a. The title of this ongoing collection is a line pulled directly from Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.

b. I moved to Washington State not too long after graduating high school. I was still in the throes of teendom—its angst and nagging melancholias.

Green and stubborn, I arrived having never ridden a public bus, nor had I been exposed to a metropolitan area of any impressive scale. That was nearly seven years ago. I ride the public bus every day and am all too familiar with city living (not that I was ever steeped in rural life—only ever kissed it).

Sometimes I miss Kentucky, but what I miss—I know this to be true—is more an idyllic memory than a reality. I miss my grandparents' property that jutted from a high hill along the Ohio River. I miss catching snakes—miss digging up bones and bottles from their big backyard—miss pulling up bluegills and mudfish from freshwater lakes.

c. The bulk of these photos are from Eastern Washington, where the sweet stench of sagebrush lulls the land—and animals, plants, and stones—into a long sort of silence that, while surely having its own loud say in things, operates too in silence, going on without notice.

The sky above, for example, does all the sky does anywhere else—but in said silence and with a big aloneness that makes for a special tone of blue.

Likewise, the animals still hunt and murder, breed and scheme—but again, in a silence and slowness-deep that staggers all this action into slow motion. An owl with big horns and palatial wings—from one sleeping rock to another—sweeps the horizon at dusk for what feels like a second before forever.

d. Time, too, amidst the arid flats, is present. Nowhere else on Earth—apart from select desolate beaches that host violent waves—drums up in me a primordial sense of history that is without man. And if, in case, he does come to mind—the highfalutin ape—he is fractional, small; a thing to come, or a far-off scent of yet-to-be people and buildings and roads.

e. [Mike falls asleep.] 

f. I don't daydream all too much and I'm not one for escapism. I don't think nature will act my savor or is innocent compared to the rest of life. 

g. There are roads to somewhere, and there are roads to nowhere else but where you need to be, roads to remember in your old age and roads with faces to hold in mind. 

h. [Mike dreams.]  

i. “The truth about it is

my kind of life's no better off

if it's got the map or if it's lost.”

Jason Molina, Farewell Transmission

j. I don't mind the physicality of aging. While the lines in my face are growing deeper—and I will admit, this does unsettle the more impressionable sentiments within me—I fear more the implantation of spent time: that I was given the chance to chance it all and never did. That the candle, in fact, burns from both ends, and what's left in that oldest middle is both a tired body and a faint mind. That glory (be that what you make it) is perhaps the result of hot and brighter beginnings, not struggled ends. 

When the time comes, hearts will not be weighed against sin but the accumulation of wasted potential. And in this, the potential for good and that which might atone for the past. 

The scale be a desert and Heaven the color blue. 

k. [Mike wakes up—having been away—and is now a far-distance from where he was. Time travel.]