Rough week, rough weekend. Not for the household as a whole. But for me a series of fumblings and bumblings and frustrations at every turn, howlings and wailings and weeps, topped off by an ill-conceived jaunt yesterday evening to show my support for the recent marriage of a friend.

I thought the town's name "Adin," which is 40 miles west of here through the mountains, yet for some reason still conceived of it as Canby, another, smaller town only 20 miles west on the same highway. So I misjudged the travel time and the expense of fuel, and spent a week's grocery money on gas and was 30 minutes late to the celebration.

I was surprised and glad, for the couple, to see the large size of the gathering in the little community hall there. I had my brother with me; Husband wisely stayed home, more accepting of his social limitations. And he had to work.

But I drove forth bravely, as always envisioning happy smiles of welcome and hugs and dances and new persons met and befriended. And as always confronted instead with the vastness of my capacity for self-delusion. I knew exactly one person there - the bride - and she was preoccupied, naturally. I had met the new hubby and he greeted me warmly, but as I was about to utter his name my anxiety froze my brain, convinced me it was wrong, and I faltered over it, seeming to have forgotten it instead. Thought paralysis - the Aspy reaction to social stress.

So B and I sat alone at our table on the periphery, fidgeting, watchful for our friend the bride so we might tell her how lovely was her dress and exclaim over her rings and wish her well. She walked from table to table, chatting and laughing, but returned to the front of the room before getting to us. And then a grace was said by the local pastor, and the entire assembly stood as one and rushed forward to load their plates with feast. My spirit sank through the floor: I would never be able to join a throng of indifferent unknowns in order to fill our plates, and anyway the question was moot - the offering was lasagna and bread and three beautiful decorated sheet cakes, all delicious-looking to and inedible by my brother, who has celiac disease (gluten sensitivity), and by me, determined to stay wheat-free out of solidarity.

We hadn't come for the food, anyway, and my stress level peaked with the forward rush of the crowd, and I took brotherB by the hand and fled with him out the building's back door. To compensate a little for the beautiful food he did not get to eat, I bought him a chocolate bar at the local mercantile, and then we drove sedately over the mountain passes and past the pastures with their hundred cows and finally into our driveway. We walked in the door, and Husband inquired, and I burst into tears.

So it is resolved: henceforward, however much I want to attend such events, however close I may feel to the celebrants, my response will be "We are unable to attend social events, but our thoughts are with you." And they will be. Because I do love people so much. But they terrify me.

Focus hard to come by lately. Strategizing around the ADD - using guarana to simulate Ritalin, for example. It works but then my heart beats too fast. So I switched to the 5-Hour Energy stuff. Gave me energy but scattered my brain absolutely everywhere. Guess I'll stick to coffee and meditation.

The house trim paint chose this year to peel mostly off, and the painter I found to remedy that turned out to be (as so many solvent-workers seem to be) a binge-drunk who ultimately disappeared with my paint and my money, having covered most of the trim while not having sanded or filled anything, and leaving the back door area paint-free. All I have for him is a cell number and the local bank manager he gave as a reference. But the painter won't return calls, and the manager isn't comfortable telling me where the painter lives. This weekend I'll buy a quart of exterior paint matched as close as I can to the gray he used and finish the job on my own. My own fault for giving cash to an alcoholic - before he'd finished the work. I'll keep a card with local AA meeting info on it to give him if he ever turns up again. These guys are fairly helpless behind the solvent damage their livers take.

Smoke persists, but today seems better than yesterday. Firefighters will contain the Barry Point fire to the north of us by the weekend, I have read. It's surpassed 150 square miles. I don't know how the fires south and east of us are doing; surely they are contained by now. One was approaching 100,000 acres, last I heard, and the other 70,000 or so. Saturday last came the blessed rain, all morning the soft even downpour that helped workers get a handle on this mess. Breathing has not been easy for anyone, and the line for asthma meds at the pharmacy last Friday was lengthy and loud.

I cooked my first green curry last night. Used every pan, bowl, and cooking appliance in the house before I was through, but it was delicious, and now that I've done it I'll know how to streamline the process next time. Matters are complicated somewhat by the fact that I have no stove, and must use three hotplates that function with varying degrees of cooperativeness - one doesn't get hot enough, one always gets too hot, and the third stays at middle heat. Lots of pan swapping and shifting. Burning and boilover. Undercook, overcook. Alas.

I've finally reached the final third of the Charles Olson biography. I didn't like him to start with and now that I've learned so much about him I really don't like him. But I am curious to know how the story ends, what becomes of the peripheral persons - wife mistresses babies rivals chums. I wish I had more respect for his thought process, but it was so ego-entwined that all his ideas seem tainted and suspect.

I'm returning to The Awakened Self: Encounters with Zen by Lucien Stryk. By the time the Olson is finished the Stryk will be underway. This one's a reread, maybe even a third go. I find myself drawn to zen from time to time and because I retain so little of what I study I find myself having to read the same basics again and again. Maybe some understanding will stick this time.

And I've begun rereading Jung's Man and His Symbols, as well. I first read it when I was in school 30 years ago, and I can use a refresher. Husband and I have been working with dream symbols, myths, and fixed-star astrology.

Have you ever experienced a niacin flush? I never had. I thought I was immune to it. But I took a handful of vitamin supplements an hour ago and suddenly I'm all over maroon and itching like fire. I can't type one more word! Agh!

FROM THE ARCHIVES
Nord, California, 1978

An old man lives in the grain bin across the road. The owner of the property there ignores him. The bin is always surrounded by pigeons. I wonder if the old man feeds them? What does he eat? He gets up early in the morning and emerges from the bin with a gunny sack and spends the entire day walking for miles down one side of the railroad track and back up the other, gathering flotsam for his sack. He probably doesn't smell good. How does he live in the dark like that, in the bin? He walks and his back is straight and his stride determined and of course he's a little crazy. I asked Gary Corea, my neighbor, about him. Gary told me that the old man is well educated and says some surprising things. Gary said, "That ol' man don't do no one no harm. Stays the summer there every year. He's got the gentlest, kindest voice you ever heard, and he says the damnedest things."

Smokechoked. Nose & lungs filling. How to cool the baked house overnight with windows shut? Sometimes a moment when a feral gust kicks a hole in it and the sky may be seen and a deep unencumbered breath inhaled. Two weeks at least of this misery but imagine how it is in the valleys around. We sit on a plateau. Imagine living in a bowl. New line of thunderstorms - shall we call them lightningstorms? - said to approach in days to come. Extra firefighters arrive at the campgrounds.

Out window: catGreta hunts in the barren yellow field, a graceful black form slinking around dead weeds to groundsquirrel burrows. In here dogApple growls under her breath watching the deer step across the field's far end. How she longs to escort them! Everything out the window colored in feeble sepia or washed in diluted pisslight.

And so we move on. Continuing in Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, I find all kinds of resonances:

[Olson's] inability to control his addictive 'whoring after culture,' his involuntary adherence to the role of hopeful artist as past generations had defined it, brought him nothing but shame. ...

Now, faced with money problems that were obviously temporary but very real, he stubbornly dodged the whole annoying work issue, squandering what little cash he had in compulsive book-buying sprees, sometimes spending whole afternoons prowling dealers' shops in search of the one line, lost in an obscure volume, which might spur him forward to new writing discoveries. ...

And once he finally stumbled into his vocation - teacher - some delightful description of his initial classrom forays:

Drawing unexpected connections with breathtaking speed, he leaped across space and time, linking Troilus and new astronomy, Frazer and Freud, field physics and Frobenius, projective geometry's 'gains of space' and epic poetry's timeless mythic archetypes, creating an open-ended architecture of knowledge that placed twentieth-century man in vivid relation to cosmic patterns of eternity. ...

"We are a perpendicular axis of planes," he declared, "constantly being intersected by planes of experience coming in from the past - coming up from the ground, the underground tide - going out to the future."

Confused though his students might have been by such utterances in 1948, said one, "We got his big message: stick to where your passions take you."

His life, foreshortened as it was by the alcoholism that seems the inevitable refuge of every male (artist or not) who is so obviously high on the autism spectrum, seemed destined for greater things even than he managed in his confusion to accomplish. No one understood these neurologies back then. With their (our) retarded emotions, inability to function as adults at the ages society expects them to, confusion as to purpose, and yet an unquenchable thirst for learning (the child's inbuilt seeking that in our case does not switch off in the adult), and curious inability to interact effectively with humans in the human world, the high-spectrum character doses himself more and more heavily with anesthetic until - JUST AT THE MOMENT WHEN HIS MATURITY WOULD CLICK IN AND HIS GIFTS BECOME OBVIOUS - he succumbs to its physiological effects.

That's my theory, anyway. I read this same sequence of events over and over again in the alcoholic male artist. Kerouac, Pollock, Olson. They never knew then that this was nature's weird painful way of holding them back until they might blossom in old age.

Females, whose hormonal makeup enables them better to mimic the neurotypical world and blend in at least a little, seem less likely to succumb to substances, but if they have made families, they seem equally inevitably to end up stranded in some remote place, completely estranged from the love their youth brought them so abundantly. I do not refer to myself only but to my female forebears who each in turn have ended up this way, and also to every stranded mother I have befriended out here in the wilderness. Bewildered, they are, to a one. What did I do? Where did they go? We can reach out no better now than we could then. We are wounded animals at our core, and the best we can do is crawl off to be alone.

But I've figured it out, kind of. The closeness with offspring seems to persist until the child is in his or her 30s. Then he stands solid on his feet and no longer needs to reach out to Mom. In neurotypical families, this is when Mom takes over the reaching, calling and visiting and sending little gifts, doing the chitchat required to keep the extended relation strong and vital, earning her contributing role of grandmother. But us folks who score 25 and above on the diagnostic spectrum (Husband is a 28; I am a 34) have no clue how to do that. Our efforts are awkward, sporadic, and after the first failure or two makes for sufficient embarrassment, we retreat, confused, and wonder why everyone around us gets those visits and calls and gifts while we get only silence and dark misunderstanding.

I fear nothing can be done about this. It's a matter of hard wiring. Certain areas of our brains simply don't connect properly. We contain vestiges of wild animal behavior. Terrors and solitarinesses. I don't want to be tranquilized into a false sociability. So perhaps I will fade away.

And now it's time for my own old age to kick in. I feeled somewhat healed and certainly more mature than I was for most of my life. Wait, though ... No I don't. I feel exactly as I felt at 6 and 10 and 14 - those childhood years when I was regarded as a litte adult with wisdom beyond her years - and I stuck there into adulthood - when I was regarded as an incompetent infant.

I think you have to be here to get it.

Anyway, back to work.

Skipped study for a couple of days: I had gotten a response on Facebook from an old high school classmate - the only classmate I'd been able to find - and it turned out to be my old nemesis. The rich kid, the smart kid - the two-points-more-in-IQ guy who used to ridicule me mercilessly whenever I mispronounced (or he thought I mispronounced) a word, etc. He went on to become a doctor, a renowned blood expert, a professor at a decent university. I found the 60-year-old version to be kind and open, and we had such a flood of correspondence over the course of three days, the relief of it overwhelmed me, and not much beyond the wrapping and mailing away of my precious library, bit by bit, has happened.

But now, after the sharing and the healing, the inevitable silence resumes. Bye-bye now. His three grown children are off at good universities, his 26-year marriage is solid as a rock, and I am left to contemplate the difference financial security and parental support and guidance can make in the life of even someone from the same tiny farm village I went to school in.

I found myself weeping in gratitude that he was able to accomplish so much, and yet I did not envy him. My lessons too benefit the collective, at least in my soft conception of things. And I still have a little bit of time ... and even if I don't, maybe something will last, or that wild gene I carry will blossom elsewhere down the line.

Still much study, very little writing going on here at the Old Same Place. Actually, for the past ten days I have been preoccupied digging up and posting for sale any valuable books and DVDs from my little collections. I have nearly 200 listed now, and not too surprisingly they have been selling briskly, one, two, and three per day. I say not surprisingly because that's as it always happens with fresh-posted books: the as-new and sought-after titles will fly out immediately. Eventually the dregs will settle and the sales doldrums set in. But we will not dwell on this. I am very grateful for the little injection of extra income that will keep the fridge filled while I pay people to paint and repair the house. The trim has been rescued, although not well. (Husband overheard one painter say to the other, "There's good enough and then there's perfect. Around here no one will pay for perfect." I was expecting Best Work. Sadly, once again I got Good Enough. If I'd known there was a choice I surely would have paid for it.) Next, I get the roof repaired. Plywood is showing through where shingles have blown away. I wanted to replace the whole shebang, just like I wanted to paint the whole house, but only piecework is affordable.

Still pushing through the Tom Clark bio of Charles Olson, and the reading peripheral to it (Yeats, Pound, and next up, Melville - repeats for all; refreshers, I guess I could call them). I have to return to my own work soon. When I get thrown off course/schedule I have to wait for my frustration and irritation to evaporate before sitting down to it again, lest I forget the wordrhythms (sensitive, elusive critters). This is I suppose another Aspergers/ADD deal. Lovely finally to have these pegs to hang excuses from.

Days continue witheringhot, near 100F, and fires all around make for constant twilight. Big meteor showers tonight and tomorrow night surely will be obscured.

Not yet two hundred titles listed in my seller account
yet the books are selling swiftly, one or two per day
at good prices this time, not like
when I had 7000 and most were worthless.
That's because these are not some vestigial inventory
but because these volumes belonged to me, were cherished by me,
were sought and bought at some expense
of time and money, one by one. I loved them. Love them.
Now must shed them because we're sinking fast
again. My books like bobbing little life preservers. Still
the ones that have no moneyworth--the titles of no interest
to online buyers--the titles I get to keep, hurrah!--I smile
with downturned mouthcorners, happy to have them,
my jewels no one understands the value of, my various hard editions
Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, John Milton
amd Zbigniew Herbert--my Dickensons Audens and Carruths
and their cohort--you can't give these away.
Thank the heavens.
The rest will feed us through the summer
and our future moves will be lightened
by a box or two. Full bellies for now and no harm done.
All the same, each little package I mail away
bears the invisible print of my
sometimes bitter kiss good-bye.

Best get out and mow the back 40 before it gets any warmer. Baling might be the answer there. Not only has feral alfalfa taken over the yard, but it has been allowed to run riot and even go to seed and is so tall I will have to elevate the mower (poor thing!) several inches just to get through. The weather was so hot, I will say in excuse; I couldn't face the toil. But now of course the weather is just as hot and the toil is many times amplified. Familiar story.

I bit the bullet and posted many books for sale online yesterday, using the non-pro-bookseller rate. Less will be removed from my account there every month but my priveleges are fewer and a chunk of money is taken out of each individual sale. This means I will post only fairly valuable books, which I had planned to do anyway. I have about 50 titles up.

I didn't want to go there again - bookselling - but we pretty desperately need cash. The house trim is peeled and exposed and cracked, and if something isn't done to rescue it soon it will be permanently damaged. So a housepainter is coming here today with a variety of grays for me to choose from, and is letting me pay in installments, and over the weekend he will prep and fill and paint the trim. Only. The house itself is in good shape, still. But even this expense is fairly devastating, and so - back to bookselling. Not that it will bring much at this point. Even back when I had 7000 titles listed I only netted $500 a month. I can't see how my 50 little books (so far) will do much more than inconvenience me. I just have to keep culling my own collections and posting titles every day, I suppose.

Walked with husband yesterday evening as the moon rose. Used phonecamera close-up to photograph the scene, and this made for a nicely fuzzy, sort of impressionistic snapshot of moonrise. I was surprised not to remember my dreams this morning: it must be the first times ever that the full moon hasn't delivered me a stunner.

These places & persons as things & spots are all inside any one of us. ... the whole world & all experience is, no matter how real, only a system of metaphor for the allegory (Keats called it) a man's life is.
- Charles Olson

Some chemical smell, oldfashioned shoe-polish or melting electrical, overpowering here but not a stroke (yes!) because I lose the scent when I walk through other rooms. I've checked the outlets and the cords, put the computer to sleep ... is it coming through this window? Someone burning plastic? Ech, nauseating.

I'd wanted to have the Thing finished, what I'm writing. I finished final edits on paper yesterday late morning, meant to keyboard them early afternoon, but as I was winding toward the work (lightening anxiety by organizing rooms, thereby organizing mental energy, as I do) Husband descended to start his own day. I told him what I was doing and that I had a deadline. He congratulated me and proceeded to talk virtually without stopping for breath until nearly suppertime, and me practically in tears. I still do not know how to express needs firmly. I had expected him to coffee and withdraw, which he does every day without fail. But not yesterday. And oddly enough not back on the day when this material all came to me in a rush I had to get down or lose it, and so I lost much of it, back in December.

Anyway I blurted finally that I had to get going, and he asked to remain in the room then reading quietly, and so I went outside to water plants and unconfuse myself. When I returned he had gone upstairs. I sat down then before the text column on the screen and soon realized I was so weary and overheated I would lose the music that sang to me so clearly just that morning. So I closed the file, showered, curled up for sad nap.

No one's fault, I decided. Something wants me to slow down. And it was true, after the morning's edit I was burned out. So why can't I begin work today? Husband has promised not to talk to me until evening. But I am groggy today - where's the jar of guarana? - and having doubts again, and since the deadline for online submissions where I wanted it to go is midnight tonight, I'm afraid I will rush now and damage it.

I'll get to it, in a bit. I'll take it easy. Other, later deadlines are out there.

Anyway, eventually I'll have a MacBook and can do computer work in trailerSylvia.

I received a bushel of cheap used books in yesterday's mail. Husband accepted the packages at the door, to my embarrassment. Why books ordered on this day and that over the course of a month must always arrive at once on a Monday I will never understand.

I finished reading Brother Souls all teary-eyed on Sunday afternoon, and so today I've started several other books hoping one or two will grab hold of me. Tom Clark's biography of Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg's Composed On the Tongue account of his acquaintance with Ezra Pound at Rapallo. Poor EP! All Ginsberg seems to do is sing him Hare Krishna. But I love the words he finally squeezes from the otherwise stubbornly silent 82-year-old Pound:

[Ginsberg]"Ah well, what I'm trying to tell you - what I came for all this time - was to give you my blessing then, because despite your disillusion - unless you want to be a messiah ... anyway, now, do you accept my blessing?"

He hesitated, opening his mouth, like an old turtle.

"I do," he said " - but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything - " This is almost exact.

... and I responded, "Ah, that's lovely to hear you say that ... " and later "as it says in I Ching, 'No harm.'" (pp.8-9)

Olson will be more difficult to crack. He seems so lacking humor or joy. But he shares my birth date of December 27 (though his is 1910), so I am curious.

Those are the two volumes near to hand as I type. There are others.

I was thinking yesterday how adult life is like a kind of exile in a foreign land and when you approach old age you want to go home again, live as you did as a child, where things are familiar. And so people who grow up in the countryside go off to cities and then return to the country late in life, and I, who formed my Self in central Los Angeles and have sought remoteness most of my adult years since then, now long to immerse myself again in urban energies.

I think maybe it's immoral, environmentally, for humans not to live in cities. Perhaps the only ones who should be allowed to live in the wilderness are holy persons - farmers, monks, and such. Then we would have to learn how to make cities healthy and livable because we could not flee them.

But who would want to live in such a restricted world?

[Midafternoon addendum: I sought Husband's brief company for coffee at lunchtime. When it seemed clear his (otherwise welcome) stories would continue again for a while I stood abruptly in his midsentence and said "I've got to go." And he said, laughing, "I'm so proud of you," and stood himself and kissed me. God sent him to me for many reasons, but surely one of them was this lesson.]

Image of Charles Olson from pavellasmusic.wordpress.com via Google

As you get older, you husband your attentions, they seem to concentrate themselves more, you are more fluent about less. You use your energies and, with any luck, they burn with an intenser light. ... One can't get on if paralyzed by the grinding knowledge of the brevity of life, and the ephemerality of works. And getting on is our most important duty, a vow we make in the worthiness of the baffling endeavor of remaining human. One part of being human is sometimes failing to keep the faith. For a writer, who spends his time so many fathoms down in the murk and complexity of the human personality, periods of "savourlessness" are inevitable. As I say, they usually presage an on-coming change, and the only way to initiate that change is to pass through (not around) the temporary melancholia. You can't reach dawn without enduring the night. Wishing won't make it so.

            --John Clellon Holmes

Mild summer. Dry, because this is desert after all, but, once you've acclimated, the 90-degree days are kind of pleasant. It takes most of the day to reach that temperature, after all. And nights are cold, so we're lucky there. It's the searing light that gets to the plants, but they seem to be getting used to it.

Coming off my third monthly three-day greenapplepurge. I didn't do so well fasting this time, and so yesterday was very difficult. But I was well by day's end and it's another month before I do that again. Meantime, discomfort is gone, again, and I continue to dodge the surgery bullet.

Oh but I was so hungry I stuffed myself with bowls of stew last night, frenzied almost. And was finally calmed.

Husband continues to instruct me in astrology. Finally I understand progressions, and that adds a new dimension to self-understanding - and other-understanding. How the natal sun advances around the chart at a degree per year (and other planets by something likewise) so you can see how you have changed and grown over time, encountered and overcome challenges (or not), and so on. My own sun has moved from the thudding Capricorn of my birth, through the disconnected Aquarius of my middle age, and now shines in Pisces, of all places! Which makes such sense, as I have remarked often on my sensations of feelings thawing and love understood.

I was ill three days with my chronic mono after doing all that heavy lifting last weekend (damn! I didn't take my tinctures to prevent that, it was so long since I'd been sick), and then with the fasting thing I was out of commission all week. I worried yesterday that it might be that I've forgotten how to be well. I am so accustomed to my bed and pillows.

So I must remember my tinctures and vitamins and brotherB's, too, and to drag us outdoors for walks every day in the sun. B's becoming sturdy again, too. Almost a full head of hair now.

Have I anything of interest to say? Evidently not. I hear husband running water in his bedroom sink for brushing teeth, and now his TV goes on and the urgent sounds of a broadcast horse race trickle down the stairs. From brother's room the clunks and thuds of dresser drawers opening and closing as he put his clean laundry away. Lovebirds screech from the kitchen. Doves coo from the powerlines out the window. dogApple sighs in sleep at my feet.

We had chosen CarmelValleyVillage as destination of our planned Great Escape from the ModocPlateau, a concrete location to visualize living in and so create an energy to follow out. Lightning can't strike unless the stricken object first sends up a little tendril of request, and we imagined that's what our picturings were, in the energetic scheme of things.

It made sense, because Husband's siblings and mother all live in nearby Monterey, and his children from former marriage live or visit nearby. It would make it easier to keep in contact. And I had grown up in Southern California (when I wasn't exiled to the Iowa farm of my grandparents) and could easily imagine the environment there, familiar enough.

But the picture wouldn't hold, much as I loved the hot smell of baked earth and manzanita I conjured, and the sensation of dappled shade.

Next we chose Chicago, where Husband grew up and lived and worked for many years. He misses it often, I think, and still has friends there. I had no sense imagery to put with it - my only contact with Chicago was a 30-minute airport layover en route to New York in 1982 - but we collected photographs and websites and I was getting to know its layout pretty well.

Although it never felt quite right.

New York might never have occurred to us if we hadn't played around one day with location astrology to see where our planets and asteroids were best aspected. And there it was, New York City, shining like a great beacon across the basins and ranges and plains between here and there. As though made for us.

So here's a street map of Manhattan on the corkboard at the foot of my bed, and this week a promising series of dreams located there, in which I always get an apartment easily and easily afford it.

I think it could be the place for us to stay, for a while. That's what the stars say, anyway. Now to do something to make that lightning strike ...

"Knowledgeable." That's the key. It was only after beginning the input of new book inventory into the old online bookseller account that I remembered. It came up fuzzily, with a fringe of little question marks, but soon enough I had full recall of the fact that no money can be made whatever UNLESS you have listed at least several thousand titles. For one thing, there's the monthly fee for using the web site. For another, all that competition means that even a five-star rating can't help you much.

Sobering. What am I doing??? I thought. Do I REALLY want to get into all this again? If it isn't a full-time activity then it's just a giant energetic drain with no hope of profit. You're either in with both feet or not.

So ... not.

Whew. That was close.

***

Labored a third afternoon yesterday in the heat and dust with friendKathleen emptying the Bookworm shelves and making a space in my storage unit for the boxes therefrom. Today I lounge and study and recover, grateful for the unexpected gift of cool gray the morning brought.

I just read a study that says persons, like my brother, who have celiac disease, more often than not react to corn gluten, too. This explains why he hasn't bounded back as strongly as I'd hoped when I changed his diet two years ago. He has regrown about 60 percent of his hair, and I noticed yesterday a bunch of pale whiskers just visible on his pale cheeks. So we have made some progress. My main concern is bone loss, though. He gets smaller by the day and has developed scoliosis. I trot him 'round in the sun every day and give him supplements, but corn has been a big part of our diet.

Out with it, too, then. Damn.

Spent yesterday afternoon in bowels of local Friends of Library "Bookworm" used book trailer clearing shelves of decades-old compost to make way for (finally, at long last) fresh stock. Much of what we removed will be "recycled" at local junk store or landfill, but I was privileged as volunteer to skim the cream, though not as completely as I would have liked. Found a couple of volumes that will go for 50 or 100 dollars, but I may spend tomorrow rooting around in the stacked garbage-book boxes (awaiting Monday pickup) for more.

Today we continue - I have offered a free corner of my storage unit for the group to store the boxes of high-graded material soon to be donated to another FOL group 50 miles to the north, which is starting its own shop and needs good stuff to get off the ground.

I am so incurably mercenary I can't stand the thought of any possibly valuable volumes being lost, even though the idea of returning to my old bookseller daze makes me queasy. It was something I did while my mind recovered from emotional breakdown mid-2000s, when I couldn't think well enough to do anything else. I enjoyed it. Eventually though my physical health broke down, too, and in 2010 I got rid of my entire 20,000-volume stock to make space in my hovel and to rest for a few years. I can't believe I'm into it again, but the profit potential when one is knowledgeable is seductive - especially if, like me, one is barely surviving on minimum-wage dole while attempting to create "art."

Flat dry heat and relentless hammer of UVs returns. The plants burn and curl no matter how moist the soil.

I dreamed last night of an old African woman who fed the famished inhabitants of the drought-stricken interior from the gardens around her hut beyond the mountains, in a green moist crescent up against the sea and sand.

Nights chock full o' dreams lately - New Moon.

Yesterday was midsummer gift of overcast and cool breezes. Soft and almost unreal. Gratitude was boundless. I had been reduced to sobs last week to see my outdoor canopy and umbrella thrashed and smashed by wind and my plants deer-nibbled. The oppressive heat and sere desiccating everything, my brain, my skin. I couldn't water hard enough to make it up.

I feel better now, indoors working and determined to keep detached from results of yard work. I water, I cultivate, but I no longer invest hope. We redouble our efforts to escape the grim desert plateau we've been confined to for far too long.

Set back to work on opus part 3, which will be done now in a minute and lobbed into those offices all unprepared to receive it. Resume was updated and cleaned up, but I find I can recall no reference names from back in the day, and the venerable Rolodex has gone missing. So - stalled. Again.

When you give birth there is a stage just before crowning called "transition" where many mothers weaken and give up, ask for drugs, anthing, in their fear. They are told, always, "Too late. It's almost over." And so it is, in a joyful rush.

And that seems an apt metaphor for this work: I grow discouraged, convinced of my words' unworthiness, and certain I labor under delusion. Then I pick up one of these biographies and learn that every hopeful artist gets to that point - repeatedly, with some - and gives up, goes underground, hits the rails, whatever, to escape his or her failure. That's when, inevitably, everything comes clear, and the work gels.

I must remember that.

Rare high desert midsummer gray, cool soft skies wrapping us in kindness.

I have deserted Sylvia after several months of trailer life. Made my bed in the Little-Big-House livingroom instead, and the past two nights I have slept (sort of) back in my creatures' midst. Awoke today with all five cats and one dog pressed against me, very welcoming.

I have taken this room over now during the day. If I need complete isolation for some work that actually begins to flow, Sylvia is available, but such a creative breakthrough seems unlikely. I polish old work here, and, yes, polish my resume as well. It's time to get real. The thyroid supplements have taken hold at last and it's time to earn money again somehow now that I have clarity of thought and vigor of body.

My tower computer died briefly last week, refusing to power up. I had written it off and resigned myself to iPhone computing until a laptop could be acquired - how, I couldn't imagine - but then a brainstorm sent me cracking open the computer case and hunting around for a tiny gray button somewhere in the innards. Sure enough, a quick press of the PRAM reset got the beast back to its feet, and it looks as though we're good to go for a while longer. I haven't had to reset a PRAM for 15 years ... I'd all but forgotten about it.

I have still a few minutes before I head in to the Big House. Heat finally hit. High 90s F and dry wind. I give thanks for flat-rate water, although the succulants wither and brown, sunblasted, despite wet roots.

I typed up a yellowing sheaf of old scrawled poems on my Skyriter manual, and then reworked them in ink, as of olde. It's satisfying. My only computer burned up somehow over the weekend so I can't do fancy Office editing. I like seeing the sheets pile up on the desk and the close lines of fuzzy black Courier type all scratched and scribbled on.

The afternoon's wind pounds and rocks poor Sylvia. The little AC hums along coolly. DogApple and catGreta are happy to nap here.

And just like that the cloud lifts.

I wake as usual in a bitter lonely funk and go through the morning motions as always, half-there, ruminating on the death of a notion of family that exists nowhere anymore, so why mourn?

And having portioned out the kibble and seed and porridge among the House creatures that pass for my family now, poor things, I retire to trailer with my bowl and my mug to break my own fast while scrolling through my iPhone apps for news of the day, then take up my pen and my book.

In my little SylviaSanctuary, redone now and so sweetly blue.

I glance up from the text beyond my reading glasses to notice the peace of the scene, the rumpled comfort of it, and the breathing animals. And from outside declared and redeclared the innocence of sparrows and the dreamlike everpresent approach and retreat like oceanwaves of big rigs on the highway.

And I remember again, as I did when I was 40 and 20 and 12 and 4 and anguished from isolation, how beautiful and perfect things can be in the instant, the pedestrian Now, and all misery and loss and abandonment - that's what actually constitutes illusion.

Outage. Bodyhealth stuff. And then wholebody edema that brought my mood low with the pointlessness of everything. Odd attitude for a former Pollyanna. But I recognized it as soggy brain syndrome and knew the bad attitude would pass as the water did.

I worked too hard in the yard for too many days in a row under the fierce light and a summer heat that was not fierce yet, particularly, and yet it knocked me out. Ah well. Here we are now.

We have acquired a 10-by-10 four-footed gazebo sunshade and erected it over the top of the wobbly umbrella for double protection, enjoyed sitting outdoors scribbling and bibbling. But although every day starts calm and cool with birdsong and sweet air, each day ends with a vicious wind, one day from the north, the next from the south, and before I knew it my staked-down gazebo had tipped up and over. BrotherB will help me carry it back and set it up again. Stakes don't count for much in this stony soil, I guess, so I'll bind each of the four legs to a strawberry planter pot and hope for the best.

I have tomatoes planted finally - mature plants left over at the nursery - along with their unbought squashes and sweet potatoes, with some parsleys and cilantros and nasturtiums for the planters. Leggy remnants of their spring garden stock.

Reading, taking notes, Olson's "Projective Verse" essay. Pausing to write little notes to loved ones who respond only to the nonpersonal matters, as though for an older person to confide in a relative were an embarrassment best left unaddressed. Young people have become so strange and mean. So good-bye to them, I suppose.

Yes, depressed. It will come back, the lifespirit, I'm pretty sure.