H.G.T.

The following is a “long” post. I put long in quotes because it’s actually barely a full page long, but I’ve noticed a tendancy in ‘internet folk’ to carp and bitch about any post that either a)Breaks V-Scroll or b) Isn’t flash enhanced and doesn’t strobe past fast enough to induce a hypnogogic seisure.

I was going to let my “would you kill people” post sit . . . but it’s my day off, and I am filled with thinky-thoughts.

It snowed yesterday, and there is snow all over everything at the moment.

I HATE the weather here. Makes me nuts. There is a cold wind here that cannot be described. It blows out of the mountains, 40, 50 mph or more sometimes, and it just scrapes everything down. A bad wind day here can be like being sandblasted. It’s so lonely and empty here that most of the people are either lonely and toughened themselves, or goofy in the head and unable to function. There are towns in Wyoming you don’t travel too or leave without a full tank of gas, because it’s 200, 300, 400 miles to the next gas station.

Yet . . . the starkness of infects a person. This is not Zen garden emptyness, or National Park nature. This is the real thing. It’s not empty because you made it empty, and it’s not nature because there are trees and green things. It’s empty because it’s always been empty. It’s nature because it is still wild and it has no fear of man, and will hurt you if it can. I an say I’ve been to places no roads lead. I can say I’ve been the only human for miles in any direction. I can say I’ve stood on top of a mountain and looked out, and been unable to see a single building. The miles of visibility, the harshness of the climate, burning summers, freezing winters, that sideways Wyoming snow . . . they infect you, and  change you, and other places seem full of styrofoam when you finally get to visit them.

I sincerely believe that the real reason for the “Wyoming Curse” (the tendancy of wyoming youth to bail at age 18, vowing never to return, only to come back years later with no real explanation) is that once a person lives here for a length of time, they feel crowded and hemmed in anyplace else.

I’ve been thinking about getting out of here, bailing for someplace urban.  I’ve done it before, and I do feel crowded other places . . . but I also feel energized, like the pure entropy of a crowd is the battery I was meant to be powered by.

My father and stepmother live just outside of D.C. They own a business there. They are cosmopolitan, smart, successful people with quite a bit of money. There is a place for me in their business. My dad, who is adopted, wants a legacy, I think, and he harraunges me to come out there and work with him and my stepbrother everytime we talk.  And the thing is, they are really decent people. I would be happy, confortable there. I would reap the benefits of positon, meet a nice girl someplace, probably after meet several that were horrible, and bam, twenty years fly by and I’m a wealthy WASP and, “Hey honey, when the fuck did we buy a boat?” “Dear, did you just say the ‘eff-word? Are you having one of your spells again?”  

I might want that life back when the twenty years have gone by, but right now it doesn’t seem like somethinig I could stand.

I have no less then three friends that I could leave the country with and make scads of money doing things most people consider unconsionable. Making hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even the vaunted millions, sounds kind of neat . . . but the last time I did things like that, I was lucky to walk away broke and alive. . . and my pistol is in my bottom drawer, where I like it. Not even loaded, at the moment. I don’t think I want to use it to make a living.

Several of my good friends want to leave this town for various other superior locales. Do I belong in any of those places? I don’t have the kind of education that grants instant legitimate employment, and I don’t think I can get that education here… My odds in another place would be about as long as they are here. . .

All I know, is I’m sick of being broke and stuck. When I get sick of being broke and stuck, I think about the old me, the me that existed half a decade ago. He was a mean, cold S.O.B., a friendless paranoid who abused a brilliant mind and a powerful body because he had an unending desire for sensation and material things. He . . .I . . . was a real bastard. A big enough bastard to deserve pretty much whatever I get between now and dying. I’m not like that so much anymore. . . but if I’d have found myself stuck like this back then, I would have went out and got mine. Even if I had to take it from somebody else. . .