The Good Student

Wild ideas had been on the decline for a long time.

Once abundant, only a few remained in idea preserves and insurgent tangles where the outcasts hunkered down in cardboard boxes. Forgotten books, ideas in them all but extinct, dried out in sheds and basements.

Endangered ideas still roamed the streets at night in hushed conversations, outside the exposing flood of titillating LED crawlers.

In a secret chamber, behind the wall of her closet, the good student still cared for the last of their kind. She kept them in the corners of her mind where no one could see them. Her favorite, self-reflection, and another related to social conscience, gave her the thrill of a dangerous secret.

She found them in a tattered book in the back of the hologram immersion theater where she worked. Some of the others wanted to throw the book away, or burn it. She said she would take care of it for them, and, being the supervisor, had the authority to convince them.

It took work and time to puzzle out the strange ways of seeing that the words engendered.

They took root and she had no one to talk to about them. She spent more time alone with words than on her cyber tether. 

Some of her friends wondered why she stopped joining them at the entertainment modules. "How will you live without fun?" they chided.

She smiled and implied that she had a new  e-boy and that he kept her stimulated.

After a while the friends moved on and gave her peace and space that she used to cultivate the ideas.

They were strange and dark and disturbing. She did not understand why she so sought them out. Maybe it was just because they were so "bad," as everyone seemed to believe.

The domesticated ideas, of course, were jealous, and patrolled the planet looking for the last of the wild ideas. When they caught one, it was big news, and the public execution of the wild idea made great spectacle.

The mottoes of "Consume!" and "It's All About You!" paraded past on the eyeglass digiscreens and were repeated in greeting as the citizens satisfied their appetites for sex, food, fun, and euphoria.

But the good student wanted something more.

She knew there was only trouble down this road, but she felt compelled to feed and free her mind. She puzzled over the words by Jung and Marx and Thoreau. The words became her friends more than her friends, her comfort in the dry desert that passed for intellectual inquiry.

But the ideas were not tame and could not be fenced in. They began to inhabit her facial expressions, even when she said nothing.

Some of the workers at the Hologram Immersion Theater noticed that she had less and less enthusiasm for "It's All About You!" or "Trivia Rules!" when they shared the greeting. They wondered if they should notify the Domesticated Idea Agents.

They worried about her, were frightened by her. She sat more and more by herself, without her digiscreen, as she mulled over some question she kept to herself, some memory of a time long gone, when it seemed so important to touch a lovely, delicate, vanishing mystery.

Turning North

The day spread out before him in an unbroken expanse of deep grass, wild flowers, and undulating hills. He stood up, rested from a night sleeping under the stars, and stretched, taking in the sunrise. The shadows revealed the slightest hollows in the broad plain that ran for twenty miles to the base of the Mountain.

There, the land rose, dark with ponderosa pines, up to the tree line to exposed rock, snow fields, and rarefied air.

He had to whole day to make his way through the pinon, juniper, and cedar pygmy forest to the base of the Mountain. He could take his time, savor each step.

He hefted his load and began to walk. The desire to move overpowered the hunger for breakfast, the habit of coffee.

It was his day to break a trail into new territory.

His mind was clear and his eyes sharp. He scanned the fields for elk. They sometimes came down from the high country to graze on the thick pastures reserved for cattle. There was a herd of about seventeen animals that he had seen before in this area, and he had heard a bull trumpet the night before. Its voice comforted something in him that needed proximity to a wild creature.

Now, there was nothing but sun, grass, scattered trees, and a breeze. He made his way north, growing  older with each step, grayer, a little less flexible.

It was his mind that really began to change though.

He saw beyond the borders of his limited perspective. He felt sad about how much time he had spent consumed by hunger, ambition, and isolation.

As a younger man, he worried about whether or not he would get enough and had made mistakes in the name of taking too much care of himself, whatever that was.

Now, the view was bigger, and he saw others as his business.

It was now, when his strength was fading, that he most wanted to apply himself, to give himself.

Of course, there were the voices he carried with him, would always carry with him.

They were packed away in the dark pockets of his pack. The told him to stop and rest; they whispered to the tired parts of his bones, saying slow down, stay here, go no further, don't worry about the others. You owe them nothing.

He knew these voices, though not exactly right, had a point to make. He had to keep his eyes and ears on the Mountain. Getting there would require every flicker of energy and strength he could marshal. He had no time or energy to spare listening to the fear hiding in those shadows.

For most of his life, he had given them too much time, had hidden out and avoided his birthright. He did what he could, he told himself. He did what he had to do, he told himself. He had been a good man, a serious man, he told himself.

And he had done these things, but he knew he had bought a lie, had failed to surrender to the work, hardship, and terror of believing in the impossible. It was for that, and for forgiving that, that he walked today.

So he walked, every step closer, a paradox of decline and ascension, invisibility and illumination.

The day was still young, but its light emanated more and more from inside as he gradually grew increasingly blind, feeble, and sure of his step.

The Dangers of the Blue Pill -- A Confession

Addiction is not too strong a word for what happens when I get the occasional free moment to surf the web. I don't know the world of internet porn, but I am guessing that the pull of that, for some, is no less strong. I'm not that into Facebook, but hear that too can become compulsive. No, I've settled into a my own cyber heroin.

My "thing," my game, is to find the best deal on Craigslist. Specifically, I look for nice bikes at bargain prices. I track them down with all the persistence of a detective on the trail of a serial murderer. I compare brands, components, condition, year, trends, and add it all up to a kind of mental Blue Book for bikes. I then winnow down the candidates to the deal of the day.

Yes, I can hear you responsible types out there. I could be putting my left brain to better use by researching or writing things that would bring me prestige or publication. What's the fun in that?

I don't need these bikes, and don't actually buy them, but I am obsessed by them.

Here is what I understand about why I do this.

I wanted a bike as a kid, and I didn't get one, until it was too late. That bike would have been the ticket to acceptance by the local bike gang -- Hobie, Seth, Pug, Mook -- all of the cool kids. They had Schwinn Sting Rays, Lemon Peelers, Apple Krates, stick shifters, slicks, sissy bars, and banana seats. These were expensive bikes, way beyond what I and my family could afford. But these had them and rolled around the neighborhood like princes. I had an old piece of pig iron junk that my sisters had outgrown.

Now, when I look at the listings on line with money in my pocket, I see them still. And I see me rolling now, in 2014, along the trails near Flagstaff, on a cool, carbon, 29er Santa Cruz Tall Boy, with my new gang, now in our fifties and sixties. It is a hazy, cheesecloth vision of finality, of realization, redemption, and fulfillment.

Funny how things persist, how the desire to make right something that cannot be made right lingers there in the folds of consciousness.

This illusion, this fantasy, this unmet and requited need for membership runs beneath my days teaching, writing, supervising, and advising.

Every once in a while, it gets out of control and I abandon my work to indulge in the fantasy, haunting the listings on line, the electronic manna. I hope to find it somewhere in there, that long-lost ticket to recognition and status among my peers.

I know that it will never meet that unmet childhood need, that the game is over, that I lost. But I can't give up hope that I might get a second chance to make it right.

Self-help people are quick to remind me that it's never too late to have a happy childhood. Well, maybe.

Another take reminds me that it's hard to wake up to reality, to take the red pill, to admit that the illusion isn't what I really want, what is really good for me.

Morpheus of The Matrix, waits for me, red pill in hand, his knife sharp, ready to cut the electronic umbilical cord, rabbit hole exposed.

It's time to ascend to the very uncontrollable reality outside cyber space and go for a ride on one of those ganga machines. 

Wrong Turn

Let's say you were going somewhere one night, somewhere important, like a party where someone was waiting for you.

Say you were at a light wondering which was the right road and you took another one, one that pulled you off your life trajectory and onto another one. You took it because you were curious and full of yourself, thought you had so much power that you could do anything, become something else, and still come out ahead.

This new one asked you to twist and contort to survive. As you wandered gravel roads in the middle of the night, the moon only a sliver, if visible at all, your lights covered with dust, your mouth dry, you thought maybe you should head back. But it was too late.

The party you were going to go to had broken up. People had gone home. Someone was probably wondering what happened, but there was no way to contact her. (This was before cell phones, wifi, or even email.)

So you kept going and you ended up acting out a life you didn't think would go this way.

Now you wonder if maybe everybody takes a wrong turn, but they don't admit it, even to themselves. No matter, you did.

People out here don't know you and look at you strangely. They don't care about your family, your history, and they don't get your jokes. Not many of them know your birthday and no one knows your astrological sign. When you think they are talking to you, they are really on their cell phones talking to somebody about surgical procedures. Everybody seems sick or has gas.

In this land, you are an outsider. Just the way you wanted it.

Being an outsider has its advantages. You get a lot of time alone for one thing. That's a kind of gold, you have to admit. But sometimes solitude lapses into loneliness. In those times, you imagine how you might find your way back, and you see what a long way it is.

By now, they have probably forgotten you anyway, you who left. Plus you are dangerous now. The one who went down the dusty road, who saw what was over the ridge, who opened his eyes, who could see where he had been from a distance, with some perspective. You saw that things didn't have to be the way they were. You saw the machinery behind making up a life, you knew that you had done it, and you had to accept the responsibility for your own sadness. 

Eventually, there you are, out of gas, the end of the road taken in the wrong turn.

As you look out over the desert from your perch above the abandoned car, you ask yourself if you did as well as you could have, if, maybe, you should have done more to get back to the road you were on. At this point, likely, it doesn't matter anymore.

But you wonder anyway. No harm in thinking, right?

Temperature's Rising

The last of winter left us yesterday, after the clouds wrung remaining drops onto the windshield. Those drops are dusty now, and the windshield holds the pattern they left. It's dirty.

But I think I'll leave it as a reminder that the rains will return. They won't be the rain of winter, but will instead be the thunderstorms of July.

It will be a long wait.

This is what we desert rats call first summer. It is the hot summer, and it begins now, extends through May, and really hits its stride in June. The furnace is kicking in, in other words. Wild fires, air that feels like a sauna, pine needles that snap when stepped on, all signal the arrival of high pressure mixed with a sun directly overhead. Soon we'll begin to count the consecutive string of hundred-degree days.

It's time to hunker down, to get "sunned in," to act like the animals and get up early, retreat when the sun gets higher, and then go back out when it is setting.

It's not a bad rhythm, this desert routine, good work, in other words, if you can get it.

But, of course, we humans tend to ignore such good sense. We stick to our artificial schedules, even when they defy conditions. Instead of adapting, we drive with the A/C too high on asphalt that dries out tires and could cook eggs. We work under a sun that boils the brain. We waste energy and don't harmonize with what we cannot change.

We could harvest more solar energy, but remove credits for installing solar panels. We waste energy fighting against the heat by creating more heat, more CO2. We exhaust ourselves trying to survive conditions we might be better off avoiding.

So it begins again, this season of heat in the desert. If I could I would rewrite the script and make this place cooler, greener, more liveable. But it is what it is, and life belongs to those most able to adapt.

N'est pas?

Downward Mobility

It sat there in the parking lot at Home Depot, and it was for sale. It was humble, but strong, well made. The owner had it built to haul his Harley around the mountain states when he was younger. Now, it was time for him and his wife to travel in an RV, not a motorcycle. He wanted to sell the little trailer, to down-size, clean out the junk around his house.

I thought I could use it for our construction project up in New Mexico. It would save wear and tear on the little pick up when we hauled sheet rock, tile, concrete blocks, and plywood from Gallup or Albuquerque down to El Morro. The pick up had been sagging under the loads of wood and dry wall and cement bags and I was concerned about the life of the springs. It's an old truck, pretty small too.

So I bought the trailer. It's part of the next chapter of my life, which is a step backward in time and status to the life of a construction worker. I will be building a house in New Mexico again this summer and likely into the next decade.

At almost sixty years old, this is a crazy direction to take. It's expensive (I don't have much money); it's physically challenging (I am getting weaker, stiffer, more brittle.); it's lower status (not that I hold very high status as a low-rung lecturer); and it is remote (way out there away from medical care, hardware stores, and theaters).

That said, the pace of life is slower and the self-reliance higher. People have less and do more with what they have. They innovate, invent, grow food, set up solar panels, make their own entertainment -- and beer.

It's going to be quite a shift in lifestyle. And I doubt that it will make me look very good on paper. 

But I will have a trailer, a truck, and -- maybe -- a roof over my head. My old age will have less protection, less financial security, but more sun, more sky, more manual work, and more trail to explore as my days grown dimmer.

To Tattoo or Not to Tattoo

She places a book, thick as a brick, a cornerstone of a bank, on the table. She is studying o-chem, organic chemistry. She sets her I-Phone to one side, butters her freshly toasted bagel, and polishes her glasses. As she licks the butter off the knife, she wonders if she should get that tattoo she has been thinking about, the one that came to her in a dream a while back.

She runs her finger along the screen of her phone, just to make sure he has not sent another desperate text message. He seems to be taking it hard, her moving west to do her pre-med requirements.

The tattoo braids a sinuous vine of roses with a snake and is set in the Garden of Eden. It dances in contrast to the rigid rules of chemistry that she will spend the morning mapping out on scratch paper. She doesn't have much time to think about the tattoo, given all the pages she will have to cover before the exam next week.

There is a notice on her Facebook page, something about a status change of her best friend back home. She says she is dating him now.

A stab of shock, anger, regret, and jealousy hit her all at once. She sets the phone on the table and looks out at the other students hard at work on their projects and course work or whatever it is they do with their time here so early in the morning.

One of the women wears a camisole that flatters her shoulders and slender arms has an artful run of tattoos across her back, down her arm, and under her armpit, disappearing beneath her shirt toward her breast. This woman sits with a handsome, tall, thin man and their talk is secretive, animated, and she stares him in the eyes.

The med student opens her notebook and pulls out some three by five note-cards. She slowly lifts the cover of the thick o-chem text and locates the chapter reading for the day. She pauses for a second before diving in to the bonds between atoms and the electrical charge they engender.

The tattoo winds away in the back of her mind, food for later thought, some other day, when the work is done and the exams taken.