We walked through silent forest in Snoqualmie until we could see snow-covered mountains and my fingers were numb.

Every time I visit America I can’t stop thinking about how dualistic it is as a place / concept / culture. I know I’m not the first person to say it and I have no great insight but it is so true and I get stuck thinking about it for hours. The people are so intuitively generous and spontaneous in their generosity that it catches me off-guard, but at the same time they collectively uphold and justify a deeply ungenerous social fabric that isolates and individualises them to the point they all exist in a semi-state of survival.

They are also immune to violence, in the movies they watch, in their schools and streets, in their drug crisis and in their foreign affairs, in a way that is so troubling and difficult to understand as an outsider. I think that immunity has come (at least for the people I know and their specific socio-cultural upbringing) from a place of trauma. They talk about the numerous friends and family they have lost to guns, suicide and fentanyl overdose in a way that is almost guarded against the enormity of admitting that the social system they live in is absurdly violent. Instead they mourn them as individuals and they grieve as individuals…

Anyway I hope no one reads this rambling also Snoqualmie is beautiful country and I whispered *vampire* into the forest as the snow fell silently around us and no birds sang. 

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