside my aunt's house has often been a resting place for my mind as I've gazed across the flat space of the valley up at the peaks in the evenings and mornings letting my eyes run up the slight slope of the defile that Hurricane Creek comes out from and

The next photo burning alder and ponderosa limbs with a wonderful friend near a little trickle of a stream at a pretty much abandoned campground north of town where in the morning I found a fire burning 3 feet deep into the roots of a ponderosa left by some folks who didn't know what they were doing and we put about 10 gallons of water down the hole which was a deep black crater and smelled of cinnamon and toffee which is what set me to find it at first when I realized there was something not quite right about that intensity of ponderosa scent

and the fish we got as a gift from the tribe and the Snake which by all means should barely have any fish left but because the fish are resilient or maybe it's the hatcheries there are still fish there in the river if we'd only remove those DAMNS then maybe they would have a chance at flourishing and

I heard from a friend that bristol is really the only producing fishery this year up in AK, setting gill nets, trawlers making runs, shore haul for a big catch whatever you gotta to do to make a living is just fine long as it can go on but salmon is should must be felt like a precious substance always has been but god damn i Don’t know how long we will have wild salmon catch that they all want leave some left on the plate $27 with a rosemary sprig and you can’t blame anyone for being distracted/disconnected because they were born into it

And I feel like the distraction I've lived for the last few months has kept me from sinking into something I probably should yet met a woman who avoided a nervous breakdown for as long as she could but had one anyway she didn't give me any details just started into my eyes and said a lot of things which have left a passing impression about trusting myself no matter what anyone else says and

when I write fast like this I realize that I am openly setting up a battle between a lingering dark impulse that feels helpless and a helpful one that is trying to supplant that old way, sentences creep in and try to make themselves real / important but I head back and delete them because I know now that they aren't true, no matter how good they seem to look to say something about, they are weak and actually empty, helpless and not good for anyone, but yet still it's a pitched battle and remains as such &&&

I haven't even gotten to the current events section of any publication for 3 weeks or maybe all year, just the way I am I guess for some reason not inclined to chase down such horrid sights and sounds to be more informed about the human condition that seems to change toward better but like me and my darkness there is always something that is bubbling up and metastasizing making itself known in the most painful, greedy way asking all our attention when it emerges yet it has been

preparing for so long by the time it becomes known it's actually a disease that has no salve, no balm, no healing tonic to stop but can only burn itself out through some inflammatory process that somehow consumes the whole goddamn organism itself—ancient medicine tells us this is the channel of elimination that is necessary, death is necessary, and the problem is the sense of holding onto death and destructiveness which is to say, embracing the evil impulse, that pulls us toward violence and darkness too and destroys us along with what is seeking to be destroyed