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Even more editing, especially at the end. – JHF

Other than the truck, I don’t remember many details of the murder up in Questa sometime after we arrived in ’99. Not the sort of thing to savor, obviously. It happened just outside a bar. The perpetrator used his wheels to crush the victim, back and forth repeatedly, and may have shot him first. Along with the thugs who stomped the fingers of a young man to make him fall into the gorge, the three kids gunned down at what we call “the triple-murder Mustang,”* the mysterious fire that destroyed the brand-new mansion of an uppity newcomer, and more humorously, the well casing pulled out of the ground at the home of a transplanted city-slicker who tried to tell his Cerro neighbors how to run their village—and man, is there a whole lot more—this is how the shadow rolls in our el Norte. The darkness of the past is worse, yet pure Americana. Kick any pile of dirt and scatter bones. Much like anywhere, I guess, but easily discerned here.

While the marketing of the town and real estate shenanigans are transgressions of a milder sort—though harder to ignore for being in your face—much about Taos is expensive, dirty, cruel, and stupid, once more with the dark side in plain view. Any competent observer can find a motherlode of blasted hopes and irony to mine. Local cultural institutions are an easy target, too, all but irresistible sometimes. Where am I going with this, we wonder?

Well, I like this stuff. It helps me feel complete to know what makes the wheels go ’round, especially the things nobody talks about. Anything that’s buried and reveals itself, messages from the unconscious, unseen energies ike vipaka, “the result of past karma that we cannot change”—see here—manifesting as unhealthy thoughts. I learned about this just the other day and thought it made a lot of sense. (That first paragraph isn’t exactly wholesome, is it?)

Anyone who’s suffered from depression knows that thoughts can kill. After moving here from Maryland fifteen years ago, I become a kind of expert. This has to do with housing, making a living, and getting on with life. The transition was simply too abrupt. I never got over the shock of finding nothing half as good as what we had for less than three times the price, and then the dot-com boom went bust and I got walloped. This was way back when, remember. You couldn’t visit Realtor.com and look at houses. You saw the little photos in the paper and went on that, or maybe telephoned from far away and asked a lot of stupid questions.

As a result of that [vipaka], for much of our time here I’ve been living in two landscapes: the one in front of me with the ninety-mile views, and a shimmering golden one that never was, assembled from the pictures in my mind. The unhealthy thoughts were something like, “You stupid bastard, now you’ll never have another home and everything is ruined!” If you think that makes it harder to succeed, you’re warm, but keep on going. Creativity is bound to suffer. Aging brings on panic. Your ego scuttles like a cockroach underneath the stove.

“My God, what if this is all there is?”

All there is?

Living in the mountains with a beautiful woman who loves you? Breathing all that clean air? Driving through spectacular vistas most Americans have never seen? Learning more about yourself, your partner, and the terrible beauty of the world than you had ever dreamed? Having the freedom to configure your own destiny?

Just yesterday I thought about the past and something shifted: I felt a different way of knowing it was really dead. A gift of grace, I think. For one long moment I keep trying to recall, I wasn’t under the lash. The wonder is, it only took me fifteen fucking years to feel this way. All the reasons and the rationales, all the dead bodies, all the money, all the losses we endured, they were what they were and could not be retrieved. In the wake of this experience, I had a sense of moving forward in an unencumbered way, as if the best were yet to come.

What’s a man to do if he no longer has to focus on the things he hates to gin up reasons to escape? For one thing, if I want to, then we can escape, lifestyle-wise or geographically or in the mind. It’s not the place, in other words (although that’s relevant), it’s me. Not you or them or her or it, just me. Fifteen years, you motherfuckers. Fifteen years, and here I am, ka-boom.

Watch the things you tell yourself.

Pay attention and be true.

* A nearby gas station mini-mart. You can still see the three descansos.

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Haven’t been too good at breaking curses lately. Drag me into beauty, fighting all the way. This is after driving to the Plaza to see the crazy Christmas lights. There was no one there a little after dark, and it was startling. I’ll have a picture for you later.

It’s always strange to walk around the plaza looking at the stores. There’s a whole other world, a little urban culture. Very little, obviously, but a completely different scene from out here where the coyotes roam. Some of the shops were open. I would have killed to go inside the Southwestern souvenir places when I was eight. Maybe even now if had the dough. I saw a middle-aged man with a gray face exhaling huge clouds of tobacco smoke in front of one of them. He was dressed like a proprietor, no tourist, and I figured he was on a break. Gray face, though. That isn’t right. I also peered in through a glass door at a little coffee shop I’d never been to. It looked warm and cozy inside, and that struck me.

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Winter is fast upon us, thought Juan del Llano. The distant mesa was still bare and ugly with houses that looked like they’d geysered up from hell and fallen back to earth, but soon brown roads of mud would criss-cross snowy whiteness littered with for sale signs and the world would be as one. (His own neighborhood, already mudded-up from unplowed snow the week before, eternal in its junk and dogs, would lead the way.)

Never again, he thought, the way one does, just like the year before, and ten long years preceding that. Time was like the rest of Taos, frozen in the basalt of the gorge. The unheard creak of deep tectonic plates might have hinted at relief if one were very, very patient, but the spirits in the rocks were older than the sun and gave no hint of mortal joy. Juan sat beside the wood stove and meditated on the past. All was slippery like the ice outside the door. Without a stick for bashing demons or a bit of balance, he would fall.

He scrambled in the closets of his mind. Surely this would work, or that, but it was dark and much too hard to see. Memories flew by the way that snowflakes did at night, erupting in the high beams. When that happened in the car, the thing to do was lower them and slow down. The appeal of being tested since forever had lost its charm, in any case, while the terrible high desert beckoned like a club.

For some the way was different. Trained in fluid movement without fear, millions moved toward what attracted them, worked hard, and thrived. Others lived off someone else’s cash or paid their dues to stand in line and wait for their reward. A subset of the latter but with fewer dues, Juan’s approach to life resembled idling at the take-out window at the local Sonic drive-in while the cashier joked and let his onion rings get cold.

And yet when he was calm enough, if ever that occurred, and expected something free, it always showed up right away. A parking place, a sunny day, the next words he would type… It was as if the Universe had been there all along. It didn’t matter where this happened, either—a mountaintop, a city, underneath the covers with his wife. Somewhere in Juan’s consciousness, an opening appeared. A place of lighter density that made him feel good to remember, like thinking about the spring.

Juan had also dreamed of corn all stacked up in the fields. Huge ears in different colors, how they tasted, what it meant. Brujas scratched upon the door: more corn! He was overrun with magic, ears were pouring down the chute, it was raining things to plant and he was on it. That’s what farmers did all winter, right? Taos was so full of shit for fertilizer anyway, and he was farming for his life.

(Ho-ho.)

No one knows why, but here in northern New Mexico it always snows on Sunday. Go ahead, say it. Anyway, it’s true. You can look it up. As you can see above, it’s been altogether too calm and temperate here for quite a while, and the gods will surely punish us soon. Like Sunday morning.

Anyway, here’s half of Taos Mountain, taken just a couple of days ago. It’s been at least three days since I last posted one of these, so here you go. Intense and enervating in these parts, as usual. Back shortly.

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