Go have a look to see what’s in the Creative Suite Four Master Collection. This is a general overview sort of article, the first of several heavy-duty reviews (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, etc.) I’ll be doing over the next few months.

Some will mourn and some will cheer, but fear not, psychic voyeurs.

As a friend emailed recently, “I don’t know what makes you bleed your life all over the internet, but it’s compelled me to read what you have had to say since 1998.” Well, I do what I do. No doubt there will continue to be blood in the Intertubes for quite some time. But I seem to be done with the chronicles themselves for now. I’m sure there’s lots more to write about, and I will. There has to be at least one more, no matter what.

Meanwhile, I spontaneously wrote this month’s Horse Fly column on the very same subject. There’s something very satisfying about having this in print all over northern New Mexico, boy howdy. It was a challenge distilling 11 lengthy blog posts into an 800-word newspaper column, but I did it, and it’s even funny. Excellent transmutation too, if I do say myself. For those of you who havent read any of the chronicles, the following is the safest way to get caught up:

THE DEVIL ON KINNEY ROAD
by John H. Farr

Just before my birthday, my 87-year-old mother called me from the hospital in Tucson to say that she was “dying.” Figuring that if she could use the phone, the end might not be so near, I played it cool:

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“COME DOWN AND HAVE ME CREMATED!” she yelled, “and DON’T FORGET THE COUPON!”

She had a discount coupon for cremation, I remembered, from the same funeral home that had turned the old man into a shoebox full of cinders. (Burn one, get one free?! Arizona at the gates of hell…)

“All right, all right. You just try and take it easy. And let me talk to Mary.”

My younger sister Mary, a registered nurse, had driven to Tucson from L.A. the night before, after hearing of Helen’s hospitalization for severe pneumonia. I learned a lot of things, and none of them were good. The old woman had been in terrible pain for at least a week, refusing to let my brother take her to the emergency room. But on Monday, the cleaning lady arrived: “My God, Helen, you have to go to the hospital!” So boom, off they went. Not only did she have pneumonia, but something else, a hardened mass of crud inside her chest that kept her lungs constricted. The surgeon wanted to operate and chisel it away, but Mary and my mother nixed that: no extraordinary measures, not at her age.

“Well?? It’s bad, but is she really dying?”

Apparently this was something of a crapshoot, since no one could say. The immediate crisis, however, was that Helen had been trying to escape until they locked her in. Furthermore, since my sister was there for an indefinite stay and my brother lived a block away, the hospital wanted to release her into home care (us). I asked if it was time for me to come. “Maybe you’d better,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can handle this.”

That was the high point of the next 10 days. The following afternoon, I headed down to the Paseo and signed up for a rental car, a little Chevy Cobalt painted black. Naturally, I balked.

“I have to go to Tucson, Arizona in the middle of August, and all you have is BLACK?!”

”I can get you something else if you want to wait,” the helpful management trainee said. I looked around the office. There were two other people sitting at desks behind the counter reading newspapers. Somewhere a fan was blowing noisily, and a fly kept trying to seek shelter in my nose. Back in Tucson, Helen was sitting in a rotten little trailer with an IV in her arm, and overnight my sister had emailed me that by the way, they’d also diagnosed her with dementia. Big surprise there, but now it was official. I knew I was utterly doomed.

“No, no. I’ll take it,” I said, rolling my eyes.

Ten minutes later I was back: the right front tire had 58 pounds of air (!) and the wheel cover was on crooked, blocking the valve. I let everyone know how pleased I was—they fixed the tire, and I was on my way.

When I rolled into Tucson at midnight, it was 92 degrees. I bedded down in a spare room in another mobile home my mother owned, expecting to check in on Helen in the morning. At 6:30 a.m., my cell phone rang. It was my dear wife, back in Taos:

“Sweetie, I know you’re not up yet, and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I just looked at my email, and Mary has left.”

AAGHHH!

It was true. One day at home with Helen had been too much, and my sister had bugged out at four in the morning, heading back to California in a suicidal guilty fit. It was also her birthday! I understood completely, having stayed away from Tucson for at least two years myself, but this was a major disaster, or so I thought. The real calamity, as it turned out, was Helen, batshit crazy and mean as hell, refusing to go to a nursing home. That afternoon, it hit 103.

* * *

Ten days later, I was back in Taos after Helen threw me out.

A week after that, I was still a wreck, sitting in the back yard drunk at 2:00 p.m. on Labor Day, playing a song I’d just written on my bouzouki over and over for three hours straight: “Mother Don’t Kill Me,” it’s called, quite the little Appalachian death-stomp ditty. It won’t help Helen, but it might help me.

(I ain’t NEVER goin’ back, of course, unless that coupon is still valid.)

I forgot to get this posted a couple of weeks ago — gee, I wonder why? — but here it is.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize elements of previous blog posts assembled into a new whole. Not quite like building Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, although related, and with much better results. This was just published in the August edition of Horse Fly. What’s more, the publisher thought it was so good, he paid me extra, a thing possibly unprecedented in the history of writing. At any rate, you can read it now without coming here to buy a paper:

JOHNNY & THE HORNED TOADS

Years ago in Texas (sorry), we called them “horny toads.”

I’d just turned 13 and didn’t know what “horny” meant, outside of the context of the critters — adolescent urges notwithstanding — but you could find the lizards everywhere, even in town. Back in junior high school in Abilene, in those glorious pre-air-conditioned days when just surviving until the final bell was an accomplishment, the reptiles were a God-given source of distraction from the heat of study hall.

We sat at actual wooden desks with inkwells and lids that opened up. Nobody used fountain pens or had any ink, so dipping pigtails wasn’t an option. But you could grab a “horny toad” at recess, lightly scratch its scaly belly to put it to sleep, and set it gently on its back inside the desk where Peggy Sue would sit. After everyone had taken their seats and study hall had settled into a sodden stupor broken only occasionally by yawns and sounds of shuffling papers, the animal would wake up and start skittering around. The victim usually opened her desk to see what was the matter, and you can guess the rest. This trick only worked with girls, of course, because they screamed so well. The perpetrator generally came to the rescue while his comrades smirked, scooping the lizard up and dropping it out the window. (Why this reminds me now of Homeland Security, I’m not sure, but see what you can do with it.)

Three years ago in Llano Quemado, I missed the photo of a lifetime. I’d taken a walk without my camera — guaranteeing at least a miracle — and sure enough there was one. About halfway up the dirt track on the mesa, something wriggled in the road 20 feet ahead and then sat still. As I approached, I saw it move again: a horned toad trying to get traction in the fine brown sand. But what was that on its right hind leg? Good Lord, a baby horned toad riding on its mother’s back! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The lizards froze when I squatted down beside them, and then I saw a second baby in the dust a couple of inches to the rear. The baby on its mothers back was spotted just like she was, while this one matched the color and texture of the ground it sat on. The mimicry was perfect. The late afternoon sun illuminated the camouflaged tableau with golden yellow light. My camera, if I’d had it, would have been 18 inches from the horned toad family, who held their position until I stood.

* * *

This summer, for whatever reasons, I see horned toad hatchlings all the time, and I’m amazed. There’s just a twitch, a thing that might be real or not, like a floater in your eye, and there they are, fully formed and no bigger than a thumbnail! Yesterday I took my camera on a hike and finally got a close-up shot: the piñon needles on the ground are longer than the tiny beast… They must be like Fritos for the magpies. How ever do they make it?

Try to find out anything about horned toads, and you’ll encounter contradictions. They’re disappearing, or they’re not, for one thing. The young receive no parental care, supposedly, although I saw differently here in Llano. New Mexico writer S. Omar Baker, who died at the age of 90 in 1953, once wrote,

“The horny toad, ill-graced but harmless
Is thought by some to be quite charmless
At least he helps eat garden ants up
And does not try to crawl your pants up.”

The easy familiarity with something few see or take notice of today disturbs me, even as I smile. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving down a twisty, rocky lane. The air was sharply cool and damp from the previous night’s rain, the warm sunlight welcome by comparison. Halfway down the hill I stopped, incredulous: sitting in the road looking up at me below the open driver’s window was a HUGE GREEN BULLFROG the size of a cantaloupe! We stared at each other for a long moment, and then I drove off, checking in my rearview mirror that I hadn’t seen a mirage.

Sometimes I feel I’ve won the lotto on another planet, and then I wake up, remembering I’ve always been right here. What happens in the in-between, though, and where did everybody go?

“The planet is asleep and it’s the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.” (Sun Ra)

Is that COOL or what? I grabbed the quotation from the comments section of an article by ex-Fug and founding member of the False Prophets, Steven Taylor, at Reality Sandwich entitled “Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself?” Highly recommended, though I had to consult my MacBook’s onboard dictionary a few times! (limen, phatic, instantiate, etc.)

(Truth = flux, and boy is that ever a relief…)

The previous post has a comment by someone I didn’t recognize. He lives in the Cascade foothills and writes at a blog you need to visit, The Farmer de Ville Chronicles. Outstanding writing, as usual a wake-up call to me to stick to what’s real and all around me. He must have a regular writing gig, and I’m ashamed that I don’t know about it.

His lifestyle reminds me of where I’m always heading in my own life, aside from lengthy detours through what most of you would call the “real world,” except of course that it isn’t — not the one God gave us, at any rate. I always arouse a kind of snarly, defensive sensibility when I make that point, that 90 percent of what we think is proper living is actually a kind of killing joke. Not surprisingly, most of us take umbrage at assertions that we live on top of a house of cards of printed lies and misconceptions. Well, too bad. It’s true, however. As true as true can be. This isn’t what you think it is and won’t turn out to be what you expect.

Spend some time reading what the Farmer has to say. Smell the herbs and feel the sweat dripping off the end of your nose.

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.

All right, here’s the deal:

I put this together back in 2005. It’s a collection of essays and columns from several years prior to and including that one that gives you the high (and low) points of pulling out of Maryland and coming here. It’s damn good, if a trifle uneven, considering the source material. I’ve never really marketed it the way I should have because I doubted my own right to breathe, but that is Grade A bullshit. What you see below is not!

The real deal…

I’m proud of this book, and it won’t be my last. You can still buy it (print-on-demand). It’s a high-quality paperback, and there’s a synopsis at the sidebar link. No more Mr. Nice Guy, just buy the damn thing and help me pay my Visa bill. America needs art!

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.

The subject of my latest column for Taos, New Mexico’s longtime alternative news and culture publication, while familiar to regular readers of this blog, has special relevance for anyone living here, so it’s gratifying that the column is now available all over the state with the latest issue.

Now everyone will know

What’s more, the piece starts at the top of the front page, and with a graphic, no less, so bully for me. I think what impressed the publisher was the dark truth embodied herein. Taos is nothing if not about the shadow, which all you would-be emigrants should keep in mind! Anyway, as promised, here it is:

Compulsion

by John H. Farr

The mud was like a dirty magnet, a “black hole” of clay that pulled everything into it. Out here in Llano, it had already driven me quite mad.

Day after day we drove through slop that only needed draining. I wanted to stand out in front of people’s houses and beat on pots and pans until they came out and told me why a minute with a hoe was such a hardship. Fortunately I didn’t, and no one shot me. One hole was too much for me, however. Not far from the house, someone had backed a huge lumbering truck out of a corral, leaving a perilous gouge in the public road. For three days I tried creeping along the rim of the abyss, only to slide down inside every time, slathering brown goo and rocks all over our shiny white new car. That ups the ante, right? It has to. On the evening of the fourth day, I stomped down the road with a shovel and filled the hole with dirt from the shoulder, crazy longhaired gringo flinging gravel in the dusk. It felt good, though: I was in a burying mood.

* * *

A month ago the timing belt on the Dodge Spirit let go and left my honey shaken and stranded in the middle of a muddy road. A sheriff’s deputy happened to come along right behind her and got the car off to one side so he could get by, and that was the high point of the day. I got her out of there with my ‘87 F-150, and we left the old car she’d inherited from her mother sitting in the mud for the AAA truck to tow to a garage. When we heard the estimate — reasonable enough, as it went — we decided to let the battered relic go. So much adventure, so little time.

The next week, the mesa melted. The big Ford churned through the slop with careless gusto, but the road was a disaster, and once I almost got stuck just 200 yards from the house. We missed a garbage pickup, then the paper. Our delivery lady just couldn’t make it, first through the mud and then the awful ruts, so she left the newspaper wrapped in plastic on the ground beside the nearest stop sign. My wife actually walked down the road in her bathrobe to get it — early in the morning, while the mud was still frozen — but that only worked the first time. For the next four days, the neighborhood devil dog carried the papers away before she got there. Finally the plucky paper person tried hanging the wrapped paper from the stop sign, and we got it once. I would rather have hanged the dog, but right about then the road began to dry out a little, and everyone went home.

That’s when my wife and I looked at each other and decided to buy a new car. Brand-new, as in unused, straining tribal orthodoxy all around. (“Oh! You got a NEW car…” said a neighbor.) She’d already had her epiphany while sitting in the dead Spirit, waiting to be rescued. I had mine when the Friday Motors salesman told me we could finance the 2007 Vibe we were looking at for zero percent and no money down. Things were moving: I held a gun to the weather, but it made no difference, and a few days later we brought the white Pontiac home in the mud.

* * *

Last week I raided a neighbor’s sand pile to fill puddles in the only two places I could park. In this neck of the woods, dead cars are to burglars as garlic and crucifixes are to vampires (“so it looks like someone’s there”), and they occupy the high ground, so I figured I could just plead sanity if cornered. As it turned out, that didn’t work, much like, “Sorry, but I had to shoot your mule to feed my dogs.” Terrible, but who can quit? Now I stalk the road with my shovel, knocking the ridges into the ruts and piling stones in the low spots, me and a million other peons somewhere mucking in the dirt to fix a road…

That’s what the winter’s probably done to lots of us. Let’s hope spring gets here before the cops.

An excellent day!

After submitting my column for this month’s Horse Fly, the head honcho and publisher emailed me in his usual terse manner and said, “Your piece isn’t good, it’s damn good. Thanks.” Someone else reported the boss also said, “it’s Taos!” and I kinda thought it was.

There are many different kinds of writing. This was driven by the need to transmute a sack of pythons into art, but I also had to pay attention to the craft. For a couple of weeks, at least, I’ve been needing to express something important that has to do with other people’s psychic landscapes. I think I nailed it in the 743-word column entitled “Compulsion,” which I’ll post here when the paper comes out next week.

What makes it work is less holding back. It’s risky, but the time is now. The all-too-common foibles of a few unidentified people (as well as my own) get gracefully skewered, and they’re going to have feelings. But as my wife said, “You have a right to be a writer.” Now that’s an interesting way to put it, but I thought of something I could do: whenever I caused offense that mattered, I’d give the injured party a rose.

Ignoring the obvious flaw in this approach, my wife said it was sweet. But what about pre-emptive flowers?

“Look, Farr sent us a rose. OH NO!”