the sun is going down over the hills; i'm a little frustrated with the early parts of the vacation. i finished e pluribus haiku 2018 (see below) and have gone on an all-out publicity venture. after that, though, it's over. i think one can get as much publicity as one wants, and one is not going to sell a whole lot of haiku. no problem, though, i will move along. i will either make one giant haiku book, five or six thousand haiku, including a novel, or at least a plot, with characters, etc., or i will give it up altogether.

my efforts at recording my own book have kind of flopped. here it is, a classic collection of seventeen stories; i have now recorded maybe four of them, and am just not happy with the quality. i need my son to help with the sound, but he's busy, making his own new youtubes. no time for a dad who truly doesn't understand the audio setup. and my voice is tinny, echo-filled, not good; i can't seem to clean it up. maybe i simply didn't understand the mic? not sure, but something didn't work, big-time.

so, in my baby-sitting times, when i'm really occupying this chair, and not trying to record, not doing any of the house projects i'd lined up for the summer, i've done this: proofread just passing through, memoirs that i've been working on for years, and that are also almost finished. those stories in many cases link off the template of this very blog (scroll down), but have been waiting in a side drawer of history for many years, and it's about time i got them off my desk. i have almost proofread the whole thing, but that required me to wallow in my first marriage and other unpleasant circumstances of my past, so it led to some agitation on my part. right now i'm kind of stuck on the amish. for example, i always looked up to them, admired their simplicity and healthy lifestyle, yet couldn't deny the various problems they had as a result of rejecting so much of the modern world. well i actually have all kinds of stuff to say about it but how much really belongs in memoirs? after all i haven't known more than two or three of them, my entire life, though even that is probably more than most people. but i come to this part of my memoirs that is full of snark and i'm thinking to myself, do i want anyone really to have a problem with this? none of the amish ever did me wrong, that i remember, so i guess my answer is, tone down the snark, except inasmuch as it's about my own silly attempts to live simply and humbly.

then, i'm a little frustrated with music. i play the banjo still, every couple of days, but i really only have a few songs on it, and never seem to get beyond those. that's the whole reason i took up the fiddle - yet, on fiddle, i really need people with me, to play anything good, and, by myself, it's even more frustrating. it's not like i pick it up and just play all these cool songs that are in my head. no, now that i don't pick it up, i can't even keep the songs in my head. very frustrating!

with quakerism i'm also frustrated, but there, going online seems to give me enough camaraderie, enough other quakers in my life, a kind of worldwide group of people with the same ideals. it would be good to have a meeting; it would also be good to have an entire community, of people who lived in a given area, who were committed to quaker ideals. i can't wait forever though. there are some in las cruces, and i know them well enough, and i find it difficult to go way across the desert on a sunday morning. but with that, i'm ok with it. after all, i spent much of my life without an adequate quaker community, and it looks like i might spend a bit more like that too. online can make up for it to a great degree.

that's the view from this chair. the wind is howling, blowing over the baking plains and coming up here, to the top of this hill, where i try not to budge, and try to work all this stuff out. it's not all going to be hunky-dory, obviously. no sooner do i take a breath, from finishing a grueling academic year, than i find all this other stuff that needs my attention, and i just don't have all that much attention. i have attention for what apparently might be some rain coming, maybe sunday. that would be wonderful. but we up here in this dry country are used to a little disappointment, too.