I'm (Sleep) Walking Here!

It's one of my favourite moments in cinema, Dustin Hoffman's wiry little Ratso Rizzo slamming the hood of an oncoming car and giving a car driver what for for almost knocking him down as he crosses the road at a busy New York crosswalk. I like it so much that I almost considered Rizzo's retort as the title for this book. After all, I am walking here, and I do not prioritize pollutants over natural aboriginal self-cleansing technology. At any rate, I actually used the phrase today, not at some errant cab driver in the busy city, but at two middle-aged mountain bikers in the empty hills who were piling down a narrow path that I was walking in the Kilpatrick Hills. I heard them behind me and turned around to acknowledge them but did not give way to them. This didn't stop both of them piling down the steep and dangerous rocky slip that I was currently negotiating. As I dodged to one side almost straight into a gorse bush, I shouted Rizzo's refrain. I also added that they, along with their mountain biking brethren who enjoy tearing up hills with their overpriced tricycles and flashy clownsuits, should show some respect not just to walkers but to the hills themselves. They both looked perplexed as if I had just spoken to them in Greek. 'But we're allowed to cycle here', the fat bearded one replied. And that meant they got the standard riposte: 'Just because some moron says you can rape the Earth with impunity doesn't mean you should'. Before shooing them away like the sleepwalking (sleepcycling) violators that they are.

 

 

 

A Bottle Of Vodka A Day

Every morning, well, let's say every other morning in winter and more or less every morning for the rest of the year, I drink a bottle of vodka (500ml). This isn't any ordinary vodka but perhaps the finest vodka the Earth has to offer (and that's saying something coming from someone who spent three years in Poland, a year in Kazakhstan, and six months in Belarus). This vodka compared to the industrial and even home-brewed kind is 100% natural with no artificial ingredients. It is also distilled through volcanic rock and the Earth herself to give this vodka a purity of punch that no other vodka can match. This Earth vodka, compared to the supermarket kind which gets you 'pissed', will emphatically get you 'unpissed' as in awake. Of course my vodka is, as the name (voda being Polish for water, and the suffix -ka expressing a diminutive) suggests, the 'little water' that tumbles down from the braes and from the heavens. I collect it at various falls, burns and pools, along my routes through the hills - always know your pure watering holes especially in drookit climates - and fill my bottle with it. To be sure, on occasion it has a slightly greenish tint to it as in today but this only means goodness and the fact that it has been distilled multiple times through the ancient bedrock of this fine land. What with this 'elixir', the purity of the air, and the primal space, solitude, and silence, these braes and hills have to offer, you come down from the hills not just Awake (with a capital A) but Alive too. And it's all due to (going and gathering) a bottle of vodka a day, (or every other day in winter).

 

 

 

Another World

It's on days like today that you see almost too clearly the two worlds that exist on this planet. Why a day like today you may ask. Because it was freezing overnight and now the sun has come out creating what meteorologists and amateur sky watchers call an 'inversion'. This inversion just like the blockbuster cinematic one we had earlier this year is fascinating, except this one is completely natural and did not cost upwards of $200m. Moreover, this one can only be seen when you're outdoors (as Nature intended) and not sealed up in some darkened auditorium breathing in other people's body odour. And this inversion is free too. These are in fact the two worlds: the world beneath the cloud which is dark, artificial, pretend, filthy, and costly; and the world above the cloud which is light, airy, spacious, pure, and free. The inversion down there in the man-world is really a per-version, having forced Nature through the meat-grinder of capitalism and progressive ideologies And up here, it is the real version, the only version... the onely version... the uni-version...