i've had a bit of a break, since i finished my grading about a week ago, and it will be almost six weeks before i start teaching full-time again. i have a lot of plans for the six weeks: linguistics book, novel, stories, publish a new e pluribus. first i published two sets of stories on amazon. one is pile of leaves: stories of a rake; the other is the walmart stories. any day now, you'll be able to search my name on amazon, and find them. the books are cheap. i designed the covers myself, and went through the process, got isbn numbers and all. this is not writing though; it's repackaging old stuff.

i am finishing my autobiography, though, and that's real writing. look down the blog at anything in italics, that has real capital letters in it. that stuff is going in the autobiography; it goes with the whole just passing through that you see on the template on the side. this will be just a straight forward story, all true, and it answers the question, why are people so fascinated with the vagabond lifestyle, whereby you give up the idea of a regular place to stay altogether, thus releasing yourself from any responsibility to the world? i did it for two years, but i write the book, partly so people don't glorify it. and i repeat, to anyone who will listen, you can't do like that anymore. mr. k.w. is proof of that, languishing in jail for years, because he was taken advantage of by someone who'd taken him in, and then, let the old guy have it.

tonight on my walk a big glorious cloud came over and made noises and lights as if we would have some rain. maybe later, we'll have rain. i finally wrote a little on the lubbock site because i'm beginning to think, somebody ought to tell these folks, water is a crisis. down san antone way, they're having too much of it, five - ten feet at a time; up here, we're lucky if those big dramatic clouds deign to spit even just a little.

i don't want to tell lubbock what to do with their water; i still feel like a visitor. i've taken to watering our own miserable patch, mostly for its therapeutic effects. it seems to kill the lawn, though; my wife says it gives the grass "false hope." whatever it is, it's like i'm spraying fire on the poor stuff. it's like, no improvement whatsoever.

more later; it's gotten late, and i'm falling apart. there might actually be rain out there, in which case, i guarantee you, folks are overjoyed, they might even wake up to see it. it's an odd situation, this balance of nature, what's left of the old ways, gathered up in this city, high and dry on the southern plain, waiting for a cloud. the ghost of the comanche, probably saying, you shouldn't-a took the last of those buffalo.