A few days back I wrote in the comments:

Before this election season, I was in a psychological/spiritual space where those things didn’t affect me in the same way, and then I got sucked in again! Damn, damn, damn. Now I have to go back and do it all over again, just so I can function. Ultimately a good thing, however. I’ll be sure to report if I find a way out.

“Those things” being collectively the vicious madness all around us, of course. That’s one reason I haven’t been writing much here lately: I went too deep into the affairs of man and had my head rung like a bell. You could also call it “shocked into temporary submission,” which I’m sure affects a great many more of us. But this presidential campaign has hit me harder than any I can remember — while they must have been awful in the past, this year I’ve never been aware of so many failures of human virtue in public life. Our national dialogue, such as it is, contains so much ignorance, hatred, and brazen lies, I can hardly cruise the blogs for half a day without incurring serious damage. Maybe it’s always been that way at the core, but the Internet makes it easy to refine the evil brew and get a straight dose. (I go here sometimes, but please be careful: some of the links are very unhealthy.)

Truly, I can’t remember a time in my own life when we seemed to care so little for each other — and I came of age at a time when policemen were siccing snarling dogs on civil-rights marchers, forgodssakes. It simply boggles the mind. Hardly anyone in public life seems to have any self-awareness at all, either (except my man).

UGH. RETCH. GOO-GOO PUCKY.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned something morbidly fascinating as a result of watching a National Geographic documentary on PBS. This one was all about strange things happening on planet Earth, except every topic was ultimately reducible to “and then we ate it.” We did, people did. Humans did. Disappearing wildlife in Africa? Simple: THEY ATE THEM. (It’s called “bush meat.”) No fish in the sea? WE ATE THEM. And on and on and on.

Somewhere along the line we must have eaten our own souls. Today I visited a worthwhile site that shall remain nameless and read a breathlessly upbeat post about how New York City is getting rid of hundreds of old subway cars by dumping them in the ocean — and did you know, why, there’s nothing toxic about them at all (very different from any NYC subway cars I’ve ridden on), and just look how much the fishes love them, etc. etc. But every time I read about some godawful piece of wreckage being sunk to “provide fish habitat,” I want to scream. It may be quasi-ecological to a lunatic, but it’s certainly immoral: we should be taking things out of the ocean, not putting them in. If there wasn’t sufficient fish habitat before we dropped subway cars into the briny deep, it’s because one way or the other, we ate it!

When a mindless planet-eating disease decides to hold an election, what else does one expect, I guess? Right. And you know what? This is strangely comforting. Just more evidence that the whole thing is our own damned fault, which means if we succeed (i.e., fail), the Earth wins.

Yay, I think.

(This probably means everything is sort of all right, but check back with me later to make sure.)

My wife reports the Vibe got 36.36 mpg on the last tank. That’s about 325 miles worth of driving, two-thirds of it on the highway, but mostly in the mountains using 4th and 3rd gears instead of 5th. I call that just dandy and expect to hit over 40 mpg on the open road when we take that little trip to Iowa.

Oh, yes. There’s a road trip coming up. I’ll have more to say about that later, but in preparation for it, I had the Vibe’s oil changed and switched to Mobil 1 synthetic. That’s what I always do with all our “good” cars. Here in Taos, I go to a local oil change emporium. They only have two service bays, but they’re fast and friendly, and I sometimes have a chance to enjoy a little car talk with the staff, all local Hispanos.

The reason I bring this up is that car culture is big with these guys. Not a one of them would be caught dead in some of the heaps I’ve driven. I mean, these dudes are proud, so it got my attention in a hurry when the assistant manager zeroed in on the new Vibe — not the sort of vehicle that usually qualifies, so you know that something deep has shifted.

The guy was smart. He already knew it had a Toyota engine and asked about my gas mileage, shaking his head when I told him. Right away, he wanted to know what it cost, and I told him. “Why are you interested?” I asked, by way of encouragement, trying to draw him out.

“Oh man,” he said, turning serious and somber. “I gotta downsize…”

He disappeared under the Vibe with a wrench, and I went outside to wait, where I took the picture of the Lotaburger posted on FotoFeed. As things happen with the Internet, someone I know who used to live here saw the photo and figured out where I’d had my oil changed. Based on an experience his girlfriend had, he emailed me to issue a warning about the place. It seems that after an oil change, my guys had forgotten to re-attach what he called a “skid plate” under the girlfriend’s VW, ultimately resulting in some $300 worth of damage that she had to pay to get repaired in Santa Fe. Hmm.

Now, I can safely say I’ve never seen a VW with a skid plate of any sort, but maybe I don’t get out enough. The most recent vintage VW I’ve ever been underneath was my old ‘84 Jetta GLI. So hey, maybe they all have skid plates now and no one told me. I wrote something almost snotty to my friend along those lines, excessively defensive about my choice of oil change jockeys, I suppose, but he didn’t seem to mind and emailed back that something had sure as hell gone missing, and that was that.

Anything is possible, especially with people having too much fun at work (or not enough), and even more so when it comes to German engineering, if there really is such a thing any more. I suspect there is, even if the cars are built in Paraguay or Kurdistan. (They aren’t, BTW.) There certainly was plenty of it in the air-cooled VW buses that I owned.

Things were always getting left off those motors or put on backwards when I had them worked on, usually something esoteric and inscrutable like the sheetmetal baffles in the cooling shroud around the cylinders. Probably I have that right. (I might not!) Whatever it was, if it wasn’t put back right or left out altogether, eventually you’d burn a valve or fry a piston, usually in the middle of nowhere. Looking back on it now, it’s simply amazing how often the damn things blew up on me, yet I didn’t try another make for decades. But oh, those buses. How I loved and hated them. One time I ended up stranded in darkest Oklahoma with the aforementioned fried cylinder, at the mercy of a garage that didn’t usually handle “those little foreign jobs.” Oh God. The parking lot was littered with decomposing diesel trucks awaiting burning or repair. It was freezing cold, and I was almost broke.

I don’t remember where I stayed, probably in the bus after they took the engine out. A couple of days later I was back on the road, but I’m sure it happened again. A valve, a cylinder, the pin from the middle of the fuel pump, whatever. It was always something. And yet, facing disaster at every turn was somehow bracing and inspiring. Experiences like that forced me to learn how to screw things up myself, always much more satisfying anyway. Some day I’ll tell you about removing the carburetor jet on a ‘69 Saab (to get the ICE out) by the side of an Iowa Interstate in January. If I’d dropped it in the gravel, we’d still be there, and none of the rest of this would ever have happened. And so much did!

Now my hair is white, but the headlights come on by themselves.

I was watching a documentary about Islamic Spain [googled link, good quotations and images] on New Mexico public TV that truly opened my eyes: what an astounding city Cordova was!

By the beginning of the ninth century, Moorish Spain was the gem of Europe with its capital city, Cordova. With the establishment of Abdurrahman III - “the great caliphate of Cordova” - came the golden age of Al-Andalus. Cordova, in southern Spain, was the intellectual center of Europe.

At a time when London was a tiny mud-hut village that “could not boast of a single streetlamp” (Digest, 1973, p. 622), in Cordova “there were half a million inhabitants, living in 113,000 houses. There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. The streets were paved and lit.” (Burke, 1985, p. 38) The houses had marble balconies for summer and hot-air ducts under the mosaic floors for the winter. They were adorned with gardens with artificial fountains and orchards”. (Digest, 1973, p. 622) “Paper, a material still unknown to the west, was everywhere. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries.” (Burke, 1985, p. 38).

Not bad, eh? And in the same vein,

During the end of the first millennium, Cordova was the intellectual well from which European humanity came to drink. Students from France and England traveled there to sit at the feet of Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars, to learn philosophy, science and medicine (Digest, 1973, p. 622). In the great library of Cordova alone, there were some 600,000 manuscripts (Burke, 1978, p. 122).

But all good things must come to an end, apparently. The caliphate fell apart, and Berber rebels burned the whole place down in 1012 A.D. Those manuscripts in the great library represented the most valuable intellectual, philosophical, and scientific works of Greek and Roman civilization, painstakingly translated into Arabic. A lot of them ended up elsewhere, safe for the time being, but the library itself was destroyed in 1013 A.D.

This reminded me of many things. The American desecration of Mesopotamia, for example. (If someone did that to Alabama, we’d nuke the bastards and deep-fat fry the corpses.) But I’d been feeling too self-absorbed to concentrate on little things like that, being much more interested in swirling unfilled needs and anxieties rising to the surface. Something was stirring the mud at the bottom of my puddle, all right. Attachment and fear of loss? Perhaps.

One of the reasons we’re looking for new housing is so my wife and I can have all our things in one place. Sounds simple enough. We’re not missing a lot, anyway, mostly boxes of history and clothes still in the storage unit. A typical old adobe has no closets at all, you understand. This comes from traditionally having two pegs on the wall instead: one for the outfit you wore during the week, and the other for the one you wore on Sunday. That was a great system, but we have too much crap to get by so easily. (Uh, unless we just get rid of stuff…)

So there’s always this conflict, like with the family history. I had stacks of ancient photo albums and other artifacts given to me by my aunt in Maine. She’s in her 90s now. The pictures were priceless, and my grandmother had annotated most of them by writing on the pages. Nothing like a fabulous medieval library, but we’re getting there. A few years ago, however, she asked for them back. As I’d always considered myself the custodian of the Farr family records, the request did set me back, especially since there was vague mention of having the albums “redone.” (Yes, let’s “redo” the Dead Sea scrolls while we’re at it, I remember thinking at the time.) The proposed project may have been related to her canonization by the local historical society, a donation-fueled stretch of reason if I ever heard one, given that she hadn’t ever lived there before retirement. Sigh.

Empathy is not a family trait. I knew she’d never comprehend the emotional blow, and that hanging on to what I’d stored away would only make me angry every time she brought it up. Just the fact that she had was bad enough, so much so that the only thing for me to do was pack up everything (an entire shipping trunk’s worth) and ship it north. I even threw in things my grandmother had given me years before: a wooden mallet, hatchet, and saddlebags that had belonged to my great-grandfather, for instance. My aunt had even mentioned those — which seems astounding to recall now — and I knew she wanted them.

So that’s what I did. The only way I could free myself from this idiotic, hurtful game was to just let everything go. If I’d grown up in what passes for a normal weird-but-loving extended family, there’d have been lots of sitting around together looking at these things, telling and listening to stories that would now be shared genealogical knowledge. As it was, I was going to have to do extraordinary work to decipher the archives, if I ever got around to it. Now I don’t have the pictures, the notes may well be lost, and the only person alive who might be able to answer, “Who the heck is that?” is thousands of miles away and not on the top of my list. Well fine, BACK INTO THE QUANTUM SOUP IT GOES! All of it!!!

[plop, gurgle, hiss...]

Except it’s not fine, not really. What am I missing out on? I’ll never know. And my mother’s own guilt-ridden self-estrangement from her own family long ago ensured no interaction with those relatives. I can’t even name all my aunts and uncles on that side, much less my first cousins, and I haven’t seen most of them for over 30 years at least…

Sometimes I feel like an orphan, and sometimes I feel just fine. I don’t know if any of this matters or if it should. Seems like it’s all a dream, anyway.

For more reasons than one, and a good thing, too. A big thank-you to Donita Sparks at FireDogLake for this! And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Grateful Dead opening the baseball season in San Francisco on 4-12-93 with the “Star Spangled Banner.”

The harmony is perfect, and you can hear all the words:

The brown cow hasn’t been around for a couple of days. I’m a little worried.

My wife says the cow’s laying low because I wrote down the phone number for Animal Control. She’s a nice cow, a young one, I think, and she’s been in the neighborhood off and on for a couple of weeks. I keep thinking someone is going to look out the window and say, “¡Dios mio! Mira, there’s one of Ernesto’s cows!” or something like that, but it never happens. Or if it did, they never called him. Let me tell you, though, the sight of a huge hairy animal 18 inches the other side of your living room window is kind of a shock. Plus, she leaves really deep footprints in the mud and every now and then, a cowflop. You can see everywhere she’s stepped for the last 14 days, and if you’re not careful, you’ll step in it, too.

Cows wander off and die out here, get chased by dogs or coyotes and fall into an arroyo, or even end up shot. Anything can happen. I’ve found a few old carcasses out on the mesa. The bones are usually scattered, but often there’s still the hide, stiff and wrinkled, with hip bones or vertebrae attached. The heads are always gone. The way I see this one devouring the clumps of dried whatever-grass, I wonder if she’s getting enough to eat and hope she doesn’t join the boneyard. I’ll call Animal Control if I see her again, in case someone’s reported a missing bovine. I did consider lassoing the critter and then calling, like that’s my civic duty, but fortunately I’m out of rope.

Ravens ready for lift-off

Meanwhile, like la vaca, we’re having trouble staying home. We simply need a bigger place where both of us can live and work. My wife rents a studio next door, but it’s too small for two pianos and on too steep a rough-and-tumble hillside to get her baby grand down there, anyway.

Living in this 105-year-old adobe with 18-inch thick walls and mud floors has been a rare adventure, though — an experienced Taoseña of my acquaintance walked in the front door for the first time and said by way of recognition, “OLD Taos,” and that’s just it. The house is probably the funkiest AND the most comfortable place I’ve ever lived, solid and quiet as a tomb. We’re out here on the edge of open country, with nothing between our awful muddy road and the nearby peaks but air and pine trees, yet main highway and the Ranchos post office are just five minutes away. A great spot, but it’s finally become something of a straitjacket, what with limited space, the ever-loving mud, and our having, well, “expanded.”

Yes, expanded. We’re taking up more space, bumping up against surrounding psychic landscapes. What was once enveloping and comforting is now often in the way, and of course the clock is ticking. Even if you’re living fully in the present moment, you move your butt when it gets sore. After nine long years of tumbling from place to place since we moved out to New Mexico, it’s time to get this finally, definitively, straightened out and DONE. No more voluntary victim crap, either. We get to have and do what we want.

Confluence of the Missouri and the Platte

It never ends, though, does it?

No plateaus, no sliding into home to win the game. Just motion, breathing, in and out, outside of time.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the header photo at the top of this page is a rollover image. Just mouse over it and see. It’s always that way, with different pictures when I feel like it. Case in point, the current image: Johnny on great-uncle Herbert’s cow, somewhere in New Hampshire in about 1948. That’s Mrs. Ebsworth, his housekeeper, behind us.

On the rollover is me in Middle River, MD a little later that same year, I think. What a great attitude!

More snow moving in tonight. Yesterday a wood delivery resulted in foot-deep trenches all over the driveway, which is now revealed to be a bottomless pit of gray clay goo. If there were no more precipitation for several months (the usual situation), the stuff might dry out before the 4th of July.

Did I mention that more snow is moving in? And we already had a couple of inches added last week. It all melted quickly, but… you know… and now here comes some more. Looking out my window toward Taos Mountain, I see it’s snowing now downtown, about 12 hours ahead of schedule.

Meanwhile, downstate it’s in the 70s. I don’t want to be that far south come summer — if summer ever comes again — but the cumulative conditions here are murderous, and now I envy places I wouldn’t touch before. This is by far the biggest test yet in John & Kathy’s Great Adventure. If you have a hankering to emigrate to el Norte, mark my words and think again. (I have no regrets, but you might!) I have a friend who’s lived in Alaska and in the Sierras in California, and he says he’s never experienced anything as hard as this. There isn’t that much actual snow left — an aerial view would leave you wondering at my complaints — but the accumulated stress and mess is deadly. We haven’t been able to do a simple thing like open the front door and take a walk for over three months now, and that’s the kind of thing that pounds you into a hole.

I go now to shave and forget. Perhaps by the time I’m able to don shorts again, I’ll be strong and proud. For now, all I want is heavy sedation.

[Coming up!]

I am 62.5 years old. I haven’t had a physical in over 10 years. We have no health insurance. But aside from a little flabbiness around the belly and other atrophic inconveniences, I’m in excellent health until they start looking, right? Well, my hearing sucks — genetics and too much rock & roll — but everything else works fine. You would kill for my blood pressure, for example.

The way I was raised caused me to postpone or avoid many of life’s potential accomplishments, yet I have a heart and a soul that seems to be quite strong. I’ve used them and Jungian analysis to go deeper into my own guts than I ever imagined was even possible, all this in the effort to understand and heal. I may be old and ugly, but I’ve never felt better inside. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine. This is the only path I’m aware of, so it must be the right one.

Writing is both an expression of my art and an illumination. Especially when blogging, something that happens almost instantaneously and often rashly, I quickly see my own complexes and neuroses writ large and clear. Afterwards, that is! This would scare a sane person away from the endeavor, but it dovetails nicely with the rest of my personal quest to open myself to love and giving. I’m learning more every single day about how reality works (the effect of thought and projection on the quantum field), and it’s about time. I have no idea what other people do with their lives, and living without producing a family of my own has left me often so self-absorbed that I end up hurting thousands of innocents along the way. Something else to be aware of and write about, no doubt. We all do this, of course, to one degree or another.

Finally paying attention to my wife’s needs (it’s only been almost 30 years!) is an entirely new area of life that’s opened up to me. My own “needs” are almost laughable by comparison. After all this time, all this suffering and joy, I feel a little lighter most of the time, like discovering some kind of glorious gift I didn’t know was there. I’m beginning to feel that absolutely everything is in my hands, and I never felt that way before in my life.

Maybe you have. If so, give yourself a pat on the back. Some of us take longer to bake!

All right, enough of this. It’s Sunday morning, I’m sitting here by myself, and this has been an unguarded moment of reflection. I trust it finds you hale and hearty, and now onward with the day.

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.

If my preceding post (and the others like it) is of any interest to you whatsoever, please go read “Waiting for the Big One” by Charles Eisenstein. I’ve just skimmed it and will be returning directly for a closer look, but I wanted to get this up.

[Reading more...] Oh, yes. If you read nothing else all day, read this essay. I wonder if I’ve been channelling the guy. Here’s a sample paragraph:

The foregoing doom-and-gloom scenario might seem familiar in tone if not in details, but consider that it may be not just The End but a Beginning as well, a birthing crisis that will propel us into a new age based on a different sense of self. This is not to say we can sit back and wait for the birthing to happen. Despite the inevitability of our gathering crisis, the seemingly futile efforts of generations of activists to avert it are extremely important. If you are such a person, facing down despair to tackle impossibly huge problems, take heart that your work is not in vain. While it is true that no effort at renewable energy, wastewater recycling, local currency, wetlands preservation, or reform of any aspect of society is going to avert catastrophe, these efforts are sowing seeds for the planetary renewal that can happen after the present regime collapses, after the addict has hit bottom upon the exhaustion of his very last technical fix.

Eisenstein is optimistic in the same way I am. Now I’ll have to go read his books.