This is how it went down.
This is how it went down.
How to be recognized as a celebrity:
How to prove your commander-in-chief and foreign policy chops when running for the Republican presidential nomination with no prior foreign policy or government experience:
I can report, after a year of apparently successful cancer treatment, that going to the dentist feels like a reaffirmation of life.
Never has an hour of hanging upside down with my jaw propped open cheered me as much as it did yesterday.
I shared this with the western bluebirds enjoying fresh water at my place this morning while I drank coffee.
I now return to Trumpmania on CNN, not entirely convinced it is the end of the world.
Sometimes my nobility is as thin as the stucco on my fake adobe house.
I made it through our annual homeowners’ meeting without a scratch — probably because everyone studiously avoided discussing free-roaming horses and Donald Trump — and ducked assignments to any of our civic boards.
I soon was back in my life as a public lands miser, walking on the 240-acre inholding just beyond my back door, hoping a public-minded government agency doesn’t trade it off to a subdivision developer and turn me into a backyard Bundy. Shouldn’t my subdivision be the last?
We talked about recycling and water consumption and I made as stab at cleaning up my own place when I got back from the walk. I plugged my fancy Dyson into what I’m afraid might be coal-fired electricity and admitted to myself that if I bought the vehicle of my dreams, it would be a Chevy Suburban.
As the full moon rises, I photograph a speck of semi-rural suburban life on a hazy horizon.
This morning’s visitors included these guys, and it was especially good to see the larger of the two — the Northern Flicker — in a circumstance other than a startling nighttime encounter on the front porch.
The smaller Downy (I think) Woodpecker usually keeps his distance and even seems to prefer bugs on trees to the seed I put out for others.
The flicker, or flickers before him, has for 24 years shacked up during the winter months under the beams of my front portal. But I forget he is there and there often is commotion — homeowner ducking, bird flapping away — when I wake him coming and going in the dark.
The little woodpecker has been around for a couple of months. The flicker seems to have arrived more recently arrived, but he seems settled in his winter digs now. He or fellow flickers keep coming.
I suspect there is some bird sign on my place that in effect says, “Good place for flickers, despite resident rube roaming around in the dark.”
I dreamed a famous billionaire real estate developer appeared before the Santa Fe historical styles committee to seek approval of his proposed Torreón de Billy the Kid Hotel and Casino in an old neighborhood near the Roundhouse.
The New York developer, who touted Hispanic influences on his Florida resort, wore a Billy the Kid-like hat. Tufts of orange hair stuck out beneath the narrow brim. Stenciled on the crown were the words, “Make the Barrio de Analco Great Again.”
In my dream, he was leasing the property along the south side of the Santa River from the state of New Mexico, which recently had acquired it a complicated swap involving an Indian tribe, former apple growers, one of Santa Fe’s most famous families and a beloved hamburger joint.
The Legislature was meeting in Santa Fe and the state budget was in trouble. The developer and supporters argued that a cut of the money paid to the state by the hotel-casino would help replace declining oil and gas revenues.
Also, a small oilfield might be developed on the river bank property, the developer mentioned briefly, near the end of his presentation.
“This would be huge,” he said, citing the potential financial reward to Santa Fe and the state.
The round, 10-story hotel-casino tower would be in keeping with other architecture in the neighborhood, including the state Capitol, the developer told the committee. It would feature cracked plaster, leaky, flat roofs and small, barred windows.
It would be modeled on a famous 19th century torreón in New Mexico’s Lincoln County, possibly once visited by Billy the Kid, although compliant with “Recent Santa Fe Style.”
When it was disclosed that the stucco on a large wall around the torreón — to conceal the parking lot and the possible oilfield — would be synthetic, a committee member suggested this could be seen as a slap in the face of the original Tlaxcalan people of the barrio, who had plastered their buildings with mud.
“I have discussed this with my many Tlaxcalan friends,” the developer responded.
“I have a great relationship with the Tlaxcalan people,” he said.
Cooper and I are glad to observe slowness of another kind on the eve of a legislative session in Santa Fe.
We could see weird clouds forming to the north.
The day began like this.
No Sean Penn. No awkward awards ceremony speeches or tasteless humor. Just blue sky, birds and trees. I did find myself worrying about what BLM might do with the undeveloped open space a few footsteps from my front door but crisp air smoothed my step and now I am back home, turning the page to fiction, although poetry keeps coming to mind.
Couldn’t think of what to say last night. It was just there.
What the heck. Maybe I’ll read “Degrees of gray in Philipsburg” again. It’s been on my mind for months.
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
by Richard Hugo
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
…
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
…
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
…
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
dream ranch 