Mein Phone Call mit Paz

That comes later, but it comes, a late night phone call from a crazy Swiss artist. Hang in there, you’ll see. First, though (and really after), my lovely Taos-tense day. (This is no place to relax.)

You already know about the screws. Well, everything else was fabulous. In the bright sun at 7,000 feet with no wind, I could walk around outdoors without a jacket at 40 degrees. Standing outside my wife’s studio, I could see for 80 miles out toward the west. Hot damn and all that! The Pedernal, some 70 miles distant, stood out clear and sharp. (I believe the phrase is “etched against the sky,” but I never use clichés.) Views are important, as I told my wife. They pull you into union with the cosmos. Put me in a little box that looks out on a fence, and I might as well be dead. I’m in NEW MEXICO. There are THINGS here.

And then I came home and made the evil mistake of reading about the “health care” bill again. The fundamental point here is that there’s no health and no care in it. They’re going to make you buy shitty, expensive insurance if you don’t already have it, and if you do, there’s no relief, no public choice that means a damn. The ban on excluding coverage for pre-existing conditions doesn’t go into effect for FOUR WHOLE YEARS. Whom are they kidding? Except they’re not, madness in the land… The crazies are right, just misinformed: not Nazi death camps for your granny, but corporate serfdom for us all. We vote people into office, and they work for someone else. That’s like calling a cop and he rapes your wife.

All right, so this is clearly out of control, just like my 88-year-old mother. Someone told me this can happen at the end of a life, these monsters coming out. That makes sense to me, an end-of-life, let’s-trash-the-place-before-we-go wild party of everything that was held in check before. It made me think she really might be going this time, although it’s all a freaking mystery and no one ever knows, and I felt a compulsion to remember something good. It’s like her spirit’s leaving and needs all its parts back for the journey: “Hey, wait a minute, don’t want to forget this!”

It’s the same with me in another way, experiencing a plague of truth and revelation as the fog lifts. Maybe the country’s in the same condition. Maybe something old is dying, and this is what we get, howling banshee high-tech mass murder, enslavement, bullshit and breakdown at the end. Maybe something REALLY SLICK is just around the corner, though!

So last night at around 11:00 P.M. the phone rings, and it’s my psychoanalyst’s ex-husband on the line from Zurich. Oh yes. He’s an artist, a real one, and that’s not something I’d wish on a dog, but don’t forget that backwards that spells “god.” Plus, remember that my cell phone’s ringtone is a bull elk mating call. (None of this is accidental, surely.)

But why???

In halting but better English than half of America speaks (and certainly with bigger words) or else in rapid German I could barely understand, he wanted to tell me what an important major artist I was and that he hoped I knew that. The adjectives were lavish. He thanked me for my writing and my photos. He said people all over the world (?) were reading my work, that I should come to Europe and give readings, and that I would do quite well there. He wants to give me money but doesn’t have any. He says he wants to introduce me to people I won’t understand. A PHONE CALL FROM SWITZERLAND, HEY! Okay, he may be crazy but so am I, so everything fits.

[pause...]

Maybe Earth get phone call from Arcturus. Me likee!

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