Difficulty with what must be done

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Words fall like rain remembered in winter, dripping, clinging to leaves once green, now brown and long fallen, vanishing in sunlight without trace, except in memory. Memory, where lives things gone, not to return.

Others manage better than me. Red liquid still runs through tubes of flesh propelled by the pumping muscle, but the heart is dead. The life that never was is over.

It is difficult for me to do what needs to be done right now. I will never be a part of human society, and I see no point in maintaining a physical semblance of life on its fringes. I'll be moving out of this house in a couple of weeks, moving into my van, and going to southern Arizona to vanish into the most remote desert mountains to prospect for gold. I'm rigging transportation to go where others cannot.

There I belong, in those places where no one has been except perhaps some other forgotten white lunatic or some lost indian long centuries ago, such places still exist, the places without foot trails on the map. Among the impartial rocks, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes, I will be one more animal.

I don't care if I find gold. I had money at a time in the past, and nothing I needed to have a human life was for sale. I'm leaving without hope of arriving.

I was a father once, in a time totally vanished, gone like the desert snow of centuries past. This is the only thing that hurts now, accepting that reality.

Soon there will be silence, and the wind beneath the small rushing clouds will sweep through the cage of bones the coyotes left for the mice to eat as the plastic gold pan tumbles end over end to lodge among the rocks awaiting the slow decay of hydrocarbon in sunlight.

The things I need to get done. Mechanisms and events too painful to pointlessly recall don't go here. They are, as the apache-kiowa Momaday said, "The mean and ordinary agonies of human history." Such things have happened often before and will happen again. Years and forgotten human lifetimes drift past like snowflakes.

My daughter asks if I'll be coming back. I don't want to lie, so I say, "Probably." Who knows, I might. The younger one, the aspie, doesn't speak of it at all.

Yeah I have allways assumed my end would be along those lines but I guess as one
gets older you have to face it more. Though I would go North to Alaska to pan for gold.

Going anywhere near Flagstaff?

Is it a long drive from where you are now?

I'll miss you if you stop posting.

Cheers

Bazza

Nah, Flagstaff's too far north and too high in elevation. Remember it's winter up here. Further south, it doesn't get too much below freezing at night except in the higher mountains. I'll be living outside all winter, hell, maybe for the rest of my life.

The country I'm headed for is maybe twelve hundred miles south of here.

You rock, bazza, and machine's cool, even if he gets a little excessive once in a while.

Some other guy's moving into my house the first of january, so I ain't got much time. My oven's going constantly drying jerky, cooked beans and barley soup.

I also gotta finish building my dirt classifying system and my mountain bike baskets.

Not much time, much to do.