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.