Memorial Day and into the summertime summertime sum sum…wherein temperatures rose. When I was a kid and going up the desert with George and Bruce – Owens Valley, Funeral Range, Death Valley – we’d pass through old mining towns and I’d dream of what it would be like to dream away time on one of those wooden porches looking out over some desert valley.*

More than sixty years later it seems I’m finding out, remembering, although in fact the original version was definitely higher up the alluvium in drier hills.  But this will do…

Meanwhile it warmed; in the park muddy dogs precluded contemplation and brought quite a

lot of the outside in to an increasingly filthy house, all the more conspicuous come Wednesday’s

raking light when by 7:37 they were abandoned, confined and howling, and I was gone

down empty roads up to Eagleville, Cedarville [not shown]

and Alturas where

Four Seasons Hardware was maskless as it ever was, the Holiday more cautious than last year

and at ten, passing the last door Lefty went through alive on the way out of town, over Cedar Pass to Rabbit Traxx’ considerably cheaper gas and down the Valley, despairing as ever over

the way our Trumplican Party continues to accelerate their overthrow of America-as-we-knew-it at home while simultaneously sending figurehead fuckheads to Israel in support of dear Benny because if it’s the “only democracy in the Middle East” what good is it to them if the supreme[ly corrupt] leader can be voted out of office**?  Sets a dangerous precedent for any aspiring Trumplican DINO***.   South of Eagleville thoughts turned to fires as one last year had kissed

the road for four miles above the Bare Ranch, receded west for a little but then returned to 447 a few miles into Nevada. Further down the highway evidence of the Poodle Fire, which we’d watched in horror last summer on interactive internet maps from distant Colorado,

had jumped the road down much of the canyon. Then it was home to dirty dogs

and over a hundred that afternoon.

Next day more of the same…after lunch while one of Willey’s guys

was out attempting to resuscitate the Chev four friends and a dog came by to visit.  They eventually returned to Reno, the truck fired up but wouldn’t run – “bad gas” the diagnosis – still.

After all those people Thursday the dogs were too many people too…dogs are, after all, people

too. But there we were.  I eventually extricated the inverter, got it onto a dolly and into the

repo on a day cool enough [95] for lunch on porch but in ‘n’ out of unease walked only to Wall Spring where huge dead limbs covered our seldom used platform and the Inkies flushed a deer.

So into another weekend, warm,

as overheated skies sketched feminine profiles

or clutching fingers…

Monday preparation in anticipation of Bill Fox’s arrival to choose/approve

the paintings I’ll loan to NMA in November took the morning before a leisurely lunch catching

up. What with the conversation and taking the inventory he was here until L. pulled in at three

following two exhausting weeks of California [including but not limited to installations in Woodside, overseeing H Street’s east wall stucco, the Mare Island Brewing Company’s Benicia outpost’s opening, packing for five months away and other worries]. Bill went back to his Reno dinner guests and we dined on the porch on corn but not oysters as the Holiday had had none

…would have been too long to have kept them anyway.

Speaking of too long, too long away; that Monday dinner was over a week ago, and the subsequent week left little opportunity for ketchup, er, catching up.

More [but not much] on that anon.

 

*Interesting how Linda’s “Gramma Seed” could easily be taken for some sort of mining equipment.

**He DID get voted out but whether he and his DINO***enablers will allow that to stand remains ever uncertain.

***Democracy in Name Only, duh…