today, me and my family went to a lake for a picnic to celebrate me sorting out college. it was nice. i kayaked to a small island. i couldn't tell you how big it was. while i was on it, i guessed it was maybe like the size of three football fields lined up side by side. that's how i thought about explaining it to you because i've been told Americans like to gauge the size of things with football fields. it's actually just under 1000 feet in diameter, big enough for to fully hide oneself and then some and for the lack of a beaten path to really mean something, which meant all the more as i did not dress for it. i went out there with swim trunks, sandals, and one of those athletic shirts. i really didn't give a shit, though. i wanted to go to this lake for the island. i didn't know what was gonna be on it, which was the entire appeal. before i actually went on, i vaguely remembered there being someone's house on it, but i learned that wasn't true at all. there was hardly anything on it, like a stark lack of things. the most i was certain would be on it was garbage, even though it was within a national park. i, fortunately, found no litter with the exception of a beer bottle buried in the ground. almost everything i saw out there was as God intended it to be: big and bug-ridden, mossy and free. it was mostly evergreen, but the dead trunks were more noticeable. like i said before, there weren't any trials, so i went where i could. the act of plotting out where i would go instead of just strolling was kind of jarring to me, it started to make me anxious. this kind of stuff doesn't usually make me anxious, so i didn't take it as that, and i guess at that time it wasn't really. it was more a little adrenaline. i kept telling myself i loved it, and i think at that time, i did. i thought this was the way people are supposed to feel.
i thought about John Zerzan and Ted Kaczynski, more so Zerzan with his ideas specifically favouring hunter-gatherer societies more than Kaczynski's general primitivism, because as i made my way up the island, i pretended to be a hunter-gather. a hopelessly goofy and oversocialized one at that, decked out with bright swim trunks and half a paddle that i brandishing like a sword, but i was still putting in an effort for the act at least. the further i went up, the more the excitement turned to fear. i kept expecting something bad to happen, and when it finally felt like it was time for it, it never came. so i kept waiting for it to catch up with me at any moment. i expected to find someone out there, like campers or other kayakers. i thought about calling out for them, but i felt i was better not reaching out for them, though with my neon green fucking swim trunks and crunchy walking, i don't know how they would have noticed me. it turned out that i was alone on the island, but i kept living with the suspicion that i wasn't. after i crossed out whatever wasn't around me, i went to something else. if it wasn't people, it was bears, etc., etc. i kept going, though. i always keep going. i didn't come out here to turn around. the nervousness is a part of the fun until it isn't.
at the northwest end of the island, there were large circular patches of forest cleared out. i'm too civ-cucked to know what from - i kept reminding myself that - but it seemed natural. the first thing to really stick out that i noticed was a really put-out campfire. i thought i'd surely find trash around it, but the place was spotless aside from a GeoCache under a dead tree trunk, which i found by complete accident. it was this Tupperware container. i couldn't tell what was in it until i dug it out. my first thought was that it was a first aid kit or drugs, the possibility of the latter of which was enough to fire the adrenaline up into dread. i dug it out with my paddle, as not to touch the fentanyl which i thought it may be possibly covered in, which i genuinely felt there was a 50/50 chance of. i was afraid that if i touched it, i could immediately overdose and die, like those fentanyl-covered grocery cart handles i hear about at the Real Canadian Superstore. i thought for a minute about it as i left it on the ground. from there, i saw it was filled with shit like Hot Wheels, key chains, what i first thought was a condom wrapper, and most excitingly, a notebook with names and dates. that was enough to make me say fuck it and roll the dice. unsurprisingly, i eventually did not die, but for the next hour, i was not totally convinced that it wouldn't happen eventually. the notebook was how it found out it was actually a GeoCache. it had names and dates of everyone who had found it since 2010, the most recent one being on January 2nd, 2021. it seemed to have been found relatively frequently, as the notebook was half filled up. i obviously made the effort to read through the whole thing. i remember little of what was in there, other than some places the people who had written in it were from (Calgary and Saskatoon primarily). regardless, it somehow helped to calm me down, even though i was still halfway convinced that i was risking an overdose of fucking fentanyl by touching this notebook. i wrote my name and the date in it, along with my town and my Instagram username. i wished future readers happy travels at the end. i felt relaxed again like i wanted to be out here. i walked up to this ledge and watched these people going water tubing by the island. i thought they would notice me, and waited for them to wave before i waved back, but they never did, so nor did i. today was the kind of beautiful that a full winter is worth waiting through for. the sky, the air, the colours, it was all perfect, i just wish i felt better.
there were these dead tree trunks surrounding the open patches. all of them had most of their branches still intact. i thought they were spider-like. i imagined them as the carcasses of huge worm-like creatures with thousands of small far-reaching penis-like tentacles that sucked onto the walls of tunnels they would dig through the ground. i imagined them covered in slime, and all their tentacles rubbing against each other making a lot of squishing sounds, so many it would kind of sound like rain. their tunnels made me think of the void under Antarctica which G---- posted about, the one where he just captioned it with the word "Thule", i don't know what he meant by that (it's probably related to the Hyperborean ancient Aryan bullshit). i don't know if that's real in the way i think he is suggesting it, but i thought if it was, it would be fucking terrifying to even sit with the idea of: a huge open crevasse under a whole continent, totally dark and silent, supposedly unknown to anyone or anything. it reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. i kept walking.
the bugs started to get to me. the idea that other animals with me started to get to me. the plants did, too. i kept on reminding myself how i was civ-cucked or some shit, or, to phrase in a way that isn't fucking stupid - i kept reminding myself that i could name more brand logos than plant life. most people can. that is not a good thing. i was getting paranoid about poison ivy, even though i'm on the wrong side of the continent to find that. i was still half-convinced i unwillingly ingested drugs. the calm went back to dread, and i hated it. i still wanted to be the outdoor kid that i thought i was. i didn't want to become the sitcom stereotype of the city kid who hates camping, i didn't want the anti-masker anti-civs to be right about me being oversocialized, i didn't want to have some kind of disorder or whatever - and more importantly, i didn't want to be oversocialized for even thinking that. i didn't want to be upset at all. Christ, it was such a gorgeous day. the more i thought and the more i thought about thinking it made me feel worse. i was now fully anxious. i decided to go home.
i was physically anxious while kayaking. i took a few minutes to stop and just breathe. i told myself over and over that i was fine, "i am the finest person on this lake. i am so fine that people look at me and think 'wow, he's so fine. i wish i was that fine'. i'm so fine i'm wearing cool guy sunglasses with a cool guy backwards baseball cap. i'm so fine i have acid-washed jeans on with Vans Old Skool hightops on. i go to Cool Guy School where i learn how to party! party! party! party! and i go home to bang some wicked hot slash, some sexy babe-age"(1). then i went for a fucking killer bike ride, and it was over again. then my family went home and K--- had some friends over for like an hour, which made me mad, which i took out on my mom, which made me realize i didn't really know what i was mad about, so i decided it was best i shut the fuck up and go for a drive. i was really upset and embarrassed that i was really upset, which made me more upset, but i thought that since i didn't need to be, i'd just let it pass, but it wouldn't let up. ever since i started talking to my mom about it that night, i thought yelling would help. i eventually think that when i feel like this, but i always think it would be too embarrassing to hear myself yell for it to do any good. but, i said fuck it, and tried to yell. i thought saying something would help it be less embarrassing, so i yelled "i'm angry - ", which made me quickly realize it is still embarrassing so i lowered my tone "and i don't know why!" then i just started sobbing, like really sobbing, so hard i didn't really care that i could hear myself. saying what i said aloud seemed to unlock whatever made me sob. i guess articulated why i was sobbing at all. i kept thinking to myself, it was something like that
i want something, but i don't know what it is.
maybe i miss something, and i want it back, but i know nothing about it. i would barely know its even gone because of that. i didn't want to think about it, i wanted to stop, so i told myself jokes. i made voices and shit, and i got out of it, i think. my chest started to feel weird afterward, though. maybe i buried whatever it was in a void. i still don't want to think about it. i don't want to make it bigger than it is. at least it was a beautiful day and i took advantage of it.
(1) i didn't actually say most of that then. i said that in the same context later in my car.
