Missoula MT is a town I made up myself. It existed for a few years in the late '90s and then disappeared until three years ago, when I moved back. I insulated the town, enclosed it in a bubble, and everyone was pretty happy with that. I had a bear and some deers and fishes, I had nice sunsets and some hills to climb up to watch those sunsets. Downtown was a western railroad town with old brick buildings and even a cobblestone street or two. It was pretty nice, I was pretty pleased. I would ride my bicycle around aimlessly, discovering new streets and neighborhoods with every turn. I went wherever I wanted to go, didn't know anyone at all, liked it pretty well. Some things were about the same as I'd left them when I abandoned the place in the year 2000 - the same smell of oak trees on campus, for example, and some of the same scenic faces walking around with the same backpacks on. One time, before I left, I looked up at the green slope of Mount Sentinel and saw the sunset reflected off the golden sides of a herd of grazing deer.
We just got new bike lanes downtown on Higgins. Very comfortable bike lanes - 'comfortable' is the only word to describe them. But now they've covered over the lines with chip seal, erased the lanes, so forget about them - that's all there is to do. South of the river, Higgins is blocked off for a couple blocks. I like it, I really like it. If I had my way Higgins would be blocked off all the time. But probably no one else would approve of that. They can have their street back after the summer.
The river trail has been extended west. I was unaware of this development, but it's happened despite my lack of knowledge or input. There's a creek crossing over there, and you have your choice: plank, pallet, or plywood. Apparently the plywood is the suboptimal solution. There are low-hanging bridges, so you have to watch your head. This was a new part of Missoula that I hadn't run through before. Maybe, if I were still connected to the land, if I hadn't moved south of the river, I would have known about all of this. Instead, I haven't even been to a baseball game this year.
At work I am trapped, all my exits blocked off except two of them, and one of those comes with a warning sign. Perhaps the best way out is a window?
"The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our sense-organs."
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
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