Indiana Josh

Denver is getting increasingly weirder.

that sunlight tho

what do a financial guru, an environmental chemist, a designer, and a tech entrepreneur have in common, besides being invariably white af?

we’re all bringing in the new year by trying to make something big, and important. here’s to hoping 2019 is full of big changes and important growth.

wet weather // cold weather lööks

~30 miles, ~12 river crossings, 7 peaks, 2 days, 1 badass dog. (Ouachita Mts | AR)

rare photo of a young ass Bandit | Dec. 2010

I think I may need to take a spiritual pilgrimage with Bandit–another road trip full of hikes and swims and camp cuddles like we’ve done so many times before. The little dude has been having a really hard time the past few months. Ending the relationship I was in took a bigger toll on me than I’d expected, partly because I did really, really like the girl, but also–and perhaps moreso–because I was grieving someone else entirely who I’d felt was an honestly better fit for my life and what I see for the kind of life I want. I haven’t quite felt comfortable reaching across time and space to say as much to them, I guess because it feels a little selfish to do so. And the funk I’ve been in has been particularly strange in light of how other aspects of my life are going *exceptionally* well, but nonetheless, that funk has been playing out in my relationship with Bandit in the form of neglect. I’ve either been a little too down to go out and play as much and go on as many hikes, or I was trying to spend as much time as possible with friends–all of which have amounted to much less time with the living entity that has been more responsible for my life’s choices and decisions over the past nine years than any other.

It’s visible and palpable. He curls up and sleeps a lot more. He follows me around tilting his head inquisitively everywhere I go, all the time. He seems more and more distressed whenever I leave the house now. And when I let him outside in the morning, a previously half hour of running around the neighborhood/woods has turned into 2-3 hours. Sometimes when I let him out he’ll go up through the woods behind my house to my landlord’s house, where he wants to hang out with her and her dog. I’ve had to go up there four or five hours later to retrieve him after he wouldn’t come home on his own.

And it only makes sense. The animals we let into our strange little worlds–these domestic spaces we’ve carved out for ourselves–shape and conform their lives and, thus, their personalities and emotional landscapes to fit our own. It’s quite literally all they know. We leave their presence and have a myriad number of diverse, stimulating, and enriching interactions and encounters with different kinds of people in different kinds of settings; we’re constantly being shaped by all of our countless daily interactions, while our animals are being shaped almost entirely by their time with us alone. I think it makes us all the more responsible to stimulate and enrich their lives as much as we possibly can.

All this to say, I can’t help but wonder how much my own grief has been reflecting onto, and affecting, him. And while I really hope my little dude has *another* nine years of life left in him, he’s still in so much of his prime right now, with all the energy and vigor to hike, swim, jump, climb, and play, and he deserves more than what I’ve been giving him lately.

I promised him today I’ll do better.

bedroom lüks

i may or may not have just spent over $400 on early pressing vinyl of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album in mono. found it in a crate in a record shop downtown. it took me a long time to come around to analog, but fuck, hearing Blue in Green come through the record player, filtered through the staccato rainfall outside of my window, is impossible to beat. i also snatched up a few early Dylans, Neil Young’s three-disc Decade, a couple Crosby, Stills, Nash & Youngs, found a re-release of a Blind Willie McTell compilation, and a few others. audio is expensive af, but damn is it an important part of the human experience.

my long-term (~7 years) ex got married last week. i’d always wondered how it might feel to get news like that one day–that a person i’d carved out a significant portion of my life with, across multiple cities, states, and countries, through so many formative years of adulthood, has married another person. there was the initial strangeness of knowing (or, at least, feeling) that an important chapter in our lives had actually, definitively closed, and that a new one for her, and without me, was beginning. but i was surprised to, almost immediately afterwards, feel genuine happiness for her. i remember thinking how much she deserves it. and then–relief, or a lightness, in recognizing that my feelings about her marriage were entirely positive, and that it all seemed so right.

i called her to congratulate her and we chatted for a bit. she told me how much our time together meant to her, how it shaped her into the person she became, and how she carried so much of what our relationship was and had been into this new one. it felt really affirming and healing, and i think–i don’t know, but i think–we both cried a little (i mean, i did, at least, but that’s no monumental feat; i cry when a leaf falls and wobbles in the right kind of light). it feels really wonderful to experience happiness that is itself the direct result of another person’s happiness.