Sunday, January 6, 2013

Running commentary

Tonight I walked for a good bit. It was what I like to call one of my epic walks, a walk where things happen. It started with a meteor. Actually, no, that's not right... It had been going on for a while before the meteor; that's just when it got interesting. Right after the meteor I decided to head out into the Denton wilderness. Geez, my hands are cold. I'm wearing gloves, and it helps to blow on them really close to my mouth, but dang! Cold. Anyway, so I'm walking out on this path near this public park, and there are some close hills that make the horizon seem very near. I saw a silhouette of several trees there on the horizon, and thought... there go the Ents. Those are giants over there, giants out of mythology. I stopped to stare at them for a while, and then I'll be fragnappled if they didn't start to move! At first it scared the ever living crap out of me, but then I remembered the horizon, and how the hill made it seem abnormally close. That didn't calm my incipient panic though, because those were people, four of them, walking along in the same wilderness as me, in the dark. If I had been wearing overalls, I probably would have shit in them. I considered turning right around, but then I thought, Ash, don't be a retard. This is real life, not a movie, and those people most likely aren't serial killers. So I kept walking, and they kept walking, but our paths never crossed and we all disappeared into the dark to each other. No harm, no foul. Later I was walking by the lake, and it was so still that the reflection of the city lights in the water seemed like another complete world. By this time fog had begun to roll in, and everything seemed ethereal... like a dream. Dang my thumb is cold. It would really suck to fall down right now. Anyway, I became pretty captivated by the reflection, so I bent over so I could look at the world upside down. I saw all of that foggy reflection as the real world, and the real world as the dream. It reminded me of a recurring dream I have, one that I have often wished I could live in forever. It's impossible to explain how that dream feels, but to put it crudely, it's like a desolate longing for comfort that is never fulfilled. So I kept walking, and the fog continued to fall, and I watched rays of volumetric light seeping through the nearby tree branches, and the fog got thicker. Once again, I felt like I wanted to be up in those tree branches, dreaming away eternity. I must have gaped and gaggled at this spectacle for several minutes, because I kind of lost track of time. I think I stared at the stars for a while, because I remember orienting myself towards the north using the Big Dipper and Polaris as a guide. The Seven Sisters were just visible as seven, and I marveled at the distance between the Pleiades and the Orion Nebula, a vast distance of light years which I could traverse with my eye in half a second. It didn't seem real at all. Now I'm home and I hear sleep calling. I love my sister and my brother in law. And their dogs, too. Dogs represent all the best qualities of people.

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