Well, it doesn’t look like we’re going to rent the house where I had my “wreck.”

You’d think that was omen enough, anyway. It didn’t seem like there was much room to park, which wouldn’t be unusual for Taos, but something else put me off enough that I pestered the California landlord into at least temporarily ignoring my emails. He’s the most intelligent fellow in that category of email correspondents I’ve run into yet, so it would be a shame if I really did piss him off. On the other hand, if he’s as smart as I think he is, he knows my wife isn’t going to pay that much per month for a shared wall. People just don’t know what it’s like to be a musician, and if you’ve never lived next door to one, you can’t just say it’ll be all right.

The place has a great location for being in town, though. My wife keeps saying she’d love to be in town, but then we don’t go for places because they’re in town, if that makes any sense. Any day now the right place is going to pop right up though, I know it is.

One reason is because we’re out of the closet now, as my wife said. I used a recent blog post for my last Horse Fly column, and anyone who reads it knows we’re looking for new studio and living space. Up until now, we’ve kept that concealed from our closest neighbors — no sense rocking the boat until we have to — but now it’s all out in the open. (Good!) The interesting thing about that piece is that I instantly regretted submitting it, but then they took it, so I was just going to pretend that nothing ever happened. You know, ignore it, let it go. I wasn’t even going to pick up a copy for my clippings file. Well, my wife did! What’s more, she read the thing and made a point of telling me how good she thought it was. The clarity of the writing, the directness.

The other thing that happened today was a response to news that came in yesterday about my mother. She’s almost 87 years old and lives in a mobile home retirement community outside of Tucson, AZ. More jarring than her being admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and a bad back (from falling down in the night) was that she’d added a third trailer to her aluminum empire. You’ve heard of the West Texas oilman who trades in his Cadillacs when the ashtrays get full? — I knew a kid in Abilene whose father did that, by the way — well, my mother has decided that since her double-wide is too full of furniture and needs work besides, it would be easier to just buy a used single-wide and go live there, leaving her old homestead for me and my siblings to deal with.

On the surface, this sounds fine, but I know all the subtexts. We could also come at this from the practical angle of how crazy it is to put her nursing home money into crappy real estate in a falling market, but that way lies peril of a more insidious variety. (An alligator hiding in a manger comes to mind.) The key is to not be sensible or expect such things from anyone involved.

Simply put, what we have here is the slowly rising wind of chaos as she approaches the end of her physical tether. Given the psyches involved [see above], it’s both an unconscious trap to yank us in and a great holy uprising in the field as everything shifts — I have to avoid it like hell and worship it at the same time! Yesterday, before I’d reached this epiphany, I decided I’d call her today and see if I could get her to back out of the deal. Today, however, I realized how silly that was, because nothing that happens will make any sense anyway. That’s a given. It doesn’t matter what she does, because it’s all a raging whirl: everyone is pedaling the best they can, and trying to direct would only stick a shovel in the spokes.

For now, I have a three-point plan:

Do no harm.
Don’t get pulled in (that way lies two-way harm).
“I love you, Mother.”

Today I saw the future. Things were pretty much fucked up, but somehow I didn’t mind.