In the last 90 minutes, we’ve had clear blue skies, a blinding snowfall, sunshine with snow, and now mostly clouds–an appropriate place for someone who feels so different from one day to the next.

Yesterday an email message from a reader made my day:

Unfortunately my wife decided to divorce me if I move from Berkeley to Taos and the decision has been made. Plates have been broken, pictures torn apart, bank accounts are separated. She read your saga…

Now the question is this: Don’t you want to start a “lovebird connection service” in your site so I can get to Taos, and find a beautiful mate even before I get there? That would be awesome. Someone smart, politically correct, dark skin, black hair and doesn’t need to be a virgin.

Here I go: Brazilian, 50, very good shape, 175 lbs- 5′ 10″, business school, Brazilian jazz guitarist/singer/composer, trotskyite, atheist, honest, sexually active, broke, great cook, long brown hair, trilingual, plus some other great qualities. The victim just has to google _________ or my Brazilian jazz band ________.

Give me permission, amigo, and I’ll fill in those blanks. Always glad to help a fellow cliff diver! (Watch out, though: around here, holding your wallet while you jump is a cottage industry.)

[Excuse me, momentarily distracted by the above.]

Judging from his request, he won’t mind my quoting his email–which I dig for the attitude–and it sounds like we have a few things in common. Recklessness, perhaps. However, as I replied immediately (so as to catch him in time), “Remarkable. I’ll get back to you. But have you ever BEEN here???”

Compassion swells my high desert heart, because besides no ocean, no jobs, crappy expensive housing, and a level of weirdness that blots out the entire known world, I am reliably informed that most single women in Taos are lesbians!–the men, too, for that matter. I think it is the altitude. In any case, I look forward to his arrival and can point him toward a few lunatic guitarists or a bus. Heck, since he’s broke now, it’s like he’s already here. Oh, I kill myself. Fortunately, it is a good day to die.

None of this is my fault, you understand. Just like Obama, the inexplicable dearth of good American punk, and TEOTWAWKI. The only thing is, most people move here first and then get divorced. Oh well. But if that mountain calls, you’re just completely fucked, and something’s bound to happen. That’s the long and the short of it. Get ready, though: you might as well fall out of a plane over Uzbekistan, albeit one with a damned Appleby’s.

And now, back to grooving on clouds…

Post from: FarrFeed

Sunday El Norte Report!

Related posts:

1. El Norte Report: More Changes
2. Report: First Rehearsal

First the breathing:

Ever since I started pouring warm salt water into my nose with the Neti pot, it’s like I’m finally breathing through the goddamned thing. My nose, not the pot. (I must have been stopped up for decades.) Tonight I told my wife, “Hey wow, I can actually take a deep breath through my nose!” She looked at me like I’d just told her the sky was blue for the tenth time today. It had been a long few hours with me.

“That’s how I always take a deep breath,” she said after a bewildered pause.

“Really?” I replied, wondering if all Iowa girls did this. Probably, I thought. “Whenever someone tells me to ‘take a deep breath,’ I almost always breathe in through my mouth,” I said. ” Like this!” Whereupon I gave a fair impression of a drowning man about to be pulled under by a shark.

She was not impressed.

Perhaps it was the timing. I’d just finished a long speech–with many great pauses that made her bang her head against the bar–about an astounding discovey of mine involving Web 2.0, social networking, and how I’ve been doing everything completely wrong. Besides the fact that she knew little of the subject, epiphanies involving future hallelujahs were a specialty of mine and wearing rather thin. “Isn’t there someone else you could talk to about this?!?” she pleaded, knowing that she couldn’t win: “Oh all right, go on…”

And this was good. In the course of trying to explain what I was thinking, it came together much more clearly in my mind. I immediately thought of an obscure metaphor that described my insight perfectly and left three sentences hanging unfinished in mid-air to pursue an entirely different line of exposition.

(This was bad.)

“AAAGHH!!”

But I persisted, for I knew the end was near. The reason it had taken me so long to recognize how the rest of the world did things in this new digitally connected world of ours and everywhere else, I went on, was because of my dysfunctional socialization at the hands of neurotically depressed farm animals who never lived in the same place longer than six months. To wit, I didn’t understand what “social” meant and only knew how to be a stupid fucking jerk. She looked at me like I had less sense than a stump.

“And this is NEWS to you??” she retorted, with that air of female finality that makes men shut up and kill bears. I noticed her wine glass was empty and decided to back off.

“Better late than never!” I said, knowing that was true, feeling nailed but confident and brother to all manly men…

This settling back into my body reassured her, and she went off to cook the organic basil chicken sausages. I had a little more tequila and found an Internet radio station from Algiers. The air was filled with wailing, drums, and ululation. I meditated on my sins.

Always crowing like a rooster, putting on a show and waiting hungrily for my reward. This is what you do outside of confidence, yelping in the void. Who knew anyone actually needed friends and gained from helping others? Always the last to know, it seems. My tombstone should probably read, “Am I dead yet?”

So much work to do, but oxygen to spare.

Post from: FarrFeed

The Discovery of Air

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It’s time for another one of these.

No story this time, just something to enjoy. This is a telephoto view of part of the Talpa valley, on the other side of the Rio Grande del Rancho, with the usual splendor in the background. I took this about three weeks ago. A wider view would the town of Taos just a short distance to the west.

Notice anything? Yup. This is actually a tighter view of the same scene in the giant FotoFeed thumbnail at the top of the sidebars. If you look again, you can almost match the contour of the snowy ridge with the bottom left part of the same feature in the smaller photo.

Post from: FarrFeed

Take a Break

Related posts:

1. FotoFeed News
2. Visitor Alert: FotoFeed!
3. Never a Break

If I’d had a blog in ‘99, this would have been posted on it. Originally a rejected magazine article submission, what we have here should really be considered part of the never-finished epic YELLOWHAMMER FARM: An Autobiographical Trip from the ’60s to the Ozarks, which I hope to give you at least a taste of as part of the ongoing Digital Potlatch. The actual Yellowhammer saga as written so far is a glorious smorgasbord of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Now that I’m an official goddamn tribal elder, it’s way overdue for completion and unveiling. Pray for me.

The following piece isn’t part of the book, but what the hell. It’s a great true story, and I hope it rings a bell or two for you. Remember, this was written in ‘99, before we moved to New Mexico. To my knowledge, this version of the tale has never been seen online before. As a special treat, I’m running a long-ago banner ad for the serialized ebook version of Yellowhammer Farm just below, assuming animated GIFs still work.

This is over 2,000 words. You’ll have to read all the way to the end to find out what happened when the Arkansas state troopers invaded, and just how they knew about us, too. There’s even a northern New Mexico connection, so relax and enjoy!

My Daddy Knowed Who They Was

[1999]

We’re moving to New Mexico with a few boxes of books, three computers, and a cat. My wife has quit the job that’s supported us for twenty years. We have little money, no jobs waiting for us, and I’m listening to voices in my head. The spirits say it’s time to pack up and go, and I’m in no position to argue.

(“It is a good day to die!”)

Much about this strongly suggests a relationship to my back-to-the-land adventures from almost 30 years ago, a trip that has never ended. A certain drama that took place at Yellowhammer Farm in northwest Arkansas in the summer of 1971 even had a bizarre New Mexico connection. It happened on a warm summer night, in a usually calm and peaceful valley, amidst great weirdness and terror, and it all had to do with LIFE Magazine and the Hog Farm…

Our 170 acres of Arkansas woods was bought and paid for at $50 an acre. Later we learned that people told jokes about us up and down the valley: something about “rich hippies from Texas” who paid way too much for land worth no more than $25 or $30 an acre, the going local rate for property this far back in the hills. A creek shown on most maps as “Painter Creek” ran north and south through the valley. “Painter” is however an understandable misspelling of what is actually Ozark dialect for “panther” (pronounced “pain-ter”) or mountain lion. On at least one map I’ve seen since, the tiny blue line is more properly designated “Panther Creek.” A neighbor said that “Panther Creek roars from end to end,” when asked how he knew what we had paid!

This same neighbor, a tall quiet-spoken farmer and part-time moonshiner named Hankins, drifted into our open-air kitchen in the woods one Sunday morning on a big grey horse while we were polishing off a rare communal breakfast. I say “drifted” because that’s just what he did: we never heard a sound, not even a twig snapping, but all at once there he was, not six feet away. This was his way of meeting (and checking up on) his new neighbors. We later realized with considerable alarm that he could have been watching us for weeks. Not that we had anything terrible to hide, just a great deal of casual nudity, which never seemed quite so casual after that.

We had no drugs at all except for coffee and a bottle of awful muscatel I bought but couldn’t finish. We did have five or six tiny marijuana plants, no more than three inches high, lovingly grown from seed and growing in small clay pots. This had more to do with religious conviction than anything else. We were doing what we believed in, but none of us had ever grown dope before. As it turned out, the collection of seedlings would never be anything more than that, but we carefully protected the little pot plants from deer and rabbits and dreamed of the day when we would have all we wanted.

Earlier that spring around Easter, one of the group, a wonderfully crazy artist brother of an old girlfriend, made his way up to the land and became the first one to actually build a place to live. I should say “dig” a place to live, because he excavated a long deep pit by hand and lined it with big flat rocks, then covered the whole thing over with a sloping tin roof. You had to jump down into a hole and then lift a plastic flap to enter, and once inside it was surprisingly cozy. At one end he had constructed a sleeping platform, and at the other end sat an old woodstove used for heating and cooking. There was plenty of light from the plastic-covered eaves, and the only thing wrong with his design was not discovered until after a long period of heavy rain.

This resourceful individual had moved up early in the spring in order to put in a garden that would feed the rest of us. It was a holy duty, which he took very seriously. By the time I arrived in late May there were already plenty of radishes and salad greens, and the other vegetables were coming along nicely. He had located the garden in the flattest spot he could find, about 20 or 30 yards farther up the hill, some distance from our kitchen area. The garden area happened to be alongside the old road (“Yellowhammer Road”) that we thought of as our driveway, coming as it did up from the “main road,” also unimproved, that led fifteen miles in either direction to the nearest paved highway. But the most singular feature of this artist’s garden was its shape: he had marked it out in a giant circle, with the different plantings occupying various pie-shaped wedges. I thought this was novel and possibly even healthily spiritual, and I was happy to weed and dig in the early summer sun wearing nothing but shoes and a hat, as was our custom…

During these first few months we lived fairly isolated from the surrounding communities. We were mostly living off supplies that we had brought with us or food from the garden, and no one had started any more construction projects, so there was little need to venture into town. Aside from the occasional carload of high school boys making the noisy, suspension-battering run up Yellowhammer Road to catch a glimpse of naked hippie women, we had few visitors. Life settled into a pleasant pattern of extended camping-out and bathing in the creek. We gave no thought to possible dangers, least of all to the infamous Arkansas state troopers of the day, feared in rural areas of the state because they operated with near impunity.

No one, especially a black man or an out-of-state driver, could count on any kind of constitutional protections when dealing with an Arkansas trooper. People could be taken into custody and never seen again. I had learned early on to recognize the big blue Plymouths and to stay out of their way. In the isolated part of the Ozarks where we now lived, there wasn’t a black person to be seen anywhere, which meant that “Texas hippies” could easily find themselves in danger of becoming substitute prey.

What did “hippie” mean, anyway? To me it was like belonging to a tribe. Our group consisted of a lawyer, an elementary school teacher, a junior college instructor, a dancer, and an artist. We were all in our mid-twenties and between us had seven college degrees. But we lived on the land, wore our hair long, went naked, and would have smoked dope if we had had any, so “hippies” we surely were to most folks. But the real revelation was yet to come.

One warm, quiet, partly moonlit night in June, very late, I sat up in my tent with a start: something far away had made a popping sound. The air was very still and calm as I listened more intently, wide awake now. There it was again: “pop,” or was it “crunch”? That was it! The sound of rocks being squeezed out from under a rolling car tire, quite some distance away, but not like the normal tires-on-gravel sound: this was slow enough to hear the individual stones, one at a time. Someone in a vehicle was creeping along very slowly, more slowly than I would ever expect, unless — oh no!

I was standing up now, my heart pounding. I stepped outside into the night and listened again: yes, definitely the sound of a car or truck, moving along the main road just south of our mailbox and Yellowhammer Road, about half a mile away. In a moment or two it would pass our road and continue its way north. I could hear a motor now… I began walking toward the sound in the dim moonlight. By the time I got to where I could look down onto our road, whoever it was should have passed the turnoff and all would be still again. But wait, what was that? “Pop-crunch-pop” even louder now, coming up Yellowhammer Road at two o’clock in morning! What could I do? I had to look. I found a spot just above the road and looked down the hill: once my eyes adjusted there was just enough light to make out the dark form of a big sedan with no lights creeping oh so slowly in my direction, one pebble at a time…

My God! I was frozen in place. The warm, still summer night was charged with absolute terror, at least for me, hiding behind a tree. All I could do was watch as what was now obviously a police car of some sort slowly approached a lane that would bring it right into the clearing in front of my tent. Suddenly I had a stupidly happy thought: maybe it was just the sheriff, checking up on us. He’d been around once before and seemed friendly enough, if a bit suspicious. Please God, let it be the sheriff, I thought. The car was almost at the lane! As it passed through a patch of moonlight just below me I could clearly see the big — blue — PLYMOUTH! An Arkansas state trooper!

At that exact moment I died — and the car rolled past the lane, continuing up Yellowhammer Road! I wheeled around, sprinted breathlessly back to my tent for a flashlight, and ran like hell over to where our few tiny marijuana plants were hidden. I hissed a warning to a couple of the others who had just been awakened by my hysterical dash, grabbed the plants, and took off up the mountain, running along the woods by an old fenceline that marked our boundary. Frantically, by leaps and bounds, clutching my armload of little clay pots, I climbed up to the end of the property and kept on going at least another eighth of a mile into the woods — finally I stopped and hid the plants behind a log. But what if someone had followed me? For the first time since I had recognized the big blue car, I stood and listened: nothing but stillness and a far-off night bird of some kind. I slowly and cautiously made my way back to camp, still terribly afraid and not knowing if anything else had happened while I’d been getting rid of the evidence.

As it turned out, nothing of consequence had occurred. The trooper must have gone up the road to where our garden was and taken a look around, because the next morning we found tire tracks inside the garden area. But that was all, nothing more. No one had been arrested or even hassled. This was the South, after all, and even an Arkansas trooper could tell the difference between cannabis and okra! After a day or two I retrieved the little pot plants from the woods. We planted them in a specially-prepared plot, where they were promptly eaten by rabbits, we figured.

About a month later, still very nervous at the sight of any kind of blue car, a friend and I stopped for lunch at a little gas station cafe back in the boonies, on the way home from a rare expedition into Fayetteville. The young boy behind the counter, finding himself alone in the empty cafe with a couple of obvious weirdos, immediately wanted to know if we knew anything about “those hippies” over toward Patrick.

We allowed as how we did, but before we could decide how much more to reveal, he astonished us by reaching under the counter and pulling out a recent copy of LIFE magazine with a cover story about hippy communes. “My daddy knowed who they was,” he said proudly, pointing to a picture of members of the Hog Farm commune working in — my God, a circular garden! Somebody, Hankins perhaps, had told his father about our own circle-shaped garden, and that was all it took to send a state trooper up our road in the middle of the night!

Post from: FarrFeed

Yellowhammer Farm Hippie Special! “My Daddy Knowed Who They Was”

Related posts:

1. One Fine Night in Fayetteville
2. Eco-Terror on the Mesa, or Watch Out, the Hippie Has a Gun!

This won’t make sense to the masses, ’cause it’s an inside joke in the Mac community. Knowing German makes me strain to understand the actual dialogue, which is pretty intense, and that kind of gets in the way of the comedy for me. But check it out in any case, and see further below for a link to where this iPad thing is really headed…

And now read this: “We Have Seen The Amazing Future Of Apple’s iPad And This Is It,” at BusinessInsider.com. Sounds about right to me! (Yes, I want one.)

Post from: FarrFeed

Hitler & the iPad

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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.)

Post from: FarrFeed

New Day on the Range

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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.

Post from: FarrFeed

Taos Easy

Related posts:

1. Taos Hard
2. Taos Rental Disconnect
3. Taos Winter Update #2: More Wood Stove Talk

“I know you like to be scared,” she said, “but I don’t!”

She went on to share what she called a “radical thought.” As I listened, I thought, good Lord, has she been reading my blog? Because what she told me wasn’t radical at all and echoed what I’d been wondering lately, too–namely, what about living someplace physically easier? We’d just come back from a walk, or rather, a slog through foot-deep snow halfway up the mesa and back. She didn’t like how difficult and slippery it was, how cold, and how she couldn’t appreciate the scenery. It was a beautiful day, all right, and I knew what she meant: you have to watch where you put your foot down, every step, even when there isn’t any snow. Now there is, though. The stuff that fell the other day will be here for weeks and weeks, and walking on it compresses it to solid ice. Just walking to the mailbox can be deadly.

That’s the nature of living in the mountains, of course, and especially these parts. Taos is not a walking town. If it isn’t snow, it’s mud, or rocks, and every 30 yards another snarling dog. We’d avoid most of that by living downtown–the only place you’ll find a sidewalk– instead of on the periphery, but then why live in New Mexico?

We have to work this out. Maybe all it takes is that better house we keep saying we’re looking for, one that feels more like a home, or maybe it really is the climate: COLD! It tends to get to you after a while, a deep, persistent unease… Everything is fine or seems to be, and yes it’s staggeringly gorgeous, but you never really get to relax. After the snow comes the mud, and then it’s spring with howling wind and blowing dust. Summer lasts a week or two, and then it’s cold again. I’m not complaining, really, just explaining, and I don’t miss at all the weeks of ghastly humid heat we endured every year in Maryland. Maybe another neighborhood would fix things, or another town. Maybe another state or country. Maybe that’s why we just can’t seem to find a “home,” even after 10 long years.

I know people who have perfectly lovely houses, modern as can be. In all my 64 years, I’ve never lived in one. (I like funky, older dwellings, places with character.) The funny thing about Taos, though, is that unless you live downtown, it doesn’t really matter: even the million-dollar houses are on dirt tracks that turn to quagmires several times a year. And yet, and yet…

Unbeknownst to my wife, I’d spent the morning looking far and wide on the Internet at places people recommended to me, places where the sun might not shine so much but you could still get out and walk or ride a bike most times of the year. They all looked fine but ultimately boring. BORING! That’s what surviving all the bullshit here can do to you, and then you’re ruined for the smoother life, if it actually exists.

I love being close to wilderness, and I’m not giving that up, but I feel like I’ve been moonlighting as a punching bag. That’s northern New Mexico for you: always on your guard, always challenged. This needs to be examined, yes, but lightly, with confidence and humor.

The adventure, as we say, continues.

Post from: FarrFeed

Taos Hard

Related posts:

1. Taos Winter Update #2: More Wood Stove Talk
2. Taos Winter Update
3. Winter of ‘08 [revised & updated]

I woke up to a good half a foot of heavy wet snow with more falling, straight down, like the stuff was poured out carefully high above and shaken through a sieve.

The first thing was, I built a fire. Sometimes there are coals enough to set a couple of aspen sticks on. If so, I set a couple of piñon chunks on top of that, close the door, and just stand back. This morning there weren’t any, and I lit an eight-inch chunk of pitch wood with a single match to start the blaze. The second thing was, I went outside to feed the birds. Holy moley, all that snow! The big elm tree was shedding clumps that fell with little “whoomphs.” There wasn’t any wind.

Afterwards, coffee and a little playing on the internet. (I don’t do politics these days so much as actual events and underlying forces.) The signs were ominous: it was like the world was floating in a cold dark ocean, and sharks had eaten all the smart people. Something really big is incubating, I thought, with all this anger and no outlet. It made me want to hear some PUNK! Where are all the angry mobs and loud guitars? Where’s the passion in the culture? What happened to our spirit, to making something WORK?

Just then the power went out. No internet or anything else. This could take a while, I knew, so I went outside to clear a few paths through ever-deepening snow: first to the two bird feeders, then to the woodpile, and last to the top of the driveway, where we’d parked the car. That’s when I got cocky and decided to back the Vibe in and out, to mash some ruts while I still could. It all worked fine, until I cut the curve too sharp and fast and got stuck cross-ways in the road. A little shovel work and woodstove ashes soon took care of that, and I gave up on the poor man’s snowplow thing.

The electricity was still off. Fortunately the house was toasty, thanks to running the wood stove day and night. I stood there, snow melting off my boots into the carpet, and realized I had to go right back outside to get more fuel. Always the hauling, the cleaning, the kneeling down before the stove… It works, though, for all the hassle. What if there were no more electricity ever, I wondered? Would everybody live like this?

Half an hour later, the refrigerator started humming again: POWER! — and lunch in front of the iMac. (Click, click, click… I was right about the sharks, all right, but why was I still here?)

The wind picked up outside, and heavy snow squalls blotted out the mountains. Not surprisingly, I needed to take a nap. We both did, actually, only she nabbed the sofa and the yellow blanket first. Coming to the business late, I had to lie on top of the bed with my battered fleece bathrobe for a cover, but I went under fast. The weather, the drama. Getting stuck. The snow, the shoveling. The fire, always the fire. Winter! Cold. The sharks would come next for the merely sane. Sleep, sleep, forget…

For me, a rest is sometimes dangerous: I wake up in another house, another time, in perpetual soft spring. Not here, though, not today, with snow still flying past the windows! The dissonance was palpable. Ever driven, I grabbed my hat and coat and walked out to check the mail.

On the way back, walking past my neighbor’s dead cars while holding my hat down tight against the gale, I thought: JESUS CHRIST, it’s COLD, everyone is NUTS, and I have HAD IT! It’s all too much, good-bye. Just give me a farm somewhere, a little place with water and good soil, where I could plant fruit trees and raise a few chickens. It would be warmer there and less insane. We’d walk a lot and be real healthy. I’d write all morning and then go do my chores. To hell with a country that won’t pull its head out of its ass. I’d just write, take care of us, and be a goddamned mystic. Of course, I am a goddamned mystic! (What else is there, really?) And I had fruit trees where we were, but didn’t want them then. Now it sounds like paradise, what gives?

Maybe it isn’t where I am, but what I do. Even in America, by God, and especially right now.

Post from: FarrFeed

What the Hell is Wrong with Us?

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