December 18, 2013

Good workouts in recent days. Feel great after. Yesterday I drove to the Arboretum, toured there a little, and then plunged down onto the Silver Creek Road. The winter sun was hot on the south side of the hill; the bottom of the valley was 10 degrees cooler, and hosted a stiff breeze. Why it should be windy just above the creek and calm on the hillsides I don’t know. Long since I’d wandered there– maybe half a year. When I was atop the hill, wandering around near the visitors’ center, there was one other visitor, a tall thin man in a green coat. My memories of the place are such a mixture of the natural and the erotic that I slipped effortlessly back into that mode, and only barely stopped myself from throwing him a heavy cruise. That he was doing the same thing was clear. What was once a very familiar set of responses seemed foreign then, and awkward. Crept into some of my old secret spots, and had a striking vision in one. I’d shouldered through a rhododendron thicket down to creek that flows into Bent Creek from a hill to the south. I was there a while, and when I turned to go back, I saw the little woodland meadow through a frame of leaves, like a wild creature peering from deep cover into the abode of men. The perspective felt familiar. It felt natural, as though once upon a time that had been my customary mode. Blaze of pain from my plantars wart at every third step. One plunges on.

In the evening it was the second part of Jackson’s The Hobbit. Taken purely as itself, I suppose it was a good movie, though it departed too often, too gratuitously, too arrogantly from Tolkien to please me much. Why correct the masters when they’re always better than you are?