Smith Rock State Park, Oregon…Merry Christmas…

“I think an artist’s outsiderness is to a large degree innate, and that the world then whittles away, or can whittle away, reducing you further toward that essence. Your earliest inclinations have probably almost always been to stay outside – to turn away, if only to set up, in doing so, some great distance across which yearning and other passions can travel. A larger field.”

–Rick Bass

(Merry Christmas to one. The photo so specific it hurts.)

Tonight: Boise, ID.

A soft, empty rain falls across this black town. I walk among strangers. The slur of autos. The slick whisper of tires meeting road. The loom and stretch of the unfamiliar clings to buildings, the dry mountains above. Lonesomeness and her dearly beloved companion interstate travel spur me. I am poised at the ragged edge of year’s end, the very earth being peeled away by bitter winds, rivers running with liquid obsidian. The birds have all gone, huddled in another time and space. There is quiet linger in our thoughts, a precedent always felt here in the shortest days. The whip and howl and curse of so much holiday leads me to walk that fine line between storm and benevolence.

The corruption. The collapse. A glance told but completely unspoken. Lo! how the sun unspools above us; is only a concept in these darkened days at year’s end. Quietly the hours do tick away. Less Language, these days more — more space, the digits in float and ever-convalescent. We ask they never stop.

Blue in the clouds. A December, the month lost to the sky. Will it collapse? Will it rise? Freedom or shelter. The night world upending herself at each dawn. Cataclysms and buoyancy. The sky passing over this valley — the clouds as marching armies of the starched, indomitable. Is the mind resolute and open? The mountains are white, both uncoupled from our small realities. Witness these.

Witness them like we witness ink on a page. Pixels in collaboration and request. A motel room along a sloshing interstate outside of Boise, ID produces nothing as her dominant ascetic. Instead, I must hunt the bedside dresser for cheap television flyers despondent with promotional faces. Copies of a copy of copy. I snatch at them with the lens. Witness these three results of peoples who ostensibly are: