were we to all drop those masks, all-at-once in a you show me yours, i’ll show you mine scenario, would there be any love left in the world of man? or would we be so repulsed by the reflection of our own shame in one another that we would be driven into solitude? if there is to be any hope left it would be in the love of Christ, but the masks of christians are even the more delicate and intricate, covering a myriad of sins with deceit rather than love. meanwhile, in the shadows behind the mask the darkness remains, and grows.

meanwhile back home partial sentences sat around the dinner table, waiting for the dreaded sound of a door slamming, the delivery of news that they would be forever torn apart and left incomplete.

another nice feature of tonight’s ride was the restraint on the drinking front. we had a relatively brief dinner & beer stop at stellars in georgetown, but it was a tiny thing compared to our typical bachhanalia.

i think this was a good thing for me, and i’m resolving to cut back on the drinking front a bit this week. i know that when i don’t like how i feel it’s always a bit more tempting to grab a cold pint or seven, and while i surely don’t like how i feel these days, i also know that it’s not helping anything. unfortunately, i don’t know what will help anything. i fear that some of my current ideas are not very sound.

i saw snakes on a plane tonight. it was not too bad. it’d have been improved with a slight change in company, but i guess you could append that to the rest of my week as well. here’s trusting that next week will hurt a little less.

notably i really like this panorama i took from the top of the marquam bridge, aka i-5:

i feel like i have so much more to say here but i don’t know how to say it. stupid words, why must you be so inadequate? i would like to go back to a simpler time. a time when i could sit on the swingset and be entertained. a time when happiness had fewer complications and felt more solid, more easily embraced and less likely to slip away. all i know is that i don’t want to be here anymore, but i don’t have any clue where would be better.

what a weekend. i am worried that i might be out of (useful) words. i don’t think the ones i have left can do anything – as far as i can tell they’re doing nothing for me at the moment – so it should come as no surprise that i’ve got nothing further to share with you. hopefully that won’t stop me from trying again at a later date.

today i found myself retracing familiar steps – around the house i grew up in and the county fair i’ve been to 25 of the last 27 years. of course with time these things have changed, but even in trying to think of how to describe them or capture them in photographs i realized that it seems impossible. the writer or photographer faces this most difficult of tasks – to convey their context to another, compacting everything present for them into a shadowy representation of the moment.

even if i had brought you with me to the fair today, your experience of it would be almost completely distanced from my own. from the way the musty smell of the livestock barn makes me hungry for the fresh milkshakes i know are on the other side to the way i can look out over the new ampitheatre and reminisce about how i used to play in that same field when we stayed there with our camp trailer. or, in walking around my house to see how the blackberries are ripening, you could never feel the sheer familiarity of the coarse grass on your feet or the memories tied into the very slope of the hill.

of course not. but i would like you to.

we all pack around with us decades of stored content, sensations that our sophisticated pattern-matching brains have analyzed and stored away. i think part of communication is conveying at least tiny parts of that context to one another, at least enough so that conversation can have some kind of a foundation. but how do we ever get there? and what if we longed to express ourselves more thoroughly, would it even be possible?