turkey creek 03.01.25

a national park

when me n’ bebo pulled up there were all these ladies dressed in black, and they were all holding white balloons. we were like “aw, birthday party,” but later on becca said they were memorializing a dead person. i don’t know anything about the death rituals of others. well, i know a few things.

after becca’s dad died we went to a funeral in a beautiful church at a monastery. one of his sons is a monk.
my dad’s funeral was also in a big church, but this was many years ago now (30), so i don’t remember many details. he was in the coffin and he was wearing a bandana, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a black denim vest. some woman asked me if i wanted to light a candle, and i told her yes.
i recall, maybe four years before that, attending my father’s father’s funeral. i was quite scared his corpse would bite me.

when my grandparents died, one shortly after the other, people were puzzled that they didn’t want anyone to do anything in the way of funeral.
when my mom died i told her church to do whatever they wanted, even though my mom didn’t want people to make a fuss. i think they made a remembrance bulletin board. i called my mom’s sister and told her my mom had died. she sounded kind of surprised. i’m not sure why, i’d told her a few weeks earlier that she was going to.
when my sister died i told the funeral home to send the ashes to her ex mother-in-law. they had more of a relationship than did my sister and i. i think my sister would have preferred if none of us knew, after all she kept it a secret. if the ex mother-in-law or husband had a funeral, or anything else, they didn’t tell me.

becca’s family had a kind of party to remember her dad. they had his home movies playing on the tv. there was a lot of food, and people i didn’t know.

i’m not sure if you’re supposed to let the remembrance :w balloons go. it makes sense that you are; that people would want to. i feel like they’d have the name of the deceased on them, and so, when let go, it’d be kinda symbolic of that person going to heaven, heaven having strong cultural associations with the sky.
i’m sorry to whomever is dead, and to the bereaved, but they shoulda held on to those balloons. i saw them in the tree branches, and caught on the sides of the creek. where was the ranger?

becca fell on her butt, and hit her wrist on her shiny metal apple-watch band. i only glanced away for one moment, and she went down. i should have caught her…
we went all around. the creek was very beautiful, and the rock formations were pretty rad as well. there was a part where i could go high, but let reg do it instead of me.
bebo almost went up, but came back after ascending three or four feet. then she sat in kinda muddy water and wouldn’t stop worrying abut her ass, askin’ if it looked wet.
i saw that someone from the deep past had carved their name in the rock. i blurred it out so they get no satisfaction from seeing it here, though they likely are dead. is carving in rocks a kind of death ritual?
maybe you’ll get some kinda idea about the beauty of it if you look at what follows? i didn’t ask becca’s permission to post her face-pic on the open web, so i’ve tried to preserve her anonymity:
reg walking
we eventually tired of being there. some said they were hungry. we left.