Adventures on the high seas.

Two winters ago was the wettest winter on record, going back to the Civil War.

Last winter was the driest on record. For months this Spring the news was all about wildfires going out of control in the freshly dried vegetation still standing around from the wettest winter the year before and it seemed the whole state would catch fire.

Now we've got what's shaping up to be the wettest summer monsoon season we have ever seen. The trenches and dykes are kind of sending the water where it needs to go. Kind of. Eventually. After the catastrophic cloudbursts pass over the water does drain off, in time. So I'm still living on a houseboat but the water hasn't more than started seeping in around the baseboards of the north wall in the bedroom.

Bill must think I'm terribly lazy. I keep the gentlemanly hours of a colonial governor, going to work around ten, leaving work around four (for high tea). The truth is that my daily routine these days necessarily involves driving home fast across town to beat the storm I see coming and shoring up the mud around my house. Today it didn't matter -- the water was well over the top of everything I'd built. Regardless: I'd much rather be inside when the storm hits than outside trying to get in. The storms hit at different times but usually from five PM onward. When the rains hit, I *need* to be home to move things off the floor, close windows, and shovel mud when need be.

Today was viscious! The storm hit fast and furious and as is usually the case the water's almost at the doors by the time the National Weather Service interrupts the news I'm listening to with that annoying high-pitched Emergency Broadcast System beep to tell me that fifteen minutes ago a storm was heading this way or that. Thanks loads, National Weather Service -- I'll be sure to stay out of arroyos and ditches just as soon as I can build a skiff out of the piano to get to my car and drive some place worth staying out of. Worthless. Today it was flash flood warnings after the water was already a good four inches deep after a whole half hour of rains.

It's still raining. It's perfectly lovely. The rain is a blessing. It softens the ground and when I come back from El Paso I'm bringing back cactuses and planting them strategically around my modest houseboat home amidst the muddy moats and lagoons of this last unpaved street on this ancient desert seafloor. Lots of pretty green things sprouting. Don't know what any of 'em are but they sure beat the sun-baked mud I usually look at.

The goal is (a) prevent flooding and (b) allow the water to soak in before it sits, becoming pestilential. The rains are cooling us off tremendously right when we need it most desperately. The mud is just an inconvenience I can work with. If it gets *really* bad, I'm wading the guitar out to the car and leaving town. Heh. But it's not that bad yet, and life is good.

Another book report.

Been to the library and reading a couple of interesting books.

Michael Byers' War Law is an excellent introduction to international law and the workings of the United Nations (including the Security Council) which I would strongly recommend to anyone who believes the current US intervention in Iraq is illegal. It is, of course, but this book will tell you how and why; so if you read it, you'll know the difference between Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter's Article 51, which helps out quite a lot when listening to the news.

David Romo's Ringside Seat to a Revolution is easily the most important book that's ever been written about El Paso. A lot of us have sort of kind of known, in how it's trickled down through generations, that El Paso was an important part of the Mexican Revolution, but it's taken nearly a century for its history to get written. Every word makes sense. Things that I "sensed" walking through this or that abandoned building or run down neighbourhood comes back to me when reading it. Shrub's closing comments in both his inaugural addresses referencing Tom Lea makes a lot more sense in light of the kind of racist Tom Lea Sr. was. I grew up with stories of underground tunnels and such -- anyone in El Paso does -- but Mr. Romo goes into it all in rich, well-documented detail. I picked it up initially for the pictures, and for the author's name, because we used to drum together in the streets downtown. Winds up he's not just one of the best musicians in the bunch; he's easily the best historian my hometown ever has produced. I started reading it in bits and pieces; now I'm going through it from cover to cover. El Paso, it winds up, was quite the anarchists' hotbed of activity for a while. And then there's the story of Zyklon B, a substance the Germans learned to use from the US Border Patrol, which used it on Mexican immigrants -- but that's further along in the book, and I haven't worked my way down there just yet.

It's compelling. I've waited all my life for this book. I've tried in my faltering way to write parts of it, but always either fell short or just hit a brick wall. David Romo has *done* it, from cover to cover. I don't know how, but I salute him for it. It's long overdue.

An amazing thing happens.

When you don't have cigarettes around the house, there is no point in stopping playing. Even if you have the little craving you know it's gonna go away in one or two more iterations of whatever you're practicing. So instead of playing for ten minutes, then stopping for twenty, you play for half an hour or an hour, then stop for twenty. Because your attention is on forgetting nicotene you're *that* much more intensely focused on the strings. And the amazing thing that happens is you actually improve. There's one transition to an F-major I've been struggling with and it's just getting closer to "right" every time I play it. I'm still messed up with it 'cause the little classical music teacher in my head is saying "don't you *dare* move the palm of your hand, just the tips of your fingers". And sit up straight, look straight ahead, don't watch the strings, blah blah blah blah. You're free to play when you want for as long as you want without being tied down to cigarettes or any other stupid thing.

Getting the most amazing range of growls and carillon rings and downright lutey sounds out of the Gretsch today. There's a sound I'm *starting* to get which developed out of the lute sound I "discovered" (I'm sure I'm not the first) which sounds just like a grade crossing. I know that must seem pretty awful but it's an evocative, hypnotic sound. Makes me want to write a song. Don't know about what, yet, though I have got ideas.

Love experimenting with different picks, each one plays differently. When I got picks the first time the guy said get a couple of mediums, he should have said get one thin and one thick that you like the feel of and see what the difference is. It's something I can obsess over and even spend money on without spending a lot. And they definitely wear out.

The rising waters.

Or, true confessions of a turnip-bleeder.

I've spent the last two days after work constructing an ingenious little system of dykes and levees and trenches, a few inches high and deep to get the water that collects here to go someplace useful. Driving home last night into the storm, I stopped to get guitar picks, so I missed the storm, but when I got home all the ground around my apartment was flooded. Waded out to the amusement of my neighbours and started cutting trenches with my Japanese handtool basically to make the water go uphill. Edison came out from next door and brought a bucket and a shovel and we took the water to the edge where we threw it out. (Native guy solution: move the water. White guy solution: dig up the earth to make it flow uphill. Between the two of us the water did recede.) Meanwhile, since the ground was wet, I built up the dam around my apartment and gave Helen, my neighbour to the north, one of her own since her apartment floods the same way mine does, too. It's fun for me, out playing in the mud. Better use of it, too, than cutting trenches out in the yard -- though they do serve to discourage the bicycle riding and running around by the kids. Run around in front of your own damn apartment. Heh. I may have to fill some of 'em in since that one lady two doors down uses a walker.

Today, even though it rained pretty seriously, it was all working well enough that I decided to breach the dam around my apartment to let the water flow in to the space in front of the living room window. I've got tons of seeds and things I've thrown out there and who knows what will grow. We'll find out in good time.

In other news my Alltel is now *so* slow that I can't even check email at home on a night I can't devote a solid hour or more to letting the gmail page load. Hence the bad link in the previous post -- I'm not an idiot, I just haven't been able to get anything to load for three days now and haven't seen it. I wasn't able to make that post the normal way, you see, I had to do it through email, and didn't know it didn't work the same until I saw it all screwed up just now. I'm starting to think it's not worth paying for their internet "service".

Speaking of lousy service, if you ever work with medical billing, watch out for NDC, which makes Lytec, which is (sorry to say) industry standard software. (If you want to know why medical care in this country's fucked up, well sir, Lytec's a big part of it.) NDC is an extortion racket masquerading as a software company.

Here's how they work: you buy their product, Lytec, which is highly specialized medical billing software. A year or two passes and you purchase an upgrade. Among the "features" of this upgrade for which you've paid thousands of dollars is the *removal* of key basic features, such as the ability to import and export databases -- diagnosis codes, transaction codes, patient and provider files, fee schedules -- all the stuff that you just absolutely need to work correctly all the time -- from one practice to another. If you ever have to set up a new practice, you'll either have to code in all that information by hand, or pay for their exorbitantly priced service contract. Ridiculous, considering all the data itself is nothing but raw text.

I've spent much of the last two or three days doing just exactly that -- keying in diagnosis codes, one at a time, copying and pasting patient records, provider records, reference codes, transaction codes, you name it. All by hand. Bill finally broke down and paid for their lousy service contract, 'cause even though it might be justifiable in a business-type way to pay someone to do what I was doing *once*, doing the same thing *twice* is madness, and we've got more than one thing going on right now that would require me to do just that if we do not pay for it.

So basically, you pay for the software to begin with -- fair enough, I suppose. But then you pay for an upgrade and get handed an empty shell of a program which is in itself *useless*. There's no information in it -- universal standard stuff, just gone, 'cause they want you to pay for it *again*. No one will help you 'til you've shelled out hundreds more for a service contract. (Nothing for a big hospital, maybe, but for a small clinic? Terrible.) Having paid for the service contract, you're then allowed to get transferred back and forth between departments and get put on hold for 20 minutes at a time. (It should go without saying, in this business, if you've ever got a hankerin' to get put on hold, you're better off callin' an insurance company, which might just bring some money *in*!) And all the time that you're on hold, you get to listen, not to music, but to sales pitches. Not even the insurance companies are *that* brazenly scummy. NDC is. If and when you finally get through to the "support" person in the call center, they basically sit there dumbly and tell you what they're told to tell you -- you guessed it: that you need to buy a whole different ancillary program, because the current version of it (which you have) does not interface with the current version of Lytec, only the older version does. In other words: the program is *designed* to fail, *and* you have to pay for *downgrades*, *and* you have to pay to be told that you have to pay for downgrades.

The "support" division at NDC, which you have to *pay* to access, over and above what you pay for the software license, is *not* even really support -- it's just another way to get you transferred back into the sales department's queue (and make you pay on the way there). You buy a service contract and the service person's answer always boils down to this: you need to talk to sales about buying some more software. The software you'll be paying for will translate Lytec's underlying databases into -- you guessed it -- raw text. Yup. ISO 8859-1. But there's no way to just save or export the databases as raw text without buying the software, 'cause they are buried somewhere in the system. Bull-fucking-shit.

With cars, there are "lemon laws". There should be "lemon laws" for software. Lytec is a lemon, though-and-through. Where is the FTC?

If you ever have to set up a new practice -- if, say, the clinic you work for gets sold, or if new clients come on board -- NDC is gonna bleed you dry. That's how NDC does business, in a word: unethically. It's a pathetic little niche monopoly. Medical billing is a very specialized and fairly complicated little world, but a monkey could program software better, and even bad software can be marketed ethically. Too bad there's no open-source medical billing software. If NDC put half as much into developing Lytec as they do into getting you to buy it -- and then "upgrades" that remove features, "service contracts" that transfer you to sales, and ancillary software that is *not* backwards compatible -- they might just have some people who could recommend it eagerly. As it is, I give it a 3 in ten because, after dozens of hours of unnecessary work, it's not impossible to print a claim that may get paid.

You want to know why your 50-minute hour with the doctor cost $145? Well, partly because I had to spend two solid days transferring data manually between two separate practices open in concurrent versions of the same software before my boss paid his own hard-earned money to the software vendor that we all know is defrauding him so we could finally get everything set up so we could spend the necessary minute and a half actually entering the data relevant to your claim for that date of service and submit it to your insurance company which may or may not pay because they're in the business for their shareholders of denying claims on any grounds they can.

Healthcare for profit. Grand idea, isn't it?

Imagine being able to buy software and have 30 or 90 days (or more) of tech support *included* in the contract. Imagine those 30 or 90 days starting, not when you license the software, but when you first need to call them. Imagine service techs that *only* help you through whatever problem you've got without trying to sell you *older* supporting software than what you've already paid for newer versions of. Imagine not having those problems in the first place 'cause they haven't been hard-coded into the program to begin with. Imagine being able to code *out* the problems that inevitably *will* crop up, even in software designed to *work*. Imagine upgrades that *add* useful features instead of *removing* vital ones.

Too bad the medical and mental health fields don't use Macs 'cause it'd save a lot of problems all around. I seriously doubt if there is even software available in that field for the Mac. But it sure would be nice. Sometimes I swear we'd be better off standing at desks with huge leather-bound ledgers and inkwells.

The last month at work has been touch and go businesswise -- suddenly *everything* was in transition. I think the worst is over with. Maybe. I *do* know we submitted 35 grand in claims today, which hasn't happened for a long damn time. Too long. There's a feeling of accomplishment and excitement when we've got the festive pink HCFA-1500s strewn about the room. Maybe it's seasonal, who knows. I guess I will find out. But this last month or so has been insane -- new practices getting set up, barely established practices getting sold, others coming perilously close to going out of business under the weight of their own bloated mismanagement, and people quitting in a huff and sabotaging computers. I don't care what you think, I think it's *fun*.

I don't write much about work. It's pretty interesting, really. Saying it's a data entry job is like saying a mechanic just has to know how to turn a screwdriver. But the confidentiality requirements are such that, well, I'd just plain have to make up half a dozen names or more if I wanted to do it right. But it's OK for me to talk nasty about Lytec, 'cause lots of different companies and clinics use it, and it really plain old sucks. And it's OK for me to say that getting money out of Blue Cross is like getting blood from a turnip, because it is.

You should see what Blue Cross puts us through to get IOPs paid. We can't use the HIPAA mandated H0015 code, because, well, BCBS is "special" enough that nationwide industry standards don't apply to them and they get to declare that they won't pay IOPs billed with the standard code. You can fight it with them to a point, and even call the State Insurance Commissioner, but eventually it comes down to claims just piling up, so you either learn to beat them at their own game and get the claims paid or just go out of business. So you have to use the generic 90899 CPT, and attach an itemized walkout statement with each HCFA-1500 (stapled in the center at the top), and it's not enough to just attach the statements, you have to print "ITEMIZED STATEMENT WITH DESCRIPTION OF CPT CODE ATTACHED" in the upper right hand corner of the HCFA-1500, send it to the local office, from which (if you're lucky) it'll get forwarded to the patient's "homeplan", where if you're lucky, they won't send you a letter demanding a description of the code (that's why you print it on the claim), or tell you the provider isn't contracted (when you know she is), or that the date of service is outside effective dates (which it may be, for all you know), and will sooner or later pay the contracted portion of what you billed them for in the first place.

It is a game. You get to where you're following a hundred different claims and patients and providers in your mind at any given time. Either everything's all caught up for the moment or everyone wants everything right now. Kind of like Foxes but it's a lot more satisfying than knowing "we stayed open" and "no one went to jail".

There's one patient -- one only -- who I actually know in the outside world -- or did, before he dropped off the face of the earth and went into IOP. (I still don't know why he's there; as a claims processor it's none of my damn business.) I haven't seen him in ages and he doesn't know I'm processing his claims. But when I see his name pop up oh once or twice a week I do remember, that's why it matters that I enter everything correctly, follow up with insurers, get claims paid, keep charges and payments moving through the system -- so that on top of whatever hell he has to have been through to land in IOPs in the first place he doesn't get slapped with a "PAST DUE" bill for thousands of dollars he thought that his insurance would pay for. Patients sometimes declare bankruptcy under the weight of these bills. If I do my job right, this guy will never have a clue I'm even there. The nightmare will just end. And when I've gone a month or two without seeing his name, I'll let it go. Now multiply by several hundred for all the patients that our clinics see.

It is still "harm reduction". I don't stop people from doing stupid things. I do not even try. But when they do I deal with it and make it as painless from where I stand as best I can. It's late. I'm going to bed.

Antara news on new Israeli campaign.

It's always nice when you can take a break from the daily stress of
indiscriminately clusterbombing civilians in cities to do a little good old fashioned advertising.

Mmmm. Smells like bacon.

New moon.

I had three messages on my cellphone when I got home today.

One was from Bill asking me to get cheese while I'm at the post office.

One was from Don Schrader.

One was from Congressman Heather Wilson.

It went from weird and incongruous to weirder and incongruouser.

I'm listening to "Happy Feet" and enjoying it but my fingers are played out and my ears are "gone" to the point I can't make out the chords any more. I go great with it until I just "break down" and can't tell sevenths from majors and Vs from IVs. "Sounds like A minor to me" and it's a goddamn C-major and all I was hearing was the C and the E. I'm not really that dumb. Must be the heat. Or maybe it was the rotorooter people who came to deal with the sewer smell emanating from -- gosh, everywhere. Bad for my nerves to have people wandering around between the building with giant machines that make noise.

Hey! Whaddaya know. The "new post" page in blogger just loaded, a mere 26 minutes after my hitting "reload" this last time. Man, the connection is blazing!

Plus I think I played out my strings today. Hard to explain but literally in the middle of practicing this morning, mid-strum, even, they just sounded "dead", out of nowhere. The guys in the store talk like you have to play for forty years for twenty hours a day to hear harmonics but I swear I can just hear 'em -- and their almost total absense. I've been playing a LOT and playing fairly hard. I *finally* learned to strum. With my right hand, even. It's a mind-trick. Half of me wants to restring the lefty guitar righthandedly so I can play it too. Hehe. It's served its purpose! Getting still ever MORE amazing sounds from the guitar I never thought I had any right to. I'm wearing out picks! I changed the washer in the Bibsby *again*, but didn't change the strings thinking they might just be dirty (which they were, so I cleaned 'em, but it didn't help a bit. They're dead, and that is that.). I go through enough guitar strings it might be worth not smoking to be able to afford the strings. I'm lucky if they last a week!

The lesson for today is "don't economize on guitar strings" 'cause when they're dead they're dead. I can't knock any sense back into 'em. Spent the last threee hours trying, it has got me nowhere and now it's too late to restring.

Then there's this amazing but weird folk music version on the radio of "Whoops I did it Again" by the evil airhead who said that very stewpid thing in Mr. Moore's film. I'm trying to find guitar tabs for it now because I do think it's a chord progression worth plagiarising. It's the first one I can't find with a google search, imagine that. Weird obscure Radiohead songs? Sure -- there'll be five or six versions of the way they played it live at this or that gig based on someone's reading from the videocamera he snuck in or the way it came out on the B-side of the 12-inch single from Zimbabwe but guitar chords for a top 40 hit? Nowhere to be found.

Hah! Nevermind. Just made up something better.

If Bach is nothing but harmonics and chord progressions then damn it all music is nothing but harmonics and chord progressions.

My resolution crumbles -- for a day.

It's just a temporary setback, but it can't happen again. One bad day where spending is concerned. Heh. At least I know about it. That is to say, I *will* when I go write down my receipts! And I spent only cash, and only what I'd planned to *save* on top of what I plan to pay back on the credit card this month. Baby steps? I'm still crawling.

Before I go into that I have to admit the google ads have me baffled and a tiny bit amused. Ads for sex crimes laywers and free long-distance calls to China? I guess that's what you get when you talk about acupuncture, someone getting out of jail, and a bigoted deputy director targeting gays on the same page.

So I skipped the farmer's market this morning. Bad decision. I figured I had more than enough food in the house already and went to the flea market instead "because they have farmers there, too". It was shaky logic to begin with -- pure rationalization -- and I should have recognized it. I walk out with a really nice antique 12-sided mirror, an excellent cast iron skillet, and a consciense that's bugging me sick. And that's not all.

I'll be damned if every unwanted guitar in town was not for sale today.

I passed up a bunch. Held a bunch in my hands. A very nicely finished but clumsily built Mexican 12-string held my interest a while, as did a tenor banjo, and a Washburn electric. But truly, most of 'em plain old belong in the flea market. People do freakish things to guitars. Like scalloping the fretboard. Or spraypainting the body with textured beige spraypaint, making me think it's probably stolen. At the end of the day there's a used Korean, Indonesian or whatever imitation of a Stratocaster, which I wouldn't normally have more than taken note of mentally, but this one is left handed. Meaning the cutouts are designed for left-handers like me, as is the bridge and tremolo unit. One of the pickups is loose on its screws and has fallen into the carved-out space in the body, so horror of horrors -- that can't *possibly* be fixed with a screwdriver, can it? -- the person wants sixty bucks for it. I recognize the brand as being moderately reputable if not hotly desired and figure what the hell. I don't see left-handed guitars every day, and certainly not for less than I could buy one new.

So I've got me a left-handed guitar with three pickups now. Why? Because I wanted to buy something. That's the real reason.

But every now and then it does come up: why don't I restring the Gretsch left-handedly? Uhm, because that'd put the Bigsby in the way and just require me to restring again a frustrating few hours later if I ever wanted to play with others again. I've wanted to, but didn't want to just waste strings and time making the guitar "backwards" for a little while, only to do it over again shortly thereafter. Plus I have no idea what the inside bracing (if there is any) looks like, and know that on violins there's a "bass bar" built under the soundboard *for* the lowest string, which is why violinists don't restring and play left-handed, usually. I know Jimi Hendrix just flipped right-handed guitars upside down and used all the right-handed features in left-handed ways, but honey, I am *so* not Jimi Hendrix it's not even *close* to funny. So having one that is already backwards seems marginally justifiable, for when I want to play backwards and upside down.

I should point out that the machine heads aren't left handed. So you're going the same direction when you tune, but on the other side, which is a little bit confusing in an "if you're not listening you'll put an eye out" sort of way. The tuning heads are really nice -- Grovers, self-lubricating -- even if they are sideways for upside-down (backwards). I wonder if anyone even makes left-handed tuning head machines. Let alone left-handed screws for the height and intonation adjusters on the bridge (which are otherwise so nifty it almost hurts).

I fixed the pickup (nice to have one I don't worry about taking apart) and restrung it. It is, if nothing else, a learning experience, as is playing it. Doing the "right hand" stuff with my RIGHT hand (the left one) does make me realize: half the frustration involved in my playing is just using my RIGHT hand (my left hand) for the "idiot work" of holding down chords while trying to make my WRONG hand (my right hand) do something as delicate and intricate as picking strings in a certain order using a certain rhythm. That's why it takes me so long "warming up" just to let my right (WRONG) hand relax. When I start out, I tend to hold the pick with a death grip while my agile left fingers struggle to hold on to the neck.

On a left-handed guitar, the left hand just does what the picking hand should do. I don't have to stare at it. It's totally natural and knows where the strings are and hits them right every time. I don't have to think "this one, now that one, now this one again" very quickly like I naturally do when I play with the WRONG hand. Of course the right hand now has to learn the mirror image of the chords I have already learned with my RIGHT hand, and man, it's kinda tough. But what the hell -- you can never have too many callused fingertips, I suppose. The *point* is to retrain my mind, regarding my WRONG hand, to not panic when I pick up the guitar because I'm asking it to do something more complicated than I've ever asked it to do in my entire life.

It's got a Fender tremolo unit built into the bridge -- or a copy of one, I honestly don't know and don't really care -- and man is it DIFFERENT. The Bigsby is smooth and subtle. This one is sharp on attack -- it's nonresponsive enough to minor pressure that you can hold it in your hand while playing all the strings, then suddenly VZHEUMF and your chord you've got has dropped nearly an octave! I think the Bibsgy loosens you up to about a third below the fretted chord at most, and it starts to respond when you look at it like you're thinking about using it at some point in the near future. They're both quite finely engineered to do essentially the same thing, but in completely different ways. And with the Bigsby, you can *tighten* the strings, too. Not much, of course, but quite enough that you can hear it, and it's very different -- for a different kind of music, I suppose.

The consolation prize for my day of outrageous spending came when I went to get a replacement for the tremolo arm at the place I knew had parts. I found one but it was too small, the clerk then searched through a drawer and found one the right size and flat-out gave it to me, saving me twelve bucks. Nice of him, and I'll buy my picks there (they're the only place in town that has the ones I like) but my main business is still going to Encore and Marc's. Local, baby. Local. Except apparently for guitars which I seem to buy with cash from strangers, and I am NOT in the market for another!

So I've got a use now for the amp that came with the Gretsch. Cheap guitar and cheap amp sound just fine together. Doesn't *need* tubes like the Gretsch does. So I've got both guitars set up, ready to play in both rooms now. Heh. Yeah. Money well spent! I can play guitar in either room without having to lug anything from one to the other. I can play blues and jazz and surfer music in one room and death metal in the other. Hopefully I'll get what I can out of this one and then sell it and the amp on craigslist or something. Not that I can even bear to think of listing the piano that doesn't even play. Not that I probably won't keep one eye open for a left-handed guitar with counter-clockwise turned machine heads and screws, because that final 1% of being "totally left-handed" is soooooo important.

This has to stop. I'm dangerous with money and a checkbook in my pocket. Fine -- I have learned *not* to use the credit card, and pay it off *fast* when I do. That's a step in the right direction but it's only just one tiny little step and doesn't mean a thing if I don't take the next one.

I have *got to* budget out my cash, before I even get it. I'm waiting for a full month's worth of daily spending reports so that I can know, systematically, what to eliminate first and what bills get paid with what paychecks. I have enough data to work with, really, but it's better in the long run if I do that "number crunching" at regular monthly intervals. I think I'm going to do it when the month changes, instead of one month from when I started tracking expenses. I started close enough to the beginning of July that it will balance out and make good sense even if I prorate for those first days when I wasn't writing down anything and extrapolate averages for *needs* into the next few days. I am eager to get it done with, before I buy a car, house, or racetrack, and before we all die in a nuclear blast leaving only a ton of musical instruments in a cheap apartment for survivors' great-great-great-great grandchildren to maybe find and put to use.

I don't *need* anything else. Anything. The washer for the Bigsby I got yesterday was the last non-food item that I sort of genuinely "needed".

Buying things *is* an addiction. If I don't need something, I'll manufacture a "need" for myself without the help of clever advertisers doing it for me. It's culturally engrained in individual consciousness, and for all I can tell it's pretty universal in this country.

Yes, I am spending less than I was last month but I'm still spending money I hardly have on things I absolutely do not need at costs beyond measurement in dollar terms. Is knowing the difference between tremolo units *really* worth paying taxes to provide military support to Israel so it can turn back around and buy aircraft from Lockheed Martin it'll only use to start a war that even hawkish Senator Domenici expresses fears about turning into a third world war? Of course it's not. I really do know better. I let my awareness of the broader consequences lapse for a few hours and found myself buying more useless crap, yet again.

Someday maybe I will get to where I can eliminate the things I absolutely never use. But that's a long way down the line. Right now I've got to *manage* my money. It isn't hard.

I'm learning how to do it at work with what is basically someone else's money. This is how you keep accounts, apply payments received, keep track of everything important, this is what's important, that's what's not. I never thought I'd learn something useful working in a billing office, I just thought that it would get me out of Foxes. Well, it did, but now I'm over Foxes, and I'm learning something absolutely vital (the hard way, as usual). Imagine that. The trick is to apply it in my daily living, too -- and it's a tiny little thing after dealing with tens of thousands of other peoples' dollars to deal with my own mere hundreds. It takes a tiny fraction of the time and there's none of the stress involved with "what if I miss a keystroke and 'lose' a few hundred?"

I'm on the right track. Yeah yeah, new guitar, big deal. It's done, it's over with. Move on. If I can train my mind to understand accounts receivable, and play a nonkeyboard instrument, and do it wrong-handed, I can train my mind to manage my money.

My great accomplishment.

I have eaten half a gallon of ice cream in under two hours.

That's not my great accomplishment.

I said a few weeks back, in the wake of having visited Don, that I was going to keep a record of every penny that I spent. So far, so good, believe it or not. I'm fast coming up on a month of doing that. When I started I said I wouldn't even try to spend less. I'd just keep track and see what happened.

I'll be damned if it's not saving me money. I'm not living like Don Schrader but I *am* getting a handle on what my real spending is. I've even done a couple of impulsive buys of things I absolutely didn't need, just saving the receipts and writing them down at the end of the day. I think it's been what, three weeks now? Almost three, I think. I'm over the halfway point to a month but not quite there yet.

It makes me think about my spending, *before* I spend, just knowing I'm going to have to write it down each evening. Writing down "cigarettes" each day is bloody frustrating, so that when I *don't* write it I feel downright relieved. A five-day week's worth of cigarettes (and mine are the cheapest Indian cigarettes on earth: 1.75/pack, a pack a day) *still* comes to 8.75 a week. If I don't smoke on the weekends, well, grand, but still -- I could change my guitar strings TWICE A WEEK for what I currently spend on cigarettes, and I'm smoking less now than I have in two years. That's two leigitimate excuses to drop by Encore or Marc's per week on my way home without spending more money than I'm spending already. (Sure is tempting -- break even *and* spend too much time in guitar shops.) If I didn't smoke for a year I'd have enough for a pretty nice Taylor acoustic. Or a Dobro. Fuck, smoking's dumb. I've stopped using credit for anything and find I have enough coming in to pay the debts I have incurred off.

I think about it as I'm in places to buy things. Went to Costco two days ago, walked out with coffee and baking soda at such prices that I *know* they lost money. Trick is they get you in for that and you walk out with CDs, DVDs, portable grills, cast iron dog bowls, inflatable liferafts, books designed to not be read, and goodness knows what other useless crap. Quit drinking working in a bar, maybe I'll quit overspending now that (thanks to my job) I've got a card for Costco. I also put some money on the cash card there for gas for later in the week. Not much -- it's *not* the cheapest place in town for gas; not by a long shot, usually -- but it *is* pretty competitive, and really close to work, which can itself often save as much as you'd spend driving out of your way to get the cheaper gas. (And ultimately the idea is not to save money on gas but to use less gas.)

I'm driving less as well. Probably a little more than half as much as before I started keeping track. I did drive back partway across town yesterday after driving back home from work and realized I hadn't done that in "forever" -- maybe a week or two. I don't think I've eaten in a restaurant since David visited. I don't particularly want to. Spending more time at home, enjoying it more, making better use of my time and energy and *still* not having all the hours in the day I really need.

So anyway I'm starting to see some patterns in my spending. I can't wait 'til I've got a month's worth of data to work from. Friday after work is when I'm in greatest danger of impulsive purchasing. I get paid, and get out of work and suddenly the little voice starts screaming "THEY'RE ALL GONNA CLOSE AT SIX, SEVEN, OR EIGHT AND IF I DON'T RUN AROUND FROM PLACE TO PLACE AND GET SUCH-AND-SUCH NOW I'LL HAVE TO WAIT AT LEAST UNTIL TOMORROW AND MAYBE 'TIL MONDAY" hits.

Last week was fucked up. I spent eighty bucks on a frame. Yes, something I've gotten many of at goodwill over the years for pennies on the dollar because all of a sudden the poster from Austin that's been sitting happily rolled up for all these years *needed* to get framed in a frame that matched Grover's fur EXACTLY. I actually *wanted* to get the Colombia and FTAA posters framed, but the estimate ran into hundreds of dollars, they're so huge. (I want to preserve them, but also want to look at them, and lamination ruins things like that.) So I satisfied myself at the time that I was being "reasonable" and just framed the concert poster instead.

This week it started out sensibly enough I suppose but soon spiralled out of control, though not *as* out of control as last week. I went to Samon's to get a couple of washers for the Bigsby. Nice brass ones. Thirteen cents. Great. Then next door for apricots and avocados. Two-thirty. Nice. Then I realized I was running out of cigarettes and wouldn't be getting any more tonight so into the car to drive three blocks to Lowe's, where I go overboard. Cereal, 5.29 for a big bag. Milk for 3.29. Two bags of very highly processed "english muffins" for 79 cents a bag and a jar of superb orange marmalade for 3.49. A 16-ounce tub of whipped butter for 1.34. And finally two 1.75 quart "cheater half gallons" of Dreyer's Rocky Road ice cream. I think the thinking is to have something way the hell more enjoyable than cigarettes on hand at all times. The total came to 22.97.

So -- heh -- yeah, it's *all* basically junk food and it cost a lot of money. But even junk food's better than cigarettes. And it's less than my little "impulse spree" was last week, which was less than the week before that. And I've got so much food in the house it is not even funny. I don't know how I can eat it all. When my fingers get tired of fretting strings and I don't want to read I'll eat but I can't eat all day. I can't eat everything I have. It's waste. Better too much than not enough, well, yes, but I can simplify a lot without wanting a thing. I'll get there.

So I guess the long story short of it is that it's definitely possible to economize without suffering loss of quality of life. We'll see how far I take it. I can't wait for the month, which will give me totals in different categories and all sorts of stuff to work with.

He's out.

Leo is out of jail.

He'd written back to me twice. I was in the process of writing back to him when a couple of mutual freinds dropped by. I showed them his letters and they resolved to write to him. I then searched the MDC inmate list and pop! He isn't there! (The only instance I can think of when "no records found" is what you *want* using a search engine.) I then checked the status of his case on the Metro Court Docket Search just to make sure he hadn't been moved someplace else. Nope. He'd gotten bonded out. Good news. The worst is probably behind him, now.

I then got to drill one of his mutual freinds on what *he* could expect in his own upcoming traffic arraignment tomorrow. Printed up his record and basically held a mock traffic arraignment for him in my living room over the ensuing two hours, explaining that the real thing would take *maybe* five minutes and the judge wants to know why she should be favourably inclined to you without hearing the whole damn sob story. It's not the first time that I've done it. Of course, as I told him, I'm not a lawyer and nothing I say constitutes legal advice. But if you dress like that for court and slump and giggle goofily like you just did for me when I ask you a straightforward question, you're toast.

Gave him the best advice I could on how to present himself and answer all the judge's probable questions to his advantage without lying. Nothing too serious in his case, maximum one year (unlikely), but a mandatory minimum of seven days if he, not knowing any better, had pled guilty to one of the charges that he wouldn't have had if he hadn't moved and papers hadn't gotten lost. When he walked into my apartment he didn't even know what his charges were, and didn't know if what he was going to was a hearing, an arraignment, a trial, or anything else. Like so many people he had folded up his ticket and shoved it all to the back of his mind 'til the very last minute and had no idea what was actually on his record. Classic "I put it off" type guy -- until it snowballs into something that he didn't even know was jailtime serious. When he left at least he knew he'd get a fine and might get worse if he screwed up and understood that it was on his own shoulders to make the right impression. I think I drilled it into his thick skull: if nothing else, he need not show contempt.

I'm pooped! I wouldn't want to be a judge. Not ever. Just doing it "pretend" is hard enough. You couldn't ever pay me enough to decide whether a person ought to go to jail.

Catching up.

I don't remember the last thing thing I wrote about so have no clue whether I went on and on about how great the square dance was. If I did, I apologise, but it bears repeating: it was great -- and in case you've got any funny ideas, square dancing is for misfits and weirdos of *all* ages, not just geriatrics. I love it, even though my part in it was to play music. Was nice to walk in, be seen with the guitar, and get waved through like I was some sort of vaguely important person. Woohoo -- my first little taste of fame, fortune, and glamour -- I like it. I thought about saying something along the lines of "I'm not a musician, but I play one on the weekends" but figured I would rather save my money, even though at seven bucks for the evening it *would* have been worth paying to get in! Way better value than a movie, any day.

Watching real people really dance. Imagine that, if you can. All the dynamics between different people, from out and out couples in love with eachother to downright sublimated hatred between people focusing intently on their steps. It's literally something from a movie, but it's REAL. Clark Gable's not on a wheeled platform in this show!

Yes, people do still go to dances, even in this day and age. Thank god. There's some civility left after all in humankind. And it is *so* exciting you would not believe it unless you were there. Things are happening everywhere and your job is to play your three chords RIGHT. hehe. It takes a fair amount of concentration! Helps to have a non-obnoxious instrument and be sitting in the back. If I'd had the banjo with me I would DIE. The banjo's purpose is to give my left hand's fingertips a break every few days (lighter strings, lower action) and let me focus on the fingerpicking in the right hand. The banjo doesn't get played in public!

Sunday I was smart and took a recorder to the jam session at the Grants Middle School Library -- not the flute-like instrument, but a device for recording sound. Got home and there's that drop-dead gorgeous jig or hornpipe or whatever in 6/8 time that I'd loved and picked up at the time but didn't remember the chord changes after several hours of playing other things for me to listen, play along, and really memorise just like I'm there again, but with the ability to repeat things and make time run backwards and forwards.

Amazing, ingenious little devices, these sound-recording instruments. Suddenly the A part going from A minor to E7 and back to A minor twice before going to D minor in the B part before going to C major before resolving back to A minor (through G or G7, F, and then E, I believe) is not something I have precisely ten seconds to figure out and commit to memory. I get to work it out, at my own pace. Run it backwards, forwards, play it upside down and inside out, make it my own, and take it back next week.

I'm dying to play plugged in with other people. The "all acoustic" disconnect is good, though -- it's not about showing off, it's about learning and playing along with the group and getting a little bit better a bit at a time while learning to communicate with other musicians. I kinda suspect and fear "rock star mentality" will just *hit* the first time I plug it in to play with other people. But man oh man I'm getting sounds out of that guitar when I'm at home that just three weeks ago -- hell, one week ago -- I never thought I would. And when I'm not constrained by the fast dance tempos, well, I'm learning to do amazing things with just those simple melodies. Of course, there is a discipline involved in playing with the groups -- if I want to do those fancy little things that sound good when I play at home with the group, then dernit, I've just got to get it up to speed, and that is that! And I can't do that if I'm fumbling my way through the basic chord changes. Doing these jam sessions and folk music stuff is the best training I could ask for. Whatever else may happen will happen in time and I could ask for nothing better. Nothing.

Now from some of the best in human nature and society to some of the worst.

Leo's still in jail. He's still got no lawyer. No one has posted bail or stood for bond for him. His hearing, if I'm reading things right, is on the 21st. Everyone I know that knows him just sort of shook their heads and said "too bad, too bad", but nobody has done a goddamn thing. What's happening to him could have easily been me a few months back. I got lucky. I learned who my freinds were and weren't. I learn again.

Sadly, it's typical of our kind -- we rally 'round an exploitative business when it gets shut down but screw the real human beings who suffer unjustly in consequence of being targeted by an out-of-control state police agency run by a hateful pervert like Jim Plagens.

Leo has the probably unique distinction of having been arrested, not once, but *twice* by Special Investigations Division officers. Remarkable, because Special Investigations Division's job is to enforce the liquor code, and Leo does not work in the liquor industry. I don't even know any *barworkers* who've been arrested *twice* by SID agents. A snippy little queer, though, I suppose, is "fair game" in their seasonal hunting safaris.

The focus, sadly, where our precious few organizations are concerned, is on the empty symbolism of the gym: this place that was notorious, that people were afraid to go to, never (in polite company) admitted setting foot in, and wouldn't be caught dead holding an overpriced membership card to. Suddenly it's *the* rallying point of our so-called community, *the* symbol of what we are about, and *the* perfect encapsulation of our very being.

Hogwash.

If you don't believe me, consider the irony that lesbian feminists are in the forefront now defending an institution which would not admit them.

This much would be the same if it had happened in a bar: the stinking hole becomes the symbol. We speak of "Stonewall", not the "Drag Rebellion". The people involved do not matter. Their stories don't matter. Name *one* person who was at the Stonewall Inn the night that Judy Garland died (without looking it up!). The *place* is what matters. The *place* becomes identified with the *event* that happens there, the two are merged into the *symbol*. Blood in the parking lot's blood in the parking lot; doesn't matter whose blood, but the ground where it's spilled becomes sacred. In this, we are a bit too much behind the businesses that represent and serve us worst, and far too little behind the people in those businesses (and countless others) who are the very backbone of whatever passes for "gay society" in this or any other town.

By this obsession with surface, and by our tendency to scatter in the face of danger, we simultaneously exhibit two of the worst stereotypes we've ever earned: we prove ourselves both cowardly and shallow.

Hm. I wonder when and where Jim Plagens will strike next. It really is too bad he can't be bothered to prevent people from driving drunk, seeing how that's the mandate of the Department of Public Safety's Special Investigations Division, of which he is the Deputy Director. He's far too busy playing "scare the faggots" and making sure that his illegal actions go undocumented. Who's the coward?

Pride and the ACLU are now "involved" -- on behalf of the gym, because backing up the gym is "the right thing to do" where they stand. (I am sure it helps that the invisible owner, Dave Bedford, is perceived to have money.) Don't get me wrong -- I am *glad* they're involved. I am even grateful. Knowing they're somewhere in the same book if not on the same page sure beats knowing I'm the *only* person who gives a rat's ass about the latest DPS outrage. If we get this kind of interest and "involvement" every other time it happens, we might not have to wait quite twenty years before DPS's SID is shown for what it is: Albuquerque's little Ramparts. And won't that be just too delightful. Meanwhile, I'll just write more and more people who wind up wrongfully imprisoned, because damn it, what else can I do?

Neither Pride not the ACLU is doing much of anything that I know of on Leo's behalf. I guess his case is a pretty "bad" one, as no one wants to risk their reputations defending a convicted drunk driver, even on a different, false, and unjust charge; the lowdown rhetorical trick "guilt by association" being far too great a challenge for the best constitutional lawyers and scholars in the country to brave. Drunk drivers are plain old too hot to handle. Goodness knows anyone convicted of drunk driving is a hardened criminal and would-be murderer, whereas anyone not convicted is clearly a goddamn saint. Or maybe we're still living in the 'fifties and as gay men who have ever had a drink it's our place to just be thankful that some breeders somewhere do think we are (in principle, if not practice) worthy of equal justice under law.

Rallying behind the business called Pride Gym without doing *anything* for Leo is the moral equivalent of putting a U.S. flag ribbon magnet saying "support our troops" on a giant SUV. It gives the message loud and clear that what really matters is keeping up appearances. As for the poor little twink stuck in jail, well, that's just too goddamn bad, now isn't it -- a few years from now he won't be such a cute little twink -- but no great loss, because twinks are a dime a dozen.

Now if he were, oh, say, a lawyer, nurse, or realtor, or other prominent (read: moneyed) "member" of "the community" we'd all turn our lives upside down to help him any way we could. But we stand to gain nothing from Leo when he gets out of jail, assuming that he ever does. He won't be in a position to help us, maybe ever, so basically we say "screw him". The attitude is one of self-satisfaction and pride of the Miltonic kind: "he got what he deserved". It is the attitude that calls anger a luxury. Anger can be an obligation, and I call this attitude hypocrisy.

Yes, I am not terribly thrilled right now with the gay men in this town. Perhaps I'll be proved wrong. I do hope so.

Pride Gym reopens.

Surprise, surprise! Pride Gym's back up and running less than two weeks after getting shut down. Thanks to Bill for emailing me this article about it from the Albuquerque Journal:

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Gym Reopens In Wake of Raid

By Debra Dominguez-Lund
Journal Staff Writer

Pride Gym, a private Albuquerque health club and spa that caters to gay men, has reopened after being raided by law enforcement July 1.

The club was closed due to safety code violations but reopened early this week after an inspection, said American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico Director Peter Simonson.

Pride Gym has not only garnered the support of the ACLU but of area gay rights heavyweights like Equality New Mexico and Albuquerque Pride, which are trying to determine why the gym was investigated and if it was targeted because it serves gays.

The raid— which involved the serving of warrants as part of an illegal alcohol sales investigation— has continued to be characterized by some as harassment of gays and blatant homophobia.

"The warrant they issued makes ample references to the sexual activity by patrons on the club's premises during the raid— none of which is relevant to liquor code violations, which was the point of their warrant," Simonson said Tuesday.

During the raid at 1803 Third NW, more than a dozen armed state agents and city police officers wearing bullet-proof vests handcuffed the occupants— some of whom were nude or wearing towels— and told them to lie down.

An official with the Special Investigations Division, state Department of Public Safety, recently told the Journal: "We did not conduct this search warrant any differently than we would any other search warrant."

Simonson said his main concern is that the gym was targeted simply because it caters to the gay community.

He said the investigation into the club was sparked by an ad in a local entertainment newspaper touting the gym's "hot after hours" activities on Friday and Saturday nights.

A state of New Mexico criminal complaint and affidavit for an arrest warrant for the club's owner, Ron Cordova, corroborates Simonson's statement.

"The ad didn't indicate alcohol was being served, so why did they investigate?" Simonson asked.

"Law enforcement is using liquor and fire code violations as a pretext for intervening in the activities of this legitimate establishment," he said.

Department of Public Safety Communications Director Peter Olson said Tuesday that he could not comment on why the investigation was conducted. He said it would be inappropriate to discuss the investigation before anyone is tried.

Albuquerque Pride Co-President Pat Baillie said her group is trying to determine the motives for the raid.

"My sense, from the level of reaction by police and comments I've heard they made," she said, "is that it all sounds pretty homophobic."

As of 7:18 PM, Leo is still in Cell 6, E Unit Pod 5.

Now for my commentary on the article. First, criticisms notwithstanding, thanks to Ms. Dominguez-Lund and the Editor at the Albuquerque Journal for covering this story in the first place. If it had happened in El Paso, no one would have touched it.

Is the unnamed "official with the Special Investigations Division" by any chance its bigoted pervert Deputy Director Jim Plagens? If so, has he retracted his earlier comment, quoted in the previously referenced Tribune article, linking Pride Gym with all-ages liquor establishments and gay men with pædophiles?

Ron Cordova -- a.k.a. Leo, 'cause that's what he goes by, his middle name -- is not to my knowledge the OWNER of Pride Gym. I have heard he is the MANAGER. In his own words he "works there". As far as I know, the owner is Dave Bedford, who remains invisible throughout this whole ordeal. (So much for "Pride" -- I guess it's just an empty pretty word, these days, or maybe he just struts around his house proudly.) I could be wrong, of course; if you know better, please correct me.

As far as I can tell, and I'm no legal scholar, the words "hot after hours" in an ad does not alone constitute probable cause to investigate an alleged liquor code violation when the business placing the ad is NOT A LICENSED PREMISES TO BEGIN WITH. Unless, apparently, it's gay. Frontier Restaurant is searing hot after hours, but it's not gay, and doesn't use the words "hot after hours" in its ads. Am I to believe that if it did, SID would raid Frontier? If Foxes had printed an ad saying "hot after hours", well, yes, by all means then SID should swoop down at 2:01 AM. That's how we stayed open -- assuming, every night, *that* was the night we'd have cops at the door if one person stayed half a minute late. That's why bar clocks are fast.

But here, again -- if the warrant was sworn out on the basis of an ad saying "hot after hours", why on earth would they have raided the gym at 10 PM? Wouldn't the warrant have been to investigate alleged AFTER HOURS activity? Has the cutoff time for bars moved forward by four hours in the few short months since I stopped working at Foxes? Or is the Department of Public Safety, which has no real interest in curbing drunk driving, just feeding us more bullshit?

Life in the Borogoves.

I have finally renamed the blog. Here, then, is how it came to pass.

Walked to the river today. Had no idea it was so close. It's easily a 15-minute walk, and only that because you have to walk around the impoundment at Tingley Beach, which I never even knew existed. I love to walk. I always have. I put off learning to drive for as long as I could, which I think turned out being 18 years of age. But somehow when I learned to drive I got out of the habit of walking anywhere for any reason, least of all for the sheer pleasure of walking.

I take Laguna down the few blocks that it runs. Laguna's a divided boulevard with big old cottonwood trees in the median and mansions set back in huge lawns on either side. Closest thing we've got to Beverly Hills. (You know you're in a permanently fashionable neighbourhood when you can tell people are trying to copy Charles' way with setting plants from the handful of homes he does that for.) At the end of Laguna is the Albuquerque Country Club. Past that is Kit Carson Park, past that a canal, then Tingley Drive and just the other side of that is Tingley Beach. (Tingley was a mayor way back when, and landscapers call all the Chinese Elms here "Tingley's Curse".) Behind the curio shop and train station -- for you see, it's the sort of park that has a miniature train -- there's a fence with a space to walk through. Past the fence is a bicycle trail. Past the bicycle trail is the recognized bosque proper. The bosque is, essentially, the living floodplain of the Rio Grande.

I saw a translation of Jabberwocky into French somewhere (I forget where) in which "the borogoves" is translated "les embougesceaux". As anyone with basic linguistic training can tell you, "borogove", "embougesceau", and "bosque" are clearly etymologycally related, deriving from a common Latin root. The separate lines of development of French, Spanish, and English over centuries resulted in the root word having these three distinct but related forms. I don't know what the original Latin word was, but have no doubt it has to do with the environment and life forms that evolve in floodplains of great rivers. Bizarre, diverse lifeforms. I saw a brown frog today the size of my thumbnail. I saw a plant, like grass, with purple star-shaped flowers that I swear told me to pick it. Everything from the obviously delicate to the very grand, but even the very grand cottonwoods are brittle, for the river moves around. The bosque is the currently dry land on either side of the river. What an amazing place. This river is why Albuquerque exists. No river, no human settlement right here. That simple.

I live in the Borogoves, you see. I am a native of the Borogoves. I grew up just downriver in a working and middle class neighbourhood built in an arollo between two wealthy neighbourhoods with a Country Club tucked away in it and now I live in the upriver equivalent of the same. I'm closer to the river now than I have ever been. I never knew it 'til I walked there. That's why it floods here so dramatically. I live in built-up riverbed. It would be possible, I suppose, to walk downriver all the way to El Paso.

Forgot to mention.

Got my acupuncture free today, since someone failed to show up. Different intern, and for the first time, different supervising physician (to mix the insurance world's terms with the world of acupuncture). The guy did moxa *on* the needles' ends, which naturally I've read about, but never have had done. I liked it. He also did some cranial adjustments. He'd touch my eyebrows or my neck and I'd sit there wondering what he was up to, then suddenly I'd float off into other worlds and come back feeling better. I could feel the qi. Surprising, given his "meat tenderizer" approach to point location -- you know, poking you here and there and saying "is it tender?", which doesn't exactly build confidence as far as bedside manner goes, but obviously works for him.

I threw away my ashtray.

Later.

The past two days.

Megaband practice yesterday. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Were maybe 20, 25 people all playing reels and jigs and stuff -- mostly in A and D -- but VERY FAST. The trick is knowing when the chords change and playing one in four beats *right* and then filling in with the right hand. Some of it's fierce. Gets more complex and faster as the night wears on. Was at Blue Dragon and the coffee was delicious for a change; I saw something better in the place than I had ever seen before. The contradance is Saturday. I'm going. Nothing will keep me from it. Nothing.

The not smoking thing is mostly working. Mostly. I'm keeping my cigarettes at work. I haven't quit but don't smoke in the house or car. Only at work. Go figure that one out. It plain disgusts me. Goes along quite well with fighting with insurance companies that lie. Eating a LOT of avocados and sprouts and garlic in Cuhautemoc tortillas. Not going vegetarian or anything like that but definitely eating better than quesadillas every night. The avocado things are easy to make and delicious and I can eat 'em all day if I want to. I have two plums left from Saturday. Eating lots and lots of prickly pears, too. Throwing the peels out in the dirt, hoping they grow. We'll see.

Wrote to Leo again, sent him a clipping from the Voice that Don gave me; I think it's safe, and if it isn't, he can eat the clipping (will taste better than the jail food, I'm sure). A freind of his says he thinks he may get out Friday with what amounts to a warning for breaking probation by getting arrested for doing his job. I am going offline now to make a phone call.

Their real priorities.

Yet again New Mexico makes a laughing stock of itself.

Brought to you, on the taxpayer dollar, by the out-of-control Special Investigations Division of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety; Jim Plagens, Deputy Director:

Officers Arrest Men For Videotaping Them

Many thanks to KRQE News Channel 13 for covering this and to Weasel for letting me know about it!

What the SID is doing here is ILLEGAL. I *know*. It was ILLEGAL when the Los Angeles Police Department did the same thing. The LAPD Ramparts Division profiled and targeted Afro-Americans for at least two decades before it broke out in a scandal so costly that it threatened to bankrupt the City; as to LAPD's treatment of legal obserers, I can personally attest. LAPD got prosecuted under federal RICO statutes, got marshalls from Clinton's U.S. Department of Justice to babysit and watch their every move, and faced civil suits such that they can't now get away with nearly what they did back in 2000.

If SID wants trouble like the LAPD faced, they are on the right track. Just so long as they keep targeting gays for selective enforcement of the law and attacking persons legally observing officers -- public servants -- discharging their duty, they'll be well on their way to making the recent debacle in the Treasurer's Office look like a Sunday school ice cream social. I seriously doubt the gym raid'll be the defining turning point, but there's a *lot* more interest in this than there was in the bar raids they did this same time last year. If they keep up the steady drumbeat, resistance will grow 'til it reaches a critical mass, and watch out -- the resistors might not all be drunk when it happens.

Meanwhile they continue to "toughen up" the liquor code with unenforceable provisions, guaranteeing -- you guessed it -- further selective enforcement. Watch out, fags. They've got us in their sights.

This is not about alcohol. This is not about drunk driving. We've got the toughest DWI laws in the nation, second only to Mississippi, yet we have more DWI fatalities and arrests than almost any other state in the Union. Something is not working, but still the State gives us more of the same.

DPS priorities are clearly not on preventing drunk driving. MADD has largely succeeded in changing an entire culture's attitude towards DWI -- in twenty years it's gone from being an acceptable subject for comic songs to being recognised as senseless murder when someone dies as a result of someone driving drunk. Meanwhile, New Mexico's own DPS can't even get the numbers down.

I do believe Jim Plagens and his goons aren't the least bit interested in stopping drunk drivers. They're interested in sexual humiliation. They're basicaly closeted dominance fetishists. You know. Perverts. The kind that photograph men in sexually degrading positions while calling them names because they get a rush from the feeling of power. The kind that laugh at 70 year old naked men lying on the ground in handcuffs. The kind that have female latina officers wave semiautomatic assault rifles in the naked flaming faggots' faces. Clearly, they have an objective, but it has nothing to do with drunk driving, and everything to do with their own twisted sexual thrills. Even a convicted drunk driver of average competence can himself prevent lots of drunk driving.

Why can't the State of New Mexico do what the doorman at Foxes can do? Maybe the perverts at SID don't have the public interest half as much at heart as the pervert on the door at Foxes does. Or maybe the pervert on the door *knows* he's accountable for his actions, whereas the petty tyrant division deputy pervert believes himself above the law.

This is not about drunk driving. This is about a state police agency run amok in the hands of a Willliam Parker wannabe deputy director. He has a standard-issue script that plays quite well -- "it's all to stop drunk driving" -- which serves to mask the sick kicks he gets humiliating his chosen minority.

He will not deign to allow public observation, let alone scrutiny, of his Division's conduct because he knows it is illegal.

I think it's about time for a FOIA request.

I've spent enough time thinking about this for one night and am going to change the subject now.

Visited Don again today. Didn't even mean to, just happened that way.

I think I knocked a front tooth loose. I really ought to see a dentist. heh. I don't have insurance, naturally. I'm eating lots of alfalfa and hoping that it doesn't get abscessed.

Leo got moved to E unit, Pod 5. I'm gonna mail him again here shortly.

Such as the good news is, I'm not smoking! Not saying I have quit, I'm just not smoking, and enjoying not smoking. Sure wish my tooth would hold still, though.

Domesticities.

Three good trips out today.

First to the Downtown Farmer's Market. Have wanted to go for two years now but always got afraid. Walked there. Was delightful. One guy had ten different varieties of garlic, I got three, including one you can eat raw and one that's really, really spicy. Got carrots and cucumbers and the most wonderful plums I think I've ever tasted. All local, bought directly from the growers. Finally, an Aloe Vera plant because I have been needing one and this one spoke to me. Tied a red string around it in exactly the right place, traded a screen for a pot with the neighbours, and kept it out all day in the light rain and gentle sun.

Then to Botanica la Salud, the little curanderismo shop by the bus station two blocks away. Again, have wanted to go since forever. Struggled with the Spanish but got Lobelia for nicotene cravings -- its main active ingredient is a molecule that works on the synapses almost the same way as nicotene. It SEEMS to be working.

Then the desire to buy something more expensive hit me. So I thought to myself "what do I legitimately need?" I've needed screens for my screen doors for almost two years now. The old ones are destroyed -- completely missing in the case of the back door and an unwelcome memory in the case of the front. Got screens, some spline, and the rollers to do it myself and rescreened my own screen doors. They're totally an Albuquerque job -- crooked and with a crease in the aluminum where I went kinda nuts with the roller, but compared with what was there before, all bent out of shape and ripped and full of cat-clawmarks and barely held slightly in place by thumbtacks, they look like a million bucks and I can FINALLY open BOTH doors and let the air flow through as this apartment was designed to let it do.

I love my apartment. I never want to leave it. Never. Music Festival tomorrow, but I may stay home and just enjoy the day here. It'll be cheaper and I won't use the gas. If I do go I will enjoy it but I'll feel I have to stay all day. I haven't positively decided yet and won't until tomorrow afternoon.

Life is good.

Unfair. But typical.

If you want to make the world a better place, write to the prisoner.

On Saturday, 1 July, around 10 PM, Albuquerque Vice Squad and New Mexico Special Investigations Department jointly shut down Pride Gym, the only gay gymnasium in this town. This comes to me a few days late since news bubbles through the grapevine a little slower for people who aren't currently the doorman at Foxes.

Almost a year ago exactly (15 July MMV) all our bars got hit by the Vice Squad on the same night. I guess the monsoons bring out the homophobic tendencies in the police department. Or maybe they just like to keep us in our places once they know for sure that Pride is over for the year.

Pride Gym was famous for its private Saturday night parties. It's a private gym -- you have to buy a membership or day pass to even get in the door, and the purpose of the day pass is to check the place out before forking over the big bucks you need to be a member. The Albuquerque Tribune story is here, complete with descriptions of nude 70 year-old men in handcuffs. The only gay man they bothered interviewing was a stinking rich out-of-towner. Here is my response to parts of it:

Jim Plagens, deputy director for Special Investigations Division, which enforces alcohol regulations, said agents were targeting the gym because it advertises selling alcohol but does not have a proper license.

Oh really. Well, I read the gay press in this town rather obsessively and never have seen any "advertisement" about Pride Gym selling alcohol. Not once! Perhaps there was a sign in their lobby? I do not know. At any rate, it is a PRIVATE CLUB and memberships are NOT for buying alcohol -- they're for getting in the door to use the equipment and sauna and hot tub and cruise. I for one am offended that yet again it is OUR businesses that get targeted when it comes time to toughen up the Liquor Code.

He also said handcuffing patrons in bar sweeps such as this is routine.

It's NOT routine -- at least not since before Stonewall -- I know, because I've been at bars while they were getting swept. I've *worked* at one *as* it was getting swept! I've NEVER seen a single patron handcuffed in a bar sweep, "routine" or otherwise. HANDCUFFING PATRONS IS NOT ROUTINE. Besides which -- Pride Gym is NOT A BAR.

"If this was an underage club, we would be doing the same thing," Plagens said, citing officer safety from unruly patrons and patron safety from agents on high alert.

So once again the tired old trope gets trotted out that gay men are pædophiles -- but carefully crafted -- "if this was", he says -- like most Tribune readers are gonna read that carefully, especially when alcohol sales at all-ages music venues are a hot-button issue right now. Guilt by association, this. It is enough that he mentions the word "underage" in context of a gay men's institution for the meaning to be absolutely clear.

And how does placing patrons in handcuffs protect them from "agents on high alert"?

As for protecting highly trained officers in flack jackets with sidearms from naked 70 year old men -- what are they, Kung Fu masters?

"Especially with a group where there could be controversy," Plagens said about allegations of inappropriate comments.

ALLEGATIONS? Read it. They're his words. Was he misquoted? Has he retracted them? If not, Jim Plagens is a homophobic bigot.

The Fire Department then came in and shut the place down for Fire Code violations.

Money never changed hands for alcohol at Pride Gym. Never. No more than money changes hands at Foxes for its Sunday chicken dinners 'cause Pride Gym is no more a bar than Foxes is a restaurant. A rough equivalent for Foxes would be the health department raiding Foxes, arresting the bartender on duty, getting the Fire Department to shut the place down for faulty wiring, detaining, handcuffing, and citing patrons for our santizer water having more than 100 parts per million chlorine bleach in the inspector's litmus paper test.

Leo, the 27 year-old manager, is a passing freind of mine and he got carted off to jail. Because he's been in trouble before, he's facing years in jail now on felony charges for an alleged offense that he neither committed nor profited from. His bond is set at an impossible $25,000 -- not that it matters all that much, because a different judge has a hold on him.

Meanwhile Dave Bedford, the owner who profited for years from all those weekly parties gets off with a couple of citations and orders to bring the building up to code. You think he's gonna fight it? I'd love him if he did! But man, from what I've seen, he's likelier to play invisible and do whatever's necessary behind the scenes to get the gym back up and running just as soon as possible and screw the guy in jail now for something that he didn't do, if by not fighting it, he can get back up and running in short order. Prove me wrong. Puhlease.

If you want to write to Leo, I am sure he'd love to hear from anyone who has words of support. I have been where he is now (same exact pod, even) and believe me, even a postcard would have made my day when I was there, and he is STUCK. Here's his address -- if you do write, use this address format exactly:

RONNIE LEON CORDOVA
INMATE #100072889
100 JOHN DANTIS DR SW
ALBUQUERQUE, NM 87151

And please, do be "discrete" -- Bernalillo County's Metropolitan Detention Center ain't exactly the gay-freindliest place on earth. Or heck, just email me, and I will gladly forward anything I get to him.

Oh -- and if you ever for whatever reason need to find an inmate in any jail or prison in this nation of jails and prisons, I can not possibly recommend inmate.com too highly.

In other news someone anonymously left a bag of nonfat dry milk behind my screen door. I assume it was meant for the cats. I mixed some up and put it outside for the ferals since the puddled rainwater out there now is pretty rank.

Magical midweek weekend.

David calls maybe three days ago and says he's coming down day after tomorrow or something like that. Just enough time to do laundry. Then I get an ironing board and a can of heavy starch (I gave up boiling shirts on the stove long ago) and iron for the first time in probably two decades. Love it. Set up the ironing board by the window and spent almost all of the fourth doing that, which has many beneficial outcomes, including the effect of letting the lingering undesirables know that they're being watched without overtly confronting them. After nearly 24 hours of people coming and going from the van that's been parked illegally for two years now and public drinking in the parking lot (Foxes ain't got nothin' on us) there's mention of a hundred dollars. Faye raises her voice. Five minutes later they're all gone.

There is a certain social rhythm to living in a place like this. Going out to check the mail, to take garbage to the dumpster, these are the reasons that we have to pass eachother's apartments and say hello, or notice that the nice old lady two doors down who doesn't speak a word of english needs help walking now, or figure out those kids belong to that parent, or when worst comes to worst to make it clear to people who are not welcome that their presence won't stop us from living.

Last night, for the first time since I moved here, every single tenant had their blinds open after dark, affording a view within their modest homes from the last little unpaved street in Albuquerque known as Central Avenue. There's that much trust living this close together for this long. For the first time since I moved here we are all not afraid of eachother. I wouldn't trade that in this little "ghetto pocket" for the most amazing old turn-of-the-century house one block away on either side of where I live. I wouldn't even trade it for Saltillo tiles and a solar water heater or a 1930s Kenmore stove that worked.

David comes in on Tuesday. Since it's a flag waving kind of day I hang the rainbow flag all day out front and it's out there waving all Harvey Milk Park-ish when he arrives. He and Lynne, his dear freind from El Paso, come in and we talk for a while as Lynne falls in love with the orange and white kitten who grooms me while I sleep. Lynne leaves and David and I watch the best fireworks show ever: a bunch of immigrant kids setting off illegal fireworks in the huge unpaved lot in front of all our apartments.

The next day I go to work but my heart isn't in it. I get some more insurance followups done, track down a problem from the pattern of denials, and get things to where Bill can handle dealing with the insurance company's network representative, now that we *know* they're lying to us and have it all documented as to who said what and when they said it and how it is contractually impossible that they can all be right. I get out and when David comes back I'm restringing my "bad" banjo, which I got many years ago and just never restrung. (Suddenly it ain't half bad!) Lynne's with him and she takes the orange kitten, having thought about it thoroughly. David and I then go to visit Don Schrader.

It was an unforgettable evening. Mr. Schrader (who asks me to call him "Don", although to me, to do so seems a little disrespectful) is an amazing human being. He has the power of his convictions and he lives them as few people I have ever known have done. This is the man who was voted "Best Local Hero" and "Best Local Crackpot" in the same issue of the Alibi a few years back. People love him because he makes them happy walking up and down Central, because he espouses their various causes, and they fear him because being around him does have the effect of making us see for ourselves what each of us could be doing better, whatever we're into. He is an inspiration and it's a blessing to be in his presence for a few brief minutes. There is, in the room where he lives, a feeling of peace unlike any I've felt outside of say the grotto of les deux Saintes Marie de la Mer. We stayed for a good two hours. Too long, since Don goes to bed early, but he was unfailingly gracious. He is the most human person I know.

I'd very much wanted David to meet Don and Don to meet David for a long time but it never happened until yesterday. I spoke very little, myself. (I can visit any time, whereas David can not.) David told a good portion of his story about growing up gay in Brownwood, Texas and coming to El Paso as a Southern Baptist missionary, which is a story I believe needs to be made into a movie. David paints it, of course -- on huge canvasses -- but his paintings are rarely seen outside the world of galleries and exhibitions in this part of the world, besides which his imagery is opaque: you practically have to know his life story to understand what he is painting. When he *tells* his story, it is magic, and there's no mistaking meaning.

As for Don, I can blather all day, but to do him justice, his own words are the best introduction I can give you. I suspect he won't mind my reproducing the entirety of a letter he wrote to the Alibi somewhere around MMIII. He gave me a xeroxed copy when I met him at my first Pride march in the dreadful year MMIV (C.E.), at which point I had only heard about him. I carry it, ironically enough, in my wallet, where I tend to conveniently forget it's there:

No job, no salary, no relationship, no degree, no house, no car, no art, no furniture, no trip, no gadgets, are worth paying federal income tax to rob, terrorize, blind, cripple, paralyze, make homeless and murder our sisters and brothers worldwide.

The main purpose of the U.S. war machine is to make sure that most Americans, especially the greediest, keep on stealing and hogging the wealth of the world.

The best way to boycott the U.S. war machine, with no fines and no threats from the IRS, is to live simply -- under the taxable level.

The taxable level this year for a single, sighted, under 65 year-old person is $7,800. I lived well last year on $3,760.

I have owned no car since I returned to Albuquerque in 1988. The last time that I rode in any car was April 7, 2001. I hate cars because I hate wars for oil, poisoned air, the horrors of global warming, highways smothering fertile soil... I love to WALK!

I would not trade my 12'x 14' apartment home for the most luxurious mansion in the world.

I am glad I have no refrigerator, no TV, no VCR, no gun, no computer, no credit cards, no business suit, no jet travel, no phone, no microwave, no air conditioner. I wash my clothes by hand at home.

I am glad I consume no booze, no cigarettes, no restaurant meals, no junk food, no meat, no dairy, no cooked food, no illegal drugs, no prescription drugs. I am glad I have no doctor, no dentist, no medical insurance. I am an all-raw foods vegetarian devoted to natural health.

I yearn for passionate lifelong romance with a man, but I will not surrender or compromise my war tax refusal and my living simply for any man on earth!

If a father gives his son a switchblade, how can the father be shocked if his son eventually stabs someone? Many U.S. peace activists for decades have paid thousands of dollars to the U.S. war machine. So, how can they be shocked when the U.S. empire uses the weapons purchased by the peace activists to mass murder worldwide? We get what we pay for.

Many U.S. actors, entertainers, and other obscenely rich Americans say "Not in my name" against the war on Iraq, but they pay far more for war than many minimum wage workers who proudly send their soldier sons and daughters to battle. How much good is to proclaim "Not in my name" unless that means "Not with my money"?

I refused to be a soldier in 1969 during the Viet Nam war. For me as a conscientious objector, to pay federal income tax to train other Americans, largely the poor and people of color, to become professional hired killers to murder on command with no conscience, would be more evil than being a soldier myself.

My life is an all-out public boycott of the U.S. empire everyday as long as I live.

Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world... my life is my message."

And an excerpt from another letter he wrote to the Alibi, which speaks so directly to me that it's not even funny:

I lived well all of 2003 on $3,390 -- less than half the federal income taxable level. I have no right to more than I need while others in this world have less than they need. I enjoy living simply!

As long as you spend like crazy for all kinds of crap you do not need, you will insist on having an income much larger than the taxable level. Your addiction to buying what you do not need keeps you paying year after year from every paycheck for United States government mass murder all over the world. Soldiers risk their bodies and their lives to wage wars, but sadly, most United States peace activists do not break their addiction to buying what we do not need in order to live simply under the taxable level to refuse to pay for U.S. wars. Marching for peace while you pay for war is like praying for health while you hog out on junk food. Stupid contradiction!

I have no right to pay tax to do to other persons what I do not want them to do to me. I have paid no federal income tax for 25 years. I pledge now, at age 58, to live simply, to own no car, and to pay no federal income tax for war for the rest of my life! This is anarchy by the Golden Rule! This is nonviolent revolution!

You might suspect that being around the man who wrote that would be a bit uncomfortable in the way that being around certain militant Animal Rights activists can be. You know -- humourless, judgmental, and single-mindedly focused to the point of nothing else mattering at all besides the rightness of the sacred cause at hand. I assure you, it's not. Joy emanates from him. He's also a near perfect gentleman -- all the sentences he has starting with the word "I" are in what I've quoted here, and having said them there, he doesn't linger on himself at all. When you meet him, you're likely to start out talking *about* him *to* him, and he is glad to share, but in short order he has you talking about you. Before you know it you've done deep self examinations with an honesty and fairness that you never thought possible.

One of the reasons I quit at Frontier when I did was because I thought I could make it that year on what I'd made, and really, I could have -- except, of course, I never did stop buying crap I didn't need. It could have worked, but didn't -- I got into "must outdo Charles" mode (not his fault, but quite disastrous -- no one can outdo Charles, and that is that).

My buying habits definitely are addictive. I need a lamp, so, yes, I get a lamp, a perfect lamp, but only after two before it which turned out to be not quite so perfect when compared with the one that I finally wound up with. I need a chair, and so I get a perfect chair (and several others on the way to the perfect chair). I need a pair of shoes, but just the perfect shoes, and different kinds for different purposes and to match whatever else I'm wearing at the time. I have already got the perfect guitar and should know when to quit.

I've got everything that I could possibly need for the rest of my life in this apartment right now, not to mention many things that are no more than wants, and still I can't seem to stop buying things. I wish that I could say "I'll never again buy anything I don't need" and then just make it happen, but come Saturday around noon I will likely get bored and wonder what's going on at the flea market. Or I'll feel great coming out of acupuncture on Wednesday and pop by goodwill and savers on the way home.

I can't even do that with smoking -- I don't need cigarettes but I keep buying them. Or, to be more honest, I haven't done it yet, which isn't the same thing. "I can't because I haven't yet" is pure defeatist thinking. It's as if part of me doesn't care what I think of myself just so long as I repeatedly get those fleeting thrills I get every time I find something amazing for so little money that it *is* absurd. It's like gambling -- yes, the Gunlocke chair cost me three dollars, but the other one I got at the same time that I never sit in cost fourteen. The thrill is great, but it adds up like no one's business. I got three bucks' worth of use-value from seventeen in exchange-value, to put it in vaguely Marxian terms. For cigarettes I'd literally be better off burning the money that I spend on them.

I want to be able to say that this is the last year I'm ever going to pay federal income taxes, and that only to keep myself out of jail, and that only because I don't think I'd survive. Realistically, I can't even plan that far ahead. At the risk of seeming an AA geek, though, I'll say I certainly wasn't planning *this* far ahead when I just wanted to stop drinking that I thought I'd never do anything other than work at Foxes 'til I got over the legal bullshit and died as elegantly as anybody ever could in that parking lot. I dunno how but life's better enough this way that I'm just not interested in going back any more than I'd move back to Seattle or LA. Anything's possible if you take it in manageable chunks while not forgetting what you really want and why you're really doing it.

Just today I "had to" drive out of my way to get a Pigma Micron -- a three dollar Japanese pen. And they just happened to have Moleskine pocket diaries on sale at the art supply store too, since we're halfway now through the year. So I got one of those for seven bucks. Then I got cigarettes. The best that I could do under the circumstances was write down in the diary on today's page precisely how much I spent today and on what. I don't know how long I can keep that up but I plan to do the same tomorrow and there's stuff I "need" to get tomorrow, besides which, it's payday, so I "can". Saturday is dangerous -- flea market -- and Sunday I go to Edgewood for the music festival. Maybe I can actually do the notebook thing every day for just one week. Not even "try" not to spend, but just *know* what I'm *actually* spending, every day, and *on* what. Just for me.

The stuff I put in here is quite highly selective, you know.

Laundry day and livable urban design.

Laundry day is a very dangerous day.

Back to Harold's as usual. I hate using the laundromats -- the only thing to be said for them is that you can get it all done fairly fast. But the people are weird there. And there's always someone panhandling outside. And all my panic buttons get pushed -- people are JUDGING me based on my socks and my underwear. I can take no consolatory pleasure in others judging me for my fabulous shirts and pants because I'm sure they're all too ignorant to recognize a tailored Stromberg's shirt when they see it tumbling at 90 miles per hour. Those triple capacity washers are amazing though. Sure would like to have just one of those at home.

Worked today, which was odd, 'cause the clinics and most of the insurance companies didn't. It was good in that it gave me a chance to get a running start on the month. Did followups with United Healthcare Services, which is one of the worst insurance companies on earth, but it was a breeze. No one else was calling so there was practically no hold time, and I figured out how to stay a step ahead of the people on the other end. "Well, when I spoke with Anita on the third of May at oh I don't know around eleven-thirty-two AM, she said that date of service was denied in error and she sent the claim back to be reprocessed and I'm just wondering why we haven't gotten paid, since we do have the auth on file -- what is it, DXP1000A6732*86, I believe? Something like that." Reorganized the filing cabinet again, this time so it won't tip over. Whoever designed the standard-issue office filing cabinet was a MORON and it's a living tribute to human stupidity that decades later the same design still prevails in millions of offices around the world. I hope whoever did design it is in hell spending eternity nursing bad bruises while having to pick up and realphabetize hundreds of files spilled out onto the sulphurous floor.

Rose, the Santo Domingo common law wife of Harold, the son of Faye, the woman who lives next door, is here. I like Rose. She tried to teach me to count to five in Keresan one time. But honestly I do not like the company she keeps. It's fair enough, I've kept similar company myself from time to time, but I don't like the little convention of undesirables clustered 'round my door when I come home peering into the windows to look at the cats. I know damn well the neighbours see the cats and count their peering into my windows little more than an annoying eccentricity. I suspect their ignoramus freinds, however, see "open windows" and "nice stuff". Screw them.

It's an unpleasant fact of life that goes with living openly to the point of defiance on Central. I have my little tricks up my sleeve to keep them out of here but still I do not like complete strangers peering in through my windows. At the same time there's some trust involved -- specifically that as neighbours we do watch out for eachother. When I want privacy I close the blinds. That is the code, it seems to work. The neighbours understand the code, I do not know about their "freinds". You know, the ones with backpacks they pick up for one night at a time. The white people they should know better than to trust, ever. Ever. They only like you 'cause you've got something they want. What that something might be is none of my business, but they don't seem a jewelry buying crowd. I trust my neighbours, but distrust my neighbours' common-law in-law's freinds. Go figure that one out.

Having said that, I'll say this, too. I have thin walls. The way this place is laid out has its good points and its bad points, but the bad points all seem to be balanced out my good points so it's hard to say "that is a serious design flaw" about *anything* where I live.

Hearing everything next door gets to mark up a point in both columns. There's always, always, always *someone* here *in* this building. I think maybe twice I have been the only person here since I moved here, for a couple of hours each time. That is, believe it or not, a good thing, in that there's always someone on the property who knows what's going on next door well enough to know whether it's normal activity or not. And with the crowd that lives in these buildings, all homosexuals and immigrants and urban indians, there's some really weird stuff that counts as "normal activity". I'm always bringing in furniture and have not been unknown to entertain strange people here from time to time. Edison plays music really loudly on what appears to be a seasonal basis -- an eccentricity I live with since he actually encourages me to play my guitar. One of the Mexican neighbours yells "play ball!" each time he passes my front door (for what reason I can't begin to fathom), and another turns his boom box to the street so the old grandmother three doors down can have music while she sits and watches the street. Kids play down at the end and have the whole length of the unpaved street to run up and down since it's sort of blocked off from traffic. Some people sit in their cars and honk their horns to get people to come out rather than go up to the door -- not because they're heinous barbarians but because they're old and feeble. People park in the summer in the shade of our trees while they eat their ice cream from the Dairy Queen, which is fine just as long as they don't leave their trash, and if they do, the former doorman at Foxes is not above walking out and making a show of writing down a license plate number.

Windows facing the street are another "one in each category" design feature. It's hell to have healights shine in when you're trying to sleep, but great to keep eyes on the street. I love having a back door. I love having space between my bedroom and the house next door. I love that the walls of the *living* rooms are shared, but not those of the bedrooms. I love the little tiny walk-in closet and the typical Albuquerque wall cabinet in the little hallway to the bathroom. The sightlines are amazing. From where I'm sitting now I can see all the important windows, feel the breeze from the fan without sitting right in the gale, and manage to both concentrate on my writing while I keep my eyes on the street, even at this late hour.

Living here forces me -- gently -- to live simply and be minimally sociable with everyone who lives here with me. It is an excellent design for a workable, livable city space. I honestly hope the new urbanists who are trying to rip this place and places like it from the people who make their lives in them for years on end don't change a thing -- except, perhaps, the asbestos tiles and placement in a floodplain. I mean, if they're going to triple the rents anyway, they may as well improve *something*.

Winding my way around to what I'm trying to say, politely: my neighbours, like any neighbours, have their troubles. They've got their family dramas and they can get quite intense like any family dramas can. But it's amazing -- raised voices don't last long. People do not fight day and night, though all the people who live together are as different as night and day. If one of 'em's drunk, it can go on for oh maybe an hour. But no matter what, in good time you'll hear Faye's voice raised like a thunderclap saying something in her native language and I'll be damned if 95% of the time that isn't the absolute last you hear of it. The remaining 5% of the time maybe a door will slam a few minutes later -- again, though, only if someone (who I won't name) has been drinking. My neighbours live in close quarters and think me a bit odd for "needing" all the space in my apartment to myself. I don't know how they do it, but it's admirable. I know it's from necessity and not from choice and do not mean to romanticize their lives. But in their own way, they live well, which is to say, a way that my people might do well to emulate in some ways.

The little crowd outside is drinking. I don't believe Faye lets them drink inside, and know she doesn't let them smoke. I turned on the porch light to shed some light on what's going on out there. If it's anything untoward, they'll take it to the van which has been sitting where it is for over two years now. Since the wiring is haywire, I can't have the fan on inside without having the porch light on too. So sorry, but I have to have it on -- you see, it's very hot in here. I love this apartment right down to its lousy old wiring. Everything works out perfectly, here, even when it only works out because everything here is so bloody imperfect. This is an amazing spot. I wouldn't trade it for the condominium at the top of the gold bank tower at Central and San Mateo.