Diversions, digressions, and their like, rule. I feel justified writing this kind of post, once in a while. Everyone else does, they're horribly boring to read, but strangely satisfying to write. So here goes: piddly, unimportant little details from my daily life, existential angst, the threat of biological extinction, and the hope of realization of my fondest dreams:
These last few days have been dominated by a most retro struggle for survival and an unexpected turn of events. This winter has been severe all around the Northern Hemisphere, as I understand. We (in the wilds of New Mexico) are dependent on two sources of heat. The first is the sun. Our house is solar(ish). We have an array of large South-facing windows, and when the sun is out, which is most days in this climate, it can become almost unbearably hot in the house, even on the coldest days. The sun warms the stone tiled floor, and most evenings you can sneak into bed at the end of the day's action without having to resort to any additional house-warming measures. But lately we have faced front after front of snowy, cloudy, and very cold weather. So the next, and only other available source of heat, is the wood-stove. There is a certain romance to wood gathering, lurching around crazy, rutted "dirt" roads in the "high country" in beaten-up trucks (vrooooom, vroooom), and then staggering around in the forest with chain-saws (vrooooom, vroooom). I gave up on that this year and decided to concentrate on scavenging wood from all around my property. Now, not many trees grow out here. We live on the edge of the desert, in the foothills of the southern spurs of the Rocky Mountains. The vegetation is what you might describe as Mediterranean at best, scrubby little cedar-like and pine-like things, rarely more than ten feet high.
A couple of years ago we had an infestation, epidemic. This was some kind of beetle that swooped down on our area in a fashion rather biblical, you might say. It attacked the pine-like trees (piñon, as they are known locally), in some areas wiping out all of them, completely altering the look of the landscape; down our way we lost about 50%. So, there is a lot of wood lying around. Trouble is, you still have to lug and cut the darned stuff. The terrain is complex, lots of ups and downs and other obstacles which makes it a major operation. Also, each tree does not yield much burnable wood; most of it is doodly little branches, which I have to leave behind littering the landscape, to be cleared up "some other day". But I really needed to do this at least once. Winter is at its perhaps worst, but at least closing stages, and today I have gathered enough to perhaps last till, if not through, March. So, if you happen to be living a few miles up the canyon, sitting on a few years supply of neatly chopped Pine, Spruce, and (nasty) Aspen, do not insult me by offering any of your hoard --
I will make it, not only that, but I will talk about it for years to come.
This distraction takes me away from my other distraction from doing art. This blogging thing is all very well, but I find myself going quite mad with the very process of writing. I can't stop writing. I get up in the morning, and I start writing. I write and write and write, and then I go to bed. Well, unless I'm lugging tree trunks around the landscape. If you look carefully, you might notice that I haven't made any blog entries recently. Then, your curiosity aroused, you might ask:"so what's happenin' man?". Well, I'm proud to announce the birth of a new mental aberration in my life: I'm writing a short story. I'm aiming at around 5 or 6 thousand words (that about right for an average length?), it's about 3/4+ done, will need a healthy dose of editing of course, a rethinking of some concepts, perhaps. I'll post the monster on my Further Issues page. So if you notice that I haven't written anything for a while, it's because I'm writing, writing, writing...
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