It was a beautiful day today, so I made a short video with my MacBook. It’s called “Adobe Shadows,” and you can also find it at Taos Video Circus (my YouTube channel).

There’s a brand new series this week (start here), featuring Los Changos del Mar, “New Mexico’s ONLY extraterrestrial, psycho-surf-punk, spy-billy, harem conjunto” in their debut on Taos Plaza. Below is just one crowd shot, and there’s more to come. The Changos have a website, too.

No, that isn’t me

It happens fast at 7,000 feet.

This morning the clouds are hanging low over the mountains. There’s actually an overcast. It rained last night, and the temperature outside is barely 60 degrees. There’s fire-building in my future, though it seems we’ve hardly had a summer. I see a flurry of activity as migrating hummingbirds crowd the feeders. The chamisa is blooming, bright sweet yellow flowers everywhere, with lots of bees. Roadside vendors have sweet peas for sale.

Tomorrow I’ll look up and see the aspen on the mountains turning yellow too. Noooo, not yet! I’ve hardly even sweated, only one day I remember when I had to change my shirt. “At least” it’s beautiful. Stunning, really, as always.

I’m free and healthy and 63. Stand by, as always, for new developments. The Taos Podcast is coming soon.

Now there’s a title you don’t see every day, and the guys who made it possible aren’t everyday fellows, either.

How it turned out that in my advanced decreptitude I’ve finally found friends who not only share many of my own predilections and cultural underpinnings but also take care of each other is mildly astounding to me. I say “mildly” because I always figured it was possible to live like that, but the actualization seemed to elude me. Probably I was too fucked up myself, not to put too fine a point on it. If that’s the case, then I must have evolved in recent years, or else I just hit the jackpot. Call it grace and good luck.

But these two fine companions, both outstanding musicians, having followed my recent travails as best they could from my raging emails, wanted to give me a chance to vent. I was invited to a night of therapeutic drinking and gentlemanly pursuits — well, mostly drinking — and vent I did. First I sang them a song I’d written yesterday afternoon, one that you’ll be able to hear soon. [See below*] In the course of the evening, we finished a fifth of Cuervo 1800 and I got dog hair all over my clothes. That would be from Popeye, the resident terrier (?). Much hilarity ensued after the venting, and I even got fed. I also heard an earful about another mother, and it shook me to the bone.

(How did we ever survive???)

When I got back to the run-down adobe on the side of the hill and sat down at my MacBook to catch up on my emails before crawling into bed, there was a message from my brother Rob. It was a beautiful message in many ways and ended with the declaration that the next time, we would both go to Tucson. That remains to be seen, of course, since I’ve said I won’t go back unless Helen is dead or in protective custody, but if she’s really out of it (say, crawling around in circles on the floor and drooling), then a guardianship hearing might prove productive. Time will tell.

What hit me hardest in the email, however, were a few sentences summarizing what life had been like at home in Houston during my younger siblings’ high school years, a period I knew little about. At that time I was at UT-Austin learning where to put it and getting my hippie credentials, so I hardly ever went “home” at all. Guana santo, man!

Remember, I was down in Houston living the hellhouse - ruled by an hourly cycle of shouting fights despite counseling and over God knows what while Mom was going for shock treatments and then the brain tumor. Back then I was hoping they’d divorce and I could move in with Dad. (Dad may have had his issues, but at least he seemed reasonable to me, and I now understand how he got so frustrated when I couldn’t grok his attempts to tutor me in Algebra II).

I got into bike riding back then as a means of staying detached from the madness at home. B____ stayed home and cried a lot. M____ practiced her saxophone and we both spent as much time at school as we could. Band, we called it. B____, not so lucky. He stuck around stuffing his face with chips while attempting to drown out the madness with a television set.

I had literally no idea. Dear God in heaven.

* Oh yes, the song. It’s the first one I’ve written in years, and the rest of the lyrics will fall into place shortly. This is all I have so far, but it sounds great accompanied by my resophonic bouzouki in Appalachian death-stomp mode. In a few days, I hope to have a recording posted here, so keep your eyes and ears open. In the meantime, here’s what I have so far. The title of this piece is [ahem], “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” and it’s a sure-fire hit in hell:

Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Well I came ‘cause you said you were dyin’
I came ‘cause my siblings were scared
but the nightmare I found down in Tucson
was worse than I ever had dared

So Mother I beg you don’t kill me
don’t throw me outside with the trash
it don’t matter how much you’ve gone crazy
I’d be happy to turn you to ash

Then I’d take you on back to Kent County
put you down in the ground next to Dad
there’d me no more abusin’ and fightin’
be the best time that I ever had

Transmutation, chilluns!

Interesting…

Example A: was $360K, now $279K and the owner will look at “any” offers. Example B: was $675K, now $395K. Whoa! That’s a drop of over 40 percent. The paper is full of ads with “REDUCED!” banners on them. And here the conventional wisdom was that this would never happen because Taos is an “end destination” resort, etc. etc. Yeah, yeah.

Looks like my wife has found a studio, by the way, so for now the pressure is off on the issue of moving from our scenic adobe hovel on the hillside. We’ll keep looking, of course, but the main job now is getting a certain baby grand down here from Dubuque. After that the snows will come, and we will move or not, depending.

One step at a time, but at least there’s movement.

A slightly different version of this and one other at FotoFeed. That’s from early yesterday afternoon, taken five minutes south of town looking roughly north.

Rio Grand Gorge w/ storm over Lobo Peak

Okay, here you go, growing just outside the door, practically. I make a mean apricot pie, or better yet, turnovers. Apricots growing right out of the ground! Don’t say I never gave you nuthin.

No, these aren’t ripe yet, but we’re gonna have a ton of ‘em

How did it get to be five days?? Anyway, FotoFeed is now current again. Today’s image is a cropped closeup from the shot below. It also shows up as the current header rollover on this page. (Mouse over my mug shot for a real thrill.) There’s even a hint of a rainbow:

Looking east toward El Salto and the village of Arroyo Seco

I took this on the way home from driving over Bobcat Pass (9,820 ft.) to look for elk. The beasts weren’t there today, but the scenery was stunning. The scene above is just north of Taos, by the way. Those are the Sangre de Cristos, of course, or at least a chunk of them.

I did something different today, bought a brushcutter/line trimmer at Sears. On the way to the dentist, no less, and both bills were the same!

It’s huge and weighs a ton. There isn’t even a place to put it, but I have one now. I just wanted to be able to cut the weeds and tall grass around the house, and also down by the acequia. It’s a matter of being able to walk around freely, to tell the truth, as the vegetation around this old adobe has been out of control for years. Charmingly so, but now we can’t find things.

I’ve been looking at several varieties of these devices for a while, and today I just did it. Mr. Visa can pay for it. We could be dead tomorrow, and I’d never get a chance to put my eye out, so this had to be. Did I mention it was huge? It has a brushcutter attachment that looks medieval. I’m sure I can slice coyotes in half with it and wreak vengeance on the chamisa. The strap has a big red plastic sign that hangs over my back and reads, “DANGER! Maintain 50 ft. distance!”

Kind of an amazing tool for an aspiring fool. Yeah, there’s this whole hillside of sagebrush and a thicket of wild roses to contend with, but we’re renting. It’s not my place. Well, today I stopped caring about that and just wanted to make it better. It’s been nine years since I owned a gasoline-powered tool that wasn’t a chainsaw, and here I am again, Farmer John without a field, acquiring implements of mass vegetative destruction. It’s out there in the dark somewhere now, covered by a tarp.

Waiting to work on a ranch, I think. This little place is just a practice cut.

Oh, what a grand few days…

We look at another place I know I won’t like — I’m one of those who know — and I’m not overwhelmed. Expecting the deal to crumble in the end regardless, I stay on my best behavior and pretty much keep silent. (Mistake!) But right away, in the absence of my all-knowing analysis, the landlord’s new refrigerator and a big sunroom have her heart racing. She doesn’t even mind that the wooded lot that starts 20 feet from the tall south-facing windows has just been sold — yet who buys a quarter-acre in town just to look at the bushes?

The house has forced-air heat with outlets way up near the high ceilings. The furnace uses propane. There isn’t a woodstove worth mentioning. I see money flying out the door and being cold to boot. “That little electric heater sure does a great job in here,” the owner says, pointing to a unit in the corner of the sunroom. She’s a very nice person, but I’m wondering why a sunroom needs a heater. At night, maybe, in the absence of insulating drapes, but still. All this I take in but keep to myself instead of sharing with my partner, who’s practically dancing a jig. Surely she’ll stop and see the bedrooms are too small, I think to myself.

Evening rain

In the end of course she’s flying high, so I have to come clean and do so about half a mile after leaving the place: basically, I hate it and we’d freeze to death. There’s a long ride home, if you know what I mean, on which I take silence for wanting to hear more. Yes, even after almost 30 years, I can still be that stupid. It isn’t hard at all. The biggest irony is that she’s fucking brilliant when cornered and almost always does the right thing: if I’d confided in her all along, she might have pulled the plug herself. We notice different things, though. On her own, she might have plunked her piano down in that sunroom, plugged electric heaters in all the rooms, and just kept on truckin’. Still, we just came through the longest, coldest winter of my life. I want a fire to get cozy with.

This morning I flip out and have to “do something,” so I drive into town to read bulletin boards for housing notices. Pretty lame, but it gets me off my butt. Trying to shake something loose, I take a short side trip on the way home to visit the Mabel Dodge Luhan House [historical site & conference center] like someone suggested. Just an intuitive thing. I walk inside, but there isn’t a bulletin board or anyone to talk to. The vibes are good back there in the compound, though, and I don’t mind.

The air outside is sharply cool and damp from last night’s rain. As I creep down the tight little alley in first gear on the way out, the sunlight is warm and welcome by way of contrast. Halfway down the little hill I stop, incredulous: sitting in the dirt road looking up at me right below the open driver’s window is a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantelope! We stare at each other for a long moment, and then I drive on, checking in my rear-view mirror that I haven’t seen a mirage. I can’t tell you how many decades it’s been since I saw a frog like that, probably not since the early days of my life. It’s been years since I heard one, too. I know there’s a big pond at a nearby gallery tucked back in the trees, but this is still the high desert, and I just saw a goddamn bullfrog in the alley.

Cocktail hour view

Very tricky afternoon on my own. I sit down to do some boring detail work for a client, but my mind is a limpet that won’t let go of where it shouldn’t be. Then I have an idea. (You don’t need to know what it is, it’s just an idea that comes from something I see.) But of course I can do that, I say to myself. It’s as obvious as anything. Something lifts, and it’s like I’m back. Hey, I feel — well, normal… no, better than “normal.” What?? I see What Can Be. Outrageous!

And then, at the same time, AT THE VERY SAME TIME, I’m aware of the pain. The big pain, the all-encompassing thing that tries to kill me. I’m okay and the pain is still there, but I’m neither one. I ease toward the hurt for a test, almost close enough to fall in, then pull back to where there’s both at the same time.

Both. At. The. Same. Time.

Sitting outside just before sunset, I notice the plum tree branches blowing in the wind, yellow-white light flashing on the leaves. The tree is a pulsating field I’ve never seen before. It wants me to promise to remember.

Maybe we won’t exactly move, you know. Maybe something else is going on.