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My wife came into the kitchen after getting the mail, both hands held behind her back. “Which hand?” she asked. I picked her right hand, and she gave me an envelope with a check from my late aunt’s estate. I couldn’t have guessed wrong, because there was another one just like it in her other hand.

One of them is for my brother in Tucson. This is the guy with a free house who couldn’t make seventeen grand last six months. Well, that isn’t very much, is it? But the terms of our aunt’s trust are embarrassing. I’m supposed to hold onto his share and pay it out to him in five annual installments if he passes a yearly battery of drug tests! Oh sure. The man is sixty-two. Even from the grave, they meddle, but the grave is where they are.

No more hand-outs, either. That’s the last of the inheritances from that lot. We’re down to siblings and cousins now. I’m down to me. It’s weird, though. There was always someone older, or the possessions of someone older, to occupy a certain space, and now there isn’t. This is the part where I either die or paint my masterpiece, and I feel fine.

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As you can see, I’ve got the hat, and now I’ll always know just where I am. I wasn’t wearing it the last time I hiked—much too new to get it sweaty—and as it turned out, I covered half of the outbound leg without even realizing it!

What I’m saying is, I found myself in a certain spot and couldn’t remember what happened to most of the last mile. You might say I spaced out, but that would be unkind. (Thinking. I was thinking.) In any case, it’s good to be able to transcend time and distance like that. Teaches you about the universe and all. I doubt it would have happened if I’d been wearing this great hat, however, and that’s another reason I won’t use it on the trail just yet.

In other news, I’ll have a new book coming out in just a few days, I hope. It’s something from the recent past that I’ve put together called The HELEN CHRONICLES: When Your Mother Falls Apart, and everyone will want a copy. Hell, Oprah’s going to eat it up. About forty blog posts from one of the worst and best periods of my life, pretty relevant now too, what with all the boomers’ parents blowing up. By the time I’m that old, the government will just issue everybody over eighty wingsuits and directions to a cliff.

Moving right along, this frees me to take up another partly-finished project. Can’t talk about this one now, I’ve already told my wife and one good friend and that’s too much. It’s fiction, though, and nothing to do with my real life. What I have so far is even funny! (Is that at all redundant?)

That about wraps it up for now, except that my wife spent several hours today reading Fat Freddy’s Cat cartoons and laughing and has no idea how tickled pink I am. I also just received the Wonder Wart-Hog book. That one may be a steeper climb for someone who probably never read a comic book (she didn’t know that “Hog of Steel” was a take-off on the you-know-who bit), but she plays Chopin with her own bare hands, so who am I to judge.

Well, it’s a quiet Saturday night—that’s how it gets, eventually—and I found this scan of a dusty slide of one of my old acrylic paintings. I wanted to see how it looks on a web page, so… Huh. Interesting. The image has meaning for me, and it works as a symbol. It’s based on a photo I took of a carp carcass that someone had impaled on a fence post at Betterton Beach, about a mile and a half from our old house. Yup. We used to live that close to the water. Sometimes we’d hear foghorns from ships on the Bay.

Same thing as sketched at the beach, different angle

One of my many unfinished ventures was a comic strip based on the dead carp in this picture. I called it “The Adventures of Corpy the Carp: He’s Good and Dead!” The idea was that all kinds of things would happen to this dead carp without his having to do anything, of course, because he was dead. Most of the time a mangy kitty-cat sidekick would drag him around. Just what the world needed, another comic strip cat! But the dead fish is golden, too bad.

From a page in my old sketchbook

I could never decide whether Corpy would “speak” (with thought balloons), because, you know, the dead thing. There’s a lot more comedy available that way, but I have to say that pure sight gags are killer. Gilbert Shelton is a master of that, you know.

Eventually I made a welded steel sculpture based on that carp, one of the most striking things I ever produced. A dentist in Galena bought it from a gallery show of mine for $1,200, woo-hoo! I remember I delivered it myself; the thing nearly fell apart in my truck, but man, was it gorgeous. When I unearth more slides, we can all have a look.

This is where I go hiking. Usually I walk two miles out, then turn around. Sometimes I go farther. If I kept walking, the loop back to the parking lot would take nine miles. Now that would be some exercise, about three hours’ worth! As it is, by doing this every other day for over a year and simply watching—being aware of—what I eat, so that I’m not eating for neurotic reasons or out of habit, I’ve lost twenty pounds from my highest-ever recorded weight. I will walk again today.

We still don’t have a home in Taos where we can have all our stuff: clothes, books, family treasures, and the like. It’s been that way for almost fifteen years, and this is crazy. Keep looking, downsize, or move on? The uncertainty is absurd, yet we bear it. We’re looking, anyway. Except in rare cases, renting is a fool’s game here. It seems like no one really wants you in their house, they want to sell, which prompts me to wonder (constantly) why anyone with half a brain would ever put money into housing here—the population is declining, too, and so on and so on… Every day I raise my cognitive shields against this constellation of self-fulfilling thoughts and soldier on, open to whatever guidance comes along. Mostly the voice inside my head just says, “Write, you fool.”

We drove to Albuquerque yesterday to have a getaway. My wife went to the grand opening of a clothing store, after which we went to lunch at Two Fools Tavern. (Yes, I’ll drive 130 miles for fish and chips.) Then we visited the UNM bookstore. I bought a hat that says “NEW MEXICO” across the front, so I’ll always know just where I am. Because I never stopped being a student, I instantly identify with university neighborhoods; so long as I don’t have to get tattooed or pierced, I’m there in spirit, absolutely! I wonder how many of the fine young men and women we saw realize my geezer ghost not only walks among them but sleeps with their friends, smokes their dope, and changes the music on their phones?

A raven the size of a missing airliner just circled overhead and landed in a tree at the bottom of the hill by the acequia, as good a reason as any to be here in the mountains. Albuquerque was a hoot as always, but every intuition, influence, predilection, and joy in my long life has to do with living close to Nature. I love to visit cities, but what I value most are my connections to the natural world. This is what I’ve learned. There’s a force, a river, an energy in my life that’s always carried me in this direction. When you live long enough, you see these things.

I also see I’m changing. My training burdened me with shackles that have only now begun to loosen, because I worked my ass off, passed the test, and didn’t self-destruct. It’s not my fault it took so long, and who knows where this leads? I love New Mexico, of course, and now I have a hat. What’s important is the flow, the theme, and that I take good care of us. Surrounded by paradoxes and dilemmas, I still feel valid and excited!

This makes no sense, but I don’t care.

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