July 15, 2025
Parallel Polis Publishing
by J.Pilgrim
I’m typing this out while I’m racked out in the back of my SUV in a Walmart parking lot in a college town, sipping a beer. I was attempting to spend New Year’s Day camping at the homestead, but my fan belt frayed out on the drive and ripped off the top of the dipstick. I assume that the fan belt is a delayed casualty of the sub-zero cold we had a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t know for sure. I do know I’m not going to risk driving home and having the belt completely fall apart.
I am sitting up on a hillside in a camp chair on the land God has granted me. I am smelling one forest fire and gaze at the skeletons of trees from the last one. My hillside was burnt to the ground back in the 90s, and then again a few years later. Trees are made from nutrients pulled from the air, mostly, which is wild, and when they die and fall down, they make dirt. The opposed hillside in my valley is nothing but deadfall, there’s not even shrubbery. All of the dirt I see is essentially air turned into dead plants that turned into dirt.
