It took someone seven months to write...this?

So, it turns out volcano climbing isn't something you just do.  Hey, y'all, let's go scale that steep 6,000 meter loose-rock-and-ice-covered behemoth this weekend, how's that sound?

Nah. C'mon now.

I get all these lil jellyroll-gobblers waddling up to me, having heard I've spent several of the last few weekends attempting to summit Arequipa's looming shade-purveyors, showering me with crumbs while proclaiming, "Oh, I can't wait to climb Chachani or Misti or whatever other earth-bumps the Andes have to offer."  As we part I enjoy them resuming their struggle, which is to say moving; and best when they're going to attempt a flight of stairs, because the ratio of stairs-taken to desperate-rail-grasps-while-collapsing-to-knees-and-wailing tends to hover in the vicinity of 2:1.

...

Or so began a post I started writing back in June 2012.  But, as usual, something distracted me for the next six or seven months, and now I'm left with an introduction to a story -- a great story, truth be told -- that I no longer wish to develop, if only because I've rehashed it repeatedly, orally, with all my co-sufferers and our friends and, occasionally, some inebriated coed in some dingy bar because exoticism is that seductive hook that'll convince her to ignore all the misgivings her friends wish and pray and text that she'd heed.  In the interest of that sexy mood I'll conveniently leave out the portions involving vomiting and shitting behind boulders and burying soiled paper in the snow inside of a majestic, ice-enveloped volcanic crater, relics for future civilizations to uncover once all Perú's mummified ancients have been unearthed.

Ah, 2012.  The (first) year I got paid to work abroad, part of a group that quickly grew into one of my most cherished collectives of friends; individually, without exception, people whose presence and friendship can't be ascribed a finite worth.  Reflecting on that period of my life, those trying and rewarding and exhausting and invigorating and busy and beautiful six months in Perú, glazes my face with a euphoric daydreaminess that probably makes mothers hug their children closer and bemoan in whisper pressed to a loved one's cheek our decaying society, bolting their doors and medicine cabinets behind them.

And 2012 was the year I stumbled into monogamy, holding down a wonderful relationship with a truly peerless woman, a relationship that revealed a sweet character I'd kept suppressed through a half-decade-plus of practiced commitment avoidance and emotional self-nuetering, a relationship that survived for some indeterminable but lengthy-ish period before it disintegrated on the strength of me being me: careless; clumsy; destructive; stubborn; unsympathetic.  It turns out family are the only ones who have to tolerate you being a dick, and that's only because they figure they're stuck with you forever anyway.


“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.” - Edgar Allan Poe*

I wish my cell phone and computer had text-and-email disabling breathalyzers attached.  And that someone would invent a device that could similarly detect emotional instability.  I'd have been saved that Oh. Fuck. Ing. Shit. moment when I clicked into my Sent Mail folder looking for an unrelated message and noticed a two-week-long binge of unidirectional harassment that made me realize that she, my ex, had saved my reputation and employability by never requesting a restraining order.  Shit's silly, y'all.   However, chaos has reaffirmed there's a fine distinction between regrettable and regret.  My past months are littered with divisive moments that can be characterized as nothing if not regrettable (and, mercifully, interspersed with even more moments of epiphany and triumph and success).  But these moments are enlightening, instructive in ways that theory and conceptualization, for the less clever of us, never can be.  Simple speculation can't impact the simple mind with the deftness of the brutal explosion, something that leaves wounds leaking and shrapnel embedded. This essential learning, no matter how violently uncomfortable it is to acquire, is impossible to regret. This is progress, these painful lurches forward.  I wish I didn't leave so many casualties in my wake. I think I just wrote my first emo song.

It would've been helpful to begin dating before the age of 28, to learn a few lessons about relationships and selflessness and, as an added bonus, to avoid a few of those STD scares. That I'm 29 and miraculously clean says nothing about me exercising discretion in selecting partners.  But it probably confirms I have at least one super-power, which is damn cool.  Only I'm unconvinced that boasting of my absolute imperviousness to other people's genital armageddon is going to coax any intelligent, worthwhile women back to my floorbound-mattress.  But there is the dual-headed shower working in my favor...



*Thanks to mi amorcita Hallie for publicizing on facebook this decidedly apropos Poe quote.