First I got up.
That was amazing but also a mistake, because my wife and I were awake at the same time and decided to do something constructive, namely peruse the entire Taos County MLS listings online for anything under $200K. That’s the upper limit of what we can afford (in theory). Maybe three of the 100 listings we found were habitable, and we made plans to drive by one of them after supper.
This took up most of the morning. In the afternoon, the Horse Fly publisher told me my column for April wasn’t a “good fit” for that issue and turned it down. I had an idiot writer hissy-fit but decided to move on and called my dentist, who was supposed to let me know a couple of days ago about a consultation with a root canal specialist in Santa Fe. [crickets...] I’ve been on this lovely $82 worth of antibiotics with “rarely fatal” side effects since March 30th, and it’s a good thing I called, because it seems I needed to make an appointment with the Santa Fe guy before the pills run out. Amazingly, the Santa Fe people found a slot for me on Monday morning. I’m to have a “re-treat,” which means a special do-over on the root canal. First they said it would cost a little over $1,700. Ten minutes later, someone re-calculated and told me I’d only have to pay $1,534 on top of the $2,100 the previous root canal, post, and crown on the same tooth had cost in January. Yes, now I think I’m officially tired of this. (There goes the new computer I won’t be buying for a while.)
By this time I was feeling the weight of it all and saw a dove outside on the bird feeding platform, looking for seeds. The poor guy, I thought, and instantly felt better, because I knew I could drive my truck to Walmart and buy a bag of sunflower seeds. This is America, after all.
On the way to Walmart, a slouching weirdo in a smoke-belching ‘61 Falcon station wagon with no shocks (I kid you not) pulled out from a side road, swerved drunkenly back and forth over two lanes and then decided on the fast one, motoring along at 15 mph under the speed limit. That was too much for the macho trucker on my right, who backed off the throttle and let the weirdo own the highway until he finally turned off. Inside Walmart, I found my birdseed and got in line to pay. The man having his merchandise rung up looked like he juggled steers for fun. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat, dirty boots and jeans, and had a huge belly bulging out of a bright red T-shirt that loomed over his giant Western belt buckle. I decided to let him be.
The cashier took another ten minutes sorting through the three dozen cans of Coleman’s stove fuel, cartons of canned soup, a dozen cigarette lighters, and other goodies the fellow was obviously taking to his moose ranch in Alberta, and then it turned out that he couldn’t pay. Not with the credit card he tried first, at any rate. They let him write a check, but then that needed several levels of approval, By this time the 25-pound sack of seeds was getting heavy on my shoulder, so I laid it on the end of the checkout counter.
There was only one person ahead of me now, a short little granny-lady buying a few bottles of soda. “Two sixty-seven,” the cashier said to her. Humming softly to herself, she slowly unzipped a pocket on her purse and carefully extracted a rolled-up wad of paper money and grocery lists held together by a rubber band. Eventually she extracted a five-dollar bill and handed it to the man, putting the roll back into her purse. When he handed her the change, two dollar bills and some coins — you know how this ends, right? — she once again extracted the roll of money and added the dollar bills to it… This took some time, as they had to be folded up just so, but she kept at at, humming all the while, and in no more time than it takes to clean a bathtub with a toothbrush got everything packed back inside her purse. In the middle of this, the cashier, either careless or overcome with frustration, turned on the belt and sent my bag of sunflower seeds whizzing right at the woman, who was leaning over the counter at that point, blissfully unaware of any danger. Yikes! Somehow I snatched the sack out of the way at just the last second, and disaster was averted. I still think that cashier knew just what he was doing, though.
I did get home to feed the doves, and after supper my sweetie and I drove out to Golondrinas Road to look at the house we’d seen advertised online. (Do not go out to Golondrinas Road. If you like bare concrete stucco Mad Max forts w/pit bulls and also hate your tires, you might dig the area, but otherwise, forget it.) On the way home, I heard my wife grinding her teeth and smelled the smoke coming out of her ears. She was probably ready to decamp for somewhere with maple trees and painted houses, and frankly, I don’t blame her.
The amazing part of all this? You didn’t hear about me on CNN. What’s more, Mr. Visa will be paying for my teeth, and I don’t care. The rocks will stop bouncing off my head some day, and then I’ll grab a few to throw right back. If we don’t find a place to live, my wife will leave me, and I can be a beach bum in Belize.
There’s all kinds of ways to play this thing, just watch!
Related posts:
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Fer cryin’ out loud John, now you’ve gone and provoked a response out of this silent reader and … and … how the heck am I supposed to get this glop of oatmeal off the keyboard!? You’re in rare form today. Love it – probably more than you do.
John
Good! I’d posted a bunch of whiny, self-defining stuff about Taos real estate earlier and deleted it. This post came later, when I was obviously more sane.
I’m sure I’m an idiot for even mentioning this, but why not look in Alamosa or someplace closer to where your sweetie is working? There are just as many spiritual mountain places in Colorado as in New Mexico. It sounds like the Taos real estate market is living in an alternate reality and doesn’t deserve to have any of its properties sold or rented. I live in a horrendously expensive resort area in Colorado which has an overinflated idea of its worth but I live in “subsidized” housing. Fancy name for owned by the town and rented way below market because the worker bees can’t afford anything else. I got tired of making the 60+ mile commute in the company shuttle van every day so I moved and now my marriage is kaput. The only decent jobs in this whole area of southwestern Colorado are right here in the resort area.
{writer now ducking from rotten veggies thrown by blog writer at the idea of leaving Taos}
a) No, you’re not an idiot!
b) My sweetie was only working in Alamosa for the fall semester.
She misses the professional contacts and networking she had there, not to mention the money.
c) I’m very sorry your marriage is kaput. Sometimes the kaput-making stuff is lying there just under the surface until something brings it out. My own marriage was very nearly kaput for the longest time after we moved out here!
d) You’re quite right about Taos real estate, and for that and other reasons (like missing water and tall leafy trees), we may at any given moment bust outa here, even after 10 years. It’s just that kind of place, very enticing and very, VERY difficult. So the idea of leaving isn’t one to take offense at at all. I don’t know anyone who’s moved here who doesn’t entertain that thought from time to time or carry it around like a burr under their saddle.
In many ways, if I had my druthers, I’d consider moving back to Maryland, if only for the water access. But the other aspects of “going back” are psychically corrosive and difficult to overcome, not to mention that we’d have even fewer resources than we do now. I would much rather either achieve a state of equilibrium right here or else move to someplace I’ve never been before that’s also greener and wetter. The odd thing is that I love the dryness of the air! I just miss paddling around in my (now departed) kayak and exploring.
OF COURSE Taos exists in an alternate reality! from following your adventures over the past decade that seemes to be the very definition of the place
. and i think that’s part of the problem with it’s housing market: Taos is such a unique, different, on-the-edge kind of place any housing should be built in harmony with the natural environment and crazy vibe of the place; instead people seemed to have just attempted to transplant generic american suburbia there and impose that kind of sickening normality into an area where it absolutely does not belong (like trying to perform a skin graft with chain mail).
). unfortunately even in the tanking real estate market this area is still way overpriced. but you never know – maybe you could find that magic insider special place you’ve been looking for out here somewhere.
and don’t go back to maryland…. come out here to cali!!!! you’d love the bay area (well, aspects of it anyway; a lot about it would probably drive you as crazy as me!
Ya know,prof John, the Best antibiotics are garlic& oil of oregano ,copious amounts of ascorbic acid[grams],a pinch of colloidial silver & even then it’d cost less than $50&last over a month,all the while slaying the deadly bugs [wch,btw,have developed a resistance to those over-priced pharma pills,wch kill Good bacteria as well&destroy the immune system]
BEWARE
-if You continue this root canal madness You will pay dearly healthwise: i’vebeenthere
We,Yr devoted readers, want You around for a long time…
Number 6, I hear you. I only have a little experience with the Pacific Ocean, and I could use some more.
Dar, of course, you believe that conventional antibiotics and root canal therapy will cost one dearly, and so it does.
But I doubt that the human body/soul continuum is as fragile as you make it out to be. In fact, once a very long time ago I was in the audience listening to a great Hindu spiritual teacher. Naturally one of the questions was about diet, and what one should eat. Amazingly to me at the time, he said, “It doesn’t matter at all! Eat whatever you want!” Much later, I understood: we’re all different. He was speaking to a Western audience with no tradition of vegetarianism. What one believes (or inherits as a belief) is all-important.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, truly, and I’m delighted to have you as a longtime reader. I have to say, though, that TELLING someone he’ll “pay dearly healthwise” seems to be the wrong thing to do. It sets up a steady stream of negative energy coming from yourself directed at me and anyone else who may be contemplating such treatment and works against healing, frankly. It’s like negative prayer, or praying for someone to die.
As for your natural antibiotic suggestions, those are actually no doubt very good. I was however in a severe medical crisis and experiencing excruciating pain, with infection beginning to spread throughout the bones of my skull. In that condition, to do anything else but take my dentist’s advice would have been truly insane. Not the time to experiment with alternatives, I needed to kill the bug RIGHT NOW.
Put me on a desert island with the garlic oil and a hot tooth, and I’ll drink the stuff until it comes out of my ears.
if you need to get away for a week or two and you’re ever up for a road trip you’re always welcome to come out here and hang and take a tour of the bay area. yeah there’s a lot of overdeveloped civilization here but there are also a lot of pockets of Pure Nature still around to enjoy. (and San Francisco will always be San Francisco, if you know what i mean ^_^ )
and “dar” needs to get off his fundamentalist high horse and stop being so dictatorial, judgmental and absolutist. you’re right about the negative vibe he projects; i can feel it just reading his comments (and i bet a lot of his own health issues were brought on by his own negativist attitude and mental state – the map is not the territory, and one creates the reality they choose (usually unconsciously) to experience). if it works (?) for him fine, whatever, but he has NO right to impose his view on anyone else, however justified he may feel.
John,
Single malt, that’ll fix some things & you won’t care about those it doesn’t.
Wow! Comments about the comments. Really starting to look like a blog here.
Well, where to start?
Number 6: dar is a strong-minded individual who’s been reading my stuff, sending me cool links, and frequently telling me what to do for years. Some of the time he’s stunningly on the mark. The rest of the time, I try not to get riled, ’cause he means well, I’m sure. Telling me I’m gonna die because of measures I’ve taken to alleviate the godawful pain and swelling is getting on my nerves — and that has worked just fine so far — but all God’s chillun got shoes, so what’s a man supposed to do?
GD! GD!!!! How very cool to hear from you. And you’re right about the single malt. I tend to go with tequila and whatever else may be available, including a large wooden mallet to the head.
robbo: what’s the matter with you, you haven’t offended anyone yet! C’mon, generate some traffic here.
i know, john. and i debated even bothering to write that post. but it proves your point about projecting negative energy – dar’s judgmental arrogance just got me so riled i couldn’t help responding in kind (especially since absolutist fundamentalism of any kind always bugs me). i hate being drawn in by that kind of dark side of the force nonsense (but as you know very well i’ve been stuck on the dark side a lot these days due to circumstances beyond my control).
robbo: hell yeah! let’s start a full-on flame war!!! or at least a good vicious “yo’ mama so…” contest
I realize I have a lot of nerve giving you advice on where to live. I can no more leave the mountains than my soon to be ex-husband can be happy outside of Texas. So, he is going to Texas and I am staying in the mountains. I grew up in Roswell, so I have spent many years under the spell of a New Mexico sky and the sacred mountains. Santa Fe causes me to feel like I’m in the center of a magical place. I spent a weekend last month in Mesa Verde, communing with the Ancient Ones. What a peaceful place. Million dollars views on a barely living wage. I just empathize with your sweetie and know a bit about her frustrations.
General Notice: Appropos of nothing in particular, comment edit function is now enabled for 30 minutes after posting. I of course can edit my own comments or yours at will.
And before anyone asks, no, I have never edited a visitor’s comment.
Mtnred: Your comments are perfectly fine! Relax.
I’ll bet you do. She deserves attention, a decent place to live, and at least a little more freedom from worry than she has now. The two of us deserve a home.
I feel the same way that you do about New Mexico. And once a person has felt something like that, almost any other place is just pretending. That’s why I will move heaven and earth to make things work right here, of course. If I can just get us a little slack, so we can travel some more. If I left the mountains for good, I would always miss them.
The truth about the water back in MD is that were I ever to plonk myself down in the Chester River again, I’m sure I would say, “Hey, I know this place!” and then that would be that. Been there, etc. For all I loved it, I mean. I would feel like I was in a trap. That’s exactly what happened when we went back in 2001, I think it was. Having “escaped,” then, it wouldn’t do to go back. Forward is the only way.