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Everything was fine, and then the unseen rock or midnight BB gun. It sneaks up on you, you know. Year upon year. The things you tolerate, get used to. First there was a little chip, regrettable but part of the experience. This one formed a tiny cross one winter, little cuts of light into the glass. In the spring it started moving, slowly. I’d make a mental note of where it was in relation to something on the dash, and eventually it stretched beyond my reference points. Another year or two, who knows. It goes more than halfway across now.

You know what this is, of course—my brother-in-law doesn’t drive his grandkids down the road behind a sheet of broken glass—but then it’s just an ancient Ford. Judging from the parking lot at Walmart, you could get a correlation going here. It’s kind of like my shirts.

I was walking down a hill beside a silver forest. The trees were straight and thin like leafless aspens close together, but metallic, alien, and inorganic. The grass along the edge of the woods was purple-black. I bent down to look at something curious I can’t recall and then moved on. The path led to a clearing on a bluff. The ground was glossy smooth and orange-brown. Beyond this was the water, bright blue water, rippling in the breeze beneath a blazing sun. To my left beside a creek or cove, I saw the strangest tree with two thick, beveled, horizontal branches positioned like the arms of an oriental dancer. Nothing like the others, it could have been a sculpture, though I knew that it was something almost living, vaguely sinister, and wanted to be seen. I stared at it a while and then moved on.

By then I’d walked to the edge of the bluff. Half-seen also to my left, two tall figures, humanoid in form but rounded, bulbous, half-transparent, dimly there and not-there. I knew that they could see me, though they gave no sign and didn’t move. Nothing that I’d ever want to gaze upon directly, and I didn’t. Below, the water, blue and wide and natural, the only thing in motion, obviously deep. Sunlight, bright light, reflecting off the surface. Whether lake or river, there was no way I could tell.

All of this a dream, of course, and vivid. During a now-forgotten stretch I woke up several times, conscious enough to read the glowing numbers of my bedside clock. Each time I fell back asleep and picked up where I’d been, like walking through a door.

Experiencing broad-based evaluation, sensing, consideration of just about everything. Possible birthday fallout, right? Who knows where this goes, hopefully toward more good humor and the light. In the meantime, enjoy this cool image of, what should I call it, the eating area/kitchen of the restored hacienda that serves as the Philmont Scout Ranch’s Kit Carson Museum in Rayado. One hell of an amazing place.

I have to stop waking up early remembering how old I am. That never used to happen when I was immortal. I went to bed at 9:00 p.m. last night, awoke just now at 2:00 a.m. and read some news. It’s like the country crossed a line, and no one even twitched.

Meanwhile in New Mexico, the air is turning cool. The mother of all winters could be bearing down on us before Thanksgiving, judging from el Niño in the far Pacific. The road will be impassable for days from snow and mud—a given, not a threat. It’s time to find a better place to live and kill the storage unit. If I could, I’d cut back even more and travel light. Books, possessions, dusty piles of junk in every corner. Projects, obligations, things that will not ease. Scraps of paper with essential numbers by my desk, provenance forgotten.