💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › joneworlds › roophloch2022.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 04:27:49.
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I'm typing this from an old blackberry phone, wifi tethered to my actual phone. And I'm logged into the republic on ssh, on an Android app called Connectbot, which this blackberry can run okay. Through ssh I can use emacs on the republic like I normally do. But there is no meta alt key on this connectbot, so I had to learn some other ways of invoking my favorite commands. That's kind of some learning, I guess. And I'm sitting on a rock near the bank of a river where I'm living these days. I remember this place. I think the water is okay, but there's sure more garbage than I remember back in the day. There's the usual trash bags and appliances and mattresses like everywhere else. But there's also this entire delivery van on its roof what must have slid off from the road above. All the boxes are spilled out across the gravel bar here. Most of them aren't even opened. I guess nobody comes around here much nowadays. Probably also why the driver's body is still strapped in there, hanging upside down by its seat belt. Looks a bit ripe by now, now that summer's passed. If no one ever finds them, Amazon doesn't need to record it on their seasonal fatality metric? I remember having one of those jobs back a ways. Got to hit your quotas. But anyways, I always like the sound of running water, like in a stream or river. And I like to stand and watch and feel its energy, and see how the water moves around things, rocks and things. Riffles and eddies. The subtle rhythm under the ever changing chaos of the flow. Its constancy comforts me, knowing that whenever I wander off from here to do whatever it is I do, that water will still be swarming against that stone, all day and all night. I remember my mother once telling me of a time when I was just a tiny baby, how I would gaze up transfixed by the wind blowing through her oak tree, staring at every little leaf swinging and turning at once, a million directions. Running water is like that too, to me. I remember the first time I ever saw the open ocean in its full grandeur, with the wide open beaches stretching for miles in both directions beyond view, and the waves coming in and out. And I remember this feeling of fear I had. The immensity of the ocean's power and energy, the menace its mindless coldness, and constancy. That it could drag me out and swallow me, kill me without knowing or caring or even noticing, and its sound and motion would never change at all, not even for a moment. And I seemed like a bug would seem to me. It was very humbling in that way. To me, the sound and movement of a stream or small river is like a very small version of that. Just enough of that energy and menace to notice it, but not enough to have me feel fear. Like a housecat to a cougar. This here little river will gurgle and flow around all this ugliness and garbage and macabre, and it won't care at all. It will go up and down, flow in and out of that log, and Amazon's truck, and their skull, and it will keep doing that long after its gone. And the sound will be the same then as now. Okay. Well, time to go home now I guess.