Now they tell me…

What if the problem with finding a house is ME?? It probably is. Can’t get away with nothin’ around here any more.

Driving into town to look at a house for rent. Why does she even want to look at that one? I rejected it yesterday without ever having seen it. That went over well: she ranted and raved, stomped her foot, and let me have it. When you get girls from Iowa stamping their feet, you’re in big trouble. I couldn’t say a thing (and didn’t try) for 20 minutes, which is fortunate. Besides, she was right.

What a paranoid sumbitch I am, scared someone’s going to say I can’t go outside and play. Everything’s a threat to my precious independence, like my wife, denying us a chance to live in a dump forever. Oh, a loveable dump, to be sure, the perfect bachelor pad, best place I’ve ever lived. Driving into town to look at a house for rent. God, the sky is beautiful! Dark blue over Taos Mountain with lightning bolts, brilliant sun and white clouds overhead. Eighty degrees and I’m cool in my long sleeves. Makes it hard to be an idiot.

We didn’t rent the place — too awkward, no wood heat, etc. — but we prowled around the neighborhood. My wife is pulled there. (This is big medicine, bastards beware.) The woman is a creature of wild unleashed passion and joy hemmed in by negativity and big smelly men. I for one spent years of my life holding her down out of madness. It didn’t work, and she’s still with me. I’m not just lucky, I’m obscene.

Driving back to Llano Quemado after latte and chai in Taos Plaza. My partner is blazing sane, friendly, and tuned in. (How do they DO that?!?) Despite this, I’m still eating broken glass from last night’s dressing down. I’ve been forgiven (in effect), she’s miles ahead, but I’m a bastard without an excuse, averaging two syllables per mile. When we get home, she goes off to practice the piano, and I take a nap, otherwise known as all I can manage without being tasered.

Cocktail hour under the elms. I look at the mountain and drink my tequila. She walks back from her studio all smiles from playing Bach, goes into the house to change her clothes, and comes back out with a glass of wine. I pour myself some more tequila, and we clink glasses. Usually one or the other of us makes a toast, but I’m not talking. Still touching her glass to mine, she leans in close, pulls her sunglasses down just far enough to drill me in the eye, and says, “You take a long time, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” I reply, turning away and downing my shot.

Later I will put on loud Cajun music from the 1930s and microwave burritos from Antonito while she makes a salad. I am lots less crazy but the weight of me has slowed us down. After dinner we have three chances to catch Callie the studio cat and blow each one.

It’s 2:00 a.m. now. Time to zap the last half-cup of coffee and answer email, order hard drives. Moths are beating against the window glass, welcome to America.

We’re still looking for a rental with more solar gain and a better woodstove. I’m feeling lucky, too.

I like heating with wood, athough it won’t do for the studio my wife needs for her glossy-black baby grand piano. In the long run, I think we’ll have to buy some land and build a couple of straw-bale “huts” for living and studio space, but for that I’ll wait until we know what our money’s going to be worth after, um… after… well, who knows? But there’s no sense buying something we’ll have to give up later just because we have to eat.

Meanwhile, here’s something that’s absolutely horrible: the cost of heating oil! No, we don’t use that in New Mexico. But back at our old home in Maryland, filling the big black heating oil tank in the moldy basement will cost someone over $700 in the fall at projected prices… That’s for one month, chilluns, and I used to scream when the bill was just one-fifth of that.

Show me how this is anything less than catastrophic for millions of families in the Northeast. I simply can’t imagine how people will cope. That this country hasn’t been on a national crusade to develop renewable energy for all over the last 10 years is worse than cruel and stupid. A lot of people in the news today deserve to be in jail.

A friend of mine called this morning and mentioned my (and his) “existential crisis.” He’s a stalwart fellow and I appreciate the sympathy, but I’m actually not having one. I did get a bit exercised over any number of thoughts during the last few days, and writing is frequently how I process all the stress. It must have worked, because today I’m fairly calm about the following:

1. The imaginary wealth of banks

2. Aging

3. Finding a better house & studio

4. My 87-year-old mother

5. What people will say about me when I’m dead

6. The false lure of “going back” (to anywhere)

7. Buying a dental implant instead of a new Mac

8. All my unused gifts & unfulfilled desires

9. Obama being swallowed by the Democratic establishment

10. The neighbors’ goddamned abandoned cats [oops]

11. Netroots as magic beans

12. Lumps

13. The irreconcilable death of American uniqueness

14. Losing weight

15. The shortest summer in the world

16. A pension fund collapse

17. Ecosystem death

18. Endless war

19. Money

20. Defrosted steaks going bad

21. Boring postponed Web work

Etc. etc.

I could go on, but it’s getting harder to think of things, which means I must be okay. And realizing yesterday just who (or what) is boss took tons of pressure off, naturally.

There’s already been a sampling of it in a previous post, but this is even better stuff at 750 pixels. Three pictures are already up, starting here, and I’ll be posting more for the rest of the week, wide shots as well as close-ups with the telephoto lens.

Untitled

My wife and I took our usual over-the-mountain drive and ended up at the Rio Pueblo at 8,411 feet, just as the evening sun lit up the green plants growing on the bottom. I’ve never seen anything like it. While I wouldn’t necessarily drink it straight, just look at that beautiful clear water flowing on down to the Rio Grande. With living plants! This is a trout stream, too.

The Rio Pueblo and Carson National Forest, folks, hardly nobody around. All week at FotoFeed.

(This has to continue…)

So there I am, sitting outside in one of the dead landlord’s aluminum lawn chairs with the cushions we bought at Wal-Mart. The chairs are fine, the cushions suck. You can still buy basic outdoor chairs this nice, but you have to hunt for them, and they won’t be at Wal-Mart. Anyway, there I am, just now. It’s cloudy-bright with occasional sun but mostly overcast, thundering in the distance, about 75 degrees. Humid, too, at 28 percent. The so-called “monsoons,” a stretch of dependable afternoon thunderstorms produced by air from Mexico, aren’t supposed to start until late July, but what the hell is normal any more.

There I am, looking at the plum tree a bear broke down to the ground in ‘03. I never saw it happen, but I saw the devastation. Fixed it, too. I pulled the broken trunks together — hanging only by a strip of bark and fiber — tied them up securely with rope, and bound it all up neatly with duct tape. (Some of the branches required additional bracing.) The tree lived. After a year I took the rope off and wrapped the trunks with fresh duct tape. A year after that, I took the tape off, and it’s been doing well ever since.

We always water this tree along with the apricots, you may be sure. This year the plums are just everywhere. You never saw so many plumbs on one branch, it’s almost ridiculous. And then just now I got up and took a closer look: almost every plum is damaged, some with sap oozing out, probably from hatching larvae of something I never heard of. They may turn out to be okay, but maybe not. I’m not counting on it.

So that’s too bad. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but that’s too bad. You’d normally anticipate some loss from insects and the like (bears too!), but this is out of whack. That’s it! — it’s out of whack. It isn’t natural. Do you follow? It isn’t balanced. Either there’s something pushing in a certain way out of ignorance, or the bear was supposed to kill the freaking tree. I go back to my chair, the nice one that you can’t buy anymore with the cushion that sucks, and look out at the clouds and mountains: what an amazing and complicated interactive THING. I’m sitting there and realizing that it all just “is” and works fine by itself, unless we mess it up.

But it’s deeper than that. We don’t “mess” anything up, we’re just part of a system so vast we can’t even imagine, and we’re inseparable from the whole. We don’t manage, conquer, rule, or masticate a goddamned thing except inside our puny little egos, because all the while we’re tumbling in a roaring wind we never even hear.

This is what thrills and comforts me. I want to bow down to it and let it rip me open.

Well, crank up the worry machine. (Or not! read on…)

What I find most interesting about using the Internet for finding news is how much of what the rest of the world sees never makes it into American media consciousness. For example, all but a rear guard of 800 Australian troops just came home from Iraq to a joyous welcome in Brisbane, and I’ve only found mention of this at UK sites. (Folks are happy the troops are coming home? No news here, move along.) On the financial front, at least three European banks have issued dire warnings about the U.S. economy over the last few weeks, and that’s also been ignored — one authority flatly predicts a complete collapse of our financial system over the next few days or weeks, and I’ll bet you haven’t read that anywhere in these United States. In fact, the level of “serious” discourse on just about any heavy topic you’d care to name is so craven and bereft of elementary reasoning, you’d have to be some sort of chemically-reinforced Pollyanna to believe we’ve actually evolved at all over the last few hundred years. (And watch out what you put in your garden!)

My wife and I have this conversation frequently. The bottom line is that while some people have definitely experienced a growing peace, maturity and spiritual expansion, life in general has become more difficult and anxiety-ridden in our lifetimes. When I first joined the workforce after graduating from the University of Texas, incomes and expenses were much more closely matched, so much so that one simply didn’t have to worry if one had a job. In 1968 my first wife and I rented a wonderful home for $75/mo. (that was considered expensive), my car payments were $36/mo., and a visit to the doctor cost $5. I took home less than $500/mo. in salary from my college teaching job, we bought everything we wanted, and the money just piled up in my checking account, month after month. There wasn’t any need to save, because it happened automatically.

Late afternoon sun illuminating aquatic plants in mountain stream

The way things are today just isn’t going to fly. It won’t be “fixed” either, none of it, not until we start all over at the bottom, treat everyone as brothers and sisters, look each other squarely in the eye, and say something like, “Okay, what CAN you give me for these eggs my hens just laid? How much for this house, this car, my services? What do you need from me, and how can we help each other? How can we help those people in the next town who have no food or water? Can you give this teacher (doctor, policeman, farmer) a place to live so he or she can stay in the community?”

That kind of trust and self-reliance may produce miracles, but first one has to have an honest sense of “self.” That’s where inner work comes in. When you know you’re part of everything and simultaneously whole, you don’t need a guide for acting properly. It just happens automatically, like when my paychecks piled up in the bank. It’s like the Golden Rule and “all you need is love,” all rolled into one.

I don’t know what they are, but there they are.

Meanwhile, would we really be worse off without high-definition TV, the Internet, computers, air-conditioned cars, and microwaves? Would it really hurt to talk to ancestors in our dreams and fly to distant lands by willing it so? Do you really believe the energy that fuels your thoughts just vanishes with your body? Is there some reason our bodies “have to” deteriorate? — why can’t we just live until we die? After all, SOME FOLKS ALREADY DO!

And on and on and on…

We’ve been sucking up the patriarchal bullshit and imbalance for the last few thousand years — doing the best we could, you understand — and now it looks like something’s gonna blow, only maybe not all at once. I hope not. Frankly, I think it must have started years ago, because I’ve felt this way since I was in my teens. I never wanted the brick house in the suburbs anyway, much less the station wagon in the drive. Not only was it silly (to me), it was also built on sand.

That’s one reason why I wanted to move to northern New Mexico, where things have always been “blown up.” Not that far to fall if things go bad, in other words. Fewer people, too, just 14 per square mile on the average in Taos County, which by the way is just a little smaller than Connecticut. But I mainly wanted to live the last half of my life in a place where Nature dominates man, and not the other way around. That’s why I go walking in the mountains when I get the chance: something happens to me in the high country that never even registers amidst the mini-marts and parking lots. I sense things one can’t put into words without diminishing the experience, although I give it my best shot because I want to share this stuff. I don’t know what’s happening, either, but a hit of what’s above 8,000 feet makes me want to go back for more, and I think this is related to the bigger question.

It could be that everything will be just fine, after all, only…um… different.

Ya know??

Tying up loose ends. Administering antidotes, etc.

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”

For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to high school with him, and of course I didn’t, having moved there back in ‘75. Lumpy? I knew him as Jay.

The news is part of a larger medicine show. It’s strange, the effect it’s all having on me… as if I’m actually a member of the human race. A long time coming too, because growing up an Air Force brat with over 40 changes of residence when I was a kid is like being cast in iron. During my school years, I never had a friend for more than a few months at a time, so I guess I never really knew what other folks considered normal. I always had to just let everybody go.

For the last nine years in Taos, I’ve had to look at every unpatched hole and all the scary monsters. It’s taken me all this time to stop walking around with the old landscapes in my head, too. It was as if the past might grab me if I weren’t careful, pull me back and mangle my soul. I haven’t exactly been pining for old scenes of late, but there was always this self-doubting incompleteness that made me wonder. Guilt, actually, I realize.

Hearing about Lumpy is part of what makes me feel connected today, and yet that also frees me. I didn’t expect that! It’s as if acknowledging my past also means I don’t “have” to go back. I feel a circle’s been completed, like everything’s OK, like I just gave myself permission to truly get on with living where I am.

Can you believe it took nine years?

Exhibit A: a photograph of me in Maryland from 1977. A very fine photographer friend of mine was cleaning out his archives and sent me this while I was in Santa Fe having fish & chips with the women in the previous post. I already knew one of them when Ed took that picture, and it wasn’t my wife! Bought that guitar from her husband, too.

Hey, I remember that shirt!

And NOW, we march!!!

I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, or was it nine?

There was some nervousness on my part at first, having to do with simply meeting someone from our old life. It wasn’t me or her I was concerned with, however, but my wife. At least I thought it had to do with her. As is most often the case, the issues are much closer to home.

There’s always been this sadness in me that what I love will surely be taken from me, even love itself. I know where this comes from now and grow my own, so to speak, but it’s been a long, hard slog through the valley of man-I-sure-fucked-up-my-life-again to reach this relative equanimity and finally-expanding joy. Most days “joyous” doesn’t fairly describe me [cough], but I’m getting there, in millimeters. Today I felt a bigger jump, as if something empowering had come to light.

My wife has had her issues with New Mexico that in my occasional terrors grow to be the things that send her back where we came from. Tonight at dinner, for example, when our old friend said she loved New Mexico and envied us for living here, my sweetie muttered, “Don’t!” Just the kind of thing to push my buttons in the past, though probably more revealing of anxiety over temporary circumstances than anything else. So even though I’ve left this all behind me, hohoho, I must have wondered if what we’d hear from back East would give my sweetie fits. Or me, for that matter.

But what useless nonsense! It was wonderful to see our friend, whom my wife immediately implored to tell her “what’s happened to everybody.” Not surprisingly, what’s happened is simply life. Most everyone is doing fine, and some are hurting. A fellow I knew in Chestertown — younger than I am, incidentally — died yesterday, in fact. It wasn’t hard to listen to at all, either, this human saga that we’d had a role in. It made me feel validated in a whole new way. I also think I needed to hear all this to see that once and for all, I wasn’t threatened, and that I had done the right thing by following my heart, as if anything else had ever been possible anyway.

This probably isn’t very clear. But I saw our old friend as closer to me as a person, somehow. More related, human-to-human. I like that. How very odd to feel all right. We could all use more of this.

So thank you, M., for all of this and more, and have a safe flight home. (You’re also the only one who might understand the title of this post, so I’ll be sending all the questions off to you.)

And now, we MARCH!!!