I enjoy sleeping in as much as my body allows, but then it’s up and out. Zero schmearo, I have a lot to do today.

So after settling up with the hostel for the evening and struggling to settle up with my insurance company for the past few months, it’s out for laundry, donning puffy and rain jacket skirt too the amusement of the children in the laundromat. Then it’s off to the post office to get packages – snacks from Bishop, a box from Mom with delicious snacks and meals and I call her to thank her and oh god I ate a moldy cookie before I noticed the mold. Then it’s dropping the boxes at the hostel and scurrying to the library to blog and mess with pictures and phone storage and and and. Having not eaten today, I wait for pizza and cheesybread from Domino’s while I’m on the phone with my Father. I carry my goodies back to the hostel and finally get the precious internet me-time I’ve been wanting. Sweet gracious, how is it 6pm already?!

So I’m sitting around and eating pizza and packing my bear can and reading articles about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and who’s next a child with a toy in a park OH WAIT THAT ALREADY HAPPENED and something within me breaks. I go into the girls’ room, crawl into my bunk to write and call my stepfather and cry. Loudly. I know everyone can hear me, but giving all of my shits about this leaves me very little room to give shits about that. As I’m winding down, someone comes in to grab something, asks if I’m okay. We talk about it a little, and I stabilize, feel understood.

I go up to apologize to everyone, and one of the other hikers asks what I was upset about. The police shootings, I respond. Oh, the cops that got shot in Dallas? I struggle like hell to check my face. Sure, I say. Sure¹.

I immediately head back downstairs, climb into bed for what I pray will be dreamless sleep.

Start: 906.6 • End: 906.6 • Day: 0
Notable Accomplishments: Got a lot of work done • Got to talk with all of the parents • Only mostly embarrassed myself in front of new people

[1] I’d like to be clear in that I condemn the attacks on these officers. I don’t think murdering folk is the way to go about literally anything. That said, given the social climate, if the Second Amendment is supposed to be about bearing arms to protect yourself from governmental abuses of power as outlined in the Declaration of Independence – abuses like governmentally-condoned killings of (particularly Black and Native) citizens (by a statistically significant margin for, often, minor offenses) and, back in the day, taxation without representation I guess* – this is, to me, what that exercise of that power granted you by that right would look like, particularly given that police are the domestic enforcers of governmental power. The end of this insurrection is also how I think the end of any such insurrection would go. Does that make it okay to go around murdering cops? Absolutely not. But I find it hard to be surprised it happened.

*I know the American Revolution was about more than this, but that’s the short and sweet of it we’re given in school, and it pales in comparison to “being extrajudiciously handled/killed for minor infractions because of the stigma of your skin color and its legacy”.