Hey friends, and those to whom my promises have not quite met the mark:

Wow. Every season now, winter included, seems to leave me looking backwards at a duration of time that tricked me in its foreshortening. I hope to write you all without a trace of hesitation and free from that internal editor inside my head (Wittgensteinians amongst you allow me that euphemism, please.) But time is our subject. I was reading this book of letters by a man named Diedrich Bonhoeffer by whom I am quite taken. Who he is, and why I am drawn to him, is for another time, but the quote that I’ve had running through my head stems from an essay he wrote, which begins thusly (I write “thusly” because I hate that word and its trumped up bootstrap-pulling aura, and this is a good place to poke fun at myself and my serious letter to all of you, most of whom will never see it):

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s life. As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty.

One of my weaknesses as a person is to encounter statements like this with suspicion and an overwhelming desire to decipher what trick a speaker who says such things may have under his or her sleeve. Rather than face something on, I look on its profile, gauging the degree to which it is permeable, penetrable, or simply thin. But maybe not here (I am not telling you I’m born again or anything religious or spiritual like that, I say this because you yourself may be like me and suspicious of speakers who try to soothe you with claims of transparency-as-goal or honesty-as-means or even sentimentality-as-nothing-to-shy-at. I simply want to talk some things out, and I have neither the time nor fortitude to contact every person I care about and love and am amazed by, plus I am terrible on the phone: I pace up and down the entire time, mumbling and repeating myself and interrupting you in mid-story with little grace or subtlety.)

So it’s been a long time. About a month ago, I saw some friends with whom I cannot imagine not being friends. It was brief, and great, but afterwards it was back to the daily grind for me after a half-dozen hours wandering airports and bumming Camels off a guy with a thick golden wristwatch who wanted to talk politics. And I was on the plane thinking about these friends and my thoughts sort of exfoliated outward into a list of people in whose lives I wish I could re-immerse myself and make tangible or palpable again, for the sheer expansive mindfuck it would be to become reacquainted with the new selves you are now and hook them to the old selves I knew, and vice versa.

Is this nostalgia then? I think not, but could be wrong. I saw two moose, a deer, and two elk on the drive to work this morning. I saw all of these animals from a distance that allowed me to see their facial expressions. The elk were the first to appear, a few hundred hundreds before the first cattleguard, and they leaped over a fence and took the sleep out of my eyes in the process. But then I saw that one of them left her baby elk behind (baby elk: think bambi but a bit bigger I guess) and I stopped by car, my animal-attracting car, to watch how the baby would deal with its mother’s absence. Too small to leap the fence at the point where its mother did, the baby elk ran parallel to the road and I fell behind it with my car, probably scaring it shitless, and then it reached a point in the fence where someone had installed a gate, and at this point the fence was about three inches shorter than at all previous points, so the baby risked it and barely cleared the gate, springing back into the woods beyond my vision. And I knew in that moment I am about to leave something again, about to strike out for new waters to see if they taste any different than those I sampled last but never quite savored, and I hate the leaving but need it at the same time. I know it is just an animal, just something I saw, but will I ever see it again and if not does that matter?

I do not know, and what was a grand plan indeed at the beginning of this letter has devolved into question marks.

I am tired of current events. We never run out of current events, never put them past us: as a species of information in our lives, they are everpresent and always asking for our attention. I have suffered for a long time from wrongfully directed attention syndrome. I remember on my 2nd or 3rd day of college, I breakfasted with an old high school math book rather than people I knew were interesting, because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t placed in the lowest math section. What a waste, what a pitiful waste! Funny, though, isn’t it: me with my orange juice and eggs, in the sad parallelograms of light that came through the windows of Pierce Hall, with an algebra book spread out before me trying to re-memorize certain formulae that may appear on this little placement test?

So summer has arrived. I have my hikes planned, and my calendar filled with baseball games in Missoula or Helena, and my bank account – fuck it, I’ll run up debt on the credit card, debt is just an absence among absences, which means i am your debt and you mine – I would love to go to the top of a three flat in Chicago and watch the street at twilight, or go to the Bay and try to run out and touch that rock just before the next gush of tide comes in, which I would race and maybe beat but enjoy regardless, or sit on a hood of a car on a gravel road and bullshit, or go some place new to see someone from olden times.

At this point I have lost steam and direction, but that may be the point. I am an early riser these days, and it is late, so I shall cut it short now with the wish that these words find you unstressed and happy with the modicum of suffering you endure alongside your ecstasy, and that you are not alone inside the vastness of your thoughts and feelings. Do not despair – I am not soft, nor old, nor quite responsible yet – I still swear and drink too much and swallow loudly at inappropriate times – but I do miss you, and would like to hug you or if that would be gender inappropriate engage in a fierce handshake and head nod combination that is cool and tender and meaningful all in the same stroke.