Part of my job is going to far away places and playing music for people at festivals. Drunk on either beer or the weekend away from work people. It's an unreal world for a weekend, people believe in things they don't normally believe in. They get caught up in it .
They had a cowboy music festival in Dust. A bevy of decidedly uncowboylike appearing people parked big trailers in the ag centre parking lot, by the dumpsters. Pegged out dogs, barbecues, rvs. The sun was blood red, the air unbreathable, but these troops of cowboy music lovers in cargo shorts didn't flinch.
Further south, three days of fun was dubbed “magical” while the mountain park burned to the dirt.
Ever since oil and gas came to the region the sky has always had a turquoise strip then an amber band of pollution, which came and went with the winds.
Now with global warmth, the winds bring acrid smoke and the sun goes out! The sun! The streetlights come on at noon, darkness at noon.
A plow wind came thorough in the evening. The trees bent to the ground, some snapped. 80 year old black poplars on the ground, and a tent blew away with international Buddhists having a meal at a festival. One died.
In the city, two days after the welfare money comes in, a man tweaks on a corner. His hands are suspended in front of his face , conducting music unheard by us. He is frozen in time, at the best festival of his life. Nearby is another man, with that bent- forward posture, stopped suddenly, feeling it, in the middle of the sidewalk in 28 degrees Celsius. Gazing inward in wonder.
A. told me that cosmic rays, protons stripped of electrons speeding through space from the Sun and other suns, travel through us and the earth with ease, but on their journey change things like DNA, so when plants and animals and we breed, this changed DNA comes with and makes evolution a thing.
Driving down the deserted highway in the dusk with cold wind coming in the car windows I see the sky hanging just so over the fields, and something is hidden there, some secret I can know, but can't see, it's there for a moment then it's gone.
But I swear I almost understood it, I almost heard it for myself, something going on beyond the veil, something singing in another language
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superb