Good Morning, Tuesday Night or A Memory from Wyoming

Brass Against. The Pot (Tool Cover). YouTube. 11 July 2018.

In recent years I've taken to listening to Audible productions, radio programs and podcasts as my weekend company and, if I am balanced enough with the teaching workload, during the week over studio activities. This morning (or Tuesday night) I was listening to a This American Life podcast of people who hoax themselves and get so invested in their own self-deception that they believe more and more, over extended periods of time, in their own known deceptions.

"Stories of people who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else does. In other words: Stories about people pulling hoaxes...on themselves."
There's no sexy plugin so here's the link if you want the full experience: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/660/hoaxing-yourself
Glass, Ira. “This American Life, Episode 660 ‘Hoaxing Yourself.’” This American Life, 2 Nov. 2018.

In Wyoming my neighbor was a bounty hunter or, if we are being politically correct, a "Bail Enforcement Agent". It sounds like fiction but that was, and to my knowledge still is, the reality in Wyoming (that bounty hunters operate as bail enforcement agents). He was a large man, long hair, leather jacket and boots who fixed cars in the small lot behind his place, and adjacent to mine, when not out on the road hunting bounty. He was raising two girls, maybe 8 and 10 years old and was often in the hospital for some heart problem but I often suspected cocaine tremors. He would pack his pick up truck, quite openly holster his revolver, loosely toss a shot gun in the cab behind and head off to parts unknown in the vast Wyoming deserts. I never saw the mother of the children but he said she was in prison in Idaho, just over the mountain pass, which became treacherous to drive in winter months. My most vivid memory of the man was from September 11th, 2001. I wandered over to his place to check the TV after hearing the NPR coverage (it was early in Wyoming). He was there with his girls, a lit cigarette, and muttering while the whole event unfolded. "That's my city" is all he said. We didn't talk much, rather just endured together and smoked cigarettes until I wandered off on my bicycle on the way to work across the valley. He often worked my car (I had the among the shittiest cars in the valley, a Pontiac sedan with red, flaking paint, and a gooey steering wheel where the faux leather was peeling). It started maybe half the time. At the time I was working on something close to a minimum wage and shoveling snow off roofs to keep the dream alive (the dream of escape from the Jersey frontier). My bounty hunter neighbor always appeared to me to have something beyond secrets, a total deception, the kind that consciousness can not pierce. I imagined broken families, drunk fathers, methamphetamine, trailers, fists, a bit of cross-dressing (a story for another day), and all around choosing disease over escape without a role model in the same state and if there was an impossible mountain of what is blocking the view. But there he was, with two kids, hunting men legally, between heart attacks, my neighbor, with whom I probably shared fewer words in all our years as neighbors than the description I just wrote here.

The backdrop of this scene is the Teton range, an absolutely young (in geological years) magnificent mountain range jutting up quite abruptly from a grand valley and just south of the great American caldera, Yellowstone National Park, and both surrounded by yet more forests, mountain ranges and protected federal and state lands. The land itself dwarfs all other activities because it was allowed to and because its use for agriculture would be limited by the extreme seasons and altitudes. I've always been fascinated by our human bodily limit, built in a vessel for the surface of this one world, being able to go only a few kilometers in either direction (above the surface of the earth or below it) without having systems fail, physical or psychological. Somewhere on the surface of this sphere is proof.

Fai(f)th (faifth, faifth, faifth).(echoing like that with the extra 'f' across buildings, or in the Swiss Alps yodeling, or with an delay pedal activated, or just that time it takes to reach from one neuron to the next.)

“Thomas Moran | The Teton Range | American | The Met.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11600. Accessed 10 Nov. 2018.