Letters From the Desert

We’re not back in the house yet. All our belongings are in some warehouse, somewhere, each item in some undetermined state of clean or written off, and we await the next stages of smoke remediation. But I’m here most days anyway. My office/recording studio, a 10 by 20 annex on the back of our garage, was unaffected by the fire, and it’s a comfort to be there with the dogs during the day. It’s gotten warm in the last few days: too warm for sustained exertion in the yard.

I’m gonna be honest with you all: I don’t know how I’ll be after Heart is gone. We had a vet appointment this morning. There was no real news. She has a new five-centimeter mass on her left shoulder, firmly attached and growing quickly. It wasn’t there three weeks ago. Her soft tissue sarcoma on her right front leg has grown, but not much. Her lungs sound clear, her pulse is strong, and her lymph nodes are not inflamed.

Reminder: the Desert Advocacy Media Network is raising funds to hire emerging desert journalists to expand and improve the 90 Miles from Needles podcast’s range of voices and issues. You can help us reach our goal of $10K (not counting matching funds!) by clicking the button here: I Roadside globe mallow waves shards of tangerine tissue all the way from Gila Bend. Wet clouds swirl through saguaro fields: the earth opens up.

There are so many things I need to write about. This new needless, murderous, historically ignorant war we seem to be fighting for no good reason against Iran, for instance. Or my increasing conviction that while AI is a deeply problematic technology that recapitulates the entire history of capitalism’s dysfunctional relationship with technology, the social media practice of shaming ordinary people for using AI is less a solution to the problem and more part of the problem.

PSA first: The Desert Advocacy Media Network has been given a significant amount of money to be used as matching funds in a campaign to pay desert journalists to work for us, with an emphasis on supporting new and emerging talent.

After spending time over the last several days string at this empty “new post” form without any words coming forth, I begin to realize that I am tapped out. This is not surprising. On Wednesday last, our veterinarian fine-needle-aspirated a new lump on Heart’s right front leg, almost as an afterthought. I almost wish I hadn’t reminded her. I had in mind making sure we could ignore it as a lipoma or something similar. A soft-tissue sarcoma is not as easy to ignore.

A couple weeks ago I walked into my office — a 200-square-foot alcove in our garage — to find that someone had been in there after I shut it down for the night a few hours previous. My trackball was on the floor beneath my desk, with its one moving part (the ball) gone missing altogether. A trash can that had been full of papers and one empty bag that had held potato chips lay on the floor, contents scattered.

This is a piece I wrote in 2016 for the event Desert Stories, which was an annual reading by desert residents who do not necessarily think of themselves as writers. The reading was spectacular, and the audience one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was a privilege to offer this piece. It also briefly resided on my website, lost after domain squatters seized the address. At 8:15 pm on May 18, 2016, the sky was darkening over Joshua Tree.

I used to have a Volkswagen, an old Transporter pickup, the kind that looked like a van that had been chopped. Mine quite resembled this one: albeit with more rust and less shine, paint UV-weathered over time to a cream of tomato soup color rather than the cherry-red in the photo.

I have a confession to make. Over the last few weeks I’ve sat myself down at the Substack desk to write something for you, and failed to have words come out of my fingers. It’s a weird mix of fatigue and depression and brain fog, along with having enough items on the podcast/nonprofit “Must Do Now Or Sooner” list that they pretty much eat up my available brain space. This hasn’t just affected Letters From the Desert: It’s caused me to have to retrench on other fronts as well.