The Hardest Hue To Hold

Hot springs bubble and spit, retribution brought forth from the slate and shale below, opening valves to The Core. No, really, all you have to do is go rent a spade and be under 80, and you too can dig down and unearth the magma leftovers. "Naturally Heated" it's called, as if there's any other way. Cold and hot, shadow and solar, it's all swirling around you in a dense fog of Nature, connecting you to it until there is no more separation - til it runs together like water and ice.

Green trims everything here, you can't hide from it - not that you'd want to - and it's only a shade away from gold. In fact, the closer we get the more it washes away the rest, the more that it burns into the retina, blocking the sharp colors and blurring the outlines. Sunlight simply shifts the balance, not the color scheme. The grey only turns the light around, radiating now from some internal place, no longer thrown and reflecting from the Heavens.

You'll have to excuse me. I've been here two months and have walked in oceans that have lured me in to the agua azul, as they say.

I'd like to stay there awhile. At least until human voices wake me, and I drown.

A walk into this heavy chop will more than likely bottom you out and double you back, but not before you might actually feel something, might actually see instead of just watch. You can push it to the maximum in whatever way you choose, but this plan forces it upon you. Tumbling in over your head, surf pounding away - temperature becomes relative and the Thoughts recede.

Sometimes the moods are just too much though, not enough sand in the world to absorb it all, you've got to send the rest back to the sea. The mood is human, it only gets in the way of what this is really about. Gold filtering through the horizon like a blanket - flecks of it looking like rain, like you might wear it if not for the wind. My humanity makes me reconsider all this, the senses lighting up to and fro, but still passing through the old Grey Block, and for that I'm sorry. The stories aren't any kind of respite, any kind of substitute. You'd be better off experimenting with drugs. In the absence of shadow, you might as well seek the dark.

Reflections all around, sun bouncing off the sea, ricocheting off the sky vapor, through the lens, upside down, played back like an instant film, reversed and thrown into the brain cavity, then reflected back through these fingers and past the last outpost, into the digital realm to be forever floating, never tied down. Sometimes it's like a pinball, so fast you can barely see it, all bells and buzzers going akimbo with bonuses, no rationality to it. It's when that path narrows out, when the stimulant straightens and quits bouncing off the goddamned obstacles, when it's straight from the money to the money, no man in the middle - that's the magic time. When the experience stands on its own merit, no interpretation, no bonuses, no humanity.

The earth can open up and offer a volley of ash and violence that could tear it apart at any time. That's why we have to hold that hue.

The gold that rains, it will rain forever, and the reflections will never slow down. Nothing in the way, nothing to stop them, no filters.

Even as the clouds fade to grey, people 500 miles west of here are watching the show, in awe, isolated in their own wicked human space.

It will happen again for me tomorrow. I can wait.