Taos Easy

It was 3° F (-16 C) when I went to bed last night. The ice still covers most of the inside of the windows in the living room this morning at 8:00 a.m.

Just now when I went outside in my mangy bathrobe to pour the birds a couple scoops of sunflower seeds, my ancient L.L. Bean moosehide slippers squeaking on the snow, the sun was shining and the temperature was still in single digits. Looking across the valley, I saw a thin veil of wood stove smoke hanging low over the town. There was Native drumming coming from the next-door neighbor’s house. He’d already been outside early, singing his Hindu prayers:

“Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhmmmmm…”

I’d been awakened briefly in the pre-dawn gray by a pack of coyotes barking and howling outside. Squinting up at the window, I saw the cat jump down from the top of the dresser, where she’d been listening until they got too close! (When our previous cat would bug me, I’d threaten to smear him with bacon grease and stake him out on the mesa–so far the current version hasn’t provoked me yet.)

This is also Taos of course, I thought this morning, remembering the piece I wrote last night. Before going to sleep, I asked the Dream Maker to give me a clue to my perpetual dilemma about where to be and how to live. I don’t remember any specific dreams, but got out of bed relieved to find that we were still ensconced in the old adobe on the hillside. Why? I need my weirdo energy! I need it bad. And this is just the place to find it.

There has to be a higher concentration of egomaniacal dreamers and practicing weirdos here than anywhere else in the world. An exquisite, scary, and often enraging stupidity as well, from which an artist can derive much joy and pain. The contradictions are simply maddening, and the tension level can be excruciating. There was nothing like this in the sleepy, we’ve-always-done-it-this-way American colonial village on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where we came from. A sensible but culturally insular place, defiantly ignorant of everything else, in that self-satisfied way so much of the East Coast is. But it wasn’t CRAZY. No one stuck his neck out. There were two or three eccentrics–all dear friends of mine–but they were amateurs compared to the average lunatic in the supermarket here.

While I had no dream last night that made it into waking consciousness this morning, I did wake up thinking that a house with actual closets and a decent kitchen might make all the difference. Even more, instead of escaping to a life of ordinary comfort in a real American town, why not “escape” into a higher standard of living right here inside the infuriating Tri-Cultural Volcano of Doom? What a perfect time to go hardcore magic on my pitiful career, just as the global debt bomb explodes and even Methodists hang bankers from the lamposts! I’ll just be SUCCESSFUL, performance art for the next depression! Weird as hell, right? Entertain the masses, rake in the shekels. Why didn’t I think of this before?!?

Too much ice or mud to take a walk? Why, we’ll just spend the winter in a warmer place. At least a little financial cushion would let us get away from time to time. A wise man I know once said that the worst thing about living in Taos is that you never get to visit here. If we could take a road trip once in a while without slitting my wrists for Mr. Visa, what a wonderful world that would be. And then we’d get to come HOME! Leave the empty shopping malls and sensible folks behind. Fall back into the weirdness, maybe even with a closet! Who knows, maybe even curbs.

I can’t leave this place, at least not yet. I’m not nearly insane enough.

Related posts:

1. Taos Hard
2. Taos Rental Disconnect
3. Taos Winter Update
4. Taos Pueblo Christmas Eve
5. Taos Winter Update #2: More Wood Stove Talk