Diamonds on the Inside

And the darkness inside can make you seem so small..But i see your true colors shining through and that’s why i love you…So don’t be afraid to let them show…True colors are beautiful like a rainbow~~~~ “True Colors” Cyndi Lauper

“When you have everything…You have everything to lose…” ~~ “Diamonds on the Inside” Ben Harper

Last night Friday the end of a week’s satisfactorily comprehensive if weary accomplishment of chores necessary to general mental and physical health, rent coming in from the Southern home, a furnace discovered to be viable in face of coming winter, a long-anticipated appointment looming for smaller dog’s vaccinations and her, Duchess’s, vital need for birth control in light of the shepherd Huron’s perpetual fawning which she mostly accepts, encourages but may snap back with impatience, annoyance, her fierce loyalty subtly if effectively adjusted and the bigger task, the major one rearing its head: insulating and skirting underneath home all with mind to winter’s relentless advance if not finishing off bathroom (there WILL be fishing and from canoe too eventually, quiet water in evening mayflies scattered on surface, some motorcycle rides and all this doing, held at bay in meanwhile from laser gaze of self-recriminating slothfulness an ingrained pattern of thought dragged along over decades of habit?) crazy this nagging as summer hasn’t even started but always in back of mind, the preparation against the relentless change of season, the compression of warmed sun-splashed memory of these passing verdantly imbued days like fossils into brain to be re-visited upon the coming darkness. But i do so yearn for the stark poignance of moonshine carving dimension out of shape of new snow piled and silent under the frigid neutral gaze of the myriad stars, our base connection to the non-human universe. The seeping in of dramatically apprehended solitude on a future frigid mid- February night footed hip deep in new snow under the silent neutral stars (ok maybe albeit with some squirming of bewildered dog activity underfoot to break the spell but lend comraderie, a sense we are in this together now). And this action long delayed too after so long, decades of failing to re-calibrate spirit along the emotional fault-lines of seasons unfolding, a correction, the true north i was born into somehow forsaken but that lack never without compensation as the south not without its own deeply ingrained humid seductions, memory.

Even as the outlying building (writing quarters?love shack? ha) came together nicely, shelves and end-tables built, sheets and blanket displayed,

the bigger propane tank delivered and trenched to house, much else of smaller import, it was a night also of passing rumination ( with aid of thc but not much) on possible themes gleaned through opaque web of vivid if fitful dreams as precious stones are collected by patient and clear-eyed pilgrim walkers along sandy pebble-strewn Lake Superior shore, the ones that glow under darkened supervised man-made strobes in darkened rented rooms or just polish up nice, jewelled and curios to be splayed along a bar counter like the incendiary because of lack sudden entry of young woman to spell the bartender who showed me the wedding ring but not hidden scars from caesarian scars of a now 6 year old child and her face seeming to glow with almost a recently re-moored teenage vitality filling in for the increasingly garrulous son of the owner of the place but he declaring his own independence and worldly aspect if jet black hair and young enough to be a grandson asking Kimmee for her number after sensing our own platonic yet easy banter and talking local news and she came on duty and i remarked and for benefit of all myself included in a self- chiding manner and not one lost on but accepted with glee by a mother in law of 70 who looked 50 and her admittedly favorite daughter in law decades younger and settled by now into the confident if fairly amused middle aged reality of distinctly mid-western origin it might seem, the playing out of our country settled one acre at a time in closely knit families free of the current malaise which questions all unions, examines them, playing hookey from the fishing tournament on a lake down the road where their camp was and they from Wisconsin like Kimmeee and perhaps one of their men i had stopped earlier on narrow road searching for Kim’s camp and where rods were set casually against parked cars, folding chairs in anticipation of walleye biting near shore and before inquiring of the turn-out and species a jack rabbit hopped behind him on the road and into the brush and he never saw but was mildly amused when i told him that as an aside later after grilling him and feeling this was a place i felt comfortable. My dogs have now become an extension or i of them of interaction, more arms and legs and hearts maybe spewing forth in material world.

There are peninsula’s within peninsulas in northern Michigan to my mind, ie anything jutting out and surrounded by water on three sides and it could be merely a point, a mere sliver of land mass, rock, splayed out in a forested silhouette and its always fun meeting headlong with her given our various competitive interpretation of maps and music (both our weakness this obsession…a hint of mutual unfathomable curiosity, melding with the world?)

Briefly back to themes before i detail our foray/adventure up further that poignant sliver of wild out-thrust of ore and soil enriched earth after re-uniting and the other forays with dogs later in week on my own and into other uncharted wilderness and when they don’t return i exact a mini imaginary tragic loss of one or other or both due to my negligence and magnified by exponentially deepening affection on all sides. Kim and i debating as usual as to what landmarks arose on horizon and even her Green Bay origins not enough to sway my own oft-ventured opinions on where things are and how their names should be pronounced and all factored around our shared interest, respect for each’s appreciation of nature, and of course the music soundtrack of our mutually irreverent wryly funny takes on life. We ended up at a bar.

The themes how they recede in and out of grasp like a firefly or a worn candle’s sputter of recall fore-boding light, darkness and fearful of neither. There were several attempts to rescue the idea from vivid dreams luridly reflecting the week’s doings, a day even of living in the moment peppered with events which always echo, recall ghosts from the past.

One was i believe the to be embraced by others hindering validation or the anticipation of it to taint the natural sharing and connection which we might desire of our artistic natures when unveiled uniquely, authentically to our true selves.

So again we ventured just yesterday (again) me and the dogs deep down 2-track trails searching rivers even fishing one where i thought i could relax, windows open just enough to hear the small one’s plaintive squealing and even catching her slithering like an eel out the improbable opening as i drew farther away and returning to admonish her and close windows further. Then clambering into a small feeder stream which fed the larger as i found on precarious wader steps around drifted wood, confused again and in rapture with each frame of natural world laid out in separate equal tableau like the three times we witnessed, the dogs and i this week and them more clamorously, vignettes of newly minted precious fawn wobbling behind their mothers vanishing, merging gratefully into cover of green-swathed protective undergrowth. Also Canadian geese or turkey earthbound and gathering broods across that dusty short-cut i take once daily into town, abreast the Plains road past the shit ponds into a town an area that has revealed more of its depth as i allow for the fantasies to subside.

Everyone i assume has their own opinion about the meaning of say “gonzo journalism” and you know how we all mostly throw in every time for the most erudite if brusquely determinate current perception of any idea…anyways… so this is mine:

It wasn’t about the drugs Hunter took, or the casually dramatic way his female presences were caught up in his brilliant scampering amidst the apocalyptic (go figure) mood of a decade, cultural rubble of HIS TIME, (anathema now in these lightening-quick steps dare i say, forward) his talent as reporter, observer mostly and keenly wallowed- in brusqueness, the examination of both base and soaring human nature, the round the fire kind of unforgettable and hysterical raconteur of tales which fester far longer in craw than one might expect, carrying with it its own retained glow perhaps…. no. It was about being in the moment, stepping into the story and becoming it.

Its easier than that if you were already aware in your gut that there is no time like NOW the rousing RAF swarm of commonly held emotional beliefs like fighters lined up in an English field but still valid if obvious, that there is a crazy balancing act we must do and especially as (ugh) creators? expressers? between the desire to recount EXACTLY IN THE MOMENT our emotional and physical reality or succumb to the maze-driven mania of organising the past into decipherable narrative chunks. Think blocks of cheese from over in Wisconsin. So Thompson chose the easy way out, who wouldn’t?, selecting a process of expression best suited to his particular passions and avoiding the need for too much long-winded navel-gazing into his past. Historically as a journalist he didn’t mind fleshing out the past politically or socially he just wasn’t going the whole none yards to back story his own personal history. Gonzo, a concept to consider, adapt for ourselves?

I leave you with this metaphor in pictorial form (desired connection?) from north of Bete Grise astride Belle du Lac and you can do the translations on those, this proof of our our energy, willingness to be part of the world if decidely removed from it. Kim had come across it like i had before but still we had to stop. Wonder. And parked in the middle of a paved road like you do, here in the U.P. where the faint of heart are rewarded equally for their non-chalance as their more adventurous intrepid partners, in the crime of “Living”. I had written “interlocutors” rather than “partners” here but was confounded of both partial meaning and all spelling. Lol.

Nah. You CANNOT make this shit up and damn, what a relief you don’t have to!