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.

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.

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.

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.

Opinions are of two types, but I'm not sure which one is the default.

When I was going to school I heard one of those pithy sayings that I maybe wrote down but don't remember very well. It was one of those elitist things that either made me feel better about myself, which is unlikely, or inspired me, which also isn't likely. All that I do remember about it is it saying that for the classes of students (undergrad, those with a graduate degree, and those who've earned a doctorate), each was qualified to have a level of opinion on a subject. I think those with a doctorate were entitled to hold a theory on something, but I don't remember the others. Someone may or may not have been able to hold an opinion, but I don't recall what level of study would give you that.

So, that's pretty useless since I'm only guessing you need a bachelor's degree for one, a master's for the next one up the chain, and a doctorate for the highest, but I don't remember if there was anything for people without college degrees or what the earned levels were.

Fortunately, that's not the point.

All I do remember is that at one level you were allowed to have an opinion, Now, that might be considered very snobby, but we do use the same word for two very different things. Opinions, without qualification are contrasted with either informed opinions or uninformed ones. When you hear someone talk about an uninformed opinion you can be pretty sure that they mean opinion to be an informed one. By the same token, when someone talks about informed opinions, plain old opinions are implied to be of the uninformed variety.

There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm going to try and be my usual anal self in the future and avoid using the word opinion to mean the uninformed ones. We all say that we have opinions about everything, but what I think we have, instead, is simply reactions. Those can come from our guts (or lizard brains) or from years of study. From now on, I hope to restrict the word opinion to the more elevated ones and understand that what most people mean by opinion is just a reaction to something.

There's nothing judgemental in that, nothing that discounts anything. We're all, every day, confronted by hundreds, thousands of things that we've never studied but maybe, at best, just heard about. To all of those, I have a reaction. I think an informed opinion (an opinion) is something much more rare and entails knowing the plusses and minuses, the pros and cons, and often not having even reached a decision on the matter.

But that's just like my opinion, man.

I know it's unpopular with some people to listen (or pay any attention) to smart people, but I get a lot of it. While those who choose to ignore people whom they consider elite (usually after calling them that name and others and otherwise dismissing what they have to say even before considering it) yell pretty loudly, I don't pay much attention to their shouts and, instead, often end up thinking about things in a new way.

The last couple weeks I've heard things about Facebook that make sense to me and let me look at it differently than I had.

Instead of seeing it just as way of being insulted by people who sought me out for friendship, trading "likes" with others I have no hope or chance of meeting, or letting others know what's caught my eye on the Internet or what I'm thinking about at the moment, Facebook also serves the valuable service of letting people know that I'm still alive and have survived whatever latest calamity the desert has decided to throw my way.

It's also, first and foremost, a business.

And that's where it's sorta the opposite of most of the things I think of as businesses, by which I mean stores. When I go shopping, I buy something that someone has made and while I lose money in the process, lots of other people get some. The people who actually made it get some, the people who employ them get some, the people who advertise it get some, the people who deliver it to the store get some, the people who employ the ones doing the delivering get some, the people who work in the store I bought it in get some, the people who own that store get some, and probably others I'm not thinking about.

I buy a shirt, a whisk broom, a chair, or some groceries or whatever, and other people make money on the deal. I'm a consumer in this case, and the product I buy is the product.

But capitalism works in other ways, too. Sometimes, such as when I'm watching TV, it gets a little more complicated. For one thing, I'm paying someone to provide me those channels, a service, but the channels I watch get most of their money from advertisers. The channels spend some money producing the shows and then sell to advertisers some time to try to convince the people watching the show to buy whatever is being advertised. So, yes, channel or network makes its money by selling my eyeballs to advertisers and, well, that makes me the product being sold.

With a few exceptions such as HBO, that's the business model. The networks sorta let you watch for free, but make their money by selling the audience for their programming to someone who's interested in selling you gold or car insurance.

And that, increasingly, is how Facebook is working. While I think of it as way of showing people what my dog looks like lying in the sand, Facebook could care less about that. What they've decided to do is to make me a product, not a consumer, and to make their money by selling my eyeballs to those who think I might want to buy a matchmaking service.

When I use or visit Facebook, I'm not a consumer, I'm a product. And, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.

In addition to the usual privacy concerns and distracting ads, I have some other problems with Facebook.

One of them, or maybe two, is of my own doing. Since I don't want the handful of people who follow me on Twitter to be left out, nearly every of my Facebook postings is a tweet that is also sent to Facebook, which means they're invariably very short and heavily edited to fit into the 140 character limit. Being me, I have much more to say than comfortably fits in that limit, but I try.

Also, I don't want to be one of those people with several dozen updates a day so I spend more time biting my tongue (and fingers) than is probably good for me. And, although I tell myself that I don't need to say it just this minute but can save it for later, I rarely do. This means much of my wisdom is known only to me, which is a tragedy.

Then there's the point of this entry: pictures.

I guess it's the nature of Facebook that what most people share are pictures, pictures of all sorts of things, nearly all of which are better than any pictures I take. A lot of those pictures are in fact cartoons, many are videos, and nearly all of them are fun to look at.

But I have little confidence in my ability to take photos and it's also sort of a pain for me to upload them. Just about everyone now has a smartphone or some such device that makes sharing photos easy, but not me. It's not that I'm necessarily cheap, but last time I checked, there's little to no coverage where I live. My old flip phone works okay, but 3G or 4G coverage is iffy, at best.

Also, I'm cheap and am saving myself some stress by my decision not to keep up with things. It's kind of refreshing, for a change, to be able to ignore a whole bunch of business and tech developments, just to look at them dispassionately and not feel bound to keep up or ashamed for not doing so.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I'd be more than happy to share pictures of where I live and the places I visit except for a couple difficulties. One, I don't go out and visit very many places and even fewer of those could be considered interesting. I'm fairly certain just about everyone has seen what stores and supermarkets look like and the ones up here aren't any different than the ones everybody else goes to.

And, I live in the desert.

What that means, among other things, is not only is the landscape bleak and, to most people, uninteresting, but it only very rarely changes and even when it does, it almost always does so very slowly. Pictures of nature are always popular, but mostly if they're of something neat to see.

There may or may not be wildlife up here. Other than birds in the morning and evening, just about every creature that calls this place home has learned a valuable lesson: if you're exposed or can be seen, you die. If the desert sun doesn't get you, something else will.

So, while there may be many interesting creatures up here, I only very rarely see them. No flocks of rabbits, no epic migrations of turtles, not even any armies of snakes, rats, or other rodents. When I have managed to see something larger than my fist, it's an individual something and, most likely, soon to regret being so visible.

This area just doesn't support great or even noteworthy numbers of anything. Maybe it's a veritable hive of activity during the night, but that's when I'm usually inside with my dog, Minardi, whom I try to shield from scorpions and rattlesnakes.

I could conceivably take pictures of the birds I see every day, but not any good ones. For some reason, they flee as soon as I show up with my camera as well as not being anywhere I can see during most of the day. Besides, everyone has a pretty good idea of what crows look like and the Internet has much better pictures than I could dream of taking of mourning doves or roadrunners.

I do see plenty of ants, but again, they're not much different than the ones you see. I think sometimes a dragon fly buzzes around in the evening, but it may just be something that looks enough like one (a flying insect about as long as a finger) that I call it that.

So, everyone on Facebook wants pictures, not words, and not only do I feel more comfortable writing, but there's not all that much for me to take pictures of.

So, in the end, I don't have much worth sharing.

You'd think I'd be better about such things.

I wouldn't say it's a lot, but the amount of time I spend worrying about rats, mice, and snakes is certainly … noticeable. While it's true that things like that live up here in the desert, I honestly don't know if they're a problem in my little piece of it.

The land around here is littered with holes, which I take to be burrows, but one thing about the desert that's becoming increasingly obvious is that it doesn't change much. In fact, without someone or something doing something to it, it hardly ever changes at all.

It has no reason to, for one thing, but more importantly, I think, is what makes it the desert in the first place: no water.

Back in Junior High I heard the joke that science had discovered the universal solvent but had no place to put it (you see, being a universal solvent, it would eat through everything). Not particularly funny, I admit, but it laid the way for later on when I learned that water, of all things, comes as close to being a universal solvent as anything nature has given us.

Trees, rocks, dirt, mountains, you name it, water wears it down. Think of the Grand Canyon. It also, I believe, does its job at tearing apart vegetation and probably even dead animals.

There is no water in the desert, which I guess explains its name. This is taking me some getting used to. The guide book for the local Joshua Tree National Forest mentions in passing when talking about litter that many things like egg shells or orange peels that can be more or less safely discarded everywhere else have to be properly disposed of in the desert. Instead of rotting away and enriching the soil or whatever, they just lay out in the sun and dehydrate.

And, stick around forever.

Which brings me back to my burrows. Yep, they're out there. I'd guess there are a couple of hundred on my property alone but I have no idea how old they are or if they're “active.” With no rains to change the land, to crumble their edges, fill them in, or do any of that stuff, they just sit there.

A few days before I legally owned this place I was up here giving it a visit, looking at it and marveling that it would soon be mine. I was checking it out, seeing more closely what I was getting myself into, when a rabbit ran across what I now call the back yard (the area of my property that's outside the chain link fence).

Yes, I smiled.

In the four months or so since then, I've seen nary a thing on the surface. No lizards, no snakes, no varmints of any description. Nothing, really, except that one fuzzybug and ants both red and black.

I'm not entirely surprised by that, given as it's winter and I think this is when any self-respecting creature would be hibernating far underground instead of freezing it's ass off on the surface. When spring comes and encourages the plants to do more than just hunker down and put up with the winds, I suspect there may be more activity, maybe even more rabbits.

And then, I fear, more rats, mice, and snakes, but I honestly have no idea.

I'm worried about them being a problem without even knowing if they'll be a problem at all. Until I've lived here a year, I really have no way of knowing how “active” the land will be.

I remember feeling the same way about coyotes.

They're obviously up here and I've seen a couple, or the same one twice, on the road a few miles from my home. Once during the night when I was watching the sky fall in little chunks of meteors I heard them, far away, howling at something or other. I assembled a small pile of handy rocks near the door to throw at them only to learn from Jim across the street that he used to raise chickens and never had any problem with coyotes.

Which laid to rest my worries about Minardi fending off roving herds.

But, back to the rats. I've never seen any sign of them on the ground, but they're also very sneaky. A few weeks ago when I finally got around to cleaning out a shed that had been erected right next to the rear of the house I did (for me), a pretty thorough cleaning and in all my brushing and sweeping found a total of one of what my mom referred to as “calling cards.”

And that single, solitary tiny turd may have just as easily come from a mouse. And that, like everything else up here, may have been left any time since the day the shed was built.

When I tore down the bush by the corner of the house to get rid of the hiding place it offered to snakes and rats, the one living thing I disturbed in the process was a moth.

One moth.

So, yeah, I'm worried. All those burrows I found inside the fence have had their openings stepped on to more easily see if something comes out. But until I live through all four seasons up here, I have no idea if I have anything to worry about or not.

In visiting King Clone the other day, a few things came to mind.

First, since it's no longer the oldest living thing on the planet, Americans don't really care much about it. It used to be number one, back before some discoveries in the past few years, but it's now dropped to third or possibly fourth, with the result that most people may think of it as an oddity more than anything worth seeing.

Still, it's out there, and not too far from my desert home.

Plants have a tough time of it, and not just those trying to eke out an existence in the high desert where there's very little rain and they're forced to live in sand composed of deconstructed granite.

Worse, other than vegans, vegetarians, and some foodies and gardeners, no one cares very much about the half of life that isn't animals. Even the best of plants aren't anywhere near as cute as a kitty and, to be frank, they don't exactly do very much. Oh, sure, some of them are pretty, but other than suffering the ravages of neglect and dying inside the home, if they can't be eaten or used as building supplies or fuel, we pretty much leave them alone.

In the case of King Clone, it (or he), is very much left alone, which is probably a good thing.

It may be over an 11,000 year old plant, but being located on the outskirts of an Off Road Vehicle area didn't bode well for its seeing its 12,000 birthday. So, someone put a wire fence around the area it's living in, which is about the only thing that sets it apart from everywhere else in the desert.

It used to be said of Microsoft that their policy against computer viruses and whatnot was keeping all their software secret. Whoever is interested in, or maybe even responsible for, keeping King Clone around, is taking a page from that book. I'm not sure there were ever going to be crowds of people flocking to look at an old plant, but there are certainly no lines of visitors, no souvenir booths, nothing in the way of guides or even signs. It's there, and if you want to look at it, you've got to find it.

Which, maybe I did.

Being unmarked has the advantage of keeping away the merely curious, which is probably a good thing in this land of rugged individualists. It's unlikely that anyone would just shoot it for the hell of it, but I wouldn't put it past those who haven't yet learned to put up with being told what to do or whose desires are solely driven by what they want, might just want to kick it, pluck at it, run over it, or otherwise destroy or injure it just for the hell of it. People are like that.

Since I'm guessing most people don't even know it's there, it's very much left alone.

The only indication I found of its location was placed by what I can only imagine are hippies since they made a tiny cairn on the roadside and a small arrow of rocks pointing under the fence. I hoped a similar cairn would exist inside, indicating King Clone's location, but I didn't see any.

What I did see was, of course, thousands of those creosote bushes, some in rings. Whether or not I saw King Clone is up for debate, but even with knowing that it was it, I'm confident I saw it since my eye past over pretty much everything in the area.

If it's still out there, I must have seen it.

(This website – http://www.lucernevalley.net/creosote/photo_tour.htm – does a better job than I could ever hope to do) The signs he saw, I didn't.

Just like in the cities, Christmas in the desert is cold but warmed by brightly decorated houses.

Some people may be surprised to hear that, and I have to admit that I wasn't expecting it, either. It's not that I didn't decorate my place (I didn't), but I don't think I quite expected to be so many people up here and so many of them to be in such a festive mood.

First, a word about living a desert community (if I can call Landers that). In the cities I grew up in there were dense population in apartments and a little farther out, residential areas of homes sitting on modest lots right next to each other. There were many blocks of these, and even farther out, huge tracts of land that had been leveled, paved, and turned into blocks and streets of tract housing, a large collection of homes that all looked pretty much alike since they were all built by the same company.

Here, it's not quite like that.

Along the main highways there are occasional communities of ten to twenty thousand people, roughly, that have pretty much everything in the way of shops and services we've come to rely on. And just like the cities, they have apartment buildings and complexes and those single family houses sitting in rows on the street. But (obviously), there are far fewer of each because of the smaller number of people.

I live about ten miles away from the closest of these, but there are a few more within twenty miles or thirty-five kilometers or so. They're often just a few blocks deep from the highway and beyond them is … land (in this case, desert land).

Some time ago, all of this desert land was marked off into a square grid by the government, who owned the land, and then further divided into smaller parcels. Then, I heard, the land was given to anyone who built a home on it and, I guess, could prove they lived there.

As a result of this, over time, some of those parcels were further divided by the people who owned them and sold to others who were looking to live in the desert, surrounded by sand and who liked this sort of thing.

What we have now can be pictured like this:

Imagine a huge expanse of featureless desert as seen from a small plane. Then, draw a checkerboard of paved roads and, within the resulting squares, smaller checkerboards of dirt roads.

The squares inside the paved roads aren't all the same size, though. The average size, I'm guessing, is five acres, or about twenty thousand square meters, but some are twice that, some half that size, and a smaller number even smaller. Actually, it's not always easy to tell because some lots are empty and there was never any consistent placing of the houses on them, anyway. I mean, somebody looked at their five acre parcel, found the flattest spot, and put up a dwelling, which might be anywhere on the land.

We now have the expected variety of houses up here. About half (?) are “normal” homes, the kind just like you'd see anywhere in southern California, in any of our cities no matter how large or small they are. Regular houses with the only distinguishing feature being a propane tank somewhere close to the house. Some of these places are landscaped beautifully, some only right around the house, and some fill the extra land with horses or what have you.

And not all of the properties have fences around them. In fact, I'd say most don't, but nearly all of them have at least some fencing like mine does.

Anyway, here and there, sometimes in clusters, there are abandoned properties. These are often, but not always, tiny homes like the one I'm living in. Driving around it's easy to spot most of the empty places because vandals have broken windows, walls or roofs have collapsed, or it just looks like no one has been there in years.

Many of the homes up here I figured to be vacation or weekend places where people from “the city” would visit to drive around on the dirt, remember what the night sky looks like with stars in it, use to manufacture meth, or just hang out and drink. But, driving around here at night, it became clear that there were more people living or staying here for the holidays than I thought.

At first it was just a few, but many of the places have the same holiday lighting as I'd gotten used to in the city. With the greater distances between the houses, it was never like the block of lights I saw in Los Angeles, but one here, one there, each one separated by one or more football fields from their neighbors.

I especially liked seeing the inflatable snowmen sitting out front.

So, up here it's cheery, festive, and Christmas-y, just more spread out. Also, Santa made it up here last night and stuck some little treats in the pockets on the back of the Christmas gloves I got from my sister and opened last night.

So, I have a new blog which is pretty the same as my old one.

With the rate everything is crumbling around me, it's only a matter of time before my half-dozen domain evaporates. That's okay, it was never popular and hasn't served any real purpose for the past few years, anyway. It was, I guess, just a vanity thing.

I moved my old blog over to this Blogger address to make sure that my immortal words of wisdom could be found until Google decides to shut this feature off. In the meantime, maybe it will be quicker for them to search if they care to and have a spare robot.

This particular entry is just to introduce my new site. I don't have any more wisdom to impart or anything particularly witty to say, but maybe writing offline and uploading when I can will entice me into using up some of Google's generous disk space offer and might even get me to update more frequently.

I can hardly update less often. I'm not convinced what I'm thinking about things is any more interesting than it used to be and there's still much more that I feel I shouldn't say than I should, but at least I have a new spot to post entries when the mood strikes.

And, it seems to be okay for just posting ramblings.

My Half-Dozen.net site is still up and running (at least for the time being), but I'm too scared to actually look to see when it will die. Feel free to steal any of the wonderful pictures of me that are there and there's still time to make a $20 donation to a worthy cause (me) to keep my phone working even if you can't afford the $10,000 gift to lower your taxable income. Yeah, it will look as if you're paying for editing services, but I won't tell.

I'm a big fan of nice, round numbers and order, but that puts me at odds with the part of the universe that isn't made up of humans, which is to say most of it.

Today is New Years day in most of the world. This is a day heavily laden with moment and meaning, but I'm not sure exactly why it's today. It's not that I object to January being the first month, but it feels pretty arbitrary to have the new year begin right now.

People, being what we are, have probably always counted days. Well, they're pretty noticeable, what with the sun rising and each one separated from the rest with all that night time and cooler temperatures. And, I suspect that it didn't take us too long to notice that days get longer or shorter, that leaves change into beautiful colors before falling off some of the trees, and that snow shows up. Early humans, I'm thinking, when they weren't busy trying just to survive, must have noticed these things and ended up thinking in terms of years.

Days are easy to figure out, years are pretty obvious, but weeks are entirely made up.

The thing is, though, that January first isn't anything special. If we're not going to say a year begins with something sensible, like being the shortest one, the longest one, or one of the two that have equal daylight and night time, we're pretty much down to just picking one at random and saying “It starts now.”

I could even accept a year beginning on some momentous, special day, even something as meager as the birthday of the guy who came up with this silly calendar with its leap years and weird structure. Sadly, though, as near as I can figure out, January first simply is, and that's all there is to it.

The thing is, no matter how much I may want it, one year isn't a nice round number of days that we can sensibly divide up. We have to take the world for what it is and attempt to make it fit some ideal we have, and what we have now just barely works. There are people trying to come up with better calendars with leap weeks every several years instead of leap days every fourth, but I'm afraid even that Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar still has the year starting on a day we wouldn't look twice at if it weren't just for some lucky placement.

Food aside, just about everyone complains about the Chinese.

I recently watched a documentary, Last Train Home, that made me regret some of the things I've felt, thought, and maybe even written about my take on the Chinese.

Conservatives simply hate the Chinese because, well, they're communists. Many liberals have trouble with them because of human rights issues, and I think Americans all over the political spectrum are upset about financial things. True, a lot of that is just hysteria and it's also true that buying US debt is simply us acting as their bank, but we all got excited about Japanese investment a couple decades ago and human nature hasn't changed at all since then.

I avoid buying some Chinese goods some times simply because I often want to use something like a screwdriver more than once. If it's something I expect to use once and throw away, like paper towels or eyeglasses with plastic lenses that are going to become less useful every time I use them, I often go with cheap.

This upsets people who think whenever I do that I'm supporting a slave state. While this may be true, it's more the government of China than its people that I think most have trouble with. That documentary, Last Train Home, changed my thinking about the people.

Dramatically.

I don't know what Lixin Fan wanted to do when he made his film. I rarely about things like that choosing, instead, to let the work speak to me for itself. He may have wanted to show us how the people suffer or it may have just been to show us the largest human migration on the planet.

What I got out of it was a deep appreciation for how the people in China struggle to survive and better themselves, things I cannot fault them for. Peasants living on farms have no money and (not surprisingly) want to get things for themselves and their families. To get any money at all, they have to move to cities, work in sweatshops that allow those with little or no education to assemble things, and live in horrifying conditions.

This film, by the way, shows us one such family.

After making the heartbreaking choice to leave their children, mom and dad scrape out a dismal life only to return, as most Chinese do, home to celebrate Chinese New Year. In a touching scene, they give their teenage daughter the present of a phone, and I tear up even now just thinking about it.

It's easy for us in America to take our way of life for granted. Seeing how the other 95% of the world lives is always humbling, especially since those of us who were born here had nothing to do with it.

I can no longer turn my nose up at Chinese goods, not knowing that someone, somewhere in China needs a job so they can pack their meager goods in a cardbox suitcase to travel and hope to live as well as I do.

My heart isn't stone.

I have neighbors whom I've never met and who obviously know nothing about me. Oddly, I think about them quite a bit.

You see, it's like this: I use them frequently when deciding things.

Let's say I want something, an event that happens quite a lot as it turns out, that someone else wants, too. We both want it, but only one of us is able to get it.

Since I want it, I have a tendency to think I should be the one to get it. That other person, no matter who they are, probably feels the same and probably ignores my wants, knows nothing of them, or somehow feels more justified in getting it than letting me have it.

At times like these, I try to remember that third person, that mysterious neighbor. I want whatever it is and so does the other guy, but since I'm rather involved in the result, my decision making process is heavily skewed. I want it and, often enough, that's more than enough reason for me to think I should get it.

The third person doesn't care which one of us gets it; he or she couldn't care less. I try to remember that and to use that to assist my own thinking. If some third party doesn't care if I get it or not, why should I?

Unless there's some compelling reason, which is hardly ever the case, it's better you should get it than me.

Some of the things I've learned are things I'm happy about. Not all of them, of course, and maybe not even many, but a few of them I've are ones I'd even pick and not just because very few people choose them.

While hearing and reading are common enough, my experience has been that not many people actually listen to what's being said or limit their reading to what is actually on the page. It seems to be a large part of the human experience to add ideas in, to read between the lines, and end up understanding or hearing things that were never brought up.

Listening or reading carefully, I admit, is much more work than jumping to conclusions, but it's something I was taught to do and I'm glad it's part of me. I rather like not hearing "that was a stupid thing to do" and not misunderstanding that as "you're stupid."

Then again, I also assume (without any reason to) that most people are as careful about what they say, how they tell things, as I am, and I have a sneaking suspicion that's rarely the case.

A second very rare quality I have is, for lack of a better word, patience. Every day I'm bombarded with a lot of claims, but I've learned to resist the temptation of believing everything I hear just because it lines up with things I already believe.

One reason for this was my (questionable) education. While studying philosophy may not have been a particularly sound decision as far as, you know, work goes, for me (at least), it got me to learn how to think and exercise my mind. Subject matter aside, philosophy is taught by presenting some idea and then challenging it. First you learn to understand what someone is saying, then you learn what the problems are with that position.

You cannot do one without the other.

I remember some professor when we were studying the ancient Greeks telling us something along the lines of "You can't just say that he's wrong because modern physics has taught us that the world's not made of fire, earth, water, and air." To argue against the position, you have first buy into his argument, comprehend what he's saying, and then using the rules of his world, see what's wrong with it.

So, the first thing I do is try and understand someone or something on its own terms. Only then can I see what's wrong with it.

Part of this, and a real learning experience for me, came early in my work life. At the time I was working at Lockheed (in their credit union), and someone intentionally or not misheard something about $600 toilet seats. Maybe they read something and only understood the words toilet seat, or maybe they thought they were being cute by calling it that.

In any case, the media exploded and people began shaking their fists about this obscene fleecing of the US government.

And, on its face, it sounds like an absurd idea to charge the taxpayers $600 for something you can get at Home Depot for about ten dollars.

Lockheed, of course, tried to explain things and sent all us employees and probably most of the media memos pointing out that the item in question wasn't a toilet seat and explaining their side of the whole thing: it was a custom part that covered the entire toilet assembly, it was a part so ancient the whole thing had to be built, again, from scratch, &c &c &c.

That little thing taught me, especially when hearing something outrageous, not to make any decision until I hear the other side. There's almost always another side, and while it's quicker and maybe more fulfilling to hear or read something that shows how bad those other guys are, it's rarely true. The truth of such things, of just about everything, contains both one way of looking at it and another.

"The truth is rarely plain and never simple." -- Oscar Wilde

It's not wrong, but that doesn't mean I don't notice it and either shake my head or grin.

I mean, I know language changes and that's fine, but some times I think the world runs ahead of the words we use to describe it, maybe just out of habit. It's a simple word, about, but I think it's not comfortable with today's digital world, which can be pretty damn exacting.

It might be just me, but I think of about as being pretty fuzzy. I'm about six feet tall, but if you were to measure me, you'd get another number. I live about five km from the ocean, it's about nine in the morning and about twenty degrees, but careful measurements would show all those numbers to be wrong.

And that's the thing.

I learned to tell time back before there were any digital watches. One of the first things I noticed when I got one was that I was unconciously mentally translating its numbers to hands on a clock to understand what it was telling me. I'd read 8:47 and picture it so that I'd know what time it was, but I also noticed something else.

If that glance at my watch came from being asked what time it was, I'd answer 8:47 and just read off the numbers. If I looked at my watch to learn the time, I'd translate the numbers and understand the time to be about a quarter to nine. I'd be less accurate, but would come up with something I could easily understand.

The same thing happened when driving. While a digital display of 38mph gave me more information, a glance at a speedometer with a needle would show me I was a tick under forty which usually was all I needed or wanted to know. The more exact number was closer to the truth, but a glance at the old dial model let me know I was going about forty, a figure that's nice and round and easy for me to understand.

It's also the way I talked. If asked, I'd say it's about quarter to nine or I was going about forty, but what's funny is how our language is now being used to talk about exact numbers while still using the old word about.

I mean, I can almost tell when someone, especially some commentator on TV, is reading from an exact digital display but continues to use our old familiar language. In the real world, in our normal lives, we use about to give an estimation about things, but I think it doesn't fit well with actual, honest answers. It seems to me a guy racing a bicycle can be going about forty or can be going thirty-eight, but not about thirty-eight.

He is going thirty-eight, not "about thirty-eight." You can tell me it's 2:27 or about 2:30, but saying it's about 2:27 just sounds silly. I think that's just lazy, using our common word followed by reading off the actual answer.

And, yeah, it kind of bugs me.

It may be saying something about me I'd rather keep hidden, but I've been thinking about disappointment.

It began by my wondering if a balanced life would be one that contained as many disappointments felt as it did disappointments caused, only to realize there's no way of knowing how much disappointment I cause. I'm aware, sometimes painfully so, of the disappointments I feel, but there's no telling how often I cause them.

I think it's fair to say that pretty much every time we're disappointed we feel it. If we don't, we're not really disappointed. What we do with those disappointments, how we respond to them, is sort of interesting, mostly because we can blow them out of all proportion. This can lead to painful rants, boring conversations, and blog entries, but I guess it's sort of human to feel upset when things don't work out the way we want. The higher we hold ourselves, maybe, the more likely we are to make a big deal out of them.

How we respond to the disappointments we cause, at least the ones we know about, tells a little about us, too. The more highly we think of ourselves, I think, the more likely we are to slough off the disappointments we cause, most often as being the other person's fault or failing.

I respond fairly poorly to disappointing others, by which I mean depressed. That's pretty much my reaction to everything, though, so it's probably no big deal. I can become a bit frantic if I think about all the disappointments I cause and don't know about, so I try not to do that.

Disregarding them entirely seems to me to be awfully conceited and as counter-productive as obsessing over them. Still, many of the disappointments I've caused haunt me, though that may be a bit dramatic. Some have had real, serious consequences, but those are just the ones I know about. I think I'd be fooling myself if I didn't think there were others, just as huge, that I never knew about.

Who knows how my life might have turned out if I hadn't disappointed some certain person at a critical point in my life? All I can do, I guess, is try to be a good Russell and trust that people will forgive me much more than I do myself.

I own a dog, which may explain why I think about them from time to time.

On a walk with him today I became somewhat preoccupied again, wondering about how he views the world. Dogs communicate, a little, through their various barks and things, but I believe it's true that they don't have language.

Which gets me to wondering.

I think it's fair to say that I'm pretty dependent on language. To be honest, I can't imagine going more than a minute or two without using a word or two to think about things, but I think my dog has managed to go through his entire life without thinking about anything using any words at all. I cannot fathom what such a life would be like.

An early scene in the movie Brainstorm featured an advanced technology that let people experience what was going on in someone else's head, in this case, a monkey's. They didn't spend much time on that, but I wonder if we could even begin to understand the thinking of anything that didn't use words.

How does my dog view me? I know he looks at me, but it's unlikely he knows my name as well as he seems to know his own. Then again, I don't pay enough attention to what first goes through my mind when I see someone I know. I doubt I first think "Rob" or "Debi," but I might. It's simply too quick for me to notice.

Still, I do wonder what my dog thinks hampered as he must be by having no language. Is life, for him, a series of sensations? Of instinct? Does he simply ignore everything that falls outside his limited view of the world?

He must be able to identify some things, but doing so without having names for them is beyond my ability to understand. How he sees the world is a mystery to me, and I have no idea how much overlap there is between his view and mine.

Still, when I'm not wondering about his dreams, I wonder about his waking hours.