the road to the highway from our house is long, winding, mostly paved, and probably the most beautiful i've ever seen. mountains rise from both sides of the canyon, and they are green and covered with pines; the road, which goes along a canyon stream, is mostly flat but winds around a few hills on its way. about halfway to the forest we slow down to go through walker's ranch; the sign says twenty. on a good day, i like to go only twenty. other days i'm more like everyone else, and do maybe thirty.

mr. walker is like ninety seven. sometimes i see him out there. he has about fifty cows who roam freely in the valley, and they roam over our house as well; he has the rights, and though we have the right to fence them out, we haven't yet. they've been providing fertilizer which i turn into black dirt.

the ranch has the doors to its barns and outbuildings open, and facing the road. so, when i slow down to twenty, i see most of his tools and equipment. of course i don't know what much of it is, not being a rancher, but some of it has to do with fencing, or roping cows or horses. there is no point, to him, of turning it to the side or protecting it by locking it. usually i make a strong cup of black coffee as i leave home and don't even get a sip of it before i get to the ranch, because the road is windy and you have to pay attention going around blind curves. sometimes there will be cows in the road, or deer will jump out at you, so you just have to have both hands on the wheel and eyes full ahead.

but when i get to the ranch, i slow down to twenty, which is like a crawl, and take sips of black coffee. i get all that black coffee right there at that ranch. if he's out there i wave at him; i actually know him. he asked me if his cows were bothering me once. i told him we would work on making him a bypass if he wanted, so that the highway would go around his ranch. he said that wasn't necessary.

people are kind of surprised that he's as active as he is, being ninety-seven and all, but he has a pretty balanced lifestyle, and has friends do the things that are hardest for him. he spends a lot of time outside. he takes care of himself when he's sick.

he's a christadelphian, part of a religious community that settled in the valley many years ago. they had a couple of schools, one of which remains, but i'm not sure what they did for a church. his kids have not been hanging around the ranch much, so i don't know what will happen when he dies. i've always thought the location would be perfect for a little town - it has mountains rising from all sides, but it's very flat, and has a couple of springs feeding the canyon wash right there - and it's all very green and beautiful, especially this time of year. he has some ancient apple trees. they seem to keep on cranking out the apples, as far as i can tell, although they are probably some ancient variety.

i watch, as i'm going twenty, and as i drink my black coffee. what else is there to do?

the onset of the rainy season on the fourth of july really brings a change in the mountains, because, with the rain, it seems significantly cooler and we really notice the shorter days. fall! i couldn't imagine fall back where i grew up, at the end of july, when things were so unbearably hot and sweaty, and you knew the "dog days" of august were still in the future. now, it's all pushed forward. the cool days of fall are already here.

in addition the hurricanes have started battering texas and hawaii, and that too is an august thing. so is the beginning of school. but it all seems like a different order this year. the fourth, the rain, worrying about school, cooler nights.

when they said they wouldn't start school until after labor day, i was relieved. i am just recently retired and school is the last thing i want to worry about. but it's a national thing, trying to figure out how these schools are going to manage these kids when everyone has to keep their distance, wear masks, etc. i could almost not bear to think about it. but in the end, i have three more to get through school. if school will not work, i have three more to do ourselves somehow. it's their main job, when they're kids - get through school. do your work. learn what you need to learn. the first thing to learn is, everything we taught you is obsolete.

talked to an old friend who i grew up with, who got the covid. isolated as we are, we don't meet many people who got the covid, but there she was, on our family zoom, telling us what it was like. lack of taste, high fever, knockdown disease, all that. she looked like she'd been through it though we told her she looked good. i felt like this thing has made us all old. we are either rough old survivors, trying to maintain what we have of our health, or we're just out there partying and waiting for it to catch up to us and get us as it inevitably will. i go up into the center of the village where many of the bars and wine stores have set up outdoor seating, and i watch people - they aren't about to wear masks, and if they are truly five feet, they can't socialize. so there's plenty of socializing going on, and that's ok because it probably keeps the human race going in one way or the other. but it's also a big spreader. our time will come soon enough.

my friend was in a sushi bar in sarasota florida. it was their local place to eat and they went there a lot. the place was not crowded when they went in and they got their food and sat down to eat. they took off their masks while they ate but not before. but a crowd came in, and they were not wearing masks, not social distancing, and hanging around the food buffet. the manager tried to get them to spread out but to no avail. they did as they wished. she had a bad feeling about it. she was right. a week or so later, she lost her sense of smell.

it occurred to me how exhausting it is to guide teens through the lockdown stage which ruins their social life and their ability to truly launch. finally i wrote about it but that doesn't make it better, slow it down, or even necessarily give me better perspective. perspective? we're like frogs in a pot of boiling water. perspective is not going to be easy to grow into.

one kid just wants to be in town every minute. this is good in a sense because for once he's figured out that happiness is not just another game or wwe subscription. he still likes those things but craves to be out, downtown, anyway. this of course, teenagers wandering around, is known to lead to trouble. so we are wary. but for the moment we are letting him do it. it's a nervous balance, and he has to be able to be comfortable down there. what can i say? i'm an enabler. i'm letting him do it. life is going on. it's hard for a kid, growing up in covid.

so blogger has a new look - i'm sure i'll get used to it, but as one who opposes all change, i'll grump first. what did they do, make it hard to figure out how to post? apparently so. eventually it will be just like usual. it's like an illinois license plate. the old one lasted twenty years, i forgot there was even such a thing as a new one.

i've come to hate ambient noise. i have tinnitus, and can't get rid of it, but if i can get rid of a shower fan, or some other kind of buzzing or rattling or whatever, i will. it's like the tinnitus raises the threshold. a person can only handle sixty and tinnitus gives you fifty right off the bat. so now along comes the shower fan and boom, you're over your limit. my wife puts a sound machine next to me at night so she can go to sleep. it makes noise. i do have earplugs but sometimes forget to put them in at night. so then i wake up with tinnitus and the ringing sometimss goes on all day. she's getting tired of shouting at me though. i've lost enough hearing that it's really a hassle for people who are used to using a normal tone of voice around each other. i am excluded from many conversations, which overall doesn't bother me, but it bothers me when i'm missing stuff i need to hear.

i think what i want to do is infuse my novels with things that one hears. i will write them in such a way that you hear my voice telling a story, a nice long endless one, but then, you hear other sounds, the sounds of the times the novel is set in. my present novel, which is really my third, the first two being unfinished, is set in iowa in 1975. i think that what i want to do is put as much of the music of 1975 in there as i can. things you recognize? things you don't? doesn't matter. it has to have a decent title, obviously. or i can just slip the words in there, like poetry. it will totally set the novel in 1975.

it's easy enough to set it in iowa. i know the streets, the landmarks, the places. i remember them all very clearly. my problme really is more where to draw the line between true and fiction. so much happened, and some of it is pure storyish. when you write a novel though i think you commit to having things matter. don't tell a story just to tell a story. tell a story that will go somewhere and interconnect with everything. it'll have music, yes, but it'll matter too. it'll have iowa images - corn, the grant wood painting, the hawkeye maybe - i don't know. so far the main image in my mind is the disappearing dutch elms - they used to line this street, but now they're gone. some people know what a street full of elms looks like, but the disease came and took every last one of them. now it's harder to come by that kind of shade.

it's a scary world out there, with storm troopers haunting the streets of the two cities my boys live in, chicago and portland. and, they say, they are sending storm troopers to kansas city and albuquerque. that means all my kids are covered, and my sister too. so my question is, are these storm troopers just going to make everyone disappear? haul them off and then they're gone like a covid victim? will we just forget about all these people who used to be around, and who used to complain freely about how the president was so bad...well maybe i better shut up.

my strategy so far has been to make it so you have to read a lot - in this case, all the way down to here on this blog - before you get to any blatant criticism of any living political leader. another strategy is to never name him or her by name. but if you have gotten this far, you already know who i'm talking about, these are trying times, and i'm trying...to survive them.

it's all ambient noise, and what really matters is what i write.

so all i can think is, if the facts all point to the fact that he's trying to kill people, when will we face the facts? for a while i said, well it doesn't matter if he's trying to kill them, or if he just doesn't care. either way lots of them will die, who cares what he wants?

but that's how nazi germany happened too. everyone said yes they disappeared and yes that's unacceptable, but in the end, they disappeared, they were killed, somebody had to want it to happen, and it happened. years later, we look at it and say, how could you have let that happen?

but the facts are this: insisting everyone go to school. insisting it be in person. refusing to pay for testing or tracing. putting it all on the states, until the states have no more. withholding funds to those who don't risk their lives. on and on. it doesn't seem like anyone really wants people to live, does it?

on the other hand are our general survival tendencies. we will prevail. we will educate our children at home if necessary. we will avoid contact, and avoid enclosed rooms. we will make sure we are still here in january.

if he uses storm troopers to squash demonstrators, he'll use them to prevent voting too. he'll use them for whatever he can get away with. he'll use the army too if he can get away with it. he'll just kill people, if they don't want to die of their own accord.

it's a very divided country; he knows that and he's encouraged that. he has no problem with one side simply killing the other, quick while they have all the guns. if it gets more divided, more violent, more warlike, he figures, bring it on, that can only help him.

those of us who favor democracy have no other choice but to wait for november. by then a lot of people will have died. and the rest will be good and scared, he figures.

pouring down rain here, and that's always good in new mexico, where we are a few hundred years behind in rainfall in general. it's almost always joyous when we get it, and almost always dangerous too, as the water has literally nowhere to go. it's a soft mountain rain, and it's drenching the ridge where they had a controlled burn the last few days.

we drive past that place on our way to town, a lot of cars and firetrucks parked on the road that heads off from the ridge into the wilderness. that part of the mountain had a lot of what they call "fuel" - dead trees sitting around waiting to burn. i think they figured that if they burned a patch through there, then the next time a fire came heading over the ridge it would be stopped by the clear space and lack of fuel. and the forest would literally start over.

i should be doing that here - I have big piles of what they call "slash" and the intention to get rid of it, but not the follow through required to plan it, set the fire, notify the authorities, and time it just right, so that it's right before the rainfall. this is the time of year. this is the rainy season.

we are scared by the news. not so much that a disease is raging through the land, but that they are trying to control our information about it. at least that bothers me a lot. i always assumed that the government kept information for our benefit - that they passed along what they knew, and gave good advice. i guess we are living in a world where that may not happen.

my wife says, "it's so blatant, it's so authoritarian, it's so totalitarian." can they get away with this? how can you hide mass graves?

we are thinking, there has to be a backlash. people have to do something about it. but i, sitting here, can do nothing about it.

and i am still surprised by the people who think it's a hoax, or think it's not real, or think it's all a leftist media plot to scare us. all the "leftist" media - well, that's the vast majority of newspapers in the world, who basically have picked up on the nasty nature of this virus from the start - is basically just reporting the numbers. people die. people suffer. people lose their parents, or their partners. it's horrible. they're not making anything up. we don't need a lot of overblown coverage to scare us. just the reality of it alone is enough to scare us.

so how many died today in florida? arizona? california? new mexico? just move along, there's nothing to see here. what you don't know, won't even matter, when it's all over.

stepped out last night because i heard there was a comet. the comet was supposed to be in the northwest, near the big dipper, in the early evening.

meanwhile i've been checking the news a lot. sixty six i am and it looks like we might have to homeschool our children. ok, we'll homeschool them. we live way the heck out in the country anyway. now's as good a time as any to get started.

way back in 1834 my ancestors arrived in quincy illinois and cholera had taken 6% of quincy's population in that very year. quincy was a bustling town - the railroads stopped there, but you could cross the river to hannibal or keep going west, or you could catch the riverboat steamers up or down the river - it was wild. but there had been the black-hawk war - that's where everyone got the cholera. the soldiers brought it in.

my great great great grandfather wanted to live out in the country, but he didn't have the land, or the house, and it was october when he landed there. he could build a house but that would take weeks or months. he had relatives out in the country and that's what he really wanted - to get out there and farm. but he couldn't yet. he holed up his family in a little house on the main street (called maine street) in what is today the historic district of quincy.

oh where was i with the stars. i stepped out last night, and there were a lot of stars, hundreds of them. thousands. it wasn't too hard to find the big dipper. there it was, off in the northwest. but here's the problem - lots of the stars were twinkling. any one of them could have been a comet. they seemed to be dancing in the sky. was it my eyes? an illusion?

back to my great-great-great grandfather. he had three boys, 5, 4 and 2, who had come 1600 miles in the wagon. they all virtually grew up together. he had a daughter in quincy, in that house, and measles came through, got the mom and the boys. measles was a pretty serious deal, you could die from it then, unlike now. the baby girl got only one measle and they all considered themselves lucky. everyone else got the not-so-bad kind also. it seemed they had dodged a bullet.

he did it - he built a house, and moved out into the country. it was just as a depression hit. there he was, though, out on a farm, with all these kids, and they figured out how to get by. illinois was better than maine - when you planted something, it came up. the ground was rich.

it was the age of steamboats. steamboats plied the river, up and down, from new orleans to saint paul. and they took the other rivers too - the missouri, the ohio, the des moines. you name it, they figured out how to get there by steamboat. they didn't have a calliope yet but that was coming. they had a rough crew and they had to grab a lot of wood from the shores to keep those steam engines running, but they did.

the two boys grew up side by side in the country outside of quincy. the older one decided to take a steamboat to saint paul, when he was 23. but he caught cholera, and died.

the second one, one year younger, was my great-great grandfather.

i saw a shooting star that night. it was off to the north a little ways. it was only for a second. it also was probably not the comet. who knows about the comet? there's an astronomer in the neighborhood - mr. hale, who actually discovered the hale-bopp comet in the house next to our house. he would have known exactly what he was watching. to me, it looked like a bunch of twinkling stars, with that one little shooting star, for just a minute.

i'm going to try to protect my kids. what else can you do?

my wife goes horseback riding almost every day. she's quite thin and the anxiety of this whole covid thing has gotten to her pretty badly. we have four kids left in the house and mostly we concentrate on keeping them safe. they are teenagers and don't really believe that anything will get them ever. or maybe it's more accurate to say they have too many distractions to keep risk abatement in mind.

the horse ranch is four miles away over a remote, rocky, back road which is impassable part of the year. the ranchers get out for groceries only once a month but like it that way. they run an rv park that combines horses and camping, and being way out there the way they are, they are pretty assured that trouble is not going to just sneak up on them.

she tries to take the girls with them but often, very often, the girls have other things on their minds. it seems to me, if i had a chance to keep getting up on a horse, i'd keep doing it. but i'm not them. i can't tell them what they want.

to me the drive out there is the best part. it's just such a remote road, that it makes the remote road we live on seem like main street. we were lucky the time we got a flat way out there because a sheriff who lives out there just happened to come by. it's the kind of road where people don't just happen to come by.

she rides up into the dry mountain country and i'm surprised there aren't more rattlers or something to spook the horses, but apparently they are more used to it than i am. i would say, if you're not packing a lot of padding, and your horse gets spooked, the problem is that you'll land on rocks. i'm sure the thought has occurred to her.

in fact this one wild horse did spook one time, and they had to call a helicopter. when we got the bill it was like fifty thousand. but they have such things covered as long as you can explain how you were way out in the middle of nowhere, actually driving to the hospital would be very risky (involving cattle guards etc.) and really helicopter was the way to go. she says, the view was great, but all i could really see was stars, since i was on my back and had to stay that way.

to her credit she got back on a horse. she's tough. i think she knows she needs it to survive in these tough times. i don't begrudge her some good times way out in the mountains. i worry, though. she's the only wife i've got.

so trump and devos order everyone to go to school, which in my opinion ruins the schools. they can't test everyone who walks through the door, so the teachers are vulnerable, and will take a family leave if they're smart, or just get out. every set of parents who can, will homeschool, for as long as they can. there is not the money to make it all work and they won't provide it. on the contrary, as they've said, they will only withhold money if they can, if someone wants to make distance learning possible. one can only conclude that they are out to kill our children and their parents.

i've been reading about the pioneers, who really lived in a different world. they would work twelve hour days, and would often be educated for only a couple of weeks in the winter. parents cared intensely about what they learned and how they learned it. sometimes parents would band together with other parents in a neighborhood and make a school, usually the one-room variety, where everyone of all ages would be educated in the same room. parents would take turns so they'd teach one day a week, or maybe two. collectively the neighborhood would provide the kids' education.

this system actually worked well, and believe it or not, kids were better educated back then. if you look at only the ground they covered, they covered way more ground than we do today. today we argue about whether to teach cursive, and we teach only the thinnest and shallowest version of history. no latin, no any language, no grammar today. memorizing state capitals, or spelling anything, out the window. back then they actually knew quite a bit more when they got out of school.

in addition, they knew how to cut logs, build a fire, seal the windows, shovel and get the snow off the roof, as this was all required just to keep the schoolhouse running. but the reason they valued education, frankly was because the rest of their lives were so tough. education was seen as a way out, or a way into a gentler world.

today kids don't see it that way, or at least, very few do. many kids are from a generation whose parents got screwed by the schools, in the sense that they became anti-education and voted for trump. whatever we were supposed to be teaching them, they didn't learn critical skills, and they send their kids to school now, mostly so they can work, or because they have to. to the question of whether they value education, well, some do, for sure. but most value it less because there is less proof that it does anyone any good. the educated are just as unemployed as anyone else, and trump is doing nothing to improve their lot, or make anyone want to be a teacher.

i think we should use the pioneer model when we start over. for starters, don't send your kids back to school until they are safe; this could be a year or two. make a system, whether you get together with your neighbors or not, where you cover your bases with your kids' education - the schools may help you with this, or they may not be able to. i actually think we are on our own here, as a culture. we can have our jobs, and make money, and live in the world without getting covid. but if we care about our children's education we may have to go a little out of our way to make sure they get one. the government just isn't going to provide a good one any more, at least for a couple of years.

in the future, i think we'll need a practical, nationwide commitment to good public schools. i honestly don't believe we have one now, or we wouldn't even have devos in there. to me she represents a significant minority (the 31% who voted for trump) and their complete disregard for good national education. you don't hear trump or devos talking about a national commitment to a good education for all american children. they don't even have that commitment themselves. so this is something we need to work on as a nation. hopefully biden is up to it, or at least willing to appoint someone who cares.

but i wouldn't even wait for biden. do you think some new president is going to come in and superimpose a national commitment onto an education system that is in shambles? i don't think so. it will take dozens of years to put the pieces back together. in the meantime, those who figure out this home0schooling business will be the ones who actually educate their children.

Happy Fourth!

May the popular demand for democracy, fair & sensible government, and a true sense of patriotism, that is a desire for what is best for this country, prevail.

first, i want to wish every one of my readers a happy fourth. i will put, on top of this post, a picture of an uncle sam on stilts, pointing something out to a kid with a suggestion that very old cars might be part of the picture. to me he is pointing out the value of history, though i doubt that was actually going on at the time. it happened at a cloudcroft fourth of july parade; i'm not sure they're even having one this year. if they are, there is only an outside chance we will make it.

i take the fourth to ponder seriously the good ideas this country was founded on, and what i am doing to perpetuate them. they are more than ever endangered, and the price of freedom is constant vigilance. but i have to admit, i also take what little time i have, and try to get my ideas down on paper where they can be read. and i'm seriously add, which means that when one idea stalls or needs a break, i need to move along to another one, rather than hanging around stewing on my inability to go forward, which is crippling. in that spirit i have about five projects that are in the works, but have a strong inclination to get started on a sixth, which is equally urgent, given that due to covid i could be toast at any minute.

i have faith that i will not pick it up from my children, yes. i let them sleep over at friends' houses and catch rides with kids whose mather works in a restaurant. i myself buy what i have to; yesterday i stood in line for about ten minutes waiting to buy spicy chicken sandwiches. but the aisles were thin, the people were from texas, and anything could have happened. in the convenience store i bought ice cream and milk: same thing. at the convenience store, allsups, mask rate was about 40% - that is actually improving. but the place is small. it circulates its own air.

in the mornings, my wife often goes horseback riding. this is my time to work. but as the sun comes up over the back of the house, it becomes quite intense, until not only is it hot outside, but it is directly above the south-facing, high triangular window at the top of our living room, and about ten thirty or eleven it shines in my eyes. time to work; i usually respond by going outside. there are generally a couple more hours before it gets truly hot.

when it's truly hot, about two, i can neither keep working outside, nor come in, where she has started cooking, and doesn't especially want me sitting around on the computer. she starts getting at me about unfinished things around the house - and yes, there are a lot of them, from cars not properly maintained, a shed that needs cleaned out, this kind of thing. i build a deck and a cat porch but it irritates her because it looks a little tumble-down from the street and i'm not truly a professional builder yet. i have all this wood from an old deck and still have to protect it from the impending rainy season. but instead i've been mostly focused on my writing projects.

my latest obsession is compiling the best of my professional writing. This would look like "essays in reflection of thirty years of teaching esl" or some such thing. these things are all over my computer, and my computer is dying. i have put most of them on google docs or on blogs, but i find that both of these options are basically unacceptable. they just don't get seen. they might at some point get used and referred to, or read, or understood, or whatever, but that's about the best i can hope for. lately i've been using amazon to compile my work, that is, to show the best of what i've done. i taught with my eyes open; i saw a lot of things. and language learning is still a mystery to vast numbers of people.

so to start with those two this time:
essays on language learning, or whatever it's called, compilation of past work, not started yet;
language as a self-organizing system, book that is about half done and needs substantial theoretical underpinning;
comin' 'round to lovin' it, book of short stories, all set at mcdonald's, almost finished;
prairie leveretts, book about my great-great grandfather, settler in nebraska territory, but also including my great-great-great grandfather, and another great-great grandfather, in other words, the eighteen hundreds, the civil war, the westward expansion
. this book needs a lot of work. I got a little too into it and couldn't see the forest for the trees. i took a little break.
just passing through, my own autobiography with traveling stories, intended now partly to set straight a genealogical record, which would answer the question, where did he get these ten children, and are they all really related? to each other?
the iowa novel, also called the actualist's wife, doesn't really have a name yet, but it is a lyric tribute to actualism and the hippie scene in iowa city in 1975. now i love those people dearly so i have all kinds of issues related to how much to reveal, and that has always been a sore spot between me and them anyway, so now it's time to play it right, and just paint a fairly accurate picture of everything that went on. this one totally absorbs me, but, the more i'm into it, the more i'm afraid i'm again missing the forest for the trees. just took a little break. i have about thirty pages which would translate into about fifty of a true novel.
quaker plays - about four are written, about two more are ready to be finished, in my head, just have to be put on paper, and i have good ideas for about three more. nixon is in there. hoover is already done. rufus, i did rufus. the idea here is to cover a wide range of quaker experience and knowledge in the modern world, so that grown-ups, this time, can read and learn about quakerism. one may be about zoom and the moral dilemmas involved in getting up there; not sure how that will pan out. i haven't even quite worked it out in my head. one problem is that you really have to get into another frame of mind to write plays; they don't write themselves. it's non-fiction in that you do research; the one on the table involves pawnees and what's called massacre canyon in western nebraska.
then beyond that i have a few other dreams:
non-fiction biography of the life of bela fleck, and his partner abigail washburn, well i guess she's his wife, and they have a baby, the banjo emperor, so throw him in there too. i don't hear music like i used to; i feel like i've lost the accuracy and enjoyment of hearing that was damaged either by moving way up on the mountain, or by working at a junior high. either way, i feel like my hearing is a bit impaired and hearing aids just amplify the horrible sound of sounds coming through water - they have become quite unpleasant to me. like beethoven, i'm working on finishing my legacy while i've gone deaf. in my case, it's figuring out how to put intense music into writing form. or rather, the joys that music brought me. it's very possible i'll never get this hearing back, since i don't plan on moving down from the mountain any time soon. but i don't feel like i've totally lost all my hearing either; i've just dunked everything into this allergy-filled swimming pool. i don't get all mad about it. remember i have ten kids, and my wife is struggling with their intense natures, and taking it out on me sometimes. i don't want to hear everything, anymore. i actually like working out on the land, where for the most part it's quiet, though sometimes there is the elk bugling, or some fire call that i'm missing.
two more novels, both half finished - i should at least mention them here. i get the sense that novels will be more productive in the end than stories. so what has happened? i've stalled, is all. one is about texas, the earlier one about small-town illinois, and saint louis. both are worthy and valuable. both are half finished. both may happen, may not.
chou and happy fourth. may freedom and democracy, and practical, sensible government prevail.

on the eve of the fourth, i should be talking about my love for the country - its wild spaces, out in the country, where i tend to flee on the fourth. i am not big on fireworks, and i'm very happy now that i'm in a place that outlaws them because the fourth is the driest moment of fire season, the very last. after the fourth the rains come, and though there isn't a lot of rain, what there is alleviates the fire hazard a little. i'm grateful. i don't want to fire off crackers anyway, so i just point out that they're dangerous and leave it at that.

the kids are going nuts with the quarantine, except the oldest, who could conceivably quarantine himself the rest of his life, if he only were to be able to make a living. here's a kid who actually made a thousand a month on his youtube channel, but now that he wants to make money he finds it a little harder, as if he's one of a billion who are trying too hard. nevertheless we told him: take it easy this summer. you got straight a's, you were valedictorian, you were the star of the class that didn't get to throw its tassels. stay home, be safe, get ready for college.

so he is, and, we are keeping our word. we let him stay up all night, or sleep in. we make no demands on him. and he chooses not to go to town. he's got his mom's caution, paranoia and anxiety in him.

the other three, on the other hand, are adopted, and though that has nothing to do with it, well, i guess it does have something to do with it. for, while we are all about caution and anxiety, they are just plain ont-and-out teenagers, wanting to be out in the world and see what's out there. they maintain that they are careful - they wear masks, they don't hug, that kind of thing. but we know better. for one thing, they don't quite really believe this coronavirus thing, aince a lot of their friends don't. they're doing what teenagers do.

which could be our undoing. i am quick, writing my books, because my time on this earth could be limited.

sometimes i brood on my failure to market successfully - maybe i'm a bad writer. i somehow naively thought that when people read good short stories they'd want to read more. or the same with haiku, which actually is even more naive. nobody pays to read haiku, i guess. but it's not even that i need the money, as time goes by, i feel like i need the recognition, and that comes in the form of money. if they buy it, they are recognizing you. if not, it's just a bunch of words on a sea of self-published dreck.

so i pound away at twitter and the social media; i put my pop art up there, and hope people recognize a kind of jangled, artistic way of looking at things. that's what i'm selling, after all. but nothing. i don't think people buy stuff off of twitter, but even if they do, it's like what, you have to have a thousand viewers to get one click, and a thousand clicks to get one sale.

i worry a little about whether i may have given away too much of it (my first few books of stories are all online, pretty much), or if too much of the early stuff is still out there; presumably i've gotten better. but i also worry about not getting better. the purpose of this very blog is to ensure that i keep writing no matter what. but i'm a little careless with it; i let myself ramble. i let myself not worry about such things as caps or formal language. and as a result some of my carelessness spills over into my regular writing. my sister says, "too many commas!" and what i think she means is, tortured turn of phrase, as my wife puts it, that distract the reader from what you're saying into attention to the way you say it. too much of that, and it's no fun to read any more.

in transcribing the work of my great great grandfather i'm impressed by how careful he is. he uses some things i would never dream of, in terms of informality, but he never uses a contraction, for example, and he clips his paragraphs. he gives the reader just what the reader can take. his sentences are careful. he was a bitter old man, convinced that his life was ruined unnecessarily, but he was interesting in that way at least: he was a good writer. i am going to pick up from him that sense of discipline, and apply it to everything i do.

at the moment i am doing about five things: finishing prairie leveretts, a story about one great-great grandfather who settled nebraska during the civil war; publishing the story of my life, the autobiography of the other great-great grandfather, treasurer of hillsdale college in its early days, and one of its first students; finishing comin' 'round to lovin' it, mcdonald's short stories; writing an iowa novel, which is kind of a documentation of a poetry movement, a documentation of a fantastic vegetarian restaurant and bakery, and at the same time, a love novel and tribute to some of the things i went through in iowa. what do you do when you fall in with someone who is, cough cough, just not the right person. it happens all the time, unfortunately. and my mission which is easy in this case, is to fill in all the details, true or not, of what i remember of iowa city at the time. my goal is to let the characters say it, so i don't have to. actually it's harder to let the characters say it, because you have to then make dialogue. but i'm up to it. it's a tall order.

and then on the marketing front, i've noticed the blogs. this is the prime example. i have eighteen hundred people coming through here every month. presumably some are coming through to read it, or care about what is happening in my life, as friends, but i don't have eighteen hundred friends; the other theory is that they are clicking around looking for something interesting. and maybe they find it, maybe they don't. probably seventeen hundred just click right back out the minute they get here. but there are still a lot of eyes on this page, and if i get the eyes on the right thing, maybe that'll help. what i'm telling you is that i might go commercial to some degree: make some blogs so that they direct a person's attention in the right direction, and thus get them to help me. this might be better than the alternative, which is to continue to use them to make my writing sloppier, more reckless, more free-form random.

a sleepy morning here - my wife is in alamo, with the fifteen-year-old, buying cleats; his sister is spending the night a friend's. the twelve-year-old is around, brooding, watching media, occupying a pig-sty. the puppy is on my lap - that's where he likes to be. we get mad at him when he barks at the deer, the rabbits, and the skunks, but that's what he does, it's his job, it's part of his identity. you could try to make him shut up (we do), but he doesn't really understand that. fortunately we feed him plenty. we like having him around. he curls up and looks cute and he anchors us wherever we are. that, i think, is his job too. as he sits here i'm not sure if he knows i am writing about him, but he knows how to place himself so i pet him as much as possible, which of course is good for my mental health. and my mental health is the most important. none of the above projects can be finished without it.

new mexico is about to turn, from the driest of the dry seasons, to what they call the monsoon. this happens around july fourth. we get what little rain we get all year on the fourth of july, or rather, from the fourth and six weeks into the end of the summer. it's not "monsoon" in the sense that you have it in, say, the philippines, but it's what we've got. we watch the clouds roll in from the southwest, from zipolite and oaxaca state, up through the great chihuahuan desert, and up past el paso to here, and it drops a little on us, and we're grateful. my greenthread, my navajo tea, will be grateful too, and will breathe, and enjoy life at its best, with just a little water. what else i could grow, i'm not sure, probably peppers (peppers grow most places in new mexico), but that's for another day, another post. chou.