there's a steady rain so i'm out on the porch at night, listening to crickets and other animals who have started making noise even though the rain has continued now for about three days. i think it will be here three or four more and then it will be monsoon season, so we can expect it really for another couple of months. and this time around there will be some flooding.

the problem is, in the new mexico clay and sand, there aren't many places for it to go. we are up here on the mountain, and like others have experienced one of the driest dry seasons ever. hot temps, totally dry, people fighting over water - and now, within three days, we have way more than we can handle. arroyos are bursting, water is hurtling downhill, and it's dangerous, the kind of thing they make la llorona movies about. but it really smells good up here in the mountains.
our problem out here is that we have a number of trailers just sitting out in the rain. They are meant to be driven, which means you could theoretically blow the puddles off the roof just by driving them down the road. we however are in no position to do that and in fact have cats and teenagers living in each one. we'd like to get rid of the funkiest of them but they are in fact useful so we haven't yet. i should be building roofs on them, is what should happen. somehow i have to get all this rain off of there without killing myself.

we've had probably about five inches already, and it's still june, so it's most likely the wettest june ever. generally the monsoon starts on the fourth of july, and everyone knows this, and the months leading up to the fourth - jan, feb, mar, apr, may, and june - are the dry season. often zero rain, zero moisture. they said monsoon would come early this year but it came with a passion - five inches at least - and fire danger is over. now it's flood danger. things are flooding already down in the valley.

i need to be working on my writing - have an autobiography (starring this blog) almost done - a biography of a geologist, a story of plains pioneers, and quaker plays, all on the verge. help me help me. i'm here on the porch, listening to the crickets and the soft rain.

doctors have been seen. roswell has been driven to. my hearing aids have been adjusted, maxed out, turned up, adjusted again. conclusions have been made.

one, my inner ear fluids were out of balance. there are two kinds of fluids in there, and it's possible that way too much coffee over way too long a time just messed with them. i've been put on a diuretic that stabilizes that and that seems to have helped. now i feel pressure in both ears and the steep decline in general hearing has stopped.

he called it maniere's disease, but that's a disease that strikes one ear at a time and this has pretty much happened to both ears. for a while we thought the left was way worse than the right, but a test the other day showed them coming out about the same and stable - not decreasing rapidly, just bad. ordinary sounds still sound like they are coming through a swimming pool in both ears, with the left sometimes entirely silent. the left will occasionally pop and then i hear a little better. so it's possible there is still fluid in both ears in spite of the new med regime.

sorry to bore you with all this stuff. people send me youtubes and i don't listen; i struggle in zooms; i struggle at home with ordinary conversations. i'm in a new phase of being generally hard of hearing and adjusting to it in public and in private. i'm a deaf old man.

meanwhile juneteenth has become a national holiday and i'm ready to kick back and enjoy the whole thing starting tomorrow. it's been a long pandemic. mind you, it marks not the end of slavery, but the awareness of the end of slavery, or the being told of the end of slavery. has anyone ever told you you're free? let me be the first to tell you. and i celebrate telling you by celebrating juneteenth.

there are many kinds of slavery in this world, but that's a very dark subject, so i won't get into it for now, just like "all lives matter" is true, but let's not take away from the momentous occasion as it is as we know it. for now i don't even know what i'll do to celebrate. we have no customs. we might as well start good ones, and start them tomorrow.

it is the driest, cruelest month here in the mountains of new mexico. we are generally accustomed to june being the driest of the dry, and rainy season such as it is starting on about the fourth of july. we had an unusually wet spring, maybe an inch, but that's an inch more than usual, and things are greener than usual. we have been lucky on the fire front. an isolated one here, one up against sierra blanca over there, a couple of irresponsible campers maybe did this one. they were small. people pounced right on them. we seem to have survived, if now we can get through two more weeks.

my goal, of course, is to have one big huge bonfire the minute i know for sure the rains are coming in. i will burn all the brush that's been sitting around all spring, dry as a bone, crackling when i step on it. i'll get as much of it out of here as i can. and then i'll watch the rains come in for a month and make the grass grow.

the cows are back - they have their own perspective, their own lazy indolence as they look at you and go back to chomping on grass right next to your kitchen window. the dogs go nuts. one of them, the chihuahua, will attack them to his own detriment if you let him; that's the way they are. the cows will undoubtedly win, and we'll be out one dog. but sometimes i go out to shoo them away, and they look back at me with that lazy indolence, and they could care less. do i have a gun? a stick? then they'll just help themselves to my grass, thank you. and if i chase the mother away from the calves there will be a horrible racket in the valley, and the dogs will go even more nuts.

slowly i pick up their poops and break them up and cover them with dirt. this process hopefully can be stretched over a few years so it really has a good chance to break up and become good soil with will ultimately cover all our land instead of this hideous red clay that nothing grows on. it's all good rotten compost, even the weeds i pick, but some of it takes longer than others to decompose and a rainy season sure would help.

i spend time outside because it's silent, in a general kind of way. i wear my hearing aids, so i pick up most things, but even then there's not much, and that's very satisfying. i've come to value silence and shun people in general. it's too much work, sometimes, even talking to my own family. but the outside never lets me down. i make piles of pine straw and have to figure out where to put them. i break bark and put it on the walking paths. i make beds of poop and dirt so that when i need good soil on the hillside i'll have it.

in marketing i was a total ratings junkie, and then i kind of let go of it. i figured i'd drawn enough blood from a turnip - i shouldn't have to bend people's arms to read my books anyway. let the ratings rise slowly into the sunset and let me produce other things, which, oddly, i can't do when i'm obsessed with marketing. i find that in the last month or so i've done lots of marketing - tweetstorms, good pop art on twitter and facebook, facebook promotions, the whole works. i covered what i considered the known universe. these are the markets i haven't touched yet: instagram, non-zons (people who avoid amazon altogether), book fairs and stores. some of these people i'm clearly not reaching, but, oh well, you can't do everything. with my limited time i should be concentrating on writing everything i want to write, as opposed to making a bigger splash and being better known. i have things i need to write. and here i am getting dizzy instead of writing them. in the last month i haven't really finished any of my current works.

there are three on the dock now - almost finished. one is my autobiography. i took it out and, surprisingly, almost done. i've been working on it for years. and by the way, it has out there in the title and is roughly patterned after this here blog. it's just me talking, and all true stories, but it will have capitals at the beginning of sentences and all. none of this all-lower-case thing, which i actually kind of like, but won't use in a book i publish. to see some of these fantastic stories (the book will have fifty of them) scroll down on the template and connect onto a few of them. they may, on this blog, be all-lower-case, but in the book there will be caps, i promise.

the other two are leverett books. i'm getting kind of absorbed in the leverett books because there are so many possibilities. my brothers and sisters want me to go to mom's side, and i just might, even though my first three books lead me right up to this fourth one that i'm about to finish, a guy born in 1830 who died in about 1920 (not sure of that date). he brings us into the modern world, a world where people are now driving cars, and can send a letter that will get where it's going in a few days. at the age of eighty they take him through yellowstone and ask him if it's worth it to wait eighty years to see it and he says yes, reckon so, if you live your life on the plains of nebraska, kansas and wisconsin then yellowstone will always be kind of a treat. but i think it's the cars that amaze him the most. back when he was four, he rode a stage 1600 miles, and he himself walked as much of that way as they could get him to walk, to save the horses.

tall corn state - now on ACX

That's right. It's narrated by Donald Davenport.
HERE
Thanks for considering it!

audiobooks coming

a very hot day, and my problem is, having come back hurrying around in it, i can't seem to cool down. i shut up the house, put on the air-con, sat back, and i'm still hot. not sure what that's all about. i'm always paranoid that one more thing has gone down the drain with my steadily increasing (67) age.

house full of visitors - three step-granddaughters, step daughter and husband, father-in-law - & my sister came a while ago as well. things get busy. my wife gets frazzled. it's all high on the nerve scale. this morning i brought my shoes out to put them on, set them on the floor - as i took a swipe of coffee my wife snatched them up and took them back and threw them under the bed. she was doing a sweep of shoes just sitting there. it drives her nuts. it's been a long pandemic.

out in the garden, my greenthread plants have been tricked into going into flower even well before rainy season - because we had some rain a while back. for that reason also it's been an unusual summer. now it's back to windy and extremely dry - with the wind sucking up every little bit of moisture left over from any of the rain experiences. one was a hailstorm - but it went away in a quick conversion from winter to summer, and now, it's just all-out summer. hundred degrees in the valley. a piercing sun. dry as a bone.

on the writing front i really do now have writer's block. about six things almost finished but instead i obsess over marketing the same stuff over and over again, beyond the point of saturation - and that kind of marketing just isn't working much. i look at my stats and they're not bad - as a hack i'm probably lucky to make twenty or thirty bucks a month - but that is really nothing compared to what i've put into it. for several weeks my strategy has been "just go back and write some more" yet that doesn't happen. the endless marketing happens instead.

then there are the blogs. it's been ten days since i even started this one. i guess i can say i'm tired.