Morning at last: there in the snow Your small blunt footprints come and go. Night has left no more to show,

Not the candle, the half-drunk wine, Or touching joy; only this sign Of your life walking into mine.

But when they vanish with the rain What morning woke to will remain Whether as happiness or pain.

Too must placid to run, I decided to take a walk. There were too many things on my head when I set out and there are still too many things remaining. Perhaps I shouldn’t call what I just did a walk. Walks are meant to be pleasant ambles with a kindred spirit as the evening slowly falls. Instead this was a furious tearing down of four miles, the anxious pacing of a panther in its cage, to use the words from a Ted Hughes poem, Panther.

The first thing I noticed in my field of vision was the yellow flowers on the wild brush that grows in the cracks of asphalt in the abandoned gas station at the corner. In a small way that represents the journey of this civilization growing crazy at its seams back to nature. I much rather see these wild flowers in an boarded up, chain link fenced gas station than tired people pulling up in cars (like sardines in a can) for gas. However much folks try to beautify them gas stations for some reason are the most depressing places in the urban landscape. I walked further up the road passing a place called Kountry Kitchen, with a fax pas well before it, all dolled up to look like a place in the country, it would have succeeded pretty well weren’t for the credit cards accepted board attached right to front porch. Up street a TV broadcasting van was pulling up onto the 14th street, with all its instrumentation hung above it, a strange metallic creature. It was perhaps dashing off to some accident scene, so that viewers of tonight’s news can get their fill of car wrecks (6,356,000 car accidents occur in US annually) or a drive by shooting. In fact I was walking outside at what is considered the most dangerous time of the week, Friday night. Enough people have been mugged for I guess cash to buy some liquor. But then lately I have grown more reckless about life, which seems to be as lucky as shooting fish in a barrel or wining at Russian roulette.

The sky, at least the part of it that wasn’t blocked up houses, gigantic TV transmitter towers and power lines, was a beautiful wash of red. I wished I was sitting at that time, with my feet dangling off the ledge at Standing Indian (the closest peak above 5000 ft to Atlanta) watching the sun set somewhere in the distance in Tennessee, with nothing but thin air and an endless carpet of trees between me and that red orb. In this reverie I didn’t notice that the sidewalk had ended. Atlanta and I suspect most of US is anti pedestrian. In some areas if one decides to go for a walk one is forced to walk in drainage ditches, through parking lots and climb fences, almost a Marines type obstacle course, only for the strong of heart. Anyway I was stuck next to the road and got to examine some old sedimentary rock and a cove of trees. I realized this whole place must have been nothing but rock and trees just around 150 years ago. Now we have blasted a road through the rocks and instead of trees have all these houses. I guess we can’t stay like the Indians did, in tepees can we?

Then I took a turn up Hemphill. This road makes me sick, it has three fast food places next to one another. MacD with it’s “We love to see you smile.” That statement is so loaded with hypocrisy that it always makes me want to laugh. The folks who work in these places work for slave wages that are barely enough to survive on. No wonder you can never hear a really happy person at the other end of the drive through places. It’s as if they are sleepwalking through life and perhaps in a way they are. Anyway all along the sidewalk I saw what Edward Abbey calls signs of Solbvious Americanus: discarded coke bottles, cans, food containers and other litter. Now I shouldn’t complain, US is a zillion times cleaner than say India. After all waste management is a billion dollar business here!!

I soon walked into Tech campus and after a long time on what was an older path that I used to walk from that old house to office through Burger bowl. I saw a couple playing with two dogs, a couple of guys kicking a soccer ball and felt myself hungering for someone to walk along with me. Then I started running and ran for a while.

That thought recalled, suddenly seems to have killed my urge to write. So I think I will end this note here.

I write this with sweat streaming down my face, having ridden Harry up and down the rolling roads that seem to characterize Atlanta. Harry by the way is what I call my bicycle, an antique road bike whose gears don't work and which is so battered that it adds to my general wino look. I like Harry though for I can pretty much go where ever I want to on it and like all things that with use absorb a certain part of the users personality, Harry too has some of my wildness now.

I consumed a lot of junk food today. A burger and french fries, how infectious are these cravings and habits!! I was craving french fries in a mix of mustard and ketchup since this morning. Burp! I guess a lot of things change when someone enters our lives in an intimate manner and mostly for good. It's as if the house, this space that we usually live in, is reconfigured one bit at a time. And just like erosion, caused by rain, wind, snow etc that keeps configuring the canyon walls into these strange and wonderful shapes, I think we do the same to one another. And when looked at after enough time has passed everything seems to have radically changed even though the whole process was much slower than that.

They were tearing up roads around the Tech Tower, apparently they are converting the core of the campus into a pedestrian only zone. But I didn’t see the point of why they have to tear up perfectly good asphalt road only to pave it later with brick!! What a colossal waste of material, effort and energy. But I guess the road construction folks, the pen pushers and the odd millionaire who would be giving the dough to name the brick paved park zone after him must all be somehow kept happy, fuck the waste of material and effort!!

But then given that I am still plugged in into the consumerist culture myself I guess I should not write polemics!! I should zealously guard my pieces of plastic, feed on Big Macs, participate in all these seasonal feel good(corporate) days that are carefully and strategically spaced apart: Father's Day, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, watch my cholesterol, pay big bucks towards health insurance and hospital bills, aspire to drive BMWs(or is it Porsche?), own a four car garage home, one for daddy, one for mommy, one for the sonny and one for the doggie who lives down in the air-conditioned kennel and goes to a pet barber(who exist in New York City) for his weekly haircut that costs fifty dollars, monthly salary of a factory worker in India!!

And if occasionally my soul bothers me I should go down to the bookstore and read rows upon rows of self help books, not that I have anything against this genre of publishing, we all need to absorb positive thoughts once in a while, I even own a few, but mainly because half of them are pure junk. Sample: Rule Book for Online Dating offers this rule to women, "Never offer your phone number first, you will make yourself appear too easy to get". Now no doubt the whole relationships scenario is so fucked up here, with so many external parameters already set up that it all becomes a huge mind trip. "Oh the dude did this, he is nice. Boy! why didn't the dude do this!! He is a piece of shit". The only folks who seem to benefit from all this of course are Columbian drug barons, Jack Daniels, shrinks and self proclaimed self help gurus who can publish more books like "Sexual Chemistry to Capture Your Martian."

Perhaps I don't get this well enough, fuck it all! Give me a wild place that's a changing canvas for the sun, a clear cold mountain creek sparkling like silver, snow flurries whirling and falling upon me like divine confetti and just a few simple folks, with clear hearts or at least those willing to make that trip to clear their windshields of accumulated junk of social programming to SEE, to associate with!