The artist who styled himself ‘John Denver’ once sang of coming home; ‘to a place he’d never been before’.
The artist who styled himself Alex Vairtere is doing it the other way around. Home, to an old decrepit familiar place.
Don’t think for a moment that I’m abandoning my dreams and plans of La Cienega, a town I fell in love with long before I ever even really saw the dusty, broken, unattractive mess by the Interstate called Holbrook.
It’s just that those plans can now ripen in their own good time, without urgency, just as they have been since late in the last millennium.
For the first time ever in this lesser place, I am not just happy, but almost content with what I already have.
In a way it’s been happening for days, but that deeper contentment bloomed fully on this day, down by the overgrown tangled thickets, down by the waterline, a mile and a half or two from this place where I plug in this computer and make the tacos and lay down my head at night.
The Big Ditch Park down there is a beautiful thing in its way.
But one thing you won’t find there is solitude.
It’s a park, and people love to go to parks, especially ones with good walking paths and running water.
Where there are people in numbers, there is no solitude.
Today I walked the goat trail past all the broken liquor bottles, and pushed through the brush and stepped over the broken barbed wire and slid gracelessly down the riverbank, and I was quite perfectly and ecstatically alone in natural reality. Just me murmuring words into a camera, and the birds talking their inscrutable song talk.
The healing in it was nearly as potent as being able to look up and see the mountains looming above.
Later on I went out for a drive just to the water machine for three more gallons, and on the way back I spotted this.
It’s a little visually confusing to look at because I was shooting into a window at sunset, and the top half of the image is dominated by a reflection off the glass, showing the sun going down and what is behind me across the street.
But the coffee and tea news on the bottom is clear enough …
Also, it seems they will have begals.
