what i do

i had a dream where i went to a large bookstore in portland and i looked for all credible sources who wrote on the subject of love and the meaning of life.  i was looking for a purpose.  i got lost in the stacks.  i was so far gone that my hair grew long and my teeth began to rot.  when i emerged the year was 2020.

there will be a train that runs through my town.  my town will be the accident of some years of quick passion between commerce and a river.  then we many offspring will litter the streets looking for things to do, writing graffiti on the walls of railway underpasses, looking for our fathers. 

i am surrounded by mountains, three primarily--mauna kea, mauna loa and hualalai--and two that float in the distance like prettier sirens i'd like to know.  perhaps i'm bashing my head against a rock just to see which is stronger.  lava rock is porous and jagged just as it is smooth.  life grows here as life is resilient, much more resilient than my throbbing head.  i'm not trying to get ahead, i just don't want to be left behind.  it's as simple as that. 

i'm the keeper of little, green leafy things with highfalutin names and the killer of little, green leafy things with common names simplified on their boat ride over.  we need not know the genealogy of the russian thistle or the bull thistle or the fireweed or the fountain grass.  we need only know that we don't want them and thus we must kill them.  they are, after all, seedy characters.  no, i'm here to encourage the growth and expansion of the "native" species.  the solum incompetum, tetramalopium arenarium, silene lanceolata, kadua corciacea.  what regal names.  everything you might want to know about who they are is right on their little tag.  such a generous life for the chosen ones. 

i work in a unique environment.  high altitude.  jogging five minutes in the fine dust filled air will mostly likely give you tuberculous.  don't say you heard it from me.  and there are bombs out there.  old, cranky things, but still with the power to explode if provoked.  i stay away from brown, rusted things or unnaturally shiny things.  i stick to the fleshy, relatively benevolent little martians of mother nature.

unlike the bombs which can stay active for years on end, nature goes in cycles.  weeds gather up muster, spread themselves as best they can like too little peanut butter on too big a piece of bread and then they die.  it's my job to kill them before they mature.  if you want to be dramatic about it then i'm what you might consider a baby killer.  but please remember those finely named princes and princesses who i protect and pamper like my own newborns.  i am not without redemption. 

i hope i'm getting my point across and it is clear what i do.  thirty pounds of liquid herbicide adorns my back every day.  i traverse through the mountains like a spider makes track lines across distant branches.  in the end i have a poisoned field of dying russian thistle, bull thistle, fountain grass, fireweed.   in the end the spider has it's web.  its not really the same thing at all. 

the terrain is difficult, very difficult.  the lava rock is shifty and uncertain of itself, constantly rolling under your too tired ankles and it's sharp points finding the soft, fleshy muscle at the base of your toes and like a apathetic soldier to simulation, it aims its bayonet sharpness and thrusts into you.  dead trees and sticks make final pleas to cling to something living often piercing skin in the process and causing angry retaliation with spine snapping deconstructions and shoulder popping pitches of the offensive woody being further into the wasteland of what is widely known and accepted as the "impact area"

just to be clear, you haven't heard any of this from me.

my feet are a war zone.  but i keep my mind elevated.  i look out to the horizon and imagine trains in a town i don't yet know.  i imagine small coffee shops and long trails lined with deciduous trees.  i imagine bookstores and libraries so large that i could lose myself.  i dream these places.  but i log down this place.  it's strange how we human creatures operate.  all day you gaze over imaginary fences hoping to get "there" and then once you're there part of you can't help missing the former "here".  and so i log down the time i spend carefully sunk down in the hollow of the Big Island's collar bone.  i make careful note of what i see.  i want to remember it all.