The Fanstastic Ms. Fox

I don't like Kelowna much. I avoid it, but my family is there.

I gave my mum a ride into town. And, with the car under me, I drove out a ways again and stopped by the house I grew up in. And walked the beach that was a short climb down a cliff.

There was a hole in a hedge - a cylindrical hollowed-out thing. I never did crawl through it. And it's gone now. Never going to know, I suppose.

The house is so well-cared for now. And everything is smaller. And what I assumed was the neighbours's house was actually their garage.

The beach is still covered in stones, but most of the good skippers have been thrown in now. Maybe that's why the beach seems smaller - years of people skipping rocks. I took a sliver from a cliff face - the one we used to throw rocks at to see the dirt crumble - and I put it in my pocket.

 

I also went up into the nearby provincial park.

When I was a child, we went out to a cliff the Morrison boys. There was this cliff with a hole through it. You could climb down that winding perilous chute and come out at the beach. So I'm told. I was small and scared and, that I recall, only the elder Morrison boys climbed down it.

I walked out for about half an hour. I asked people if they knew where that hole was, but to no luck.

But I found it. It's a twisty thing that looks just the right size to fall in and get stuck and shout for help and not be heard. But I measured the gap with my boot, noted the lack of a warning sign, said a quick invocation... and fell through.

There's a cave at the bottom. I never would have seen it had I not found something I was afraid of and dropped through it.

I took that beach rock out of my pocket and exchanged it for a bit of quartz. Then I climbed up the cliff.

...and Gilgamesh lost his

The urge towards self-______ is here again.

Self what? Not self-destruction; but perhaps a shade of self-annihilation and some self-escape with aspects of self-transformation.

This happens from time to time: the urge to slip away like ice cream under a brick. The urge to shift, change (from least to most) my dress, routine, hair, skin, sex, mode of speech, name, home, work, hobbies, values, sense of humour; it all has to go, or rather change, or rather stay with the something (i.e. "me") that's left behind. At least it feels that way.
                                                                I'm such a conservative dresser.

That which no longer is cannot be wounded. An old skin, left behind, is no more than a place-marking curio, like an historical plaque. It will not bleed when cut. The new will have slithered off and is somewhere else being... different, getting injured and forming new scars, but the new snake shed those too.

The catch is that snakes have to crawl everywhere.

Why this urge now? I feel death creeping up on me. It's custom to disguise yourself by inverting your clothes. Maybe death just hates exposed seams. Does anyone think it's strange that we wear the seams next to our skin?  I digress. It's good to digress.

Anyway. Change in the face of death.
Everyone here looks old, sick, worn out, worn down, worn away. Going. Eroding.
I don't want to be caught up in this, but I can feel it in me.

That's one explanation

Alternative or Conjuncitve explanation

Grandmother: dead. Job interview: done.  Current academic haits: unsustainable.

And so I think I'm going to dye my hair funny colours - baldness be damned.

Whether or not I take up street luge remains to be seen.