<< in and out of our argument, a butterfly >>

wild things live in the valley around goreme. there are these tiny little lizards that you never see -- you just see hear the flit of their tails as they disappear from your sight. there are wild pigeons that fly in formation. there are burrows everywhere. along the side of the trail i saw a cluster of downwhite feathers on the ground where a fat bird had been eaten. on the horizon i saw a dog with light fur but a dark nose and paws -- like you'd imagine a fox to be, dark tail. and deep clawmark tracks cut into the sand, footprints pressed in deeper than mine.

the whole area around goreme is a national park with hiking trails marked, and many more that are not. you can walk as far as you please, which i like. the only people i saw in the valley were turkish women in flowing clothes gathering herbs and pruning trees with white petals, same white petals as i saw at sundance and that get _everywhere, and one man leaning on a pitchfork.

there are two kinds of soil in the valley, soft sandy stuff that moves under your feet with each step and rises up behind you in tufts, and harder chalky stuff. every year the rain washes away more of the sand, exposing more and more of the hard rock that now rises up in towers that drip down at the top, rolling and flowing like magic mushrooms
in the valley, up and down, floop, your eye tracing up and down, never resting.

everywhere you look you can see doors and windows and steps and walls from where people have dug houses into the mushroom formations.

there are houses impossibly high up the rock chimneys, sometimes a hundred feet up. these have had to be abandoned. the valley erodes every year: gradually it lowers so much that it becomes impossible to climb up into existing houses, so people move their houses lower down. you can see doors and windows left behind all the way up the rock spires.

there is a lot of dust in the air here. the valley seems to say: that nothing lasts. there are white and yellow butterflies.

for supper i had guiltless raw honeycomb from the farmer's market, where men run their fingers right through big tubs of dried beans to check their texture -- a little booth selling soldered copper pots for boiling coffee, another selling bananas and tomatoes, another pistachios and salty nuts, another packages of tea from the supermarket.

at present sitting in the common area of the Rock Valley Pension where i am staying in goreme. in the air is the smokey apple smell of a nargileh. two lithuanian girls are sharing it as they work their way through a bottle of wine. there is an empty foil chocolate wrapper on the table in front of them. it is me and another boy who poke at laptops. the girls talk quickly. bubbles sound through their waterpipe. they are getting more and more emphatic with their gestures and they are talking with more and more energy. they look each other directly in the eye. none of the boys makes that kind of eye contact with them. they toss in not a word of turkish, nor english.

the TV over the clock is tuned to turkish MTV. they are playing Moby.

why does my heart feel so bad?
why does my soul feel so bad?

yesterday i felt down for sure. today, less so. now playing: paris hilton's latest single.