Home for the Holidays

I have returned to the land where I was born and my grey fluffy cat is still banging his poor head on the treat cupboard like he’s always done. He attempts to rub gently, you see, but ends up whacking his face with an audible thud. Watching him suggest over and over again what goodies we should provide him with, sacrificing his skull in the meantime, I ended up asking myself: what are my treats that I bang my head for? 

Returning to your hometown mixes intense familiarity with mild instability. The first decade after graduating high school makes for a bit of an eruption of paths, peers scattering surprisingly and not, all deepening individual channels. What I mean by this scattering of childhood peers resembles something of a hatching spider sack. And yes: it is both slightly disturbing and awe-inspiring. I would rather not look at the sprawl, but I am too fascinated to curb my gaze. I have friends I used to sling crawdads and eat pine needles with who are now married and settling down on local ranches. I have a friend disinterested in architecture studying architecture, some peers ditching their tech degrees to be whitewater raft guides, a handful of them falling in love in foreign lands, quite a few changing their hair-dos, some obedient and some outlaws, one or two getting in with their dream career realms, and others providing sound baths for famous hip-hop artists in India. All the absurdities and extremes and limitations we opt into or opt out of. Sizes of all different shapes and shapes of all different sizes. All you have to do to evoke a portrait for the chaos of your 20s in a post-modern, digital era is aggressively splat paint on the surface of your choosing to classical piano remix of Old Thyme Mem’ry while simultaneously writing “I am impermanent” on fresh-baked cookies for your neighbor next to an underfed pack of wolves. The following masterpiece will help you feel seen by the strange cluster of early modern adulthood. Furthermore, the “throw away” into the trash bin once the art piece has lost its brief enlightenment will further iterate the point. The point of what, you may ask? Well, the courage to ask anything at all.

My friend and I went to the thrift store on this winter day in my feverish mountain hometown. It is rather stunning to report that smalltown Montana used stores are not cheap. Another enigma of our times: $60 donated western boots and extravagant sub-par health insurance that only requires you sell half your house in the event of a heart attack caused by Chinese apple juice preservatives somehow cheaper than domestic fresh apple juice. Nevertheless my friend discovered one of the strangest and most wondrous shirts I have ever witnessed. Stripes and clumsy spirals, charmingly ugly and existential, this was a short-sleeved shirt inseparable from an attached button cardigan that must have belonged to a grandma, Roald Dahl-like character turned science-pirate. This shirt is impossible to fully appreciate in person, let alone write about, which is why I enjoy it so much. The best way to refer to such a garment is that when I first put it on, I felt reminded of the fact that life began in the ocean and crawled itself onto land where reptiles evolved into velociraptors and extinction events lapsed. After all that, here I am in a thrift store in Whitefish, Montana looking at my mismatched self in the mirror, astonishingly conscious and ready to have a good laugh.

After churning my sensitive-artist-self through the formats of college, I feel depleted. My creative internal twittering continues, but slouched. Tears of concern still sprinkle off my chin, but less motivated to find the Earth than usual. Headlines of genocide, famine, extraction, and AI fence me in like barbed wires and blatant censorship skips through my heart like heatwaves. I can taste white-out on my tongue and feel grains of lithium glowing between my toes. It’s like watching a horror movie for the uncanny suspense of the unknown and boringly, the CGI monster becomes revealed. It’s frightening how quick wonder can become phony. It feels like three years ago malice wore a mask of consideration. Now malice is fully bare. 

I am tiptoeing a fine-line between purpose and listlessness with my craft. Wrapping my fingers around a pencil and tuning my thoughts with paint may very well be skills of history. What mediums are relevant for the future? Is this very written essay obsolete? Is the author akin to how I presently think of the blacksmith?

Something I’ve realized lately: those who have a healthy, or at least maturing relationship with the fact that we are impermanent tend to be compassionate people, or strive to be good. Those who have an unhealthy, avoidant relationship with the fact that we are impermanent seem to brew destruction and apathy. Glimpsing at our global political sphere I am troubled to calculate a severe deception of mortality infesting our leaders. Our global persons in power neglect admittance to our eventual disappearance and I witness the pent up willful ignorance translate into overindulgent material luxury, disrespect to the environment and future generations, and hoarding of imagined control. In truth, there is no way to purchase an escape at the end. The fact of lifelong scurry to bedazzle the mountains with mansions and improve freshwater with updated jet boats ultimately sabotages the pinnacle destination we were born with. What is the point in running away from your own feet? It is a shame to bury home with houses. Underneath all the manufactured fuss-pile of topical glamor and promises is the beauty and safety that humanity craves.

Yeah, I am a little spicy and getting stuck on the nucleus.

So progress? Perhaps we could start with a requirement for politicians and CEOs to wear cardigan-shirts decorated in amoebas, drop them off alone, but for loons, in the middle of a star-lit forest with a copy of Frankenstein and a mirror. Heck, I’d join them all for the holidays. How do you make someone realize that by stabbing the world in the back you are stabbing yourself in the back? Your offspring, your memory, your integrity, your worth?

There are some that bang their heads on titles for a kind of treat that cannot be demanded: only earned. And there are others who forsake status in favor of footing. 

So I mosey about a foggy globe, naively captivated by the ways color mixes and squirrels dart about, missing departed companions indifferent to return. A ptarmigan is living in my dad’s woodpile and my mother wears Eeyore slippers. I’ve taken more baths than can justify the prune, exercise to my limits on mellow days, and make most meals with cheese, turning on my own insular axis. The gray-green of the horizon slips yawns into my coffee just to slow me down. I’m stuttering and lonely but fine with it for now. These times call for investments into eccentric ugly cardigan shirts and long looks at woodland creatures, proper armor for the great acceleration. Might as well resemble the emergence of life in a time where we tend to forget how we arrived here, mighty and trembling. As Eeyore describes this entree, “A trifling matter, and fussy of me, but we all have our little ways.”