TIme can be Deceived, and other things I learned in Big Sky Country

"To beguile the time,/ Look like the time"

-Lady Macbeth

Macbeth Act I.5, l.62-63

Thesis: Time is a corruptible prison-guard. If you act like you've already got a way out, she gets curious and jealous and gives you the keys anyway, if only until you slip up and give yourself away. Still, temporary relief can be incredibly welcome relief.

Sub-Thesis: The local joke in Missoula is that their town is 5 minutes away from Montana. It's a microcosm of weird hippie college culture inside a larger ecosystem of weird (sometimes hippie) cowboy culture. A psychological and cultural anomaly.

Synthesis: My time in Missoula gave me an opportunity to act as though I wasn't dead in the middle of the space that I'm dead in the middle of.

Thank you, Jan, for the iPhone photos.

Thank you, Jacob, for the hospitality you pretended to hate.

Thanks to both of you for the love, friendship, and everything you bring out in me.

Thank you, Clark Fork River, for your presence. You were the universal solvent and catalyst through which this chemical sublimation took place. Thank you for your bridges, psychologically and physically forcing me to cross boundaries and confront the space around your edges everywhere I went.

Thank you, Montana, for your open country and your big sky, your striking mountains, your run-down mining towns, for your dusty antiques store that offered me up an underpriced, vintage, brandless guitar amp. Your kindness is not lost on me.