after Alturas were all pretty major; for one there was Planet X’s fiftieth birthday celebration

with pigmeat, music and lots of people I failed to meet, spending most of the small fraction

of the time we were there talking with ranchers Susie and Grover Jackson from Gerlach or immensely enjoying the very live music of the Smoke Creek Irregulars’ reunion performance…

all in all a great and historic event, after which Linda departed for Hawaii to oversee

the installation of her sculpture “Wayfinding”, a year in the making, on the very day that Jeanne Rose [Jeanne Alice Colón, January 9, 1937 – June 15, 2024] passed away in San Francisco…

This I learned the next day, Father’s Day, from our son Bryan, who was present but not in her presence [she wished to be alone and somehow pulled it off despite being in the chaos of SF General following a fall].  Another one gone, oh, and much to reflect upon, oh*.

Meanwhile here the weather cooled off,

brightening the atmosphere but bringing

huge winds overnight, leaving trees down across the path by morning.

One tree, anyway. The airs became temporarily Octoberish, felt like that, too…

I tried my backup camera, a new-to-me Lumix, as the zoom on the one I’d used for years was becoming a little idiosyncratic.  So far so goodly…

Monday UPS, who unlike FedEx does deliver to the house, brought a massively gorgeous  Maynard Dixon catalog which though surprisingly shoddily made [Really, Rizzoli?] definitely gave me some things to think about** in my spare time along with pulling foxtails

from dogs’ feet. Dinners in L’s absence looked way better than they tasted, the moon grew daily

and the Inkies and I walked, some days feeling more mobile than others while somewhere

in there, apropos of a friend’s misplaced enthusiasm for DeLorme Atlases, I decided to compare them to a Benchmark I had just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken about their dangerous lameness and, no, I wasn’t.  Check out how much pavement the big D thinks is around here

as opposed to the Benchmark’s more detailed [if still inadequate, given how various our

unpaved roads can be]. Friends shouldn’t let friends use DeLorme’s…they can prove

[and have been proven] fatal. Better to follow one’s nose out towards the desert,

around the ponds [not ponds of despond]

and enjoy cool[er] days while they last, even if under

inexplicable surveillance.

Meanwhile far away in Hawaii

Linda watched as her grandest project to date was flawlessly installed even if here we aren’t

able to get a crane [or even four guys] out to set up the Remnants of Omaha.  The contrast between working with Howard as opposed to being a lone artist competing with the Burnocracy

for scant local resources…is stark.

They can’t stop the moon, though.

*Back on St. Patrick’s Day a lifelong friend, the antiquarian bookseller who’d provided Terence McKenna [and me] with his first DMT, left us.  Not unexpectedly, but many were left bereft nonetheless. Machinist elves, indeed.

**

There’s also this Eric Dolphy album, with Ron Carter on cello. Out. There.