New Day on the Range

For the last two days, I’ve been high on air. And that’s not the only weirdness.

I’ve always had stuffy sinuses. I snore like a walrus. A while back someone pointed me to a utensil called a “neti pot,” basically a little pitcher that you use to pour warm salt water into one nostril and out the other.

“EEW, GROSS!”

And is it, sort of. But the idea of washing my nasal passages with good ole water seemed so simple and pure, not to mention cheap, that I knew I should try it. You have to do this over a sink and blow your nose a time or two, but does it ever do the trick. It felt like breathing was twice as easy afterwards. Free-flowing, like I hot-rodded my head.

Oxygen, chilluns! Here at 7,000 feet, the stuff is important. This part of the world has some of the cleanest air on the planet, too. I went out to get some firewood before noon: it was still way below freezing, with full sunshine and hardly any wind. Great chilled volumes of sharp dry air flowed in and out of my lungs. It was like electricity connecting me with all Creation, as if I could taste the clean, white snow and damp piñon with my whole body. My engine ran better. I had power to spare. But that’s not all.

I think I’m here now.

This is really big and changes everything. Yesterday when I walked to the mailbox, I didn’t think of any other life or place and just walked to the mailbox… It was so incredible. People like me never want to be tied down and always have an “out” down deep or churning in their preoccupations. But this time I just walked to the freaking mailbox, listening to the sound my shoes made crunching on the snow, and breathing that cold dry New Mexico air that gets you stoned. What? NEW MEXICO?! Yes, I’m here. I made it, I’m here, and it only took me 10 years after we arrived.

We’re living in the mountains. There are no malls or freeways anywhere. The air would be illegal most places. There are Indians and bears and shit. I’m healthy. [inhale, exhale] All our food is organic. I might fall down on the ice and kill myself, but the muddy roads keep out the riff-raff, and I won’t get run over by a bus. Just a few miles in most directions takes me into the wilderness or something close to it. I can take jaw-dropping photos 10 steps out the front door. My wife hasn’t left me yet. (She goes out and buys me steaks and tequila while I play on the computer or shovel snow off the roof.) Besides melting snow leaking into the kitchen and no motorcycle, what exactly is wrong with this picture?

Dammit, this is fun.

If we don’t get a blizzard Thursday night like we’re supposed to, I’m going to go drink Stolichnaya and talk fake Russian with a crazy musician buddy of mine. He’s got this comrade thing going and wants us both to put on big overcoats and sit in the snow with a bottle. A storm would be appropriate, then. So would freezing into wolfbait trying to get there.

(This door will open now. I have my hand on the knob.)

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