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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


05.17.06, wednesday morning

Consider the history of a bog. It started as a lake, clear, pristine, grey or blue depending on the moods of the sky. Birds bathed at the rim. Deer drank. Centuries passed, some colder than others, but all the same, the lake kept its first form, with more or less the same inhabitants. Then one century, reeds colonized the lake, followed by willow, oak and pine. Dead algae drifted to the bottom of the lake while at the surface rain drizzled or needled down as trees fell, shrouded in moss that tacked and interlocked each to their neighbor. The water had the consistency of beef stew, thick, onion-latticed, almost sticky, so that the fallen was inseparable from the fen. Finally the fen became a bog, treacherous in nature, characterized by the endless death and casual burial of inhabitants and passersby in an earth that knew few dry days. More centuries passed, millenia, until the bog was cut and stripped of its peat, so that 8000 years could burn in one hour. The bog's history is kin to that of my memories; writing is a blade hacking peat into fuel.





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