I took a walk today.
It was pretty good.
POST WALK EXPERIENCES ITT

The last time I took a walk was in late August, at 3AM. It was nice and pleasant at first but I quickly grew anxious and retreated home.

I walk down the exact same street whenever I go outside. It's where I grew up. I keep searching for something or someone, and I'm always unsuccessful. Maybe I'm not going about it in the right way, but that's all I know in this life besides sleeping and browsing the internet.

I will go for a walk now. It's 26 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but whatever. If I don't report back in the next couple of posts, it means I have died. But please don't waste your tears on me.

I'm back from my walk now. My face and hands are still tingling from the cold.
I set off down the sidewalk with a McGee and Me mug of hot tea. The sun casts its tired light sideways as it quickly nears the orange-tinged horizon. My first thought upon looking around at the neighborhood is that the graphics sure are realistic, which makes me think I really should go out more often. After all, this is reality; I can reach out and feel this tree, bathe my fingers in the shadow it throws.
I hear car wheels whooshing down a distant road, occasional planes in the sky, and the rustle of tree branches in the cold breeze. The calm chords of wind chimes emanate from behind one house. In a few houses my passing sets dogs to barking. A couple of lawns are already festooned with gaudy blinking lights and plastic graven images of the gods of consumerism.
The sidewalk ends as I wander over to the local park/nature preserve, carefully avoiding land mines of dog excrement. I've heard the land where the park stands was a quarry long ago. Recently, it's been "improved" with the help of some government $; the main trail is now paved, but litter still lies among the fallen limbs and leaves. There are new informational plaques up everywhere about the animals that are supposedly around somewhere, though I've never seen most of them. A couple of wooden decks have been erected to overlook the pond, and it appears they have recently been repainted, possibly to cover the permanent marker vandalism they accumulated almost immediately after their construction.
The paved path begins at the street and curves around to the back of the large main pond. I walk down it and look at the photographs of the wildlife printed on the informational plaques. As it is late autumn, the woods surrounding me have become a bare thicket of half-dead trees and their weedlike offspring, interrupted here and there by small scummy ponds. I chuck a lump of mossy wood into a pond, but it bounces off the pond's crystalline surface.
By the time I reach the paving's terminus at the rear of the main pond, the McGee and Me mug has long since been empty and is colder than my hands. I set it down on a park bench and set off down one of the narrow, unpaved trails through the woods. The trail tops the dirt ridge of a narrow peninsula that nearly cleaves the pond in half. This walk is nostalgic for me; I used to ride this trail on my mountain bike when I was younger and less preoccupied with technology. At the tip of the peninsula there's a makeshift bridge, half submerged in the icy water and not quite reaching the shore of the opposite peninsula.
I double back and take a different path through the woods. This one is wider but clearly less used. It's covered with a thick crust of frosty leaves. Every step I take makes a sound like a dozen Pringles commercials, and I can't hear anything else. This path leads to the chain link fence that marks the boundary of the landfill. The hole in the fence is much larger than I remember. Someone has cut it and bent back a whole segment of it, from one pole to another. A kind of moat choked with tall grass and cattail reeds stands between me and the expanse of rolling hills dotted with extraction wells that makes up most of the landfill. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, large flocks of small birds wheel freely through the air, turning in tandem, occasionally alighting for a moment among the reeds. The dump before me seems more beautiful and clean than the park behind me.
I don't dare to pass through the fence into the landfill, fearing the contaminants and carcinogens that lie beneath those artificial hills of dirt and clay. Besides, the park is only open from dawn til dusk. If I don't leave soon, the Eagle Eye Neighborhood Watch could call the police on me. I collect my mug and walk back home.

i like walks

i took another walk today at 2/3ish pm
listened to some tycho/chrome sparks and felt cozy :333

Today and tonight it was very cold, and the wind was going like 34MPH. I walked to the convenience store and back to campus in my big blue hooded toggle coat. With the wind chill factor it was about 3F outside. Sometimes the wind was so strong that I had a really hard time even walking forward, and had to take refuge behind a building for a minute. Any exposed skin hurt a lot.

So yeah. That was a pretty cool adventure.

I miss taking walks. I haven't really went for a walk in a few years now. My town started to become very unsafe and I moved to a different section of it that isn't very "friendly" to pedestrians. Someone in my town actually got killed and ran over the other day right down the street. I knew the guy as well. He was walking home from work.