Well, it’s only taken a whole year, but I’m finally mostly done with a new website for a very talented musician, Stanley Greenthal of Seattle, Washington. You can see it in all its nearly-completed glory at StanleyGreenthal.com, of course.

Stanley counts a couple of excellent professional photographers among his friends, and I’ve used as many of their shots as I could in designing the site. Be sure to visit the Gallery of Strings & Drums to see what a hand-coded photo gallery looks like. I know, I’m a glutton for punishment. But the results blend in perfectly with the rest of the site, something a prepackaged gallery can rarely accomplish.

In the future, however, the galleries will be automated! ‘Nuff said…

Indeed. Getting caught up now. Take a look at FotoFeed to see more photos of the Mississippi River from Eagle Point Park in Dubuque, Iowa, and bid farewell to a truckload of turkeys! The current “on the road” series actually starts here, if you’re interested.

I just looked out the window, and New Mexico is still here. There’s a mountain thousands of feet high without a single condo on it, and there never will be, because it’s sacred to the Pueblo. I’m not assaulted by golf or 24/7 grass mowing. The closest Interstate highway is over an hour away. I froze all winter, but I’ll never be hot and sticky. My wife loves me even though I’m a jerk. I’m almost 63 with the ambition of a 30-year-old. Call me a “senior” (except when I buy a movie ticket) and you get shoved into the gorge — hey, there’s a gorge! Over 600 feet, straight down onto rocks that are BILLIONS of years old. I saw a hummingbird yesterday, three bright yellow goldfinches this morning. It’s going to be 75 degrees today, and the wind won’t be blowing over 45 mph.

Is this heaven, or what?!

Oh yeah, vote Obama.

Must walk and breathe today.

Courage!

This will be published locally next week in Horse Fly, a monthly arts & politics newspaper here in Taos. Be sure to pick up your free copy if you live here. Out-of-towners can subscribe, too.

NINE-YEAR ITCH
by John H. Farr

Geez, how long does it TAKE?!

Nine long years in the shadow of the mountain, and my hair’s been growing for maybe six or seven now. I was going to cut it a while back, but someone accused me of trying to look like a biker. I figured he was jealous, so I put away the scissors. Anyway, the flying jackhammers are back.

I don’t know what kind of woodpeckers they are, because I’ve mostly only heard them. Yesterday it sounded like they wanted to eat the chimney. That didn’t last long — how could it? — but then they flew to the bottom of the hill and attacked a telephone pole. Tiring of that, they ended up in the branches of a tall dead aspen, where they finally settled in. Whackety-whackety-brrrap-bap-bap. Brrrap. Whackety. Bap-bap. While this was going on, a herd of scruffy cattle mysteriously appeared in an old corral a little ways down the road, like they’d just dropped out of the sky. At least they had all their parts.

Nine long years in the shadow of the mountain. Every now and then, I think I may be used to this. Now I don’t think of what I don’t have more than a dozen times a month. There’s a tan on my face, even in the winter. I drop Spanish words in conversation with native speakers. I look like I flew out of a tree.

* * *

Never in a million years did I think it would go like this. Heck, I never thought anything. But coming here nine years ago, things were pretty brutal, or seemed to be. The shock of rolling through Questa after living in a place where farmers mowed the thick green grass right up to the cornstalks almost disemboweled me. Still can, too. Not long ago a friend described throwing open his old kitchen door in Missouri in the morning, in the fall, and breathing in the smell of wet red leaves. I nearly walked right out the door and stole a car.

A real winter like we’ve had can also make you vulnerable in this way, no matter where you’re from. Personally, I’ve never felt so physically and psychologically restrained. Some days I didn’t think we’d ever see the ground again, much less any sign of the tulips I dug up from the useless bed beside the house, where a giant elm is lifting the adobe wall, and planted just out back.

But around Easter my wife pulled back the straw and found them! It’s like a miracle. It loosens all the straps. Why, they may even bloom before the grasshoppers hatch, and I can just drop dead.

There’s more, too. Around the same time, a wandering cow in the night tripped over and snapped the cable from the satellite TV. Yes, that really happened. I know that’s what it was, because she fell against the house, and I opened the door to look in case there was a rockslide or someone’s truck had slipped evilly out of gear. By then she was in the sagebrush on the other side of the driveway, calmly munching on a patch of dry grass in the glare of my Wal-Mart spotlight. I put two and two together and closed the door. In the morning, I found the cable and the cow flops. The thing is, when I stood there later in the afternoon sun, jerry-rigging a fix with cheap Chinese coaxial cable parts and electrician’s tape, the world was right. It just was, like with the silly plants.

* * *

For years I fought against old memories. There had to be a better place, a different solution. The itch had always been to run away. That’s the way I felt when I was swatting deerflies with a sweaty towel in Maryland, but at least we were there first. Now it’s been nine years with a storage unit. The last time I yanked open the door, the first thing I saw was fresh rat crap on the floor.

I know how to fix this. (No, not gasoline.) This itch I’m scratching with a shovel, dammit, and you’re all invited to the barbecue.

Okay, I’m FTPing like a sonofabitch. Watch out, things may get a little wonky here for a while… [transfer files, transfer files] Hey, that worked fine! Cool. You are now reading FarrFeed running on WordPress 2.5.

The “write post” interface sucks, though. This version may drive me to MarsEdit, after all.

Well, this is kinda strange, but I think everything will be all right.

After years of carping, bitching, whining, hating, excoriating, and denouncing anything that has to do with the corrupt soul of American governance and policy (especially the traitorous, cowardly Democratic leadership in Congress), and after undergoing a complete transformation of personal consciousness regarding the things that really matter — on my good days — I actually feel happy to be heading out to vote tomorrow. It’s the damnedest thing.

The last time I felt even remotely like this was in ‘92. Finally I had a chance to vote for one of my own, so to speak, and even though I thought Clinton and Gore much too conservative and conventional, they were still my guys. I could have been them (with tons more money and sense), and they could have been me, at least in part. I was voting for my generation, and I wanted it to count…

It was an unusually warm fall that year in Maryland. On election day, the sky was overcast, the air was damp and still. We lived in the country just the other side of Still Pond, about seven miles or so on a quiet two-lane road from the polling place in a community center in Kennedyville. I wanted to remember that day by doing something different, so I rode my bike to vote. My clothes got wet with sweat, and when I got there, I know I must have reeked. That didn’t matter, though — all the way home I felt really good, because I’d taken part in something big that was also important just for me. To this day I refer to Bill Clinton as “my boy,” though if the truth be known, I’m rather tired of him now. I think we’d get along just fine, though, outside of all the politics, if that were possible.

Here in Llano Quemado, it snowed all day long today. There’s half a foot of fresh powder on top of snow and ice that’s been here for a couple of months. By the time the sun went down, it was winter wonderland all over again, and tomorrow night the temperature will drop below zero.

Anticipating all this, I scored three-quarters of a cord of resin-charged piñon on Sunday. My current wood guy and friend charges $150 for that much. He owns half a mountain and cuts the wood from his own forest. A wildlife survey found there were 1,100 elk on his land, and sometimes when he drives up there, they run a hundred strong alongside his truck… I know, one can hardly believe these things, but I assure you it’s all true, and soon he’ll take me up there. You need to know this because it adds to what the firewood means. It’s full of resin because he cuts only beetle-killed trees. He actually takes as much of the whole tree home as he can to cut up, down to the smallest branches, leaving no burnable waste up in the woods. What I’m trying to say is that this is special fuel. You throw a couple of chunks on top of the coals in the morning, and usually they start right up. I hardly ever use kindling, since the fire runs pretty much 24/7.

Now, of course, the woodpile has disappeared again under a blanket of white. It’s pretty, but I have to take a broom outside to find my firewood. I was just out there to uncover enough to bring in for the evening. There wasn’t any wind at all, and I didn’t feel cold except for where the snow got into my crocs. (Okay, I’m lazy…)

In the midst of these conditions, our car died over the weekend. We only have the ‘87 Ford F-150 now, like a regular ranch family, but we won’t be using it tomorrow. When we head off to the Talpa community center to vote — about a mile and a half away — we’ll be on foot, by choice. Walking in the snow on a quiet rural back road, we’ll go past fields, a river, scores of barking dogs, horses, cows, a few nice homes, and several bombed-out trailers. If the sun has come out by then, it’ll all be fairly spectacular on the one hand and ridiculously ordinary on the other. Just a couple of people, walking down the road to vote. I don’t know how my wife will vote, but I’m voting for Obama.

This isn’t generational. Obama’s about as old as a lot of my current friends. (The older I get, the more imperative it is to meet them younger.) One’s own kind are easy to acknowledge, great shuffling beasts who sniff each other once, flap a little wattle, and instantly know everything. My younger friends are like me 15 years ago, no longer kids but still immortal, full of energy just slightly poisoned by regret — enough to give it flavor — and making plans without a ticking clock. I suck it up like a vampire of love. I need this stuff to keep my own hoop rolling down the road.

Hillary won’t do. I know her, remember (sniff and flap). Obama represents the new. That’s all I care about. The old is utterly, forever discredited and damned. All I have to do to figure this out is look in any mirror. To hell with me, to goddamn hell with John McCain, but cast a vote for change and joy. I want to ring a gong and make a statement. The last ten years have been a horror and grotesquery, and now our world is dying. What else is there to do but go on record as siding with the unknown, with all the invisible potential straining to bust loose every second? I still don’t care too much about what Obama may believe, but I think he’ll wield a helluva broom.

I want to do the most damage to the frozen past. I want to live for now, for everyone, and go for broke.

This should be obvious, but I thought I’d get it out of the way.

For all my caterwauling and messing with my own head, I see that this is what to do now. Hillary Clinton is my age, and my generation needs to LET GO… We’re too corrupt and set in our ways. We know too many people. We think we know how it is, how politics works, what things are made of, and that’s an automatic trap. So Obama it is. I haven’t read a single policy statement or heard a single speech, but that’s where I am.

I don’t think we need any debates. In a perfect world, Hillary would just drop out. Yeah, yeah, I know. But the election is over, as far as I’m concerned, and think of all the time I’ve saved. No, seriously: I’m assuming that the fates have enough sense to see that the world needs a younger, black American president with a name a pedicab operator in Karachi or a seamstress in Rio will never forget. Geez, he even has a grandmother in Kenya who doesn’t speak any English. This is rather more huge than people have bothered to notice, but it’s there. I sense an opportunity for inner change on a planetary level. Whether or not Obama is part of that, seeing him run makes me feel it, and that’s important.

In the ole U.S. of A., the process is potentially our transformation and salvation, so much so that I don’t even have to like him. I probably would, though, if I paid attention. And just the thought of participating in the Great Bonfire of every hackneyed, bitter stereotype that ever made me hate my fellow countrymen would be reward enough to get me to vote. Yes, I’m going to vote. It’s come to that at last. The symbolism of a massive repudiation of the last eight years would be a very powerful thing, so the ritual must take place.

Call it voting as a spiritual act. That’s really how I’m thinking of it.

UPDATE: Obama is a Leo, born Aug. 4, 1961. That absolutely seals it for me.

They did it again. Every time I think I’m good to go, Steve Jobs rolls out something I absolutely have to have, usually right after I’ve bought a gadget that’s no damn good anymore.

And all you Windows users really need to get religion. There’s only one company out there that cares about making your computer life easier, and that’s Apple. Case in point? Time Capsule. This even works with PCs, by the way. It’s basically a full-featured wireless base station (router) with a 500 GB or 1 terabyte “server grade” hard drive built in. So? So, you can wirelessly back up all your home or office computers automatically with this thing, and of course it works just fine for setting up your wireless network. There’s nothing like it in the Windows world, and if there were, it wouldn’t work. (You know I’m right.)

And don’t get me started on the new MacBook Air, a .76 inch thick aluminum laptop that introduces a whole new world. Where to start? Let me put it this way: did you read my previous post about all the trouble I had installing OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard) on my MacBook? The problem was the DVD-ROM drive, very picky about what you put inside. Well, the MacBook Air allows you to install software from any computer (even a Windows PC!) on your wireless network. You don’t even need a stinking optical drive. Obviously, I like that.

It would be nice if we didn’t NEED DVDs, and that’s where Apple is headed, eventually dropping physical media entirely. Okay, there’s going to be some bitching. Boy, is there ever. Remember when Apple got rid of the floppy drive? Geez. And that 500 GB hard drive I bought a week ago?

It’s going right back to the vendor, so I can pre-order a Time Capsule.

Whew! All caught up now, with four new photos, after a bout of high geekery and pig-headedness nearly put me out of business for a while. More on that later. For now, enjoy.

Man. Some days this place just blows me away.

Blogging will resume shortly. I installed a new hard drive in the MacBook and upgraded to Leopard. LOTS of little things to take care of along the way. 

Soon!