i took the 755AM greyhound to Springfield and my gf swooped me up. we drove past Cosby show-esque brownstones, rougher hewn brick homes and abandoned businesses and we each remarked that the other’s hometown looked depressed and a little scary.
Worcester is gentrifying to me. we both missed days gone by and headed to Northampton to spend the day. took a little ‘magic honey’ that wasn’t enough to hallucinate but enough to be giggly ordering food.
in the 10 yrs or so since we met, i traveled north america and got hepatitus, she graduated Mt Holyoke. i mostly write when stuff is bad between us but most of the time it’s rad. the time’s it’s not, a lot of that is internet miscommunication. modern time is a blessing and a curse like anything.
bussed home at night and the Berkshire mountains in the distance might as well be the Rockies. or my favorites, those large yellow hills w/ random thick trees but never a forest that abound in NorCal. although the first dozen or so times i rode greyhound through there i thought it was Oregon.
regardless of the arbitrary manmade distinction, as a 22 yr old, horny for life, i’d been enamored w/ those hills and the sparse but frequent trees.
like Chris McCandless before me [though i was ignorant of him at the time] i thought i could live under those trees on way too steep to climb unless you’re a mountain goat hills. i had no survival skills but i beleived in my innate ability that ‘society has driven out of us’. i thought it would come back to me, instinct and the knowledge we’ve been divorced from.
prolly a stupid fucking idea.
but leaving my gf in western Mass and seeing the mountains dark against a darker sky before the lights that mean food [and used to mean cigarette breaks] ahead brought me back. maybe to naivete or maybe just bravery that’s been lacking in my wintry existence.
Costa Rica in 4 days.
i know i can find food there, living off the land wouldn’t be the concern. integrating into the people is.
private street dangerous 