Some people stroll...

...through cemeteries rationally and socially on late Sunday or Sabbath afternoons in midsummer. They are not of my eccentric tribe.

I remember when I was a boy, walking through a particular cemetery on late Sunday afternoons in midsummer. That space of the dead generated in me a kind of muted ecstasy. The strangeness of it had a texture of the infinite (a poetic, not religious infinity). It opened up a region or vortex of delectable, macabre melancholy.

That haze of atmosphere mixed with a smell of moody grass.

The experience was distinct from any mournful connection to dead relatives there, though maybe that played a role subconsciously. It was more about time suddenly felt as an alien substance, as an exception to an unknown rule, as a something freakish and woven of the sublime -- sublime in the sense of beautiful or wondrous terror.

Perhaps those early-in-life, late Sunday afternoons of strolling through a cemetery contributed to my becoming an outsider being.

It's just a thought. I'm just having a moment of questionable nostalgia.