Junin de los Andes

Sitting in an internet cafe´in Junin de los Andes, and not thinking of much to say, so how about a journal entry written while I actually was where I am trying to write about?

January 16th, 2009 (weird)
Los Vertientes de los Radales, Estancia Ranquilco, Provencia de Neuquen, Argentina, South America, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Town of Infiniti, State of Mystery...

This place seems to be wittled down to its adult teeth, and even some of them have started to go. That whiskey wind and old tobacco sun have taken their toll throughout the years, and perhaps we don´t choose our vices afterall. The condor shit builds up in long white lines beneath the roosts, and these cliffs, which I´ve already likened to decaying teeth, seem to have the eyebrows of an old man. And now I´m guilty of anthropomorphizing the anthropomorphism. It seems we´re married to these lenses. The goats grazing on the slope to the south look like a herd of pygmy polar bears, and the moon in the morning blue sky a thumbnail caught between the folds of dimensions. Speaking of things breaking through often uncrossable barriers, the veil between this world and the next seems to be especially flimsy at the moment. The dearest people in my life who have stepped out of their bodies into the nakedness of spirit (a fancy way of saying: those that have died), have been visiting my dreams just about every night, especially Hodi, and I have been getting hugs that I thought were lost to me forever. I sat on the sheep so it couldn´t get away as Brett plunged a knife into its jugular and I held my hand against its heart as it went through its final beats, and suddenly life seemed little more than a fancy vanishing act. Perhaps I will have engraved on my tombstone: ¨How´d I do?¨

This is a prickly place. Seems evolution held a competetion in the best spine and thorn category right here in these mountains. Even the soft looking bunch grasses give you that itchy sort of poke that can peel away a layer from the weaker parts of one´s sanity.

Brett and I have been perusing his book on stars, and I think it´s got to be the most rewarding and fascinating route to an existential crisis yet. So here I sit, pondering the stardustiness of it all, a medium-sized life form on the crust of a mostly molten planet that´s dangling like a teardrop, or an intergalactic cranberry, on one wing of a tiny spiraled galaxy in the middle (because what isn´t the middle?) of infiniti. These thoughts make me feel like I´m fifteen again, but without the pot. I must be evolving!