Circumstances involving a minor lower back injury have led me to stay in my room for the entire day and, without making this sound too weird because it’s not that deep, access parts of the brain that have not been unlocked since being 20 or 21 years old during the Covid-19 outbreak that confined me to a basement suite in Edmonton for every hour of the day. It’s sort of a nostalgic feeling but also very obviously bad for me. If my roommates were to see me in this state they’d know that something was off, with some sense of certainty, even if they are a people of chill temperment. Getting out of this state of mind should be a priority but it is sort of all-consuming and inescapable in the moment, sleep is usually the only solution. Being solitary and sweaty and rat-like undeniably has a certain drunken warmth if one digs deep enough into it, not that it is a fruitful or worthwhile experience. Drunken is a good word for it because there’s often a process of defragmenting your brain while returning to normalcy that sort of leaves you in a state of hangover and it’s also an indulgent sort of process tapping into it in the first place.
Thinking of laying in of green grass helps, dreaming of the ranch helps sometimes even though it’s not my labour of love but my father’s. Laying down in grass in the city is annoying because inevitably you still hear the buzz of the cars, there’s too much light pollution at night to see any stars, one has to go all the way to a park to get to it. Coddling from human settlement kind of kills any of the sensation that you might get from grounding yourself. It doesn’t always really do that I guess, but in my mind right now it does, it wouldn’t help me and I know that it wouldn’t help me.
Laying in the grass in the countryside is annoying, at least in Texas, because you could make yourself vulnerable to the dangers of the natural world. That is kind of a reductive thing to say. Imagine dreaming about green grass and instead of thinking about how the blades might kiss your skin in a gentle breeze or how morning dew might wet the back of your legs or any sort of naturally induced reprieve or even momentary ecstasy, you think about how ‘annoying’ it is as if its an overrated experience. Kind of a sad system of thought but also you shouldn’t beat yourself up for it if you think like that, maybe you’re just solutions-oriented, which is very perm-press khaki and grey of you but it probably doesn’t mean you aren’t enjoying the grass. You should work on not being so obtuse though, just because you’re chilling on the grass doesn’t mean that you aren’t still a huge square.