there is a bright moon out there tonight, not full but bright enough to light up the gravel driveway, where i expect my son to come driving up in about an hour. he's driving from chicago. and he may or may not have a squeaky clean, covid-free experience to share when he gets here, but either way we are a little suspicious, wary, hoping that he's clean just as we hope our own kids come home from the village clean.

one cannot blame the village for being a little wary of outsiders. my advice to him will be to park and simply not move for a couple of weeks. let the world go on around us and don't tell everyone that someone from illinois has just driven up our road. it's not the kind of thing you want to advertise. he's on quarantine, and should not be going to the store anyway. he will just hide out with us out in this country house out in the boondocks.

he called me just now from carrizozo. that's a small crossroads town way out in the middle of new mexico, not far from oscuro and the road to the trinity bomb site. he will drive right past oscuro, and on to tularosa and alamogordo before cutting back west, up into the mountains, and out to our house. he will be driving those desert roads under this same moon, with the mountains always looking down at him from the west. he'll do this because he's gone just a little past the mountains, to come down and hook around from beneath them, before climbing back into them right at alamogordo.

most of new mexico is towns that are in the desert right at the foot of mountains, like alamogordo, las cruces, even carrizozo. nearly every town is dramatic in some way because of intense views of mountains and the knowledge that you can climb right up into them if you so desire. alamo is like that; i consider it a perfectly normal 20,000-person town, with not much going on, but these dramatic mountains tower over it and make it sparkle at night and look like a beautiful place. nah, it's just as intense as any place. but it has these dramatic views.

it irritates me that he drives without a spare. that means he's kind of out there, like i used to be, at the mercy of fates and the good will of strangers. during a coronavirus, i'm not sure that people will stop. though they will probably at least call me for him, so that i could go get him. now that he's less than an hour and a half away, that's a more realistic possibility.

these are stressful times, since no matter what we say to our teens about risk, they don't really get it. and if we really restrict their movement, they make everyone miserable. so we're boxed in, and life becomes a compromise that involves some risk.

in our case the good news is that the virus has barely showed up in our small remote 9,000-foot village. the bad news is that if it does show up, it will very likely be our teens who bring it.

but let's not dwell on death and doom. today is a clear, sunny, beautiful day, and i've been taking some time to myself after spinning my wheels for a while. i figure, if it's so hard to type or do work around the house (my main occupations), because of a badly cut finger, maybe something is telling me to back off and enjoy the beautiful weather. the peak of the day here is absolutely gorgeous - blue sky, hot clear sun, dry as a bone. but winter is coming. the colors or what they are, are at their peak. they glow in the afternoon sun.

my typing is a little stilted. i take my time and i miss a lot of letters, have to go back, try again. i don't care, at least not on this blog. i figure, if it's worth it to me to express my mind, it's worth it to take my time, redo it, get it right.

i took a walk with my wife around our five acres. it was a little tour of some of the back corners where we often don't go or at least not every day. they seem to be doing fine. things are growing, and green, and the sun beats down. she says, nice place for a tiny house. i'm thinking, nice place to just keep it just as it is. or maybe get the dead stuff out of the way, at least, so the new trees have a better chance.

some trouble with the kids - in short, they are not getting life satisfaction out of being way out in the country. lockdown is not easy on them, or us. they feel like busting out.

but i am. a little yellow bird, a little off-color, hops around in front of me just now. finally he hears my stilted typing and flies off. he has brought his yellowish beauty to me, from wherever he lives, and is hopping around hoping for some of the sprite i spilled earlier. i was cleaning out a son's room. a thankless job, and, bad as sprite is, i end up pouring some out. some of the critters are no doubt as into it as the kids are.

my stomach is churning, and it's partly because of five or six cups of coffee, most black these days, and partly because of risk. i know that whatever is going on out there, it's not good. the news cycle grinds on. people die. winter gets closer. i need a little good news, another bird maybe, something to get us over the hot part of the afternoon.

i have trouble typing now, since i cut my finger to the bone pounding a stake on monday. i got eleven stitches, all on the knuckle side of my left pointing finger. now i have trouble typing letters like e r t d f and c which i would normally type with that finger. as i drive it looks to the oncoming cars like i've already said hello, as my finger is pointing out at them just as part of my hanging onto the steering wheel with that hand.

so i have all these writing projects and i'm eager to get going on them, actually in a burst of wanting to write, but i can't. these particular letters come up a lot, and it's a lot slower to hunt and peck with the remaining digits. so i'm in a kind of enforced break.

i still do bog though, as even hunting and pecking, and getting by necessity a lower score, is relaxing. i don't do it for the score. i do it because it calms my nerves.

lots of running around these days, taking kids to town for various sports and such. deer on the road, and elk too. the neighbors tell of bears and cats. coyotes out there too. we keep the pets indoors.

they say it's going to be warm and dry this late september - bad for the western fires, but good for me to push back the lazy-boy, and, even if i get nothing done on the writing, at least get some thinking done. the hunt-and-peck, that's all just words on the page. like these. the sun, always bright in new mexico, ambles across to the west, and it's always just a bit dry anyway, and we're so far out here, even the covid hasn't found us yet. hope it stays that way.

Comin' 'Round to Lovin' It - 23 short stories out of 99 billion served

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the picture, below, represents the best part of my day. sure, driving is ok, i drive the kids around, i go here, i go there, i see lots of deer and elk. but late in the afternoon the little dog looks at me like, well, aren't we going to go out on the road?

it's a winding dirt road through the forest, very short, doesn't really go anywhere except to our house and maybe one other place. we often see animals - cows (big dogies), deer, elk, or maybe just ground squirrels tearing around. mostly it's just fresh air and forest. the little dog is in heaven, and he gets his ears and nose going and tries to take in everything.

i consider it my own road pretty much, since the guy who lives at the end only comes by occasionally, it's just a refuge for him. we live out here, so i'm pretty territorial about the place. we notice when people drive up the road, especially if they're not visiting us. we have this little patch of forest to take care of, and do take care of it, pretty much.

there are a lot of people who know we're back here, but who don't come out all that much. there are maybe a dozen families in the canyon, and most of them have a patch of forest like we do where they're left alone and come out to go to town maybe once a day, or once a week. we are unusual in that we go to town maybe two or three times a day, and really wear out the cars. but we have teenagers. people are aware of that too. they are supportive.

southern new mexico is, in general, ranching country. the people who own the land and run the cattle are the kings, in my opinion. if you own a few cows, you can run them around, fix fence, sell off a few of them, it seems like a way to make a living. i'm working on the local rancher - he's 97 - but what i want from him is for him to teach me how to grow an apple orchard. he seems to have a good one. he says, they aren't ripe yet, not 'til the first of october. but they're looking pretty red to me. i'm hoping he'll let me pick a few, and make some apple sauce.

i sometimes forget how intense this place is, but then a fog rolls around and the whole place is shrouded in a kind of hazy mystery. one thing that is a mystery is where all these roads go, that go off into the fog, into the mountains. usually it's off into someone's land, where they are surrounded by woods and elk and deer, and are generally armed to the teeth.

but that's ok, everyone in this country is armed to the teeth, and these are at least nice people, people who know how to use and take care of guns, and even know how to dress the deer they kill. and probably, they also know the hunting regulations, and follow them. that makes them many times better than the people in the rest of the country, who are also armed to the teeth, but who don't give much credence to the local regulations.

so these roads go off into the back country, and one by one, i'm learning where they go and who lives up where. it's a delicate country, because it's so dry, and just about every piece of property has a well and pulls more water out of the ground for our own needs. i feel slightly responsible for the imbalance in water in the rest of the country: hurricane after hurricane pounds the southeast, and the west coast dries out and burns up. no such thing as climate change? i'm sorry, but we people have some reckoning to do. when the big glaciers fall into the sea things will change a little, and i think it will become obvious.

but in my own small way, all we're doing is occupying a remote five-acre plot out in the sacramento mountains of southeast new mexico, and trying to hold on to our children, who are learning lessons the hard way and trying to make their way in a pandemic. we will be happy if all of them live to be responsible adults. the first part of that is simply to live. and even that is a delicate compromise. how can a teenager not go mix in with the rest of the world?

today there's more running around. the fog has lifted. time to get supplies. meds, for one thing, have run low.

i was cleaning out a brush pile this morning and i thought to myself for a minute, i like the moral certainty of a brush pile. but then i thought, that's something i probably shouldn't share, because everyone will think i've gone bonkers. there were cut pine boughs, old branches, a few gnarly oak stumps, lots of pine needles, and whole trees which i sorted as i went along. everything was a little soggy because of recent rains and everything in any brush pile is constantly reverting to the earth from whence it came. my wife came along and offered to pay a thousand bucks just to have someone haul it away. but that's not how i want to spend a thousand bucks. it just goes to show she lives in kind of a different universe than i do that way. even though that thousand bucks is basically both of ours.

right before the rains, i almost built a huge fire, but it was kind of out of respect for california and oregon that i didn't. at that time it was mostly california but same principle. they are having fires so huge that fire tornados are appearing once a week whereas they used to be only once every ten years or so. whole swaths of land are just burning to a crisp. is this any kind of situation to start another fire, even if it's a ways away?

then the rains came and the decision was made for me. it was a slow soggy rain that lasted a few days, and even now it's kind of drizzling and very cloudy. it was an unusual year as this was ten inches of snow up in wyoming and it's only early september. but i think i'm with most people in saying you can't count on anything anymore, and if the climate is going a little bonkers well that's only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

my hope is that it dries out as a brush pile so that i can burn it all steadily and slowly, get the fuel down to nothing. i find no pleasure in paying a thousand bucks to have someone come and burn it down on their place, and then i run out of money and have to do that for some other rich family in the area. i'll clear your brush, bring it to my place, and burn it. no, i'll just take care of my own, and yes i'm a few years behind but i'll catch up. slowly and steadily, with lots of good campfires.

i had to take a break from writing. every once and a while i take a look at what i'm doing and decide that i'm going about it the wrong way. one wrong way is doing my brush pile in the morning and waiting until i'm exhausted to actually work on it. another way is trying to finish a book of mcdonald's stories before i've really said everything i wanted to. and a final way is trying to wrap up a prairie leveretts project when there's still so much to learn about that civil war era. those books are taking me through history and i totally love it, for example reading old newspapers from 1860, but then i find myself missing content and wishing i'd done a little background research before i got started. next time around i'm going to do that. i'll do a book that's totally absorbed in one era, and i'll provide a lot of background which hopefully i'll have by the time i write.

i have a granson up in oregon who is almost one, learning to walk and talk, and they are hunkered down not going outside because of the bad air. they don't even go out to the garage, so they aren't doing their laundry, because of the bad air. and the county south and east of portland is evacuated - a friend of mine had to evacuate her three horses because of the fires. for a while i thought, i'll run up there in a truck and trailer, grab three horses, get out of there, and quick go meet that grandson. but that's the wrong conditions to go meet someone. for one thing, you can't breathe. for another, truck and trailer is a major operation. might be a pipe dream, but there i was, thinking of driving right into the fires. and the thing is, i have way too much going on around here. kids are turning into adults right in front of us, totally unprepared for the world.

on top of that i now talk to my family a lot. they are mostly isolated in different parts of the world. there's that grandson, but i think he'll be ok, as long as the whole city doesn't catch on fire. there are folks in england and albuquerque, pittsburgh, chicago and kansas, and i keep track of them all and encourage them to stay safe. that's all any of us can do. it may just back off, die, and leave us alone, but something tells me we're in for a long haul.

one's sanity is all one has, and we have to look at everything in terms of that. so they break the post office, and the schools, and the jobs, and the vote. they steal the vote maybe or declare it invalid for whatever reason. but you have to keep your sanity above all. take up arms, yes. do whatever you need to do. but keep your sanity.

the crickets are loud these days. i'm leaning in to this identity as retiree. i have a few books to write before i die. my kids are determined to not worry too much about that. they don't believe much in a disease they haven't seen. i mean, they know it's real, but that doesn't mean much to them, and they might go out and get it anyway, and there wouldn't be much i could do. we try to keep our kids safe but in the end what will keep us safe is being way out here in the mountains where covid hasn't really shown up.

so as a retiree i milk the idea that i'm very vulnerable and don't really want all this exposure. if i get through a day without going to allsup's it's a victory. i think i stepped in it today but only for a second, to see if a friend was working there. but no matter, the kids were around, infecting each other and carrying on without masks. the usual.

at nine thousand feet, maybe there's less oxygen for the little covid things to latch on to. i guess i'm counting on that. higher air, more sun, less chance for virus to spread.

listen to me, it's got so fear is one inch below my first words. it's terrible to live this way. it's hunting season - elk everywhere, deer too, hunters looking at them trying to decide when and how to break the law, that kind of thing. break the law, i say, because i think the ones i see are actually early, and the season hasn't started yet. but they're out here, in camo, with guns, and ready. whether they actually kill any, i don't know.

they need their sanity too, i guess.

 

on tuesday i take a look at my marketing situation, since i do my own, and on the first of the month i take a look at my blog system, since that's part of my marketing, i realized. i never really made my blogs to be commercial. but apparently my writing needs some work, and hasn't just caught on like wildfire, where one person buying one then turns into that same person buying endless copies. it's not working out that way. it may be that i'm not that great a writer.

i can deal with that. for one thing, i've turned to writing true stories of my ancestors and relatives, and there's a learning curve to non-fiction, too. it may be that by participating in many genres - short stories, plays, non-fiction, and novels (i have yet to finish one) i will master none. but at least i will have given them a shot.

one of my concerns is that i am limited to amazon, and all the people i like have been shunning amazon. so i'm considering using another platform, namely Lulu, or another way to market the books.

but on amazon itself, things are not looking that great. it's like my numbers are drifting into a bed of ash (i've been making a lot of fires these days). no publicity makes people just try to read something. kdp special doesn't seem to pick anything up. i'm flailing. ok.

then there are the blogs, like this one, that are actually pretty interesting. see that ad on the side? i'm curious about whether it works. but i can also tell you that this blog has a running average of about two thousand visitors a month, although maybe a hundred of them are me checking into my own computer. that's a lot of people. now if i were truly commercial (i have very mixed feelings about going commercial, and i've never been commercial), that's a lot of people i could be making my pitch to. i could be making my pitch to you, dear reader.

but i'm not, really. i'm just giving you my thoughts, with the little keep your sanity ad on the right.

my blogs have always been things i felt good about putting out there; i never really had reason to use them to draw traffic to, say, something i'm selling. now that i'm selling books, i'm a little inclined to use them that way, but part of me doesn't want to give up that innocent nature. my poetry blog, for example, is just about the poetry i like, and the poetry i have written. and it's always been that way. one time i put an amazon ad on it hoping to pick up revenue, but it didn't work. no revenue. just like all poetry publications. it's words on the page, or electronically. you're either doing it for love, or you're just doing it.

i have one about language as a self-organizing system. it's got one of my favorite url's, named after chicago traffic, and it's totally non-commercial. could i make it commercial? it's one of a kind, as far as i can tell, nobody makes weblogs to say that language is a self-organizing system. my inclination is to decorate it, perhaps use it to point to other ones, but not really make it commercial.

i think i'll make some of them commercial. it'll be an experiment. this one, no way. it'll stay small letters, and what's on my mind, and nothing else. a little ad in the template, maybe.