JohnnyoftheWell: on the road with DOCSPORTELLO ROAD TRIP

JohnnyoftheWell 05.18.23	the new Zelda is out is this a coincidence join us
Ryus 05.18.23	NW arkansas is very beautiful
Purpl3Spartan 05.18.23	check sungazer
JohnnyoftheWell 05.19.23	i know that name ?
DocSportello 05.19.23	omfg Johnny ya nailed it! massive thanks for the sweet recs and for entertaining my increasingly frazzled whims lol. was a genuine delight. ok ahHHH back to sleep
Dewinged 05.19.23	Can't believe I read all this. I was eagerly awaiting for a zombie apocalypse ala Resident Evil 2 remake's intro but the horror was cut short, tsk tsk. Glad the Doc made it though!
Storm In A Teacup 05.21.23	Bump.
DocSportello 05.21.23	There’s a story I tell my students, it’s a metaphor of sorts, to get them thinking about the writing process. I tell them about a course I took in my final years as an undergraduate, an interdisciplinary English-ecology course that had us engage thoughtfully with material well beyond the harbor of the lecture hall. This was just under a decade ago, in Nashville, which also happens to be my home; and it was indeed right around this time too that I began to recognize that this place was not, in fact, the same home (a blitz of construction, a vibe shift). I was keenly aware then, as those sunset Tennessee years exploded into view, that I would need to savor as best I could what time was left with the spaces that had moved me most. It was around this time that Radnor Lake State Park, a gorgeous little nature reservation and hiking area oddly nestled between various suburbs, had obtained a sizable swath of land, extending its boundaries and marking the occasion with a series of off-trail hikes led by one of the park rangers. One of the general requirements of the English-ecology class I was taking entailed participating in one relevant “event” of my choice, so signing up for one of these curated hikes was a no-brainer. Doubly so, the park being a two-minute walk from my childhood home . . . it would be fair to call this lake and its surroundings the most profoundly formative open world space of all the spaces I’ve internalized
DocSportello 05.21.23	The hike took place on a chilly but graciously wind-free November afternoon – quiet, partially cloudy, all the leaves well fallen and crunching underfoot, but not wet, not muddy. There were maybe thirty of us and the ranger. The three-hour hiking tour of Radnor Lake’s new and undeveloped zone would have been a revelation simply for the raw beauty of rolling hills seen from their own peaks; but the thing that elevated this pleasant walk through the woods into a scene I would refashion time and time again had nothing to do with the park’s immediate reality. It was something the ranger said. A detail, honestly. We were about twenty minutes from getting back to the parking lot and one of my fellow tourists asked the ranger if the park would be turning some of what we’d seen into public trails. A good question. The ranger didn’t know or wasn’t at liberty to satisfy the answer, but he did know this: a healthy ecosystem needs room to breathe, and the general rule of thumb in park management is that 60% of total land should be left to the land. It was matter-of-fact for the ranger, no frills, just reality, but even in the moments immediately after he’d answered the question I saw how the general principle of it echoed a truth about the health of a text, since a text is in many ways a perfectly flawed microcosm of an ecosystem proper. It suffices to say that this minor epiphany presented to me a range of exciting suggestions about the nature of language and the ways we should use it. When I have told this story in the past, however, I have not come to the conclusion that I will now: when you need to fashion a trail, sometimes it’s imperative that you flat-out ignore percentages, proportions, scale. Sometimes all that matters is moving dirt
DocSportello 05.21.23	a brief reflective transmission from home : )
pizzamachine 05.25.23	bump for no reason
DocSportello 05.25.23	hittin the road again tomorrow hmmm