Come the night evil, come the gray day. All ways darkest, before the full of the moon.

Friday and 13 may well have been the blackest of it, or Saturday, it all ran together.

Then Sunday, and there were five precious hours of sunny warmth. At last I walked in their honor and they in mine.

Since I was out in it anyway, I made a bridge back to myself for later and cold and wet.

This bridge is probably going to be useless, and building it a waste of effort, cuz:

1) If it’s wet enough out for the bridge to be needed, it’s probably too muddy for my liking on the other side anyway.

2) This low road walk is less than perfect, at least on days when the least hint of hiss (or any sound that says people) is enough to set my teeth on edge, and

3) This way of getting five miles in works, but involves either walking through neighborhoods, or parking the truck somewhere less than perfect.

But: I also learned that wasted effort is better than no effort at all.

And I found a vast, previously undiscovered dry duck lake, which ain’t nothin’.

In the last moments of full sun, having decided that the low road will have to live as a dead end on those sensitive days, I drove out to the other end of the wash again and ate a wicked burrito.

The other end still exists, as an option, for the times when my head isn’t right enough to just jam out the low road an call it done. Doubtless I’ll be making use of that option, in the very near term.

So I got my five in for real.

And I made sure of an option.

In between all of that there are two more little pieces to tell.

Little Piece #1 is why I was so god damned depressed for 36 or 48 hours.

Let’s get it over with as quick as possible.

“When you find a turtle on a fence post, it didn’t get there by accident.” The turtle in this case is named Syria, and the post is The American Way of Death, International Edition.

More about the everlasting fence.

More about the Domestic Edition:
FL Woman Charged w/ TERRORISM For Angry Response To Rejected Medical Claim

“A Lakeland woman was charged Tuesday after police said she ended a call to an insurance company with the words:

Delay, Deny, Depose”.

Why is that terrorism? (Besides the obvious fact that it isn’t … )

Because those three words were the same ones that were engraved into the casings of the three bullets that killed that evil fuck of a health insurance CEO.

So by uttering them, in the course of ending a phone call to Blue Cross in which she herself was having a claim denied, she became a terrorist in the eyes of the Liberty and Justice For All Crew.

The judge denied her lawyer’s request to release her on her own recognizance and set bail at One Hundred Thousand dollars. Really and Truly.

I don’t recognize this country any more, and I damn sure am done pledging my allegiance to it, or to any corporation including the one that claims to be in charge of caring for my health. These things they say routinely are all lies, and they keep coming even though everybody knows that by now.

I might not have gotten so depressed over this kind of bad news, this time, except for the days being so gray, and except for the fact that the people in the family adjacent to mine don’t think anything is wrong, either with any of what I just detailed, or with the philosophical slavery they were sold into back these forty-some years gone by.

(and why lord oh why do i still care what they think i am such a fuckin’ dumbass)

All together at once, it was just too much for me.

The nose of my plane dipped sharply and for some long moments I was seriously in danger of crashing, of Losing It. Hitting the unforgiving ground a Loser.

It’s not over, either. The dishes are still piled, and I’m still wearing the filth and the fear that coated me in the midst of all that.

Walking in the sunshine even though I didn’t want to just leveled out my descent path somewhat.

Little Piece #2 is this.

I’m not going to go into it too deeply.

I’ll just tell you that the cardboard sign you probably can’t read just says one word:

“Free”.

And that to advantage myself, theoretically, by acquiring that questionable piece of freedom, I would need, at the least, a proper circular saw.

Which of course is not free, but between 50 and 100 somewhere, per Harbor Freight.

It might be worth it anyway. Maybe.

If the shell is still there when the sun returns.