"As well ask men what they think of stone."

In Oregon there's a mushroom thousands of acres big. In reality it's neither one huge organism or millions of separate ones, but a network of function and communication. It knows if you are present, it reroutes the passage of nutrients and information when a node is broken. When conditions are right, a mushroom breaks through the surface like an inconsolable weed and sucks life from its environment. No real point here, other than I really want to stand on it and watch the puke yellow growth thinking and working and practically bubbling with activity out to the horizon.

"Sometimes you just need a two-day bender to clear your head." And of all the laws I've broken, trespassing somehow feels the best. To rework the environment to suit your needs. Not to destroy, but to undercut the very notion that we can own things and cordon them off and hold back. And so at 3am, diving from the high-board and splashing whiskey-laden into the deep-end like a gangly ape I feel both the ecstatic solitude of the village idiot and the swelling outrage of myself ten years ago clawing around for what it needs. I no longer feel that I have to justify my behavior in some teetering matrix of what would be acceptable "if every other person did it", that I only need to explain it to myself and retain consistency. Fix holes in my notions as I find them, and make up for missteps and going too far in the only way I really can.

The thing about love. Every time you've been mired in it and imagine some timeless definition of it . . .it becomes a different animal. And so you, scarred and adorned and maybe even a bit fortified and cautious, see utterly different dollar signs and cartoon hearts over things than your Sim did a decade previous when all the romance you knew was television and the only regrets were in songs.

Somewhere there's a lonely whale navigating the depths looking for his friends and family. To never find them. Cheer up, you're not dead yet.