First, let me just assure you that there’s nothing ominous about my silence. Life is good; I’m taking tons of pictures and learning about the craft of photography and even doing some photo work. My family is good. The spring is beautiful in Santa Fe. My old dogs are getting older, which I worry about, but it’s very good to remember to love them as much as I can as often as I can. I’m still writing, but just not posting a lot of stuff to this dumb quasi-diary. No crazy car accidents. It remains incredibly good to not be playing music, it’s still one of the kindest things I’ve ever done for myself, and I’ve even started selling instruments. I’m cooking all the time, and I’m trying to figure out how to best combine my interest in Southeast Asian food with my interest in outdoor cooking now that the weather’s nicer. Whatever. I’m having fun and most of my online silence is me living away from the computer. A good thing.

The other component of my online silence is that I’ve basically lost interest in the “unfocused blog” idea, and I’m exploring ideas about doing something that’s a little more pointed. Now that I have some very nice and “realer” outlets for the parts of me that used to cling to music, an “unfocused blog” is just not enough to scratch any real creative itch. Part of me craves a different or at least more specific challenge. When I’m “between outlets,” then this rambling, unedited and unfocused writing outlet is better than nothing, but “better than nothing” isn’t a gap I need to fill right now. Photography provides me with a lot of the challenges that attracted me to music. And, even more importantly, I haven’t learned enough about it that I’ve stopped enjoying it. 

So, on the very unlikely chance that someone’s actually reading this – if I shut this down, I’ll be back. Some ideas I’m juggling:

• I’m more likely to craft a “real” photography website before I get back into any blogging. It’ll be a nice challenge, and Buddha knows that nobody’s going to do it for me.
• I’m already offering my help to some people with projects that I believe in, including a little charity in New York that provides birthday cakes for kids when their families can’t afford it and a permaculture landscape design startup in Santa Fe. So while it may seem outwardly unimpressive for me to just do the work my 2-3 full time jobs and family life require, I’ve got other stuff going on. Always.
• I’m thinking about starting up another little company of my own, or at least blogging about something that might generate some kind of audience. If I can craft an idea that represents an attractive-sounding challenge for me, I’ll give it a try. I’ve got the energy for a startup but haven’t convinced myself of the right idea yet.
• I’m going to put together at least one, probably two, photo books in a small run for friends and family now that they’re so easy to create and so affordable. (And on-demand is cool! I don’t have to print 500 of them and wonder what to do with 499, I can create 5 and if someone else wants one, turn that into 6 without breaking the bank.) It’s not because I think I’ve arrived at some epic level of achievement, but rather because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to share my excitement with people I care about.
• I’m getting into printing photos a little more; this is weird for me, a departure from how I treated music. When I wrote my own music, I almost never recorded any of it. I liked the noncommittal aloofness of it, kind of like “there’s no way of capturing the brilliance of this concept in a recording, so I’m not even going to bother trying.” (Yeah, right!) So anyway, me actually printing photos out represents a type of commitment that I rarely exposed my music to, and it’s nice. Nice to get it out of the way, to work past it. In some weird way, it may even come full circle and help me feel differently about music one day. But for now, I don’t actually care; it’s enough for it to be what it is. And again, it’s not because I feel like I’ve “arrived,” it’s because I’m excited about what I’m doing and want to do more of it, and the best way to do more of something is by doing more of something. Sounds simple, hard to put into practice.
• I’m dabbling with a lot of learning for work and updating my skillset. Partly so I can do good work for my clients, partly to keep myself challenged, and partly because “you never know.” 
• I’m slowly – SLOWLY – scribbling out some backbone ideas for a novel. I may never put enough effort into it to finish, but it’s an enjoyable challenge and even when it leaves me frustrated, I find that it opens up creative channels I didn’t know about or had forgotten about. So even if it remains nothing but a creative exercise, I learn from it and grow.
• There are lots of even un-sexier things I need to handle, like projects around the house and taking advantage of several contiguous broken-toe-free months to get out and run again.
• Geocaching; good, dumb fun that I want to do more of in the spring. It gets us out of the house and takes us places we’d never find on our own and exposes me to odd places and things to photograph. It’s a great way of getting out of your own head and coming up with something to do that isn’t laden with expectations or burdened with familiarity. Even just hiking more has been great. I really like New Mexico. No, I love it. On one hand, it feels familiar, like home, but on the other hand, it’s still 99.9% undiscovered to me. So without any financial or spiritual or personal goal attached to it, it’s just great to get out and see and hear and smell and live the experiences that are here right in front of me.  

That’s the short list; if I sat and brainstormed for 20 minutes, I’m sure I’ve left large blocks of things out. Things that I’m planning and may never finish, things that I haven’t even planned. But I’m in an exploring mode, and trying out Stuff is what keeps me entertained these days. It’s not that I abandon everything I start, far from it. But I don’t pressure myself about it; I have so many ideas and so many areas to explore that there are bound to be some false starts. 

I’ve had people ask me what I’ve been doing since I quit playing music, and my answer comes across as sarcastic. (Imagine!) “I’m pretty busy not-playing music.” And for most people, that’s an underwhelming response; I’ve heard, “I’m not impressed,” several times recently, and in almost exactly the same way, so I noticed. But here’s the thing about it: 1) it’s true, and it’s great. Not-playing has been very good for me. 2) I don’t actually care if my life sounds impressive or not; what I was doing when I was playing wasn’t impressive either, and I’ve spent my “artistic” career choosing unimpressive paths. If I’d wanted to be impressive, I wouldn’t have stuck with piano and I wouldn’t have played jazz. (Well, that’s not strictly true, I’m stubborn. But the point is valid; it’s easier to be a rock star by playing rock music, so to speak.) If I wanted to take impressive photos, I’d forget about cliche sunsets and common birds and find some naked chicks or something. Whatever.

“I’m walking around outside” is probably not any more impressive, yet hiking and being in nature is fundamentally nourishing to me. “I grill food behind my house a lot” isn’t impressive, but I love it, I learn from it and improve, and I’m getting pretty effin’ good at it for some things. “I’m taking pictures of common birds and treacly sunsets” is probably not that impressive, but taking dumb, cliche pictures of this barren landscape has become important to me and so has my work on getting better at it. It’s probably not impressive that I live with all these big, dumb, ugly mutts that I love being around. (Who, by the way, aren’t dumb or ugly or even necessarily that big.) It’s probably not impressive that I have a charming kid or that I’ve been married for a decade and a half or that I’m learning the difference between Western and Mountain bluebirds, or that I know the difference between an ocotillo cactus and a cholla and a prickly pear. Or that I spend more time reading about comparative religion issues than most people spend watching TV. I could go on about all the unimpressive stuff that I do, but that defeats the purpose – it makes it sound like I’m trying to make it sound impressive. And I’m actually not. My point is that – impressive or not – I’m quite busy just being alive, and from where I’m sitting, that’s more than good enough. 

I know I’m getting wordy and rant-y. (Imagine!) I guess I’ve just heard, “Hmm. That’s not very impressive,” too many times recently to consider it just a joke. It’s actually kind of funny to me because I’m more content with more things in my life than perhaps ever before, but I have to admit that it still gets me thinking. I guess I’m not even sure if I wanted to set out to do something impressive what it would be and if it would be Suitably Impressive to others. And impressive compared to what? Or who? What is it that I’m being compared to? Me, 10 years ago? (I can’t imagine why.) Strangers? Which ones? Imagine my shock at realizing that I’ve never even taken the time to learn what or whose Level of Impressiveness I’ve been competing against lo these many years!

I’m actually smiling as I write all this; partly because I’m enjoying my own rambling more than I should, partly because I really, really like my life and find it very funny to get glimpses of how other people might see it, and partly because I’m catching myself in my old Suffering Artist role – like if the world was never impressed by my music, it was surely because it was so brilliant. So if I’ve now reached beyond Too-brilliant Music and actually achieved an entire life that “the world” (or 2 or 3 people in it, to be more accurate) doesn’t “get,” then Suffering Artist thinks we are most assuredly on the right path. And partly because the me that’s making fun of all this secretly still thinks this way.

It’s all pretty funny, just as it should be. But maybe I won’t stop pointless blogging after all. I’d hate to not-impress someone by giving up another pointless activity. (Heh…)

What I thought was cool was that the inaugural staff has not only posted the menu itself, probably as expected, but also the recipes! I’m probably not going to make me any pheasant any time soon – you really ought to hunt your own if you’re going to eat pheasant, and I’m not going to hunt my own –  but I’m pretty tempted to scale down that seafood stew/puff pastry recipe my damn self. (The recipe calls for 6 Maine Lobster tails. I’m thinking of a quantity that is more in the zero-to-one lobster tail range.) My kid will probably make “that face” at me if I offer her some, she’s not big on seafood or creamy soups, but if it’s good enough for the leader of the free world (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?), it’s durned well good enough for my family. No matter. More for the grownups.

As far as the article went, it was followed by the expected “Obama’s so cool for invoking Abraham Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and fixes everything!” and “Obama’s such a phony for invoking Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and shows everyone what a big, Lincoln-invoking phony he is!” blog comments. Almost totally polar, just like everything political over the last 8 years and beyond. Oh, well. 

Meanwhile, in the midst of the expected Tastes Great/Less Filling blog comments, there was a rational, non-partisan comment: a person pointed out what should have occurred to every reader right away – basically, what they ate in Lincoln’s time wasn’t really a matter of fashion, in Lincoln’s day, they ate what was local, and they ate what was seasonal.

(I guess you could say it was partisan in the sense that the post was about sustainability and eating local, stuff that is usually attributed to the left, so the person who wrote the post was probably a so-called liberal, but the whole left/right thing has gotten so twisted these days that I hesitate to use the terms to label actual values, and without the blog commenter either praising Obama or slamming Bush, I’d be guessing anyway.)

I can’t say Lincoln wouldn’t have loved him some kiwifruit, but we’ll probably never know. Meanwhile, in the brave new world we live in, the whole localvore movement is preaching the same thing: eat what’s local, and eat what’s in season. I can dig it. Not just foodwise and nutritionwise and environmentwise, but local-economywise. And personally, I can dig the localvore thing a lot more than the organic movement, well intentioned though the organic movement may be. Those organically grown strawberries from California aren’t helping the environment too much if  they have to be transported to New York City, not to mention the nutritional wrinkles that long distance transportation of food introduces. I’m not anti-organic, don’t get me wrong, but I like organic stuff for easily debatable health reasons more than anything related to sustainability. Free trade goods? All for it. Local? Fantastic. Organic? Well, maybe. That’s a whole ‘nother area to explore. Please note that I didn’t use this as an opportunity to make a single milk-hormone/breast size joke. I’m all sensitive about stuff like that now that I have a daughter, so you’re welcome.

Another aside: I’d feel a whole lot more enthusiastic about embracing the localvore thing if I didn’t live in New Mexico. New York City is surrounded by verdant farm states that provide endless variety. Portland, Oregon residents could “buy local” until the cows come home. Here in New Mexico, I’d have to pare whole limbs off the FDA food tree if I stuck to eating what was grown within 50 miles. My wife has had pocket gophers literally pull plants out of her hand and into the ground, so there aren’t a whole lot of gardeners in our immediate area, and living in a mountainous/rocky/high desert area takes care of some of the rest. We do what we can, of course, but you can’t live off piñon nuts, honey, organic soy candles and green chile forever. (“I’m on the Santa Fe diet – please pass the smudge sticks. “) I exaggerate, of course. We also have red chile. (“Nurse, this man has the worst turquoise deficiency I’ve ever seen – get me 20ccs of Cerillos Green, and fast!” I’ll stop now.)

Anywhoo… This inaugural dinner was not crafted in a vacuum. OF COURSE they were aware that the Lincoln tie-in has solid PR value. And why not? They’re very aware that fans and enemies alike will be reading meaning into his hat choices and what kind of Blackberry he carries and what kind of shirts he appeared in in college photos. And his menu choices at inaugural dinners and such.  Haven’t come across too many anti-Lincolnites in my travels, so it seems to be a pretty safe gesture, and the naysayers always were going to say nay to whatever got picked anyway. 

Obama’s decisions are more closely scrutinized than any other single person on the planet right now. If these decisions have to be made, why not make them with some thought, and when they’re made with some thought, why pick on him for it? His choices continue to be encouraging to me for the most part. His campaign won largely because he assembled a strong team and let them do their thing, and it seems like he still has a good team and they’re still doing their perspective things. If I was him, however, I would have been tempted to add some lamb shawarma or basmati rice or hummus or something to the menu just to let the “He’s an Arab” types squirm a little. But then again, I can be kind of a prick.

I’m almost done with my live music obligations for now; I have a couple little things coming up and they’re going to be fun, and I’ve got a couple more ambitious things I’ll dabble with that may be fun. My day work picks up about this time of year, and it’s starting early. (Maybe. It’s hard to remember exactly what 12 months ago looked and smelled like.) I’m hoping for enough calm spots to get back to working on my own music a little, and out of my busy period, and once my studio’s reassembled I’ll probably want to practice and play again, but when I have to keep things broken down to move them it’s hard to motivate. I made a couple new friends and played some of my best live music gigs since I moved here. Also some (*ahem*) “learning” experience type gigs. (I keep hoping that I’ll go through a day or a week without learning something, most learning involves some kind of pain. Maybe one day.) And I’m even more open to playing jazz again now after years of avoiding it. Selfishly, I have to admit that it’s because if I refuse anything with jazz, that means hardly any gigs at all since a non-jazz-playing jazz musician is not that useful outside music that needs non-jazz-playing jazz musicians, but being open to what’s available seems like it’s not the worst thing.

I heard my wife and daughter screaming in the living room the other day, and as a dad, my adrenal gland figured it was terrorists or something so I kicked my office chair over and fought my way out of the between-gigs mess on the floor, instruments, cables, stands, whatever. I don’t even remember what they were screaming about, probably a popsicle fell on the floor or something. In my forceful exit of my office, I damaged another toe, it’s dark purple top to bottom. Again. I’ve tried to convey that it’s important to save the “armed robbers have entered the house” type of scream for occasions that require my powerful intervention, and to maybe consider picking a slightly mellower “I dropped a popsicle” scream for occasions that aren’t worth me breaking limbs to arrive quickly for. As with anything else, we shall see. Meanwhile, it’s pretty interesting to note how often dogs step on that EXACT TOE, and how often my daughter uses my feet to either jump off or push up from the floor on. My cries of agony create alarm in my family when the button gets pushed, and they’ve encouraged me to find a less startling way to express that my damaged appendage has been trod upon once again. But in this case, I am actually using my “you’re standing on my broken toe” yell, so what are you going to do?

After months sitting dormant, I set up and got my hot tub working again over the weekend. We had some issues with it last year, and after it was sorted out by our dealer, we let it just sit there in our garage-that’s-not-a-garage. We figured we’d landscape and do all sorts of stuff that would allow us to move it outside our bedroom over the summer. Anette made tons of progress in getting the yard in shape, but we’re pretty short of being hot tub ready, so I figured why wait? I don’t regret parking it indoors again, I’ve missed it. It reminded me of the day it arrived, and as we were setting it up in its first home, our bedroom, my daughter jumped off the bed and landed squarely on my broken toe and I couldn’t even talk for a couple seconds; I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to let people jump on a broken toe, and for good reason. Even if they’re small people. So there’s some kind of broken toe – hot tub connection. Or not. My cold prevents me from smelling much (although it’s getting better), and while I’m confident I’m measuring the chemicals appropriately, my family assures me that the room with the hot tub in it has a pretty strong chlorine smell. I take their word for it.

The day after my really busy period ended, a cold started. My middle class work ethic programmed my subconscious mind to stave the cold off until I had time to recover, and it worked out pretty well. But delaying the onset of the cold that my daughter first showed evidence of maybe 4 weeks ago seems to have made the cold hit even harder, and it’s been difficult to shake. It’s not anything tragic, just a bad autumn head cold. Last week, it was vitamins and zinc and ginseng and eccinacea and fluids and tea, and occasional cold medicine if I needed to actually accomplish something. But the novelty of the cold has worn off, so I brought out my big guns – the astragalus root. I boil it for a while, add more water, boil it some more, and finally drink the result in a tea cup with honey. It doesn’t have much taste to begin with, and with my cold, I barely even get the honey taste. (I mean to say, it doesn’t taste bad as some herbal stuff might.) So now, it’s starting to really turn around. Astragalus is amazing, and while some people use it as a tonic, I use it like antibiotics. Seems to work about as well and about as fast, and my body doesn’t need to “recover” from it as it would with an antibiotic series. As strange as it sounds, I don’t dread being sick, it is what it is. But it addles my mind enough that I’m getting tired of it, so it’s time to move on.

So I’m trying to feel better, partly so I can work more effectively by day, partly so I’m less grumpy by night, and partly because there’s so much to do. I have some little things I want to get started with my new friend Chris Cushman, an amazing musician and composer I did a couple gigs with at the state fair. He and Cloud and I are going to gig at Grandma’s in November, that’ll be great, and we’re working on our first round of promotional stuff, demos, etc. Another friend is trying to organize a jam with a couple people we know, and some guys doing a movie soundtrack want to record it to use as grist for their electronic chop-chop work, that’ll be fun if we can organize it, but it’s remarkably hard to get 3 or 4 people in the same room at the same time, perhaps more here than other places I’ve lived. My friend Shunnae’s record release is in a couple weeks, and I’m doing a sort-of-classical thing with a cello player, it’s a 12-minute kids’ piece in 6 movements for a small group. It’s been fun to read music again for a minute and play a different kind of music with a different group; I’m definitely not trying to enter or re-enter that world, but reaching outside my comfort zone (whatever that is?) is good for me. There’s another artist who my friend Larry is producing, and we’re going to see what kind of collaboration we can come up with. I still have my own album’s completion in my targets, but that’s for when “everything else is done,” so that may remain an elusive target. My friend Pete has broached maybe working together on some stock music stuff, and if we can steal enough time from our other commitments, it could only be a blast. I have my newest Rhodes to find some cool use for, and I want to shuffle my office enough that I can start working on left hand bass on organ again. Stuff to do.

It’s a promising sounding season; on one hand, anything that’s still 4 weeks away sounds fun. On the other hand, I’ve been ranting about wanting some change and this is a season of change and it’s an election year so we’re in a culture of change (hopefully for the better), so it could be fun. I feel drawn toward something that I can’t quite explain, and maybe an opportunity to make it clearer will come up as I’m working on all this stuff. I feel like getting more involved with non-music creative efforts. Photography remains fun, I’m reluctant to wreck my enjoyment with a business agenda but it may not have to be that way. I might take a class in something; I’d like to study Sumi-E painting maybe. I got away from writing about the time my gig business started, and I’m getting back into it, but I’ve been reading voraciously so it doesn’t feel like any momentum has been lost. (True or not.) Haruki Murakami is definitely a current favorite, really stimulating for me. I’m also evaluating my parental role; my kid started a real preschool, Waldorf, a couple weeks ago, and all that goes along with it is plenty to process. I read a book called Freakanomics recently, it was about an economist who has pretty inventive ways of using microeconomic tools to analyze real life issues. AIDS; abortion; education. One thing the book points out is that who parents are matters, but most of what makes them matter happened before the kid was born – genes. Indicators of “smart” genes, lots of books in the house, for instance, are more important than actions of the parents, reading every night or forbidding television, for example. Not in terms of a moral sense or anything like that, just looking statistically at how things work, that’s how it seems to go. Makes me rethink the private school thing a little; you want to do what’s best for your kid, but the responsibility these days is for parents to separate what makes them feel like they’re making a difference versus what actually makes a difference. Can’t say I’m always good at it, but it’s something to work on.

That being said, I love hummingbirds.

My day job has become a life crushing whirlpool of despair, and I’m constantly on the lookout for things to break the despair-loop. In recent weeks, the hummingbirds have returned to my vast estate, and some of them hang out outside my office window. They’re really cool. It’s one thing I can always count on to really break my chain of thought and bring me “into the moment.”

I’m interested enough in them that I try to identify them and take pictures and stuff, but at the end of the day, they’re just amazing to stare at, and it doesn’t matter if you know a Rufous hummingbird from a Ruby Throated.

They have dogfights outside my window, and they chatter like R2D2. I’ve seen them perch in the tree outside my wife’s office to avoid a torrential downpour, I’ve seen them drink from our bird baths. Not to be too new-agey about it, but I get a geeky buzz whenever they’re close. I’m not saying they carry angelic crystal rainbow energy or anything, but I get a genuine charge from them. No matter how bad the workday gets, it’s a pleasant – if short – diversion to watch them do their thing, and I’d swear that a couple of them have nested in one of my locust trees.

So the antics are engaging, and after you start to identify the personalities of the regular visitors, you have a pretty good idea what to expect. I find myself appreciating the chance to see them do what they do even when it’s exactly what they did last time. I feel somehow lucky or privileged in the same way as when I’ve just seen a cougar or an elk or a sunset. (I saw a cougar in Cerrillos one time, that was pretty cool, too.)

The thing that really cemented it for me happened about a week ago, though. I was at a barbecue with maybe 10 other people, there were a couple dogs there and my daughter was running around. It was only a couple miles from here, so it was in one of those low-nighttime-light areas and the sunset was amazing. Shortly after the sun had dipped below the horizon and the lengthy dusk had officially begun, I started paying more attention to the humminbird feeder – if you have regular visitors, they get kind of hectic about squeezing in a last meal before dark, and I saw a couple buzz up.

The ones that visit my house are really pissy about sharing; there are 4 metal flower thingies they could drink from at once, but they all seem to want to be the only one eating, even when they appear to be a mated pair. At our friends’, though, they were more communal and you’d see 2 or 3 at once without any real issues except the occasional dogfight after they’d had their fill. In this case, there were 2, and I thought I could make out their coloring, a Rufous male and female. (If you haven’t seen one before, the Rufous hummingbird male is a bright copper color. They’re striking. The females are not so bright, but they’re beautiful, too. I’m going to try to dig up one of my pictures of them that’s good enough to show off the coloring.) They sat and drank together for probably a minute, a lot longer than they sit still in the House of Dogs where I live. Everyone else at the party was occupied, and nobody else seemed to care about watching the birds, so I was the only one watching.

In unison, the 2 hummingbirds slowly flew away from the feeder at the same time and stopped about 3 feet away. Then they got very close to each other and appeared to kiss each other, and they started spinning in a slow circle and rising into the air. Just slowly kissing and spinning in a circle until they were out of sight. Now I’m no hummingbirdologis, so I’m not sure that hummingbirds even kiss or that they really were a mated pair. For all I know, one of them got stuck in the other one – after all, they’re a lot like little lawn darts – and maybe the other one was spinning to try to get unstuck from the other one’s neck. But it was an amazing sight, and the voices from the party dropped away and all I could see or hear or focus on was the spiraling pair of birds. When they were gone, the silence remained for a second, and as the activity around me started to filter back in to my attention, I realized I was the only person who had seen the little show. In the middle of a small but lively party, nature had provided another subtly dramatic performance for me alone.

There’s that narcissism again – all of reality exists to serve me, and me alone!!!!. But it’s not different than that feeling you get when you notice a street lamp burning out when you’re walking in the city, and you realize you were the only person in the whole world who just saw it. One of a small handful at worst. In a big, homogenous world full of Targets and IHOPs, the idea that you’ve had something personal and unique happen to you and to you alone is a wonderful, selfish, indulgence. Humminbirds in a love (or death) spiral, street lights popping out just at the moment you look at them – little nothings. But when you experience those little nothings in a certain way, where you’re paying attention in a certain way, there’s no moment where you’re more alive. When your life flashes before your eyes, you don’t see material acquisitions or job promotions or “achievements,” you see those “little things” – dumb, meaningless moments that are neither dumb nor meaningless: the smell of newly mowed grass, a puppy you held once when you were a kid, a sunset walk that didn’t even seem that amazing at the time. So in the middle of career despair, hummingbirds are one of my neat “little things” these days. I’m hoping not to have any more near-death experiences for a little while, but if I do have one, I wouldn’t be surprised if a hummingbird moment snuck in there somewhere.

I love living here.

My kid was sleeping in my bed between us, and I was surrounded by dogs, and I heard kind of a squeeking, whistling noise. I assumed it was the puppy Loki with a typical burst of night energy and he was just tearing up some squeeky dog toy. But it set off Sheba, which would have been odd if it really was Loki, and she did her growling-barking-running-into-things deal and ran outside and was barking and growling and running into things outside our bedroom window, which was open. My wife groaned, the girl tossed and turned, and I just remained in place. Sheba gave up quickly and came back in. Watson started his click-panting, and they everyone was restless for a minute. Anette asked if I heard it as it happened again.

I said, “It’s just the puppy with a toy.” She didn’t say anything. As I took inventory of my aches, I realized I had a dog laying next to my feet, a dog across my legs, one on the floor next to me with my hand on it, and I could hear Watson’s click-panting at the foot of the bed, so it couldn’t be the puppy. My eyes popped open and I was awake. Not scared or nervous, just curious, and I’m The Dad, after all. I put on some glasses, which are really useful in an unlighted house in the middle of the night, and went to the window first and when I didn’t see anything, I did a quiet patrol of the house. The puppy followed me around, and I could feel him bumping into the back of my leg and stopping when I stopped and just generally staying close. I didn’t see or hear much until I was in the kitchen, and I heard something outside through the window again. It wasn’t close, definitely not anywhere on our property, and while it had a whistling quality to it, it sounded more like a smaller animal squeaking. It’s hard to play “Do These Sounds Match?” in the middle of the night, so for all I know, it wasn’t the same noise. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. It was a half moon, give or take, so the coyotes would be out hunting, so as much as I felt bad that it was probably a rabbit being taken out or something, I was also slightly relieved that it didn’t sound man-made. I heard some distant dog barking and some kind of howling – it’s hard for me to distinguish a single unenthusiastic coyote from a single enthusiastic dog, but it was all in the distance, and on a calm night here, “the distance” was most likely several miles away.

I put my glasses somewhere I could find them and laid down again. The dogs were mostly settled, and since it had only been a couple of minutes, that was reassuring, too, because they’d lose their minds if whatever they heard was close. After a couple of minutes, we all heard something again. With the fan on in the room and all the dog panting and stuff, not to mention years of playing loud music, it was hard to make it out, but it didn’t get more than a couple growls from the pack so I let it go. Then Anette said, “Should we be worried about the car or anything?” She was still convinced it was someone out walking around, and maybe she’d heard actual footsteps or something. Since the car out front is not even a month old, what with me dramatically wrecking the old one in a spinning, flipping freeway accident and all that, I figured I’d check again.

I turned off the one light that was on in our hallway, nobody was up walking around anyway, and I felt around in our front closet for some shoes to put on. I’d found my glasses easily, a lifetime of half-blindness has created generally good habits about where I put them, and it wasn’t nearly cool enough to need a sweater or anything. Loki the puppy erupted with some barking when he heard the front door open for me to slip out, so my “slipping” was rendered pretty un-ninjalike by my hissing “Shut up!” because I didn’t want to really wake my kid up. He’s not old enough to be stubborn, so he stopped right away. Good dog. (Mostly.)

It was very, very calm out. I could hear the bristly sound of my shoes on the front doormat, and with my first couple steps I could hear every little piece of gravel or barkdust I stepped on. I could hear the sounds of the few cars on the freeway several miles away, it has to be pretty calm to make it to us, and I could hear the hum of a couple of the neighborhood electrical transformers – or whatever they’re called, the green boxes at the front of each property where people hook up to the grid. Every little breath and scrape and shuffle seemed to carry forever. I stopped about 15 feet in front of my house in the shadow of our big pinon tree, and I took a moment to recognize that even halfway full, the moon here is strong enough to cast shadows in the middle of the night. It gives moonlit nights a pretty strange quality, like in the early James Bond movie Dr. No, or in old Star Trek episodes, where they simulated night by filming during the full light of day with some kind of lens filter on to give the impression of darkness. (On full moon nights, it’s not at all difficult to read by the light of the moon, it’s more like a street light than a celestial body.)

I didn’t hear anything unusual, I could even hear my dogs whining and complaining a little a half acre away in my bedroom, so I walked to the street. It was genuinely still while I stood where my driveway meets the dirt road. There had been workers out earlier grading the street and using a backhoe to empty out the culverts – monsoon season has caused some trouble, and out here, a good mud is much harder to drive in than any amount of snow or ice, and they were trying to help the drainage on our road – so I could smell the fresh, damp dirt, and I could hear some crickets. I took a deep breath and just soaked up the night for a second, and I felt a vague appreciation for where I live. (I can only say “I really like living here” so many times without feeling stupid.)

Suddenly I heard a howl of some sort, and it was unlike any coyote or dog howl I’ve heard before. I knew it had to be a coyote, we don’t have wolves in this area, but it was still a different version of it than we usually hear – it’s a lot more common to hear the “laughing” type calls, or the “we’ve just torn up something delicious” pack noises, this sound was more like a foley library’s wolf call, something you’d hear right after Sesame Street’s “The Count” has enumerated 7 cookies. I could tell it was coming from the north and a little west, but as the sound spooled up and got louder, it surrounded me. It echoed off the houses and cars around me and I could actually hear it surround me. Clockwise. In music-production-geek terms, it sounded as though it had a slow chorus effect created by some sort of Doppler motion.

The sound was distant enough that I didn’t sense any imminent peril, but it was creepy enough that it sent chills down my back. I froze, just in case there was some kind of movement around me that was going along with it that I’d missed – the sound blocked out everything else for a second, and it startled me to realize that my other senses had just checked out for a second. A slow, second howl started, and it was followed by a couple others this time, and it was more like the usual coyote din, and there was some of the “laughing” barking as well, so I figured one of the local packs had just found some food. I’ll never get used to the sound, and it gave me another chill, but I rationally knew that my car was OK, and that’s what I was worried about. As I realized that most of an acre lay between me and my front door and I was listening to coyotes out hunting in a pack somewhere nearby under the light of the moon, my sleep-deprived and generally addled mind realized that I should probably also take some basic steps regarding my own well being, so I walked back to the house, slow enough to keep the foot noise down and fast enough to get the hell out of there.

I didn’t hear them again the rest of the night. It was another one of those odd things that made me feel that those sounds were meant for me alone; nobody else was out standing in Surround Sound Coyotevision like I was, and while I rationally realize how narcissistic it is to feel that it was all just for me, it’s also easy to believe it after having been there. It’s somehow reassuring to think that in this big, modern, technical world that it’s possible to be completely alone and have old experiences right in the middle of your neighborhood. It probably doesn’t hurt when your neighborhood borders America’s Outback, but still…

Anyway, I took the week off from non-work activities outside home. I’m a little hermetic these days to begin with, introspection mode, but it’s been good. At the end of the week I’ll cook for a bunch of people, next week I’ll have some rehearsals and get out and take some pictures or something, but this week is off. And I find that just going through the hoops of daily life are really pleasant here. I really like Santa Fe.

I’ve been here 2 1/2 years; long enough to have some idea what to expect, but new enough that I still enjoy all of it. 3 weeks ago, the last of the blossoms fell off our locust trees, they were amazing, and 2 days ago, the chollas all bloomed again, they’re amazing in this thin, bright light. We’re on the cusp of monsoon season, so we’re starting to get the crazy thunderheads and really dramatic thunderheads and violent, sudden winds that blow tumbleweed across the roads. I’m still kind of geeked about tumbleweed. Right now a lot of the rain misses us, so we see it all around with the weird high-altitude clouds and thunderheads, and if it does hit us, the pinon trees and sage smell great. I didn’t know the term “virga” before I moved here, but it’s pretty common – it’s rain that doesn’t make it to the ground, it creates some pretty alien scenes.

Still getting new birds visiting the feeders and baths (not many hummingbirds for now, though, that might be weird, but what do I know?), weird moths and Junebugs at night, ground squirrels and prairie dogs out front, coyotes at night, red tailed hawks riding thermals over the roads. Occasional deer. (Actually just one, but it was pretty hard to miss. Literally.) Every once in a while we’ll see a roadrunner, and on one hand, it’s just a weird looking bird, but it’s actually exciting in a real and probably dumb way. We had a couple families of bluebirds in houses I built with my daughter, they’re no longer nesting but they hang out, and the quail have started to visit again. The canyon towhees think they own our place and we can’t even leave our car windows open because they’ll just sit inside. I live halfway between the “I need to know the name of everything” camp and the “it’s just beautiful and I don’t care what it’s called camp,” and both suit me.

It’s also a great when tourist season starts; I live outside of town so my daily life isn’t affected by it, but when I go into the downtown area, there’s always some kind of party or festival or free music. So there’s stuff going on, and if I don’t feel like taking advantage, I don’t have to even know about it, and if I feel like it, there’s something constantly available. Perfect. Locals grouse about “the parking situation” and all that, but if you’ve ever lived in a real city, a bad day here would be almost laughably easy somewhere else. I don’t mind walking a block or two.

The sky changes every hour of every day, so it’s always new; new peaks you haven’t noticed on the horizon, new streaks of red rock in familiar foothills close by, and constant shifts in distance depending on what kind of clouds are out – are the Sangre de Cristo mountains so close I can touch them, or are they a hazy mirage that can never be reached? I haven’t taken as much advantage of the hiking around here as I’d like recently, but it’s a perfect time to get back into it, especially with out of town guests.

So life’s not perfect, it’s just life, and I’m not exactly living large, I’m living medium. And it suits me. And while I figure out what I want to do when I grow up, there’s no place else I’d like to be.

The dealership hasn’t done a single thing right in the process, from just doing the work correctly, to basic customer service like returning phone calls or finishing work when promised – ever, to leaving the car a greasy mess inside, to never returning phone calls, to pretty basic politeness during phone calls. (To be fair, Zeke – probably not his real name – The Assistant Service Manager Guy was reasonably polite.) I swear that we were on a reality TV show called “treat your customers like shit” or something. And told us that Chrysler had said to him, “We don’t know what else to tell you, let us know when you figure it out.” So the incompetent corporate mothership abandoned the incompetent locals to figure it out for themselves.

At the end of the day, it’s not exactly an awful truck, it was just a faulty alternator – a faulty alternator at 4,000 miles or so requiring 5 months of downtime and repeated incorrect changes that wrecked my truck’s interior? I hate and distrust it now, but that would happen with any vehicle that let me down so often and so hugely so early in its life.

And sure, the dealership’s service department sucks – 5 months to diagnose and repair an alternator? Why waste a chance to take a simple situation and use it to turn a customer into a lifelong enemy?

But at the end of the day, the fault is mine. It’s the Mullicious Family Curse. Every 40 years or so, someone from my family exhibits the blind and dumb optimism necessary to forget Chrysler’s past letdowns and goes out and buys a Dodge. Its failures are so epic and the dealer’s service followup so tragic that nobody we know, family or not, will buy another Chrysler product for decades. It was my destiny, almost 40 years since my dear not-departed mother’s brand new Dart was traded in for a Chevy pickup that was more reliable at 30 years of age than my nearly infant Ram. Now, our family has a new dark legend to keep the young ones safe again for another 40 years, and the part I played was bigger than my own life. I hope it skips a generation, but we always want what’s best for our offspring.

I’m like Icarus or something, I just flew a little too close to the sun. I dared to hope for an affordable and reliable American pickup to fill my family’s transportation needs, and I was simply wrong. Nothing more to it. This isn’t a story of failure, it’s really just a story of a boy who never learned not to dream.

(Don’t ask about the Lemon Law, either. Too many lessons for one post… And I’m intentionally not naming the dealership for fear of them doing even worse things to my truck when it needs service, the nearest alternative is 70 miles away.)

Note: As of winter 2010/2011, everything on the truck appears to be working basically correctly at the same time! It only took four years to work out the kinks on our vehicle. God help us if they need to change the mud flaps or something – we’re out of warranty and it’ll probably cost me $60,000.