You must forgive me for reiterating that the worst part of writing is the first sentence you have to write. See, now we’re off on a walk where we can commune together, get lost a little, and hopefully find our way back.
Write or not, time circles around the sun. It’s funny, shuffling papers written about days past, that all it amounts to is a nice stack and a smug feeling of intrinsic growth. A good chronology for the biography when I’m a living dead man, if that already hasn’t happened.
People who find themselves ill too often, are ill. This summer’s disease is leukoplakia – never heard of it yesterday, will surely die of it tomorrow. Who knows how many untreated, incurable, terminal illnesses I’ve diagnosed myself with since the world got sick.
I think what I hate to say most is that I don’t want to be writing this, but instead that. But I find myself with the neurosis of needing to stay relevant on a website I didn’t know existed a year ago. Slowly but surely, the focus shifts, and the compass points towards an old oasis—the Internet Ocean.
Somewhere in between meditating for an hour a day, and taking a new mushroom supplement, I’ve been spending a lot of time noticing the trees. I must’ve said it before, but after deeming myself short in high school, I looked at my feet my whole life, much less others in the eye, or up at the trees.
But like a small, hopefully permanent, psychedelic trip, the nature-oriented part of my brain seems to have opened its three eyes. Days 1-10, I swear I spent an hour just lying in fields, or graveyards, sitting in parks by myself watching sunsets. But here, about a month out, I am rushing to nowhere to do nothing and get my daily Blue Light Therapy.
The internet and television really are the pornography of real life. Luckily, about two degrees of separation from it most days, I laugh at the thought of spending more than an hour or two cramping my eyes at a neon obelisk, instead of getting high on flowers.
This is all to say, you have to remind yourself no, you don’t have to go to that thing, or wake up if you don’t have to, or go to that place, or write shit. You need to say, I am nothing compared to this orchard that, I assure you, is in your neighborhood. You have to say to yourself that you can do the things you love, and nobody cares.
Ben Bonkoske 