Nothing compares

Cold stiff wind just powerful enough to make you fall over laughingly while taking a stereotypically majestic and self-congratulatory picture of yourself in front of massive jagged peaks srumbling in snow, and all the other indescribable beingness of winter in the mountains. The movement of wind and snow over each other, over ground and through tree, over crisp frozen lake, swerving like tiny clouds around your feet, the bleak blank empty beauty of it all, element interacting with element, short gnarled trees just trying to survive with their sputtered green, the snow blown to look like clouds looming around the moments, the mountains, swooping and swirling like birds and cigarette smoke and ocean waves, 'looks like the gates of heaven opening up, just above that lake,' says Mitch, and I agree, thinking something about how the sun, like most women, is much more alluring when covered by something smooth and white, yet still showing just a little bit of light, and her winking without being a peacock, expressing her beauty without showing it off, being beautiful without manipulating some sordid beauty out of herself.

All that type of failing language bullshit. I was going to put up my first picture on this blog of me near a frozen lake with the sun and powerful phallic rock-crags smooth feminine hills and clouds of windblown snow behind, but my bud didn't have his camera with him. I don't know, I have been wavering between being a romantic about these sorts of experiences and then just viewing them as another particular emotional response to something that has been built up in ones mind from past experiences and Jeremiah Johnson, and that, if ones mindset is right, working at McDonalds when it's hot and humid can be of an equivalently ecstatic or epiphanetic experience as watching sunsets from mountain passes and clear wind through pine boughs etc.etc.etc., all of that, so that there is nothing necessarily more Beautiful in the 'mountain' than in the McDonald's, but that I am merely too weak/simple-minded/conditioned to experience that sort of feeling in blander situations, such as, say, driving in downtown traffic in deep heat and humidity and nothing on the radio but bad music and static and even on NPR it's a report by that guy with the annoying voice (most NPR radio personalities have distinctive voices, if repetitive cadences, and most of them I like...Garrison Keeler, of course, rules, as does that one main guys from All Things Considered...but one of the standard reporters that I hear a lot grates me as though he is to sound as bananas are to taste).

So what is it? Do I continue holding a certain hypocritical disdain when people extol the virtues of traveling and being all adventurous and condemn or condescend to those who do otherwise, in essence blaming their own inability to live steadily and joyously on a certain deficiency in their system that makes them unable to Be in a steady 9-5 state... or are they right? Or is it just a matter of programming, genetics, and natural inclination, that we all find our it in different places...but is it ludicrous to say that there's more it in the Maroon Bells than in the Taco Bells? I suppose that all you can say is that if people are consciously and purposefully and awareishly deciphering where they find their it, then wherever they see it, there it is.

I guess I want to avoid the narrow self-absorbedness that is the tendency of those who devote their lives to adventuring, and I also want to avoid the narrow slothfulness of those who don't think about what they're doing or why they're doing it but just doing that which gives them a sense of security. I think I usually tend toward both of these extremes in different ways and at different times, though I'm probably more often guilty of the latter.

Anyway, I'm feeeling neither very steady and regimented and logical in my ideas nor free and energetic. I promise, I'm talking about good ideas, or interesting ones, I'm just not doing it too well or interestingly. I'll come back to it later. But, basically, I had a few moments today, on a relatively short hike, when I said to myself "it's great to be alive..." which is something I always Believe, but not something I necessarily feel all the time, and I usually don't have that specific thought come from my present experience but, rather, from thinking about thinking about life and experience.

Also, I like Lou Reed. I used to have a bit of a prejudiced aversion to his post-velvet stuff, since it's less melodic and more talky, but, beyond the catchy licks and riffs and rhythms, and intriguing lyrical constructions, he just Sounds cool without Sounding like he's Trying to Sound cool.

like David Yarborough.