Summer 2015 Beginnings

Apparently I have stopped using this blog to post things, ever. But having a space dedicated to the visual and refined regurgitation of raw life ore is actually pretty important to me... and having a space to more freely do this where I might reference it as record and use it to keep the time, which slips away ever so consistently, is of concrete value.

Last summer I was in the back-country. The summer before that I worked quite a lot on game development. This summer I am going to Europe in September, but for now... I'm working on game development. It is a long path and one that somehow actually works in tandem with how I've learned to live as best I can-- it is like a mirror opposite that makes an unlikely compliment to life on a thru-hike.

There is an orange-muddy sense of landscape, riven with rich alternations of hue-- the true colors of life defying the platonic word 'hue' in their material abundance and interrelations. I have an incredibly deep nostalgia now for proximity to this abundance of material-- the soils of the world, dappled and flattened as they are by crests of stone (fuck that simplicity though, it's each step of civilization's wave of noise from traffic bouncing off the ripples on an alpine lake infected with blue green algae spurting over the sill of a cage of granite holding soft sedimentary sleeping layers drifting into one another, mucked up by my feet, no nature nor pure humanity anywhere to be seen), valleys of dark blue and green laced through by tiny and rushing silty cold waters, and the feeling of sleeping outside, huge dusted golden moon traversing the sky, spilling chalky light onto stray virga and countless other kinds of transient clouds you don't see so much as feel because you're dead asleep, dirt in all the spare cracks of your feet, different outside hands and courses of sweat run through your hair again and again as you drink the best drink that has ever existed-- brisk snow-melt on a hot day full of walking.

Still, there is a way to appreciate this substance from a distance-- through contemplation. Learning to paint textures for game environments is a thing I've often wished to do, and doing it by doing it for a real project with real pressures is a challenging and satisfying thing to undertake. More on that later.

Last weekend I went across the sound with Eric and Ben to Olympic National Park, a place I've really not spent that much time in, other than a weekend trip up the Hoh River Valley with Eric many years ago, to the base of Mt. Olympus. The High Divide trail tantalized us with views of the peak and interior places of the range.