Went for a long walk yesterday. My shyness and anxiety seems to be fading away, and I was reminded of all the long walks I used to take when I lived in LA. I don’t remember anything stopping me from doing so back then, so I wonder what changed. I guess I had more places to go to then. And more people to see.

Now I’m focused on the flowers. Sometimes they make better company anyway.

I went for a walk yesterday and found out Lake County will hold their annual fair this summer. A few days ago, Lake County reported its first death due to the coronavirus. He was a man in his 70s. Yesterday, Montana recorded over 200 new cases, a majority coming from young people. Last week, Dr. Fauci said that young people are propagating the pandemic because they don’t care if they get infected. “[I]t doesn’t end with you,” he said. “You get infected and have no symptoms. The chances are you’re going to infect someone else, who will then infect someone else."

School starts in a few weeks, and the voices of parents who are worried for their children are getting drowned out by those that are against wearing masks and want things to return to normal, at whatever the cost. Death has come to Lake County, kids don’t care if they get infected, and the adults are propagating ignorance and selfishness. I enter commercial buildings with signs up stating that masks are mandatory, but I continue to see people not wearing them. I’m reminded of Jonathan Hickman’s amazing East of West series. On the cover of each issue is this quote:

This is the world. It is not the one we were supposed to have, but it’s the one we made. We did this. We did it with open eyes and willing hands. We broke it, and there is no putting it back together.

As long as we can have our fair then who cares about everything else, right?

I’ve been more tired this week than at any other time in recent memory, and I don’t know why. I’ve been battling ever increasing headaches and laziness at a time when I want to be doing more. But yesterday I slept for nine hours, and I spent the day feeling well-rested for the first time in a long time. I wrote a simple schedule in my notebook with the goal of getting eight hours of sleep a night, but I fear I’ll need more. I wish I had the chance to sleep when I felt tired and to wake up naturally, but I don’t, so a schedule is necessary.

My plan for the weekend is to rest and to look after my body.

Growing up, I never felt like I fit into any group. To paraphrase Miguel, I felt like I was too white for the Mexicans and not white enough for the white people. I felt like I always had to push myself to prove myself to either group, from how I behaved around them to what languages I spoke.

When I was around ten, one of my white friends asked a group of us over to his house. This friend had everything. His room was full of expensive lego models, books, and video game consoles. He had all the cool N64 games, and I was jealous because I didn’t. His fridge and pantry had all the expensive snacks that my mom would never buy because we couldn’t afford them. Outside, he had a big yard with a trampoline and a pool. I remember playing with them throughout the whole day and feeling both lucky and out of place. When it was time to go home, we went to find his mom at her office. She was a children’s book author, and she had a computer with dozens and dozens of reams of printer paper stacked up all over. My friend had told her that I spoke Spanish, and on the drive home she asked me many translation questions that I dutifully answered. How do you say this? How do you say that? I remember feeling so ashamed when I told where I lived because I lived in an apartment building where they lived in a beautiful big house. The next year, my friend moved away, and I never saw him again.

By the time I went to high school, my friends were mostly Mexican and other people of color. In classes, I sat next to them while the white people sat next to each other. I don’t think this was a conscious decision by any of us, but this pattern stayed consistent throughout my four years in school. But by this point in my life, I started to become my own person. Where my friends took Spanish class, I took French. Where my friends took regular college prep classes, I took AP courses. At home, my mom would speak to me in Spanish, but I would answer back in English. At school, my friends would speak to each other in Spanglish, and I would speak to them in English. There was one time when a friend asked me over to his house. Because I spoke English to him when he spoke to me in Spanish, his mom spoke to me in English and not in Spanish. She wasn’t fluent in it at all, but she tried anyway. When my friend told her that I knew Spanish, she gave me a look I’ve seen so many Mexican people give white people that I felt ashamed. I started to speak to her in Spanish, but it came out broken and slow because I had stopped speaking Spanish around the time I started hanging out with those white friends years before.

When I’m around white people, I feel like I blend in easily with them because of how I look, but there’s this gap in our experiences and upbringing that I know is there but they don’t. That chasm is huge here in Montana. I often feel out of place and disingenuous when around my friends and co-workers, but when I speak up about my culture and heritage, I feel this pushback from them that feels dangerously close to racism. When my co-worker started throwing out the n-word so nonchalantly the other day and asked me why black people can say it but white people can’t, all these feelings about race and my place in the world bubbled up again, and I’ve been battling with them ever since. I feel insecure when I speak up for people of color because of how I look but also confident because of my upbringing and experiences growing up Mexican and being Mexican.

A few years ago, I took one of those DNA tests to see what ethnicities I was composed of, and I remember feeling relieved when the results came back and said that I was 44% Mexican, 27% Portuguese, 12% Spanish, 5% Italian, and 12% a mixture of other ethnicities. These results affirmed my identity both to me and to the world. White people have a privilege that other people don’t, and before they acknowledge that, we’re always going to have a problem. For me at least, I know where I stand and now other people do, too.

I finished Ling Ma’s Severance yesterday, an entertaining plague novel that took me out of the plague novel we’re currently living in. What the novel got shamelessly and maddeningly right is our compulsion for normalcy at whatever the cost. We’re all guilty of this. I’m guilty of this. I continue to use the same route to drive to work, do the same job for eight hours, drive home on the same route, buy groceries at the same grocery store, workout my same workouts, make the same dinners, watch the same TV, talk to the same people, and sleep on the same bed. But we’re not living in normal times. If wearing a mask reduces the spread of the coronavirus by even a single percent, what’s the harm in wearing one? I don’t get it. Montana is the oldest state in the West. Shouldn’t we think of our elders before we think of ourselves?

Temperatures will reach the 90s this week, and I’ve been without an AC in my office for weeks. Fortunately, a few of my co-workers installed a new AC unit and a window in my office yesterday, and I couldn’t be more grateful. I’ve worked in this office for almost six years without a window so working with one now will be fun. I’ll now be able to tell what time of day it is without looking at my watch. That’s important for a guy whose job is to stare at screens all day.

I saw the president wear a face mask the other day, but I continue to hear people in my county protest them, their yells about rights and freedoms fueling our increased case counts. My county now has the second highest active coronavirus cases in the state, behind Yellowstone County, home to Billings, the biggest city in the state. We don’t have big cities in my county, so these high numbers are concerning. On Tuesday, the U.S. reported over 1,000 coronavirus deaths for the first time since May 29th, but nearly one in three of us don’t believe the virus’ death toll is as high as the official count. More countries are denying American’s entry into their countries, but that’s okay because instead of traveling, we’re spending our time online spewing more than three times as much hate speech since before George Floyd’s death in May. I continue to hear people proclaim that “All Lives Matter,” and someone in a position of power recently asked me why black people can call each other the n-word but white people can’t. If that’s not enough, a couple hundred acres started burning on the reservation on Monday night and more land should burn in the coming weeks and months.

The world is aflame with literal fires, a pandemic, and an infodemic, but all we seem to care about is ourselves, our rights to not wear masks, our right to infect everyone around us with our bullshit because we’re Americans. That’s the American way, a populace no one else in the world wants, a populace that is okay with unmarked vans kidnapping innocent citizens to who knows where because “All Lives Matter,” as long as that life is white. Science has never moved this fast to create a vaccine but that won’t matter because so many of us won’t even take it. How many will have to die before we realize how stupid we’ve been? I’m afraid the answer won’t matter because we won’t believe the literal death happening around us until it’s too late.

I poured wine into a wine glass last night, and I noticed how the light interacted with it, and I thought there was a grace to it, something worth remembering. As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed how easy it has been for me to disregard things I’ve seen or experienced before. A flower is a flower, a sunset a sunset. But ever since I started journaling here, I’ve begun to slow down and notice the things I’ve been taking for granted. With my camera, I’ve been able to see things anew. Bees are no longer just bees, flowers are no longer just flowers. With my notebook, I’ve been paying attention to my thoughts more. Emotions and random ideas are no longer fleeting but worthy of writing down and examining closely.

I don’t know where I’m going or what will come from this, but if I can remember to slow down and open my eyes, then things will turn out okay.

I walked to the park and took photographs of flowers and insects and birds. I walked along the creek and saw insects striding across the water. I saw a bird hunting for worms on the grass and snapped a photo of a worm dangling from its beak. I saw a honeybee burrow its body into a purple flower and come out with its face covered in pollen. I saw kids riding their bikes and swinging on swings. I saw a man sitting alone by a table, his gaze turned toward the trees and the quiet. As I kept walking, I wondered why I’ve never walked this way before. I kept discovering new things, new sights, new sounds, new experiences. Is this what the world is like? Vast and beautiful and endless?

The other day I asked a photographer how she has the confidence to carry a camera with her everywhere and photograph people. I will remember her answer for the rest of my life. “The important thing,” she says, “is not to let your shyness get in your way. The thing about photography is that it throws you into direct contact with life, and that can be scary at times, but if you want to do the photography you want to do, there is simply no way about it except to go out bravely and shoot.”

I picked up my guitar for the first time in a week and learned about time signatures and the F chord. I’m having trouble with this chord, but I know I’ll get better with practice. I know I won’t get anywhere if I’m afraid of failure. Is not all art a tribute to the artist’s battle with fear? A testament to their bravery?

I remember how much my fingers hurt when I first started playing my guitar. I also remember how badly my chords sounded. If I had stopped then, I never would’ve developed the callouses on my fingertips that made it easier to play, and I never would have experienced the joy of producing my own music. That, in itself, is an act of bravery I will always be grateful for.

One day in high school, a teacher of mine went around his class and asked my classmates what they would be if they weren’t human. “My dog,” someone said. “A camera,” said another. “A bird,” I said. He asked me why I wanted to be a bird, a tinge of disappointment in his voice. “Because I want to fly far away,” I said. That tinge of disappointment made me feel bad then, like I lacked the imagination those around me seemed to have. He didn’t press me any further, and I haven’t thought of that moment until now.

Last year I read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and in it she describes her journey toward slowing down and noticing the things around her. “When I travel,” she says,

I no longer feel like I’ve arrived until I have “met” the local bioregion by walking around, observing what grows there, and learning something about the indigenous history of that place (which, in all too many places, is the last record of people engaging in any meaningful way with the bioregion). Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs will never be “a bunch of green.” A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.

I took this picture of an osprey flying around her nest near my school, and I’ve felt this connection to her and to the wildlife around me that I’ve never truly experienced before. When I was a firefighter, I felt this connection to the land that I mostly kept in my periphery. Like so many things in my life, it has stayed there while I focus on the trivialities that make modern life so mundane. Most everything I’ve ever experienced has stayed in my periphery, and what I want to do is to slow down and notice the things around me.

I went on Wikipedia and learned that ospreys are piscivores. Her nest is between the Ninepipes reservoir to the east and the Flathead River to the west, so she has food aplenty. I saw her chicks flying around the nest for a bit and then flying back, her gaze motherly and loving. I heard her sing as she flew around. She is no longer just “a bird” to me, but a mighty osprey.

What else is out there that I haven’t seen or paid attention to? How many different species of birds are within my radius? Of insects? Of living souls in general? We share this world with so many living beings, but how many of us ever truly connect with them?