Here's how clever I am: I may be able to fix my Jeep's "death wobble."

Yes, it still happens in spite of having the alignment fixed and the tires balanced. It shows up around 45mph and seems to be more frequent or more violent under braking so I only need to be careful in fourth gear for what that's worth.

According to the how-to-fix-it website, I'm now down to suspension elements. One of the advantages of a four wheel drive vehicle is that they're easier to get under than a passenger car, but I still think my friend Rudi had the best idea back in the day when he was thinking of digging a pit so he could work on the underside of his Volkswagens. And, now that I think of it, I could make one of those easily enough if I rented a little ditch digger, but I may save that up for later.

Instead, I was going to run to Home Depot and pick up some bricks to drive up onto to make it even easier, but today I remembered I already have some that I plan to use for that shed I never get around to building. I could drive the front of the Jeep onto those and  -- voila! -- plenty of room to mess around with suspension or even make it worse!

The bigger sticking point is most of the next things to check need two people: one to sit in the Jeep and wiggle the steering wheel back and forth and another to "observe" how the steering components work.

Hmmm.

I originally considered teaching my dog, Vinko, how to wiggle the steering wheel, but on second thought I discounted that plan. While it would be great for this purpose, the more I thought about it the less I considered it one of my better ideas. Sure, it may help here and now when I need to fix the Jeep, but what if he decides he'd like to enjoy a treat while I'm driving and grabs the wheel while I'm cruising along at highway speeds? That may not work out so well.

But, and here's where the clever part comes into play, my camera takes movies! If I can set it all up, I can aim the camera at the component I should be checking, begin making a video, and hustle into the Jeep sitting on the bricks and wiggle the steering wheel myself! Then, after a bit of that, get out of the Jeep, shut off the camera, and view the movie all without bothering another person.

What could possibly go wrong?

I get a kick out of people's reactions at the dog park when they ask me where I live. Invariably, when I tell them we (my dog, Vinko, and I) come from Landers, I'll get a variation on "way out there?" that never fails to make me smile.

I then correct them (frequently by asking why everyone has that reaction) and they back down, and sometimes the subject gets dropped and sometimes they ask more about my living arrangements or whatever. The reason I get such a charge out of it comes from an old saying and also this map:

First, the old saying, "One hundred years is a long time for Americans and one hundred miles is a long way for Englishmen."

I have to say I think that's true, and not just for Englishmen but for everyone in Europe and the old world. We in America don't have anything very old, not compared to what they have, so we get all excited about some building or other that dates back to the 1800s or, in Los Angeles terms, to the 1960s. It's sort of like what Erma Bombeck said to someone who was in her twenties: I've got cookie sheets older than that.

In the US, at least in the western part, one hundred miles isn't considered very far at all, maybe a two hour trip by car. Just about everyone I've known has driven many times those sort of distances on vacations or to shop or go to events, and no one's made a very big deal about it, but I realize a lot of people in Europe or elsewhere were born, lived, and died in the place they were born and never ventured more than a day's walk from their home.

On the map it's a little over ten miles (16km) from Landers, where I live, to Yucca Valley and a couple more to the dog park. That's about the same distance from Yucca Valley to Morongo Valley and just a little less than the trip from Yucca Valley to Joshua Tree.

I should note that Yucca Valley is by far the largest of the towns in the Morongo Basin, boasting over 25,000 people.

But, and here's what gets me, everyone in Yucca (as I call it) acts as if Landers is on the other side of the planet. Now, I admit that there's not much of a reason for any of them to drive up here for a visit, but if they want to go to Victorville or Barstow or Las Vegas, they have to drive through it, and maybe that's their only experience of the place.

But, really, people, c'mon.

Most of the residences in Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, and Morongo Valley are all within a mile of highway 62, which runs east to west on the map. The other highway, 247, runs from the 62 up to Victorville and passes through a couple of small places that even I consider "too far" out to live in. One of those is Johnson Valley, which is mostly an off road driving place and site of the annual War of the Hammers, and then there's Lucerne Valley where you can turn to drive up to Big Bear.

Along the way to Victorville, I might add, you go through Apple Valley, which is where my congressional representative has his home and also the nearest Best Buy. It takes close to an hour to make that drive, and I can't say that I do it a lot. Not in the summer, anyway.

Our little Morongo Basin, however, with its handful of towns, is home to maybe about fifty thousand people all told, and as someone used to driving forty-five minutes to work each day, I can visit any of them in less time than it used to take me to do that.

And, yet, despite the old saying, in Morongo Basin, it seems ten miles is a long way, even along paved, straight, and empty desert roads where you can actually drive the whole way at highway speeds. Also, anything from earlier than the sixties is ancient, so we test positive for both sides of the saying.

If you think the world's changed a lot in your lifetime, do yourself a favor and read something else.

As far as most of the things I'm interested in go, nothing has changed while I've been on earth or for the thousands of years that we've been around. Sure, how we do things has changed a lot, but we as people have changed very little, if at all. We still love and fight and bully each other and get hurt over the same things, we still try to make sense of the world and ask the same questions we always have.

We're pretty much the same as every other living thing on this planet, too, in the sense that we want things, but maybe different in that sometimes we can make that happen. A bunny might really want a carrot, but unless it bounces across one during its hopping, it's out of luck. We're pretty much unique, I think, in that we can make carrots happen. Sometimes.

And here's where it gets interesting.

I'll leave aside the question of whether or not we should change the world to be more to our liking and write a bit about just how it is we go about making that happen. Whether it's the love of a woman, a big pile of tasty carrots, rain to grow our crops, a healthy herd of goats, or the destruction of our enemies, humans have always wanted things and have tried any number of things to get the results they want.

As you can imagine, this wanting and trying isn't a recent thing, and is probably as old as humankind. Sir James G. Frazer, around the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about it. A lot. He came up with a twelve volume collection that described in agonizing detail the ways we've tried throughout our history to make the world more the way we want it to be.

He also put forth an argument that I think about quite a bit. I have no idea how well his ideas were accepted in the academic world (he was a Scot who studied at Cambridge), but whether or not they're true, they took hold with me.

We have to go back to the beginning to understand his thinking, back to the earliest cave men. Putting aside cultural, clothing, and other differences, they had a lot of the same problems we do. They needed their crops to grow, their enemies defeated, and that woman over there to love them, to give just three examples. How they tried to make that happen, and how we've tried ever since to make that happen is all cataloged in his work, The Golden Bough.

Simply put, Frazer came up with the idea that the first thing humans came up with is what he called primitive magic. Early man knew that it rained sometimes, but not always when and how much he wanted. So, they tried to change that, and the first thing they thought of was magic, as practiced by the witch doctors, shamans, and the like.

It started innocently enough with sympathetic magic, people going out with water and pouring it on their fields to show nature how it was supposed to act. What better way to get fertile crops than by taking someone out into the fields and screwing?

Maybe a bit later, or maybe at the same time, other magics were popular. If someone discovered that a spear with a bit of animal fur stuck onto it by chance killed a deer, they all started sticking fur on their spears. And so on.

The witch doctors kept track of all these coincidences and they became the way to do things (and were about as successful as you can imagine).

A bit later on, according to Frazer, some people weren't all that happy with the success rate and perhaps jealous of the power the witch doctor had over the tribe. And, instead of an impartial universe that would mimic our human activities in the fields, they came up with the notion that someone other than us was in charge of the rain and if we got on his or her good side, we'd be rewarded.

As Frazer put it, we progressed from magic to religion, and priests (in a generic sense) started telling their people who was in charge of the rain and how to please them. Gods for every big and little thing were worshipped and the priests soon replaced the witch doctors as the people in the tribe who knew how to get things done.

Every tribe, every culture, who'd had their own magical rituals and practices, pretty much all evolved to have their own religious practices and rituals, and Sir Frazer pretty much covers them all. Although his twelve volume compendium was later published as a much shorter one volume book, there's still pages and pages, chapter after chapter, detailing corn gods, dead, dying, and resurrected gods, and every other manner of things we've practiced and worshipped.

From there, we discovered science, and, in a nutshell, Frazer argues that sort of similar to evolution, we've gone from magic to religion to science to get things done, with each of these evolving in turn before being cast aside.

And I think there's a lot in what he has to say on the matter. We still practice magic with our lucky panties and underwear and it still seems to be true that chocolates and roses somehow get us love, and we still pray for rain or to get a job or score a point, and we've tried everything from seeding clouds to developing atomic weapons to get our way in the world.

So, at first we thought we were in charge of what happens, then it was god(s), and now it's us again. I didn't study any more sociology (Frazer's field) than I needed to graduate, so I have no idea if anyone is talking about him and his theory any more or if it's been disproven, but I still like it.

True or not, it explains a lot. Pretty much everything, actually.

Because of where I live, I do a lot of driving through the desert.

Most of my driving, I'd say, is done between 50-60 MPH (80-90KPH) because, well, as you can see from the photo, why not? The roads are mostly straight, mostly level, and there isn't very much in the way of obstacles.

The speed I drive is determined by two things: what mood I'm in and how windy it is. Lots of time I just cruise along, taking in the desert, and enjoying the views of the surrounding mountains and whatnot. At night, when it's dark, I can't see anything except half a football field ahead and the occasional light on a property, but I still drive the same speed.

If it's windy, as it often is in the desert, I sometimes can't drive as fast as I want because my Jeep has the aerodynamics of a brick. Heading into the wind feels like hauling a full trailer, and I just do the best I can.

I mention this because it's not a rare thing for me to be passed by someone when I'm driving into town or taking a trip across the desert, most often during the early morning or evening by someone who I imagine to be going or coming from work.

But not always.

I tell myself that a lot of the passenger cars that zip around me, safely or not, are tourists whose only desire is to get the hell out of the desert as quickly as they can. I can understand that. The desert isn't for everyone, and it's nothing but something to endure for most of the people who want to either leave or get to the coastal cities from the rest of America.

The Mojave desert, where I live, is a big place, and it can take hours to get through it, and it's not the only desert in the southwest. You can get from Los Angeles to the forested mountains of northern Arizona in a day, but then its more deserts all the way through the rest of Arizona, New Mexico, and into Texas.

So, yeah, a lot of people just want to get the desert over and done with. I don't mind it a bit if they want to pass me, and I don't mind it, either, if it's a local person in a pickup who can't stand the thought of having his masculinity challenged by driving slower than he wants and sees my slow Jeep as a challenge he can't just ignore.

Many of the people who live in the area around where I live have to travel forty miles or so to work and back every day, and they have no time for sightseeing or enjoying the desert. I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world and all the expanse of the desert to spend it in.

The only thing that bugs me, and that's only sometimes, are the radio stations I can receive. There's a local station (one) that plays popular music because, well, the lowest common denominator means something, and that one comes in just fine. I guess there may be others that play some version of country, but I never listen to those because I like country music even less than pop.

There's a Las Vegas station I can pick up that plays oldies, but mostly songs I didn't like all that much back when they were popular. When I'm in the right place, I can pick up a local NPR station, and that's great for listening to jazz on nighttime drives through the black desert and non-local news during the daytime hours.

And, there's an AM station that is ... different.

Late at night, the AM station has a conspiracy theory program that is, in a word, astounding. In the early morning there's a couple gay guys who are funny, and later on, of course, they play Rush Limbaugh and a bunch of Limbaugh wannabes.

I don't listen to any of those.

My Jeep's radio also plays CDs, so I've made some of those, but they invariably start skipping as soon as I leave the paved streets, which I do pretty often. Sometimes they get scratched, so my CDs have an expected life that can be measured in hours and I get used to missing parts of songs. Jose is too old to have a USB or media port, but I don't have any iPod or iAnything for music, anyway.

So I do a lot of driving, a lot of it in silence, and it's all part of the desert life. When  you're miles from anywhere, you get used to driving, and it helps to have a dog along for the ride.

After about seventeen hours, my power is back on.

Last night it was so warm I decided to hide from the heat by taking a nap. That was going fine until I woke up around six PM and was hot. Also, the little portable AC unit was off, as was everything else that likes to use electricity.

It's the sorta thing I'm getting used to.

This time, however, the power didn't come back on after a minute or so, and I had no idea how long it had been off. So, I did what any normal person would do and panicked (but just a bit). It was around 95 or so inside the cabin (mid 30s, centigrade) and while I could stay reasonably cool thanks to water and wearing a damp T-shirt, I worried about my dog.

This week's waste of money was getting him one of those "Cool Beds," which are basically a hot water bottle filled with some spongy stuff, big enough for a dog to lie on and a couple fingers thick. He wants nothing to do with it. In his defense, it's not very cool, either, but I guess it would be if I could fill it with cold water. Since the cold water that comes from the tap is warm, I'd need to refrigerate the three gallons or so, and there's just not that much room inside the refrigerator.

But ... onto events!

After calming down a bit, I loaded Vinko into the Jeep and we drove down to the dog park. It's usually cooler there, but that may just be because of the half hour or so it takes to get there. We stayed there until it was too dark for me to distinguish him from some of the other dogs, and then stopped at the market to pick up some food. I'd heard on the radio that someone had run into a power pole and it could be a few more hours until power was restored to my area, so I wasn't sure I could use the electric range.

It was around nine at night and very dark driving home, but I passed by a number of homes that had electricity on, which I took to be a good sign. A few miles away from home, I didn't see anyone had power, so I braced for the worst and made it back to the cabin.

I should point out that even in the best and brightest of nights, I can't see anything inside the Jeep when I park it away. It has no working interior lights (but I might be able to fix that by pulling some fuse), so I can only grab what I can feel and anything missing is lost until the next morning. I didn't lose Vinko, but it was too dark for me to dissemble and eat the rotisserie chicken, so I dined on cole slaw and went outside to watch the meteors.

My view of them was somewhat compromised by a lightning storm far off to the north that kept ruining my night vision, but I saw a few great shooting stars and any number of smaller ones even in spite of the small number of clouds overhead.

Then, I decided to go to sleep and wake up early and catch the last few hours of meteors before the sun rose. I went inside the cabin, and the temperature inside hadn't dropped a bit, so I did the next best thing and surprised Vinko.

Among everything else, I have a portable mattress, yoga mat type thingy that's a couple inches thick and rarely gets used. I've always been a bit wary of what goes on outside at night, but it was such a nice night out (maybe 85 or so), that I threw caution to the winds, got wet in a cold shower, and laid down in my underwear on the mat behind the cabin to watch stars and fall asleep.

Within a matter of minutes, Vinko got up from where he'd been lying on the sand and joined me on the mat and, as far as I know, we both fell asleep.

For a couple hours, anyway.

Around two in the morning it got a bit chilly outside bivouacing, so I went back inside. It was cooler there, too, and we slept until dawn.

In the process of all that, which honestly isn't very much at all, I'd managed to break my flashlight and awakened to a cabin that still had everything needed for modern living except electricity. I learned that, if I'm desperate enough, I can make and drink room temperature coffee, but that's about it. I knew better than to heat up the stuff inside the refrigerator by opening it, so I again packed up Vinko and we headed back to the dog park. I stopped at a gas station for some coffee (which tasted great!), and we got to the park around six-thirty in the morning, greeted everyone and their dogs, and sat around watching and chatting.

It got too hot for that by eight thirty in the morning. Since the local radio said the power outage was now supposed to be resolved by noon, I took the Jeep in to see if there was something wrong with its wheel alignment. For the past couple months, once or twice I'd hit a bump on the road and the front would shimmy and it would take a couple seconds for me to regain control. The alignment is fine, and the guy said it's a Jeep thing, took ten dollars from me, and gave me a free keychain (one of those caribiner things.

It wasn't anywhere near noon, so I had the oil changed, the tires checked for proper inflation, stopped at a couple stores, and drove back home. I called the power company and the new, updated time for power to be restored was three-thirty in the afternoon, but now the outage was a result of the light winds and they'd called for extra help (I'm guessing from Palm Springs).

We got back, I fixed the flashlight by taking it apart and putting it back together, and I finished a book I'd been reading. It was in the low nineties when I decided to take a nap, and within five minutes of my lying down, all the clocks beeped.

It was just after twelve, about seventeen hours after the power went off, so I turned on the computer, paid my electric bill ($47.57USD) and sent them a "thank you" message. Then, I wrote this.

Yesterday I woke up with neither my phone nor my Internet working.

My Internet connection died Tuesday afternoon, and I'd hoped that by unplugging everything and giving everything the night off would solve the problem. When it's working, my modem displays five lights -- power, system, transmit, receive, and LAN. The power light comes on when the modem is plugged in, but even getting it to light is not as easy as one might think.

The power connection reminds me of an older audio type connector. It's round and has a number of pins and requires a fair bit of twisting to get them all to align so I can actually plug it in. Then, instead of fitting securely in the socket, it just lays there and the power LED goes from blue, which is good, to red, which is not.

Sometimes I end up by putting some stress on the power cord by wedging it against the wall so that it's shoved firmly into the socket. When it's at its worst, if I even look at the damn thing sideways, it gets loose and turns off.

I've come to terms with it, though, and it only occasionally annoys me. Live and learn, as they say.

When the satellite dish was installed and the guy got me up and running, he warned me that this model of modem had a tendency to overheat and die, and he recommended I keep a small fan blowing on it. As luck would have it, I already owned a small fan, which I used to use to cool myself before moving here, and during the summer months I keep it trained on the damn thing.

Wednesday I noticed it was quite warm on one side, but other than keeping the fan on it, there wasn't much I could do. Then, sometime in the afternoon, the modem displayed just one light, the power on one.

Without either the system light, which I take to be a sign the modem is running its software correctly, it's LAN light, which goes on when it can see that it's connected to something, I wasn't surprised that Windows couldn't find the Internet or let me connect to anything. So, I just unplugged everything and called it a day. This has worked in the past, and I figured it would work again.

So, early Wednesday morning, I plugged it back in and nothing had changed. No flashing transmit and receive lights, no system light, no LAN light. Just the power one.

I says to myself, Grrrr, and fixed another cup of coffee.

Pretty much ever since I called Hughesnet and got connected, they'd been advertising a newer, faster plan than the one I have, one which requires a different modem. I wasn't interested in it for a couple reasons, but the last time I called them about a problem, Amanda (remember her?), mentioned that the plan and setup I have is pretty much past its sell by date.

Since I wanted to keep that plan for as long as I can, my first thought was to buy a replacement modem. This required two things: One, they still needed to sell them, and, two, I needed to call them and see about having them send me one or two.

Which is when I noticed the second problem. My phone couldn't find a signal (either!) and was stuck in "searching" mode. Another Grrr, another cup of coffee.

Before my Internet died, I'd seen some posts about people up here losing their cell phone coverage. Most of the people up here, of course, live in the cities and have those fancy ass G type things that let them use smartphones, so I hadn't given it much thought. Also, I can go for over a week without using my phone at all, so it wasn't any big deal to me.

But I did catch the end of the local news on the radio, and they were saying something or other about the outtage, so I waited.

I didn't have a working phone and had no Internet, but my TV worked, I had things to do, and books to read, so I was unhappy, but not without options.

A couple hours later my phone found a bar and I called Hughesnet to see about getting another modem. Instead of the usual options, I heard a recorded message saying they were having severe system problems, which they hoped to fix by that afternoon, and because of the volume of call, the projected wait time would be half an hour before I could speak with anyone.

I hung up.

It's been rather hot the past few days and it was expected to be even hotter today (yesterday), so I figured it would be a good day to drive up to Big Bear. It's always quite a bit cooler up there and I figured since he can't go to the park and play with other dogs because of his bronchial thing, I'd see how he felt about seeing a standing body of water.

So, I loaded up the Jeep with water and things, and drove the fifty miles or so up a winding mountain road to get to Big Bear. That was done mostly without incident, but I did overshoot one corner and a thrilling moment wearing a thousand miles off the tires as I skidded around the hairpin and out of my lane, but other than that the trip was uneventful.

We made it to a park next to (what's left of) Big Bear lake, and I met some women who'd taken their dog there, and we chatted a bit. Of course, they said lots of nice things about Vinko, and after a bit of that, we headed down to the shoreline.

Vinko, to my surprise, acted as if he didn't notice the water at all. I didn't expect him to get excited about the ducks, which he recognized as birds and, therefore, of no interest at all, but he didn't seem to notice the water, either. He waded right in, up to his ankles, and walked back and forth a bit, still on his leash. I didn't let him run free.

He was fine with wading until he spotted some moss on a nearby rock, gently waving as the water lapped the shoreline. That spooked him, and he'd have nothing more to do with the water and its wiggling plants for quite awhile.

He eventually got back in, again far enough to cover his feet, and that was about that.

When we got back home, my phone still worked and the Internet still didn't. I called Hughesnet and got an updated message that said the problem would be fixed later that night, and went about my business. Before going to bed, I tried Hughesnet again, and they'd gone back to the "sometime this afternoon" message, and we slept as best we could through another warm night.

Then, this morning, I plugged the modem back in and everything came up as good as ever. Also, it works and here I am, on the Internet and with a working phone, just like a regular person!

Back when I was married, my father in law would typically respond to any "How's it going?" or "How are you doing?" greeting with a shrug and "Could be worse," even occasionally extending it to the more common "Come va?"

I can't say that I'd ever heard anyone say that before, but I liked it and immediately picked it up as being not only a little different, but also true.

I've struggled with how to respond to these social niceties for quite awhile now, mostly because I worry too much about things. Yes, I know when someone meets me and asks "How are you?" they don't really mean anything by it, but something in me still makes me see it as a real question that deserves an honest answer.

Which I'm not always comfortable giving,

Because of my attitude and mental makeup, "fine" or "okay" aren't often the truth, and I don't want to lie to people and give them the wrong impression on the off chance they really are asking. And, even if I'm in the right frame of mind and have the time, I doubt whomever's asking really wants a full account of what's going on with me.

My ex-father-in-law's response, however, is a good quick way to answer. No matter what's going on with me, no matter how good or bad I'm feeling, it could always be worse. In fact, it could always be much worse, so I say "Could be worse," and feel I'm looking on the bright side.

What's interesting is how many people respond to that comment as if it's a bad or negative thing. I'm not keeping score or anything, but it seems like about half the time when people hear that, they react as if I'm saying things are horrible or at least very bad.

I don't get that.

The only thing I can come up with is they word worse and are thrown for a loop. Ohmigod, maybe they think, he's saying things are the worst, when, in fact, I'm saying the exact opposite. I've decided such people, naturally enough, aren't really listening to what I say, don't really care how I answer, and are just making idle chit-chat.

But I can't help taking even simple, everyday greetings as not being a legitimate question. Well, maybe I could, but I don't. It could be worse, I suppose.

The summer heat divides the people who visit our local dog park into those who go in the morning and those who are there in the evening. From about nine or ten in the morning until around six at night, it's usually vacant.

Let's say there's five to ten people there during the more hospitable hours and rarely more than a dozen dogs (because that's what I see). What's interesting to me is that hardly anyone who's there in the morning ever visits in the evening, which leaves me and one or two others who ever are there for both sessions.

That sort of makes sense because of how people divvy up and schedule their time, but that doesn't explain the animosity between the two groups. When the subject comes up, which it does with alarming frequency, neither group has anything good to say about the other.

To be fair, while the dogs romp and chase and play with each other, most of the conversation between the owners is just gossip. I don't know any of these people well enough to talk about them even if I wanted to. Vinko, my dog, gets along famously with both groups and he has his fans in each of them. There's usually one person who asks me to bring him around more because his or her dog likes playing with him, but these people live a lot closer to the park than we do.

As much as I'd like to take Vinko there more often, it's about a twenty-five mile round trip for me so I try to visit only when I also need something in town. So, one day I'll go in the morning and then pick up coffee, ham steaks, and tamales and then might visit the next evening when I've run out of bottled water, ramen, or milk. It works out pretty well, but it also keeps me on the fringe of each group.

They love seeing Vinko, or claim to, but we're not "regulars."

Maybe they do it among themselves when I'm not around, but I haven't heard any direct talk about politics. Sure, there's hints and dog whistles, but most of the talk is either about the weather or about the dogs and the things they do at their homes.

I don't mind talking about the dogs, especially not about mine.

Both groups get together outside of the park and have even invited me to join them, but I've yet to do that mostly because they meet up for lunch and that's not really a convenient time for me. I mean, it would be, except for being another trip to town and back and the gallon of gas I'd have to pay for and the wear and tear on Jose, my Jeep. And, to be honest, there just isn't anything I want to spend three or four hours in town hanging around to do.

I guess I'll stay as an outsider, but not an outcast, and try to juggle my involvement with both groups for as long as I can get away with it. I pretty much like both of them equally, as does Vinko, and I hope I never have to choose one or the other.

Because there are so damn many of them living up here, it's nearly impossible to go anywhere public and not have old people talk to me.

Part of that, of course, might be because I, myself, am an old person and they feel some sense of kinship, or it just might be that they want to talk. Unfortunately, what they most often bring up is how much better things used to be, as if that's some novel concept or a recent discovery they've made.

It is, rather, the most obvious thing in the world and has been so for as long as humans have been aging, but never mind that. They mention it, and I'm never quite sure why.

The most disturbing part of hearing that bromide is that the person uttering it rarely wants me to say anything other than "yep," or nod in agreement, leading me to think it's not so much an attempt to provide me with any information but more like some secret password that's used to determine whether or not I'm in the club.

What the people proclaiming it do not want to do is talk about its implications, which (naturally) is invariably my reaction. I immediately go through, and discard, three possible responses:

1.  Agree, and point out that all these changes happened on our watch
2. Agree, and sadly shake my head while saying "and we let it happen."
3. Agree, look down, and mumble something about how we caused it

I've never used any of these, in part because I'm afraid to and also because I've convinced myself that I'd hear back something about filthy liberals, commies, hippies, or non-white people. Any of those would only make me sadder and feel even worse.

The world is different than the one I grew up in. I'm not convinced that most of the perceived differences stem from the fact that when I was growing up, I was a kid. Naturally things are better when you're a kid. Not only don't you know what's really going on and have, as your main task, to play and learn and grow, but you're a child!

So, not only is my view of the world I grew up in skewed toward wonderfulness, it's incomplete. Maybe everyone else can, but I can't possible compare the world when I was busy eating dirt and tormenting ants to the one I now find myself in.

Yes, it's changed, and I have no idea how different it would have been to grow up now instead of then, and I'm in no position to be able to make value judgements about which is better. It wouldn't matter, anyway, the world is what it is as the young folks say. It always has been and always will be.

After a few years of living up here in the desert, here's what I know about it: Hardly anything at all.

The desert is an unpopular place to live, especially the part where I live. The most striking thing about it compared to the city where I lived before is the amount of land there is. Los Angeles is a huge city, no doubt about that, but you never get to see much of it at one time because of all the buildings, development, and overall evidence of human occupation.

The desert has hardly any of any of those. My neighbors are all over a hundred yards away, and each of them separated by at least that much from their neighbors. There are no multi storey houses within view and it's several miles to the first street light. There are a number of small enclaves of humanity between me and the nearest town, but mostly it's just desert. Rolling, lumpy, sand and rock marked with creosote bushes and the occasional Joshua Tree (for which the area is famous). Around many, if not most of the houses, foreign trees have been planted to provide shade and if you get close to them, your view of the desert is destroyed.

Those trees don't really interrupt the view, especially since they don't grow in clusters, and the bushes usually only get to about chest high.

Because of that, you pretty much can see to the horizon, or at least to the mountains that ring this part of the world. You can actually see the land, and there's a lot of it.

As I've mentioned before, this area is classified as "rural," but that brings up all sorts of associations for me that don't fit. Still, if your only options are rural and urban, it has to do. What rural means in this instance is mostly dirt roads and huge stretches of nothing between one thing and the next. Yes, there's a place to take my recyclables and one where I can buy fabric or office supplies or get water or propane services, but they're all miles from each other and often have unpaved parking lots. It took me some getting used to go to a business and find just the building with its perimeter scrubbed free of vegetation by hundreds or thousands of earlier visitors. You park where you want in those places. No one minds.

The three or four large shopping centers in the nearby town, of course, have paved parking lots with all the usual markings. As you'd expect, those shopping centers are also spaced out with naked desert buffering them on all but the side facing the highway.

I was really struck by how uneven the surface of the planet is. A two minute drive takes you up and down rises that I never noticed when all the land was developed and filled with houses and buildings or even with trees in the forests I've visited. When you can't see more than a kilometer in any direction, you can't notice it. Although the view from my home stretches almost to the horizon, I don't have to drive more than a minute to be in an area I can't see from home because it's in a dip or behind a small rise.

I expected the heat for which the desert is most famous (and famously shunned) and humbling views of mountains, but not how damn much land there is up here. I think I mentioned before how the realtor who found this place and helped me to buy it herself came from Redondo Beach and said a lot of former beach people moved here. In talking with some of the few people up here, I've come to see she's right. One of the same things that draws people to the ocean or seaside is copied in desert living: the sense of expansiveness. Quite the same state of mind that I got endlessly watching the waves come and go in the foreground of a seemingly endless body of water I feel when looking over the desert stretching out forever.

So, this ended up having nothing to do with the title, which means I can keep that idea in mind when I feel like writing next time.

Maybe I knew once how the brain remembers things, but if so, I've forgotten it. Probably something having to do with electricity and chemical reactions.

I think I once knew more facts than I do now, even had more memories, but I think what happens is that if I don't refresh them by thinking about them again, over time they fade away. I usually know that I used to know a particular thing, so I'm not completely forgetful or senile, but other than being aware of the hole where a particular name or thing should be, I just don't know.

I notice it often with words. I used to have a lot more words readily available to me when I went to say or write something, but that number has dwindled and I hate how often I know a word but can't think of it and have to use another one that doesn't mean the same thing (or what I want to say) at all.

What I think is happening is all between my own ears and behind my own eyeballs, obviously.

What I think is going on is, like I said, that I'm not refreshing the memories often enough, not keeping the path to that memory open and clear. I'm not sure if its being overrun or overgrown by other things, or if it's simply neglected and I don't have the ability or tools on my own to resurrect it.

When I've forgotten something, like today's name of a movie I saw years ago, I know it has a name and I can even remember parts of the movie. Just, not its name. It's not like I sit around wracking my brain trying to recall it, either, I know it's not there for me to pick up any more and that makes me a bit sad.

But, also like today, when I'm reminded what the name is, I get the feeling that I'll know it again for a good, long time.

A few years ago I had a similar hole in my brain when I needed to know what eight times nine was. It only took me a few seconds to remember (seventy-two), but what was weird is that the answer didn't feel right. I even did the math (subtracting eight from eighty and nine from eighty-one) to confirm the answer, but it just didn't feel like the right answer, not the way twenty feels like the right one for four times five.

Maybe if I start writing every day again I'll get some words back. Or, maybe they're gone for good (or at least until someone or something reminds me). I know there are many books and characters and movies whose names or stories I no longer have readily accessible, but I think that's just the way it's going to be. I don't have time to read or see them all again. Besides, there's too many new ones.

If I'd had a job or been surrounded by people who talked about them, maybe I would have remembered a lot more of them. Instead, I know the boot code for a DEC PDP 1170, the IP address for a useable Class C license and my ex-wife's bra size, but none of those come into play much any more.

Maybe, by working at it, I can keep my memories alive and even get back some that are long gone. The good news is, in the end, it won't matter much either way.

Just after the Memorial Day Weekend I spied a small mouse who had taken up residence inside the cabin, or who was at least "just visiting."

I checked with my dog, Vinko, and we both decided that small as it was, there just wasn't room here for a third resident. Although, unlike lizards, Vinko ignored it, I thought it best not to tempt fate and bought a trap to capture the rodent.

I've killed countless mice and rats during my life, easily over a hundred all told, and even shot one with a .22 inside a place I was renting, but the desert is a harsh enough environment without me adding to some poor creature's struggles. This time, I got one of those "catch 'em live" traps, baited it with peanut butter instead of their recommended (and pricey) special attraction formula stuff, and spent the next few days passively hunting.

It worked.

Once I confirmed that I had, in fact, a mouse stuck inside the black plastic box, I had to decide where to release it. When I lived in Los Angeles, I'd occasionally catch a live mouse and there it was an easy decision: near that restaurant I didn't much care for.

Up here, however, there was no such place nearby.

The easiest thing to do, of course, is to just take it a ways off in any direction and let it go, so I ruled that out immediately. With my luck, I figured it would find it's way back here and I wanted none of that, but there honestly isn't much nearby except desert and homes.

I don't know any of my neighbors well enough to dislike them enough to foist a plague of varmints upon them and I rather like the post office and the service it provides, but, fortunately for me, there is a third option.

World renowned for its psychic and spiritual cleansing and healing powers, the Integratron would obviously make a fine home for a mouse. I have no idea if they have any food there, but it's surrounded with the same desert plants that surround everything else up here, and any desert mouse who's worthy of the name should be able to find something to its liking around the Integratron itself or even in the adjacent buildings.

So, about a week ago, I set it off to live at the Integratron.

It didn't take me long, maybe even during the drive home, for a couple things to occur to me. The first, and most immediate, is that I'd set a creature to live on its own in an unknown place. Even if it could find or make a home and find food, I'd doomed it to a sad, stressful. and lonely existence. Even if it could survive in the shadow of the mighty Integratron or could find a way inside, it would die lonely and unloved, its life a mockery of all that we hold valuable.

The good news is, I was also sure that I had not, in fact, caught the only existing mouse in the cabin. I've never heard of them living a solitary existence and, if there's one mouse, there's gotta be more. I hoped to capture another one and let it loose, also near the Integratron, so the two could frolic, swap tales and tasty seeds, and maybe even set up home and flourish and thrive in the natural vortex of cosmic energy.

If they were lucky, I'd even get one of each gender so they could mate and raise a family of Integramice.

And, yesterday, I trapped a second one, and after taking it to my now designated mouse freedom zone, it scurried off into the same bush where I'd freed the first one. Maybe they'll meet up, maybe they won't. All I can do is my part.

And worry about where the hell they're going to find water.