A Brief Introduction to Everything Important I

The high rises stare back at us and we shiver. I don’t suppose you want to know all this, but it is the sad burden laid upon your shoulders, like a beast of burden (ideally a llama, but we’ll take what we can get, our budget is rather low) forced to go up a freezing cold mountain in Peru when really all it wants to do is eat some peaches.

The high rises stare back at us and we shiver. The Peruvian mountains you are trekking through I have already trekked and I am familiar with the cold you are experiencing. I am familiar with the fatigue you wish you could relieve. I am intimate with the fatigue, with the cold, with the mountain. I wish you didn’t have to come. I wish you could stay home. We don’t pick these things, though. They pick us. C’est la fucking vie, grab your toothbrush, let’s roll.

The high rises stare back at us and we shiver. This is a true story, a depressingly true story, about a boy and some friends and their struggle with reality. You see, well, I don’t really know how to explain this except: reality is much more unstable than you’d undoubtedly love to believe. Reality is less like a stone and more like a sea. Shifting subtly, gently, and depending on the weather, suddenly and impulsively.

The skyscrapers leer at us and we are emboldened. The struggle with reality is not perceptible, really. The battlefronts, the trenches, are located in an amorphous “theater” that is like the subconscious afterthought of World War II-torn Germany. What I’m trying to tell you is the path you’re on, that Peruvian path up Mount Chimborazo, isn’t so much a path as it is a ethereal staircase. You feel it beneath you and that is the only sign of its existence. Moving on.

The high rises stare back at us.

We shiver.