almost forty years in the central time zone, and now i've moved over to the mountain, where the sun sets peacefully on the white sands in the evening, with a pink and blue sky, and a purplish range of mountains beyond them. the sun is wiser now, having passed over texas, and chicago, and all that pain back in the east, and it's moving through the enormous skies of southern new mexico and on to arizona and california beyond. as far as the time itself goes, that's rather arbitrary. i try to keep the cars current to whatever zone we happen to be in, but only the phones are good at it; they change by themselves, and spare us the trouble. as we cross the line, between lovington new mexico and plains texas, we check the phones to see how long it takes them to figure it out. but it takes us longer, because we don't always change the car clocks right away, and they sometimes lag in the other state's time zone.

a couple of days moving vans full of junk to a house where we don't really need it, and i've become resistant to even going back and getting more. and yet, there is still some stuff in the shed, and i'm sure some of it was intended to come here. the garden tools? the navajo tea? it all went out to the shed, with the intention of being brought here. not everything made it here. what's left is locked up in this tiny-house shed, behind our house in lubbock, while we try to lease the house for the semester or the school year. i'm here, in new mexico, planning my classes so that i return to lubbock once a week and show my face, all the while following the regulations and living under the strict oversight that they provide to online classes. it so happens that they are very sensitive as to what goes up there, how it's done, how much contact the teacher actually has, etc. i am learning the ropes. i now want to be in lubbock as little as possible; my wife wants to avoid it altogether.

the cabin up here is packed to the gills. i started out with the idea of bringing everything we had deliberately saved, or had not thrown out. but we kept finding more junk in the house, and bringing it out. pretty soon it seemed like i'd filled the van with a shed-full of stuff, only to have a shed-full remaining, that i was leaving behind. and the stuff that came out of the house (and the garage, which is kind of junk squared) kind of covered up what i had originally set out to bring. so, the garden tools, the navajo tea, some of that stuff didn't make it.

new mexico is overall calmer than texas. texas i find highly political, as if everybody plans to vote twice in different shades of red. they even drive like they're political. i'd like to say they're fun-loving football fans, and by and large that's true, but whereas they'll always talk football with you, they won't start up with you if they sense you're liberal, and it doesn't take them long to figure that out. but it seems, around every corner, people are talking about it. nowhere does anyone hate hillary more, but they're not idiots, and they can see that trump doesn't have a clue, and is a destructive psychopath. so that makes everyone hot under the collar, in a nutshell. driving is no fun anymore.

then there are the students. they are always checking tinder or pokemon, and swiping their phones, so there are car wrecks everywhere. i sense that they aren't destructively hostile, like trump, they're just kids, doing what they want to, and doing it at any old red light in the middle of the city. several times i saw people just clop each other in ridiculous kinds of wrecks. you'd think they'd at least be watching the road in front of them. but apparently it's hard to swipe and hold onto the wheel, or something. and the real world adds a twist, at least in the case of pokemon. certain places are more likely to have people swiping randomly, instead of paying attention, and i think people there have a right to be a little aggrieved that some game has singled them out to be a place where people don't pay attention on the roads.

out on the wide, flat rangelands, where you can see for hundreds of miles, and it's all skies, or in some cases oilfields, you could do just about anything and still drive straight, but out there, i'm finding, life is so sharp, so colorful, so intense, i just want to see it. three quarters of the jobs out here in new mexico are truck driving jobs, and i want to stay home, besides being a bad driver, but, it's tempting, i'll tell you. it's much better than driving around lubbock, where all the new cars cut you off or at least make you look bad. my new goal is to stay up on the mountain, where it's fall already, and the air smells like pines and an occasional campfire.