Declaration of Irrelevancy

I have no desire to be relevant, or become so, therefore I’m irrelevant.

I haven’t been relevant since 2012, therefore I’ve slipped, unnoticed as it were, into irrelevancy.

I’m ambulatory, thank goodness, and my mind is still clear enough to count both my steps and my lost steps, those steps I’ve taken and the steps I’ve lost when I’ve forgotten to take my iPhone out for its walk.

Up here in the mountains, as I like to call them, at 6,000 or so ft. where I live part time in a cabin, as I like to call it, I continue to make my mark as an irrelevant non-entity, looking out as I write this toward Ptarmigan Mountain, the specific mountain that’s now out in front of me at 12, 038 ft., unclimbed by yours truly.

I’m looking out at this grand Ptarmigan Mountain right now, a mountain still with a little snow on its temples, trying to find a coherent narrative for my irrelevancy. I make every attempt I can think of to attempt to climb Ptarmigan Mountain and claim a relevancy that might re-establish the coherent narrative my life once had. But it seems that as I’ve lost relevance I’ve also lost a bit of coherence, step by step, watching both amiable and mean-spirited plantation owners make headlines while climbing such large mountains, larger than even Ptarmigan, making headlines by imposing their ‘look at me, I’m so successful and I’m rich’ mantras on me. I hear them climbing and climbing and climbing, but I suspect that they’ll find there’s really nothing there once they reach the top, only some lonely blue sky or dark thunderclouds that sometimes roll in from Yellowstone Park, unexpectedly, bearing the great gifts of rain, wind, and snow.

There was a time when I was still relevant, listening to the nightly news by pointing my iPhone toward Cedar Mountain near Cody, with its squadron of cell phone towers. In those days there was better reception there atop Cedar Mountain. Now that I’m fully irrelevant, the news from Cedar Mountain sounds to me like drivel, palaver or jeremiad, not even half as good a silence.

Irrelevant now, completely so, I specialize in collecting the artists of static electricity, where from time to time the pure dry air of northwest Wyoming creates a spark or two that rubs on and off of me at will, with a real new, very creative charge of energy when I’m least expecting it.