how uniform your beautiful is I went for a walk the other night, on Sunday night. Admittedly, I should have been studying, but instead I threw my jacket over my warmer-then-conventional-clothing-but-lacking-complete-taste pajamas, and bundled up to go outside. I even wore winter boots. Nothing makes me feel more Canadian then the ritual entailed in dressing up to go outside, other then the prospect of cardiovascular activity caused by sloughing through knee deep snow to get anywhere.

In anycase, it was right at the tail end of the big dump we started getting the night before, and by that time, it was about four and a half inches to five inches deep and still falling. My house is uniquely situated at the top of the edge of the river valley, overlooking the low-lying areas of edmonton and the downtown area, so the most logical and nicest place to go for a walk is along the edge, which is always across a street lined with huge houses, and provisioned with more benches dedicated to dead people then you can shake a stick at.

I really sort of savor the first winter walk of the season. The air was crisp, and the snow was pristine and untouched in the parks for the most-part. I'd love to say completely, but alas, there are still a few kids that realize the value of the outdoors, as is evident by the sled trails still remaining in the park that I walked to across the circle. I love the sound of boots smushing through snow. I love being surrounded by smooth white oblivion (in the coolie of the park) that sparkles under the streetlights. But I'm getting all scattered here.

I walked slow and wonderfully, watching the snow spill and avalanche in front of my boots. I cut across the coolie, I listened to Matt Good. I ended up suprising myself though with my apparent lack of knowlege in the area, because I found the most breathtaking place to sit. And by breathtaking, I mean the scenery.

Below me spread (as previously understated) the river valley and the downtown core. I could see all the way east as far as the second green bridge (past our green bridge), and I'd never noticed how you could see the river hook around like that until then. A fair amount of apartment buildings had put up christmas lights over the weekend, which added to the houses already lit in the river valley residential area (the swanky end- the idiots who built on a floodplain that was seventeen feet underwater in the big flood) by their own festive cheer and streetlights. On top of these lights, in traffic as well as sporadically lit office building floors, was the hazy film of falling snow that spread it all into a (albeit unhealthy) glow over the city.

When I look at a scene like this, it's hard to say why I enjoy it so much. Perhaps it is the feeling of standing still when everything else is moving below you. Or it's the aneurism you can provoke when you think of all the complexities of the hundreds of lives being lived out in front of you, which in turn joins up with the thought of, "pitiful and insignificant" in the grand scheme of the world. But it's not something that makes me feel bad, it just sort of puts me in awe all over again, which seems sometimes impossible when you turn into a agnostic cynic.

I ended up sitting in the snow and thinking for quite a while as I enjoyed it all. I had originally come out for the walk to see if I could clear my head a bit. I've had minimal success with sleeping a whole night through lately, or getting to bed on time, or falling asleep. My mind feels like it's going a million miles a minute, and it's not even because I'm validly stressed. It's fucking pathetic though because I still don't ever feel like I have something valid coming out of my mouth. A cohesive thought? A well formed opinion? Sometimes I wonder if I just have a string of fart jokes left to keep me going for the rest of my life in the "speaking" part of the brain. I wonder if I could criticize my own ability to speak so much that I cancel myself into muteness. It is incredibly appealing to just be able to walk around with a whiteboard on a string with a blue marker for communication sometimes. I keep trying to pinpoint why I've become so incredibly unable to be more than a white noise person when I talk to my friends, but I'm wondering if it's like a disease or something- once you catch it, you can't escape it, and it's like your voice becomes trapped in your body and it has no way out. What if it just leaks out the back of your brain, in the memory that you (I? I seem to lose a lot of memory. I need RAM) lose each day? What if I forget that I was once able to be clever and verbose and witty in a conversation, full of knowlege and profound things to say?

This is a message to myself: I am clever, verbose and witty, full of knowlege, and profound things to say. Don't forget!

A lot of other things have been racing through my mind as well. Surprisingly enough, most of these involve my new year's resolutions. I know it's early, but I've been thinking of two things specifically that need to be done on the behalf of my heart. I'd just like to start over in January with a clean slate in that regard. I can't say that I've ever had a lack of complexity in my life involving relationships or love or whatever people pretend draws them together, and I'm so fucking tired of it. It's like an overeater- doesn't just take small portions of food for each meal, but instead dumps huge piles of steaming crap onto a plate in one go. It's not that I don't want to be in love, it's that I do. But I can't do that until I figure out a way to keep myself from doing such stupid things with my own foolish organ. I'm glad I learn from my mistakes (well, I do, but sometimes they have repeats) but goddamn, I have to stop making them.
  ¶ 6:37 PM