Day 275

retail stores and cashiers and shoppers struck me in a new light today. it was a reawakening to consumerism- the cheap jewelry browsers and fitting room attendants fell under the shades of the stratifications of corporate america. i put on a new pair of shoes in t.j. maxx and felt strange, as if for the first time in my life i realized that i didn't and wouldn't buy something that had white and clean appeal. it didn't matter to me anymore.

everything else- the images on stacks of magazines in borders and the car and driver and darting pedestrians in yellow crosswalks- were reminders of when this kind of life was important to me, or at least of the similar lifestyle where i thought i could find some sort of pseudo comfort and renewal in these places. and the same layouts of the same businesses back home home and routinized lives of these people in montana transfered into my own self awareness of a sluggish, ghost-like aura that i began to notice in each step, allowing some surreal outer perspective of my movements into these stores and around isles- like i could see my last fading traces following in the lightest and least discernible layers of a foggy. i was uneasy about it all again.

the idea of fish tacos had never appealed to me, but melody's recommendation of a fish burrito made a good and pleasing lunch. later, for dinner, the four of us would find ourselves in taco bell. memories of summer nights seemed to look up from different plastic benches and seats of the cookie cutter restaurant layout.

i'd bought sweet tea, both an arizona can and a gold peak bottle, this afternoon and decided that the taste of both were as relevant awarenesses to me as any certain songs might have in regards to memories of specific past. but i had no fishing pole today. no jeep. i'm with foreign friends, answering their questions about this shopping center in kalispell, montana, of where i've never really been but who's commercialism i have undoubtedly never not seen before.

i bought a couple books from a used bookstore that boasted a collection of over fifty thousand. shelves and piles of dust and brown pages polluted the narrow floor spaces of this second-life forest. i wondered if you'd have to be half crazy to work in an unorganized and untidy ocean such as this but after the older man behind the counter had cheerfully wheezed that he'd accept five dollars for both a tom wolfe and jon krakauer's 'into the wild' books, i left happy and proud of him who understood and managed such a drafty, spine-bowled literature treasury.

now tonight we're chilling with our friends here and listening to music and making sushi. the deer on the wall are still omnipresent-gazed and i'm thankful to feel alive in this life that has suddenly revealed itself today as uniquely 'set apart' and, almost now, maybe nearly completely free.