old walks for a new year

dilly dallying

I have some sick and juicy posts lined up for you all in this new year. But they are not ready… But one central theme of 2025 for me is going to be WALKING. So in that spirit here is an account of…

2 Walks from December 2023.

Last weekend, I wanted to take a walk while thinking important thoughts about walking, and poetry, and the Putah Creek watershed. Then my boyfriend showed up at my house and asked to join me on my walk, and I said “Yeah.” At first I was excited for our walk. But then, I saw a sign that said “No Dogs” at the Putah Creek South Fork Riparian Reserve! I had brought my dog, Peppa Pleek, along for our excursion–not expecting that I would be experiencing speciesist harassment at the hands of the Nature Police.

So, I had to go to Grasslands Regional Park—which I hadn’t been to since August, when I was viciously attacked by hordes of mosquitoes, narrowly avoiding West Nile, which is on the ups in Yolo County. There, the scratchy grass was all dead and gray. The wind was bitter and the sheep that used to graze along were nowhere to be seen. “This sucks,” I thought. So I went to the closed-off section of the park, enclosed in chain-link for dogs to run around off-leash–only to find that the city had halved the space afforded to dog freedom by adding an additional fenceline that bisected the area of the dog-park. Despicable! Still, I did a lap.

The whole time there was this awkward atmosphere between me and my bf and we were both very quiet. I felt like he had some kind of expectation of me, or the walk—or maybe I had some expectation of him having some expectation of me, and was viewing the walk through his eyes, and projecting my own perceived shortcomings onto the situation. Regardless, it felt like this Atmosphere of Entanglement was ruining my ability to Walk Artfully in my Emotional Landscape. Eventually my boyfriend sat on a bench near the entrance and started looking at his phone. But I wasn’t ready to go. “I’m taking another lap,” I demurred.

On my solitary stroll of reverie, I located and beheld a single tangerine colored California poppy that was against all odds still in bloom on the other side of the fence. I stared at its flame for about twenty seconds until I felt I had satisfied my transcendentalist duty of witnessing Nature and then I kept walking. I felt bad that my boyfriend was just sitting there surrounded by dead grass. I finished the lap and said, “Let’s just leave.”

But I still wanted to try to clear my head through Walking so I made another stop about five minutes later at the levee trail that was en route back into town. Perhaps my lingering ennui could go away if I just got the place right! But the vibe was still off. It got to the point where he kept asking me if something was wrong. I broodily said, “Nothing. I’m just trying to think about walking.” I felt such frustration and alienation. He didn’t understand my Art of Walking—but deep down I knew it wasn’t his fault, it was actually the fault of Society.

Yes, ensnared tightly in the Arms of Society I couldn’t focus on the wonder of the sky, the distant mountains, the dormant trees, the scowling wind, the crunch of gravel underfoot. Or, I guess I could… but it was really hard for some reason, maybe because of my internalized anthropocentrism. The mountains in the distance were obscured by fog. A window in the white now and again would offer a glimpse of Mount Diablo splitting the clouds with its hulking back. It could have been beautiful, but it felt like I was just watching it, and not really seeing it. Does that even make sense? Everything felt behind a pane of cheap scratchy plastic like when you’re trying to decide what vape flavor to buy at the gas station.

Eventually, I resigned to my grief. I felt like the Hunger Artist in that Kafka story. Maybe I was just hangry? I let the sorrow seep into my skin, and the world softened around the edges of my eyes. My vision blurred, and everything transformed into a familiar Kansas landscape—brown, yellow, dead and gray, a dead orchard, a plowed field, a fallow. Something bubbled inside my intestines, and I missed home, and I missed my friends.

–

HEX 64 (Wei Chi, The End in Sight) (Fire over Water, Eye over Ear) →

(Changing Line 6) → In the sixth line, magnetic, we see a feudal prince with his bow shooting at a falcon on the top of a high wall, and hitting it. The effect of this action will be in every way advantageous.

HEX 40 (Hseih, Liberation—Deliverance) (Thunder over Water, Foot over Ear)

–

Thoreau explains the etymology of the word saunter in his essay Walking: the word has its origin in the ancient rite of Pilgrimage, where seekers of spiritual truth would pass by villages heading for what they called ‘sainte-terre,’ the holy land. Though Thoreau also gives an equally compelling alternative origin: perhaps it came from the pilgrims referring to themselves as ‘san-terre,’ or without land—since pilgrims were errant by nature of their practice. So a saunterer is simultaneously a holy-lander and a no-lander; one who brings home everywhere they walk. This dual meaning, with both options seemingly at odds with the other, reminds me of the etymology of Utopia—simultaneously the perfect place, and a ‘no place.’

There’s this problem with American transcendentalism though. In purely psychological and spiritual terms, of course I wish to be at peace in my environment like that. But looking at it through the lens of materialism, it has settler colonial vibes if you’re physically bringing some of your home wherever you go to set down ‘roots.’ I’m not really an errant person if I’m U-hauling all my shit across the country with me. At best I’m just a rent person because at least I can’t afford to buy land out here, or anywhere for that matter. But at least I can still walk around.

Eduoard Glissant’s notion of errantry might offer a slant way of looking at things here– he defines errantry as “chosen rather than enforced, a privilege rather than exile [...] it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment [but] [...] produced through an engagement with the other on unmeasurable terms” (18). This form of movement—or, rather, framing of movement— “troubles the expected.” It embraces relation as such instead of using movement as a means of further stratifying space and excluding others in their wake. How could I embody this form of errantry while walking around?

/

/

/

Chevisaunce, chevisaunce, chevisaunce, seance, seance, sconce and scone with anchovy sauce? More Gawain, less Yvain? My Green Chapel? Gawain in a Chevrolet? Where is my mound, stones, stream, cave, entry into Otherworld, Hellmouth, Tomb, Void, Camelot? Came a lot, went a lot? How does this relate to my Girdle (feminine object)? Have I no faith in heaven nor girdle? Have I faith in nothing but the Wall King and the feminine knot?

Chivalry in the foot, by the levee, Forth marching—

foot lock a, the knight marching. Questing through the onward,

the blockchain questing to the kingdom of In

knock knock lord whether, Time’s to Wield Excalibur

walk courtly, unlock secrets, the Legendary Tale of Arthur

Aventurus! Feeling advantageous after these games we play,

decadent gravy in the scales of history. Rash boon, rash

boon! Another game, another game! Risk is a marvelous

thing, outlandish and ambiguous. Sasha Fierce—Shantay You Stay,

Sasha Grendel—Sashay Away.

That’s the Wheel of Fortune. I’m gonna hurl—indistinguishably—from all the floating ganglia.

Where are the wildmen, where are the wolf fights? I am reduced to misery in my Castle of Paper, to the lesser pleasure of accuracy. When did the time start to slip? Where is my circle girdle fractal? Where is my fairytale thread? Where are the lusty fellows who rip continuity?

Undo your door outside, undo your door! Enter the errant tree. What is an errant tree? An inert Ent. Errancy of language, describe difference everywhere–inscribe it the same too. The land is a tablet and a profane double. Roastbeef comic sex object. Chivalry is Necropastoral.

Love conquers all it’s wretched.

/

/

/

I needed more alone time so I could lament the fact that I was alone, and walk around. I only wanted to walk around, read and write, pray/ruminate, and play games. I had no libido for sex or work or Adderall or food or communion. I was like one of those New Yorkers that existed solely on spite, going, “Ayy I’m walkin ‘ere” to anyone who passes by.

So I kept walking, past stables, into pastures and alongside pens of livestock—llamas, cows, goats, sheep. Then I sauntered across the freeway, into a grassland speckled with seemingly abandoned industrial-looking buildings. It looked like Kansas again, or at least some abandoned Superfund site. Signage indicated that some facilities may be used by the UC Davis Ecology Dept. Those guys are crazy, so I figured it would be OK if I sparked it.

My joint looked like Katy Perry may have rolled it—it was in cherry-print, cherry-flavored “Juicy” brand rolling papers that I got for free at my old headshop job. It was slender. I smoked it and looked at the migrating birds. There were hundreds, thousands in murmuration—glimmering black, weaving in and out of one anothers’ flight paths. They were one amorphous solid, like gaseous molecules. Horripilation indeed I say…

I hadn’t been smoking actual weed for a couple years because it would give me anxiety, but now I truly felt good, good, good. All good. Connected to myself, and my past, and my surroundings. Every tree was like a sculpture. Everything was new and exciting and full of wonder. Recrudescence not repetition of the steps in the grasses, no wiser configuration of argument, internal walking, recursive refusal to walk or crawl back inside myself, echolalia of the step into the foot up the ankle, the turn of the calf and the twist of the thigh, the popping of the joints as my hips are disciplined back into place, I feel my pelvis like a stapler, like a rubber band frozen. Moving the first foot forward is as important as the second foot following or maybe the shoe is incommensurable. The shoe is the glossolalia.

Yet I still had the tip of my joint, a filter I had used a Hellofresh junk mail ad to make. I had to hold onto it until I found a receptacle. Why aren’t there trash cans out here, I wondered. Well, I was in the middle of nowhere. If there were trash cans, whose job would it be to come way out here to collect them? I wouldn’t mind a job like that but if that was the case why wasn’t I already doing that. But someone needed to do something about this predicament I was in, since many others must have been in my shoes not long ago—like, look at all this litter! Behold it!!!

Suddenly I sensed a presence behind me. A young man with curly hair jogged by in an earth-tone Patagonia fleece and black runner’s tights. He was kind of sexy so I felt doleful apprehended in the presence of his gaze. Could he smell that I was blazed? Was he into that? Who cares. He was long gone anyway, in his hurried gait… us walkers tend to get left behind like that. But no worries. I grabbed a nearby empty Dasani bottle. I dropped the roach in it and sealed it. It was easier to carry the bottle than just the roach, plus it contained the musky smoke smell emanating from the nub.

Then, I began to feel implicated in a runaway decision-making calculus wherein if I saw litter, I was obligated to pick it up. So I picked up a McDonalds cup to put the bottle in. Then, I saw a Trader Joe paper bag. I grabbed it and put the McDonalds cup with the bottle with the roach in it. Then, I started picking up other litter and tossing it in there. That’s why I can’t smoke weed—I’ll end up picking up litter! But it felt like my life purpose. One of the truly most meaningful things I had done in as long as I could remember.

My paradigm was not a moral one. I felt no superiority or malice toward the litterbugs. There was no spite. In fact, I was rather certain that I wasn’t really “helping” the environment anyway—most of it would end up in a landfill anyway after I dumped it in the receptacle. At best maybe it would get recycled, crushed into blocks and shipped off to East Asia somewhere with the facilities to actually turn recycled material back into something valuable so it can re-enter the commodity realm as a novelty recycled wallet or Hot Wheels car or something.

What I was doing was sorting, not cleaning. I was undertaking a beautiful action, not an ethical one. I wanted the street to be more beautiful, and the space, in my taste, had a more pleasant atmosphere without the litter, except specific centerpieces I deigned to keep. It was also reverse causal for me—by picking up the litter, I was making the trash beautiful again, too. Each piece of litter had its own unique texture, color, and shape to admire.

There was a dinked-up silvery metal rod. A gauzy foam rod that I could not identify a use for—perhaps to keep the inside of a tube dry, or an paintbrush crafted for an oddly specific surface? I collected a couple orange-ish plastic tie ribbons that once held together Glad trash bags. A wet cardboard pizza box. A 8” by 4” by 1” piece of brilliant white styrofoam. An emptied Vita-Coco coconut water carton. A thick black plastic hunk in the shape of a tray that looked like it fell off of a car. A crushed In-N-Out cup, strawless. Seven blue nitrile gloves in various states of decomposition—some crisp, crumbly and pastel periwinkle, some still elastic and royal blue. Was this the work of “scientists?” Did environmental scientists or biologists or whoever not realize the whole point of science was to improve the Earth??? I was aghast and reproachful. Higher education and for what… I found a Starbucks cup, and sleeve. I thought about how they were suing their Union for demanding Palestinian justice. And the McDonalds cup too—aren’t they giving the IDF free meals? Then I found a straw. Did it belong to the In N Out cup? Then another bag, a plastic one from the Nugget–I didn’t even know they had plastic bags there!

Each object held a surprise, a lesson. I collected a clear plastic swathe of netting that looked like it was once a produce sack, like the kind that holds russet potatoes. The grid of squares was so uniform, and the shape was complex when it was wadded up—like a vectorized 3D model, or one of those tattoos that techno DJs get in Berlin when too much ketamine malforms their brain.

I picked up one Flum nicotine disposable vape, wild mint flavor–I thought about how much I used to love them until my boyfriend and Wellbutrin and my own Power helped me quit nicotine–in fact last time I found one of these was in Topanga Canyon State Park and I hit it and it actually worked and it lasted me two weeks. I was grateful for the bounty of Mother Earth in that moment but now I was even more glad I had changed. I thought about how each vape contains copper and cobalt, mined with exploitative child labor in the Congo. I saw a friend’s TikTok yesterday that pointed out that disposable vapes are now the number one source of e-waste in America – 4.5 vapes are thrown out per second according to the US Public Interest Research Group. And even though I picked this one up to “throw it away,” I knew it had nowhere to really go, unless we were going to blast it off into space–the vapes are not recyclable—they leak these heavy metals into soil and water, somewhere, maybe the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump in Ghana.

Which takes us to a central qualm of sorting, and of the notion of ‘trash’ and ‘waste’ in general—it always has to go somewhere else for it to not be here. When we create bad stuff it doesn’t just go away. When we litter the trash becomes everyone else’s problem. When we can afford trash service it’s the problem of the dump. When the dump gets full its the problem of wherever poorer place they dump it. It’s all slow violence. It’s such a disturbing cycle when places like Congo and Cambodia are robbed of their natural resources, wrecked politically, socially, and environmentally, then the imperial cores gobble up the resources so much they can’t even finish it all, and they ship the toxic scraps back to other sacrifice zones.

–

There were so many semiotic registers to each piece of litter. Normally I would have simply overlooked them, designated them as trash—but here I was, considering the effects of transnational neoliberal capitalism, branding, commodity chains through the lens of neomaterialist object oriented philosophy, material sciences, decomposition, individual agency and ethical paradigms… Litter was actually quite valuable in terms of thinking through our complex entanglement inside kyriarchal systems of power, and through our situatedness in place. Or that’s what someone with funding from the Mellon Foundation would say.

I already knew litter could do all those things because I did a project on it my senior year of undergrad. I had read this article by this person named I think Andil Gosine that was talking about how cruising is criminalized in part because of the litter it leaves behind—condom wrappers, beer cans, needles—and for some reason my takeaway was initially that it was OK for gay people to litter. But I think the real lesson is that litter reflects use of spaces. It’s not OK if gay people litter, but they shouldn’t be scapegoated when the vast majority of litter comes from corporations and the military industrial complex. Like according to the Pew Research Institute over 75% of microplastics in the ocean are caused from degrading or dumped car tires? Gay people can barely drive? But there are some culprits…

Outside the Veterinary Science building, I came across a waste disposal box—with options for recycling, composting, and landfill. I sorted my trash, took a picture, then threw it all away. I considered keeping some of it to make a sculpture of some sort. Would that be cool or tacky? I figured I should be discerning—I only kept the metal rod, because that’s what felt right. And then, on my walk home, I found a lime green cast of ankle tape that clearly fell off a dog’s paw. I put that on the top of my metal rod and carried it around like a staff. I was the Wizard of Litter.

I showed my friend Maddie the picture and she said, “Wow, the trash really tells a story—you’re going back to your gatherer roots.”

By this she was referring to when we used to build fires on the lakeshore in highschool when we would smoke weed together. Our friend group designated each of us each a job title. I was gatherer (of kindling and driftwood), Bianca was the builder, and Maddie was the tender. I at first did not like my role as gatherer, and wanted to be tender—but slowly I realized I was indeed meant to Gather. For a while I even decided I would name my child Gaedrian because I misread the Old English word Gaderian—gather—as Gaedrian and I was like that would be a cute name. So I dedicate this post to my future child Gaedrian.