Midwinterim

𝕯ear Future Me,

If you exist…

It’s mid-December in the year 2023 CE, and we’re a handful of months away from turning 37. We think about that a lot each time we glance our visage in the mirror and see the growing number of silvery white strands strewn amidst the charred brown, forested waves atop our head.

In the past 347 days since genuinely writing for personal reasons, we’ve generated 213 documents —all in the way of essays, surveys, discussions, plans, proposals. There’s never not tedium to distract and drain, by design- the way things are done in the times and places we occupy. Not the way we’d prefer it, and methinks hardly the way most other people would, either.

We’re 131 days into our third time (second time accompanied ) living in Colorado in the seven and a half years since we first arrived here. That’s 23 days longer than our previous attempt, and this final go of things seems to be better sticking the landing. We’re 1,749.69 miles (as the crow flies) from where we started (again) a few months ago. We’ve landed out west, this time compelled by the existentially definitive conviction to create a place of meaning to call home or bust.

We’ve been driven here in part by the unavoidably unfolding consequences of ever-emergent global climate crises, and in part by a shared affinity for the majesty and security of the geologically young, majestic mountains. There are qualities to existing here that are nowhere to be found east of the Mississippi River, and a real sense of home we both feel, in this genuine frontier place. It’s a home we’ve chosen for ourselves, which hasn’t otherwise been ordained by the circumstances of our birth or relative associations with others. Its expansive geography is as untamed and wide as its skies, with an abundance of inexplicably diverse browns, greys, whites, and reds. I’ve been taught by an aggregate three winters here just how much brown there can be to a place. The outside world exists as something almost in the way of a weathered, sensory daguerreotype.

I guess what I’m engaging in here could be considered a form of automatic writing in the way of the Surrealist movement. We yearn to create for the sake of creation. But it’s often overwhelmingly difficult to create in a world so defined by its institutional abundance of destruction. We want to breathe life into creative endeavors that mean things to ourselves and others. We intrinsically pine for it as a mode of expression in a world where such things, at least it often seems, have been run ragged to points of near-extinction. How do you create anything beautiful or meaningful in a consensus existence so utterly defined by forces like consumption and annihilation?

We long for the spring, not just in the coming year, but in our lives. There’ve been many false starts along the way (story of our life). At this moment, we find ourselves trapped in a paralytic stagnation that has come to define so much of both of our lives — if they could even be holistically labeled “lives”, rather than mere existences. Sometimes there are these shimmering pockets of existential lucidity, but are they ever free from interruption? It’s the perpetuation of these and other noble dreams for which we long, as we’d imagine most anyone probably does in their own niches of this greater cosmic mystery we all seem to occupy.

If the point of societal organization isn’t to serve and benefit the people who make it up, then what is it?

There’s plenty about which to earnestly despair these days. We’ve witnessed a discouraging and relatable abundance of real poverty everywhere we’ve gone, for some time now. Remember when we were training to work that allegedly solid federal job (which I won’t specify in this piece, for liability reasons), last summer? Remember how there were people, working (so-called “full-time” positions) for that same institution, who were living out of their cars in that organization’s gated parking lot?

Yeah- we’d pull into work first thing in the morning, and see them going about their morning routines from what were clearly the sedans they inhabited as homes?

Everywhere we go, across the entire country we’re financially trapped in, the homeless and impoverished abound. There isn’t a single grocery store or Walmart parking lot you’ve been to that doesn’t have at least one or two, often more broken down cars and RVs where people have set up makeshift shanty towns to try and survive within. And easily a third of the street corners, everywhere you go- are occupied by panhandlers or people visibly in significant economic distress. Which sounds cleaner to write about so prosaically than it is to witness, or to be reminded of- having shared their lot (and never being far from it) not too long ago.

Every store we visit is filled with a growing circus of dystopian, cyberpunk, anti-theft and security measures — from algorithm-driven cameras to locked plexiglass cases, to straight up chains binding high value products in multiple aisles. And it’s not just the so-called luxury or high-end stuff. It’s more often healthcare items, and basic necessities — things like laundry detergent and infant formula.