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Wed, 13 Apr 2011

Last week I had an awful day. Mainly, I just hated people. I hated their faces, and especially, I hated their voices. This happens to me from time to time. I kind of wigged out.

I need a vacation, I thought.

I know I just had a vacation. But that was in Los Angeles. I need a vacation away from people. I wish I could take a vacation and just go off in the woods somewhere. It's been so long since I've been to the woods. That's what I need.

That whole thought process actually occurred to me, in those exact words. And then, these exact words popped into my brain:

Oh wait! I live in Northern Minnesota! I completely forgot! I'm already in the woods!

Fifteen minutes later, I was bounding down a trail, surrounded by the smell of white pines and the sound of a raging creek swollen with the spring melt. It was morning. Birds shrieked everywhere. I never saw a single person the whole time I was out there. I returned with a permanent grin stuck on my face. Anger? What anger?

I've been taking a lot of morning walks lately, but most of them have been in town. It started as a desire to take photographs of dirty alleys and abandoned buildings. People who live in my town always talk about how beautiful it is. And it is beautiful, but it can also be ugly at times, especially in the so-called "spring" when the sun is low and glaring in the sky and everything is brown and covered in a winter's worth of salty garbage left behind once the snow has receded.

What I'm saying is I've spent a lot of time in the grime. So much that I actually forgot that these little patches of filth are surrounded by water and forest. Go figure.

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