it's a cold rainy night in the mountains of south central new mexico. winter is coming. we get significant winter in these parts so i should be preparing, doing hard preparation. i should put plastic on the screens and windows. i should get stuff inside that will be damaged by the snow. i should take down our glamping tent.

i've been fanatically consumed by my book ratings, which means that some of this stuff is going untended. even the oil in the car, i let go, because frankly i was obsessed by what came next, some writing project, and just wasn't thinking about it. the car survived though. the generator didn't. i still don't know how to fix generators.

for my book ratings i read books. simply put, i read somebody's, and rate them, and somebody reads mine and rates mine. it really helps. it gives the appearance that one's books are being read, because they are. sure, they're being read by one author at a time. but they'd be read by one person at a time anyway, so things could be much worse. as it is, i'm having some success. if any book is rated at below a million one is lucky, and at the moment i have about six below a million. now that's hustling. i stlll may be making only twenty or thirty bucks a month but i don't care. i also, in a general way, am racing against time to see if i can write what i want before it's too late.

but the winter chill sets into the valley like the fog that came with it and it's just on the edge of a freeze, maybe even a hard freeze that will make me take my hose inside and put it away for the winter. we're like a little minnesota, way up here towering over the southwest at almost 9,000 feet, and we don't have to go far to get down into the valley, the desert, where it never gets below about forty. lots of people do this, winter in the valley, but we're full-timers. we're going to make it even if we are a huge mountain ridge away from civilization. we like it out here.

i feel the wide expanse of open land, national park, reservation and rangeland, has been good for my writing, because there's no human drama, or rather, the human drama is all in one direction, back toward town. i can feel like i'm not going to be set upon, though i'm well aware there are rattlers out there, not to mention mountain lions and bears. i believe i saw a mountain lion the other day - much larger than a fox - and i liked the look he gave me - suspicious, calm, aware, ready. he wasn't afraid of my car - though he wasn't coming anywhere near it.

but, i've kind of run out of stories. i find, reading novels, that the best ones come from careful observation of the human condition, and since the pandemic, i've got no patience for the human condition or even the various fallen angels that occupy the place. i'd rather stay home. i could write forever, i just have run out of things to say.

thinking on my feet, i figure it's time to take a little break, and make the place a little more ready for winter. i've got to make stairs and a roof; these are things that will help in the winter. i'd actually like to make several roofs - a bicycle shed, a place to put things out of the snow. with the cold and wet i feel the need to close places up and make them warm and dry - to figure out how metal sheeting attaches onto roofing wood and get started.

the kids are busy with school. simply put, they never bought into this lifestyle and agreed to move way out here only on the condition that they could still have what they had in town. mostly they like internet, candy, ice cream, and fried food. but occasionally they watch a good movie or make a bowl of popcorn. that, popcorn, would be health food. their life is pretty well wrapped up in internet and electricity. and sports - they all play varying degrees of sports.

which means i do a lot of driving. all the more easy to become obsessed with ratings.

just got disappointed by an interesting problem - when someone has already written the book i wanted to write.

i was obsessed by the columbian exposition in chicago in 1893, a spectacle, a city, a tribute to architecture and technology in the "gilded age" (?). gilded or guilded, not sure which, it's an expression i don't use, but it characterizes that time at the end of the century when people were excited about electricity, innovation, technology, and everything that came with it. and it was a precursor, to some degree, to the roaring twenties; there was a panic at the end of it, but it was caused basically by overconfidence and overspending.

so my idea was to set my novel in the chicago world's fair and have a contrast between people who came from the countryside, or foreign countries, and the setting itself, which was many fantastic architectural marvels with lagoons, etc., separating them from the south side. at first i wasn't even clear about where jackson park was (near south side) but i found out and was doing research into the site itself, when i encountered this book. the guy had done something similar to what i thought of.

except that he focused his book on the contrast between the architect who designed the place, and this one mass murderer. the murderer, henry holmes, lured women into a torture chamber near the exposition and then killed them. the book, the devil in the white city, was a best-seller, probably still is, highly ranked and very popular. and non-fiction, which appeals to me.

the more i go along, the more i tend to favor historical reality. that is, making sure as much of the book as possible is true, and actually happened, and is still a gripping story that makes you want to read it from cover to cover. i'm not totally comfortable making up stories anymore, though i've done it for years, and called it fiction, and didn't worry about it. now i want to deal with the truth, and make that a gripping story. so this guy obviously did what i aspire to and is a possible mentor.

the whole thing was sparked by finally taking out a big, wide, coffee table book from maybe 1895, and opening it up. the cover and the first pages have long ago been destroyed and yellowed out by exposure to air. but deep inside it are these black and white photos of the buildings in the exposition, and i can see in them great care on the part of the photographer, and an entirely different appreciation of architecture that was considered revolutionary and new at the time, or, well, maybe, just like the best that they could crank out. i even now love the stuff they made back then, like old science buildings in universities, and wonder why no one has that kind of sense when they build new buildings. maybe it uses up too much asbestos? in any case i wouldn't mind a city of forty or fifty neo-classical (or whatever, my research hasn't really gone all that far) buildings to hang around in and have my main characters running around in.

except that, again this larson guy already did it.

this sleepy old blog reveals so much of my life - if only because i have been pretty regular over the years. i write everything. i don't hold back. i tell what's going on. it is my life.

a lot of traveling lately - when the older one gets depressed in las cruces, i go and get him. now he's depressed because his bike was stolen. or maybe, because i told him people steal a lot of bikes on college campuses and he left his bike out there in the rack anyway. it looked safe. it felt like nobody came by very much. boy was he wrong. they come by regularly. in september, and probably again in march. just like they did in texas and just about everywhere else.

the trip takes us out of our own mountains, over a ridge, up into cloudcroft at 8700 feet, where it was raining, and then down to the desert, through the white sands, through the tularosa basin, and up over another mountain pass, the san augustin, which is also probably about 8000. that last one kind of wears you out, but it's exceptionally beautiful. also, there are cars and trucks broken down on either side of it, and on our mountain as well, just not used to the steep hills and the pressure it puts on an engine. but the wildflowers bloom like crazy on the mountainsides.

at the border patrol checkpoint they have their system down. they scan your tags on your way in and have some idea if you're just a piker like me, or if you're into serious getting under the law. i had my answer ready - even the dog was an american citizen, and he's pretty friendly, and he just got his boy back, so he was in a good mood too.the guy just waved us on through. i saw the mobile home encampment at holloman - little kabul, i guess you could call it - but i'm not sure that's what it is, it could just be their transport system, and the more serious thousands are deeper in the village. holloman is an air force base - one of five in the nation that is being used for refugees - and so we know, sure enough, that we got a few....a few thousand anyway.

out in my shed i finally took out this huge old coffee table book from the late 1800's. to be specific it showed all the grand things from the chicago columbian world exposition of 1893. they went out of their way to put their best foot forward, you could say. they built tons of things, and then made this coffee table book to show them off. some of the pages are faded into oblivion, but what's there is truly incredible. at the time, a world of its own, definitely worth making a book out of. hmm.
br> good night everyone.

monday is alnmost always a kind of day off here, although that doesn't make it more peaceful. kids have no school, and, energized by sleeping in two days in a row already, they wake up eager to do stuff, and that almost always involves money and trip to town. we hold them off as long as possible, hoping they'll sleep half the day and limit the suffering by about half.

now, the weather is stunning, but that rarely has anything to do with it. sometimes they want to hang out downtown with friends, or play some basketball, or just go into town to eat. they're kind of relentless. my wife has taken to riding horses most of the morning and part of the afternoon, so often i get the brunt of it when they wake up. but they're like, where's mom, like she's going to magically make food appear, or permission to go, when in fact she'll stall too. i'm more curmudgeonly when i stall. i have more experience, having less money for longer.

i am actually working on several projects at once, even home, by my computer, as they wake up. one, i am reading others' books in return for their reading mine. i am making a small quaker pamphlet on my copy machine back in the shed, but if i don't find a more efficient way of making it (it spits out copies very slowly, one at a time) it won't work as a long-term solution. that is a job for the patient, involving careful observing of how it lays out and staples as a pamphlet, so i'm just doing a test run now, a single pamphlet which i will pore over.

but while i was in the shed i pulled out and brought forward grandma margo's scrapbook, a large thing with colorful pictures. i can barely hold back on starting this project even before i've finished my last one (my autobiography, finally almost totally proofread). with the proofreading of my autobiography almost done, i have about six things i could charge forward on, but this scrapbook calls out to me when i'm out in the shed. so i brought it in. it puts me, in a visual artistic way, in the toledo ohio of about 1906, that's where it starts. she is about fourteen when she starts it. i am not quite clear on the dates or even whether she puts everything in order. i decided to catalog it and see if i can decide what i want to focus on and what i should copy.

so proofreading the last of my autobiography is a chore, but i'm really not in the mood.

so my choices are, research on toledo ~ 1906, research on language (also a chore), research on some other stuff.

as i check my stats almost constantly, the amazon record service says, crank it out. publish it. produce it. whatever, get it on the table.

first musicians to play the ped-mall, iowa city, late seventies, with jeff morgan and jeff mccandless

a little disappointed that i didn't make a slightly bigger deal out of this blog in the big fuss over the release of my autobiography. i will say a few things about it, though. this blog is me, with no pretense, all truth, no caps, just rambling straight out of my fingers as i type. to some degree, dressing it up is pretense, so it goes against my nature, and it even skips my mind as something i 'need' to do. yes it might be good for publicity; after all, the more i put myself out there, in general, the better i do. and yes, i see the stories that are buried deep within this blog as backing up the truth of the rest of it. it's actually a pretty well-documented life.

i am having issues with truth vs. fiction in general in that it has been maybe ten years that this autobiography has been almost done, and i've tried hard to make it truthful and put everything in it, and in the process have lost the joy of just creating fiction from the things i hear and from my mind in general. it's like i can't do both things at once. i am used to multitasking to some degree, having five or six projects going on at once, but with this it's taken over the landscape and i can hardly breathe until it's totally done. even now there are a few crucial typos that i have to fix and meanwhile the first run has gone through and a number of people have bought the book with the typos. it's not a huge crime, that a few things came out wrong or didn't make sense, and it's only a few books as i'm still not a million-seller these days. but what it means is that it's not totally done to the point i can put it behind me.

as for this blog, i'm actually proud of it even in the ramshackle condition it's in. i see that it's advertising the crime stories book on its template, and that's what, about eight years old, but is still one of my most inspired books of stories, so i hesitate to just take it off there and replace it with tall corn state or one of the others. i love the long list of dates at the bottom of the template - testament that it's been doing its service for many years. family pictures need to be updated - that's a common thing and one i need to keep tending to anyway but tend to get to when it gets cold and time to be thinking about the holidays. in general it limps along as usual. now that i keep track of all my blogs i consider this one on top of the rest as it gets by far the most visitors and i think that first, some of them are me, and second, the vast majority look at these small letters and just turn away. they're not about to sit and read my ramble.

but yes, it's me, with the same name, as regular as i can get it, and some times like now, it's all the writing i can muster.

i've been suffering dizzy spells - something like three in the last three days. two were almosts - staved off by having medicine with me and taking it right away. in short the world feels unsteady as i look out at it from my eyes. i can't be sure i see where the road is when i walk and i feel like people can tell when they watch me and get slightly threatened by the appearance that i'm drunk. i mean no harm - i just can't walk that steadily - but i don't even like to be out there walking when i'm not sure where each step is taking me. it's not painful, but it's unpleasant, and i start grabbing things like handrails to keep a steady path. the medicine actually helps so i've taken to keeping it with me in the days just in case.

this makes it more urgent, in my opinion, that i get to doing the third of the big three projects. the first was the novel, the second, the autobiography; there were three i wanted to do before i die. the third is the language book. to some degree it takes more focus and concentration but, like the others, it's already half done. but there are a lot of others i'm also inclined to pursue and i haven't totally decided.

in the leverett series there's another that's almost done: prairie leveretts - about my great great grandfather, who was on the 1600-mile stagecoach ride as a four-year-old, tried to settle southeast nebraska during the civil war, settled a farm in wisconsin and then moved out to the prairie to settle in sioux falls, south dakota, only to have the last of three huge panic/depressions wipe out south dakota and its chance of becoming a bustling settlement area. this only represents the high points of his life and his wife was with him every step of the way, along with the six of his surviviving kids of whom the fourth was my great grandfather. there's a little blip in the story where, toward the end of his life in the early days of the century, his youngest son has him come visit out in california one winter, sunnyvale to be exact. and his wife has been complaining all along about the cold plains winters being hard on her respiratory conditions and i think she's a driving force in their taking winters and getting out of them once they can. at the beginning of the century people now have cars and are a little more used to just going somewhere if they really need to, and california is a place where most midwesterners at least know someone and can have a place to stay when they get there. so they do it and go to sunnyvale for the winter, and what happens but the great california earthquake - they are there and experience it.

because i had so much fun with my first novel i am now hungry to produce the second, which will be about texas, but that's where i'm stuck with writer's block. that one is about half done too, but it stalled for lack of a good finishing plan that turns the plot just right and says something i want to say. i didn't quite map it out enough before i started and, as a result, it stalled. it's a common pattern for me unfortunately.

and finally something is driving me back to the puritan ages where i have lots of ancestors sitting back there seething and waiting to have their stories told. they don't mind if it's fiction or non-fiction but of course i'm stuck on that fence anyway and can't seem to work it out. it's not like i've ever had a problem just saying what it was or combining them when necessary - it's just that sometimes it's hard to get a true fiction off the ground when i am caught up in the reality of it.

and there's more, too, believe it or not.

Just Passing Through

Autobiography and true stories from out there

$4.39 on Kindle
$8.80 + shipping paperback, through Amazon
also on Kindle Unlimited
working on other methods of selling

labor day weekend sunday. around here that means i'm trying to avoid going to town, because i have to go to las cruces tomorrow, over two hours each way, and i just need a break from driving. even to cloudcroft, about eithteen miles, four or five of them gravel and very washed out by the rains, it's a problem, about an hour and a half of driving alone, not to mention the constant risk of deer, elk and whatever just jumping out at you while you drive.

i spent a good amount of time this morning pulling weeds and moving sticks - unfortunately i might be allergic to the weeds i was pulling, because now my eyes are itching like crazy. i used to think my eyes got red and sore from the c-pap blowing air up onto them all night as i rolled over in my sleep, but the other thing i've been doing is pulling these weeds, and the ones i really want to get are the ones that are going to seed because i don't want such a big crop next year. i was down to my last corner, a front corner of the property, although i suspect i've left a few in scattered places - i've tried my best to clear the grounds of them. i always wash my hands when i come back in. but the problem is whenever your hands happen to touch your face. i'm one person who can't keep my hands off my face.

the world is full of angst about covid and for good reason. lots of kids under 12 aren't vaccinated and lots of other people aren't either. in fact almost half of our area is unvaccinated as well. so the kids in the schools are sitting ducks, and sure enough, they'll get it. our four, thirteen and up, are all vaccinated, so we're counting on that to get us through. but there's nothing stopping it if it ravages the community, and i think it already is. the high school was closed for a week. a second-grade teacher had it, or tested positive, and had a kid in the high school. it's a small town - it's only a matter of time before everyone gets it.

this blog is gearing up for a big production. namely, that i have finished my autobiography, and am about to put it on the market. it is on the market, but i'm laying low about it for several reasons, even though this would be the ideal weekend to spring it on people. the first reason is that i never quite consider it finished. at the moment the published version doesn't even mention this blog, although that will be corrected soon, as it seems i have to at least mention the things about it that are important. one, it's one of the longest-running blogs out there. two, it's been all-low-caps, the whole time, no variation on its style, really. three, it's full of family pictures and events. it's my whole life, twenty or thirty years worth.

time to celebrate, get the templates in order, put some pictures up.

i just did a pretty outrageous thing: i just published my book, just passing through: autobiography and true stories from out there - it has this blog in its subtitle, and this blog, i might add, has been by my side now for almost thirty years. almost all the stories from the book started out on this blog, and are still here. i wrote the first versions of them as many as thirty years ago. the stories have been anchoring this blog along with various pictures of my family which are mostly hidden deep within it.

but here's what's outrageous: i pretty much failed to mention the blog in the book. it's part of my subconscious; it's part of me, but it's not one of these things that i think about when i'm recounting my life's accomplishments. it's just like background.

i've done it that way intentionally - i write here frequently; i have no standards of organization or anything else that i enforce upon myself here. it is just me rambling. why should i make a big deal out of it?

well, for starters, because it will probably outlive all of us. its age alone makes it one of the longer-running blogs out here in the blogosphere. those righteous date-stamps down in the templane, one a month for all those years, make the template nice and long and make it virtually impossible to find anything you are looking for unless you happen to know the exact date i might have been talking about it.

that's how i like my blogs: rich, full of interesting things, and impossible to disassemble through ordinary means.

here's the new book. so far it's on kindle only:

Just Passing Through: Autobiography and true stories from out there