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It’s my birthday again (August 9th) and something’s different this time. I’m just pumped in a bizarre new way. It started a few days ago, and I wouldn’t embarrass myself like this if it weren’t true. There’s powerful good medicine in the air. Like fear took a vacation. Like I’ve been granted grace to not react to the usual crap. Like I can steer this thing. Like everything is fine! Do you realize what this means?! Who cares, I’m rolling with it.

I’ve been listening to a lot of rock & roll lately. All kinds of stuff. (I’ve been around and know some shit. I am not my father’s Oldsmobile.) Rock & roll is good for you! I pity anyone who’s never felt that devil music rush. And speaking of devils, here are the Tall Boys playing “Final Kick.” It’s a song about SUICIDE! I love it!

[You won’t be able to play that without joining Spotify, sorry. It’s free, though. And WordPress blogs support these embeds now, so you’re going to see them everywhere. I have the $10/mo. premium plan. Higher fidelity!]

We’re going to the mountains tomorrow—Jemez Springs—on a route that’ll take us by Los Alamos. I was born on the day we nuked Nagasaki. Guess where they built the bomb? Full circle, kids! Happy Birthday to all my Leo friends, too. I don’t know any other sign that makes such a fuss over being born or deserves to more. 🙂

Enjoy the rainbow. I shot that yesterday evening.

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This was the view from the road above the house around 7:00 p.m. today. If we ever move—which we really have to do because we need more space to live like grownups—I may not be able to just step out the front door, walk 100 yards, and take a shot like this. Then again, I might! But this is why I’m driven not to miss whatever may be out there at any given moment.

The above scene followed a sharp, hard-hitting storm this afternoon that brought the heaviest rain I’ve seen in 14 years of living in New Mexico. Sure, most of those were drought years, but still. It came down heavy enough to turn the driveway into a river in 30 seconds. The hail was almost horizontal in the gusts and ricocheted off the windows! The excitement was over before I thought to shoot some video, which really is a shame, because the noise was awesome and the cat was terrified. Being from San Luis, she’s usually not. These Colorado mountain cats are something else, you understand, and I would never mess with one from Costilla County. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, it’s cold and wet now, and there’s actual mud outside. I’m closing windows so it stays warm enough not to need a fire like my neighbor built. That’s right. Across the road, about the time I took this picture, white smoke rising coming from the chimney on August 7! (46 °F tonight, they tell me.)

Summer in the Rockies, dig it!

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This is probably my favorite photo of him, taken at Randolph Field, San Antonio, Texas on his birthday in 1941. He doesn’t have his wings yet but he will just five months later, when he married my mother and it all began. That’s a 23-year-old Officer Candidate School flight cadet you’re looking at, and Jesus, did he love to fly. With my own birthday coming up in two days, all of this is on my mind.

At this point he didn’t know he wouldn’t be sent off to fight the Germans or the Japanese. (For that matter, the country wasn’t in a declared war yet.) After graduation, the Army Air Corps made him an advanced flight instructor instead—too damn good a pilot to be wasted under fire—so he spent the whole of WWII teaching hothead buddies how to fly and swivel their heads to look for Messerschmidts. Most of those boys died. The crazy bastards made for better killers, I expect, and the survivors came back from Europe or the Pacific at least two ranks above him. He stuck it out regardless for another 20 years and retired from the Air Force with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The ones he taught taught well enough to save their asses made it all the way to general! I don’t think he ever got over that.

There’s an inscription on the back side in his handwriting. (That’s my mother’s on the front.) Being who he was, he felt compelled to apologize for what he called “a horrible expression.”

“Was looking into the sun, and a smile was being forced upon me.”

I guess so, because he rarely cracked a grin that I remember when he was older. If we called him on it, he would say that he was smiling “on the inside.” I don’t know, though. And I’m not known for smiling like a fiend myself. It does get better, chilluns, it really does. But you have to go down deep and find the ruts. Learn the “rules” and then move on so you can break them. I know now how important these things are. My wife from Iowa has a smile that melts brick walls, and I see it 50 times a day.

If I woke up and it wasn’t there, I think I’d just drop dead.

Another phone call from darkest Arizona, though I was glad at first. I hadn’t heard from the guy for months. Except for the fact that the few checks I sent got cashed, the last checks, out of my own pocket just to help him out, I wouldn’t have known he even was alive.

The inheritance is gone. His Social Security started last month and he’s already broke two weeks before his second check. He’s in the hole for overdue utility bills and tried to pay them. Doesn’t know how to game the system, plead for time, seek assistance, do what everyone who’s ever been there in that way has done. He owed $118 on the electric bill. He bought a money order but never mailed it. Didn’t fill in the “Payable to” line, either, and someone took it. “Someone in my house,” he says. So far there’s “a woman” and some other someones, or maybe she’s the one. There were voices in the background and he wasn’t using his own phone.

Baby brother Robbo and the perfect symbol of an eventual middle child

As I write he has no water. That’s because he hadn’t paid the water bill, but this was temporary and he had a chance to get caught up. Before he got around to that however, “someone” turned the water on. His water. Someone in his house who wanted water broke the seal and wrenched the thing back on until the water cops got wise. I wonder who the someone is. Now they want a $350 deposit before they’ll even talk to him. No drinking, bathing, washing dishes, or flushing the toilet in the ole singlewide. In Arizona. In the sun. I hope he’s paying the homeowner association fees. Does it even matter?

There’s some kind of trouble with his food stamps. (Of course there is, it’s Arizona.) According to him, I have to tell someone he owns the house and also say I’m not sending him the $400 monthly subsidy I was before the old lady died. What is this, some kind of time warp? I stopped doing that a year ago or more. And if he can’t prove he owns his trailer, which he does, then the wheels ain’t coming off this thing, they never got put on.

“I love you, Johnny,” he signs off the way he always does. But someone’s going to set him up or put a bullet in his head unless an angel intervenes.

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