To accomplish my civic duty, Vinko & I drove offroad down a steep pass into a wash, across the desert, and over to Flamingo Heights to vote.

There's not much in Landers, not even a place to vote. I'm registered as a vote-by-mail guy, but rather than spending about $1 in postage to mail back the heavy cardboard vote-by-mail ballot, I chose to drive to the nearest polling location where I could drop it off, which happens to be in Flamingo Heights.

As expected, once again I saw no trace of flamingos, not even plastic ones. Maybe I need to explore more thoroughly. What I did see is a part of the desert that looks remarkably the same as all the other parts of the desert up here, only this part has a different name.

I could have driven there all the way on paved roads, but thought, "what the hell" and decided to take a short cut which, like most shortcuts around here, was more direct but quite a bit slower. I'd never taken this particular road before, so it also had that going for it and was drawn on the map as a straight line, which effectively eliminates most chances of getting lost in the desert and dying.

I had a hunch, and was right, that it would mean driving up a small rise of ten degrees or so, but that's no problem for my little Jeep. The descent into the wash, however, was near one of its steeper parts, so after making sure that Vinko and I were both strapped in, we rode down what I'm guessing is a 45 degree slope into the bottom of the wash. Please note that I'm no good with numbers and am prone to exaggeration.

But not, I think, in this case.

Anyway, it was fun little ride and the polling place was at the community center, a pre-fab metal building that's a step or two up from a storage container and just like lots of other buildings up here. One of the poll workers made sure everything was fine and put my ballot in a box just for mail in ballots that weren't, and our brief meeting means that if I die, my last words spoken to a human being weren't "I like your toenails," which I said yesterday in town to a woman in a parking lot.

I'm not happy about this vote, and not just because I think I got a lot of the questions wrong. I always worry about that, but am far too opinionated to ever cast a perfect ballot. My difficulty this time is that it's increasingly hard to vote for someone because I like his or her name or previous occupation. That's served me well in the past, but there's a growing number of people I wouldn't want anywhere near an elected office and I don't know enough about most of the candidates.

To me, they're mostly names on a ballot running for some office I never knew existed.

One of my hard and fast rules is to stop reading anything on the Internet or listening to anyone on the radio or TV who uses the words regime or agenda. It may be harsh, but I've learned through experience that nothing that follows will be important or give me any insight to whatever they're talking about. It will all be blather, talking points, and just fuel for all of the people who are delighted to hear someone repeat things they've already decided are true.

In short, nothing new.

I left a lot of the ballot blank just because I don't like to reward people who think or act that way and, since I never heard anything these candidates say or write, I have no idea if they're one of those non-thinking morons who populate our current political scene.

I'd hate myself, even more than usual, if I voted for someone who wanted to destroy capitalism, throw all the bums out, turn my nation's beauty into profits for companies, or couldn't get his or her head over the stupid idea of impeaching our president.

So, I hope the people who are sane and see elected office as something other than a way to make themselves and their friends rich and who try to do more than pander to the least among us get elected.

My confidence in that is minimal.

They're making progress on my new electrical pole.

Some real world, city conventions, have made it to this part of the world unless, of course, they originated here. One of them is a long-time favorite of mine, the USA marking and subsequent writing on the streets. I don't why, but it always made me happy to see these markings.

If you look closely at the pole, you can see somebody's witten USA along its length, but that doesn't reflect any of the obnoxious, chauvinism such signs and banners usually provoke in me. No one is cheering or acting superior here, they're just asking for help.

I'm not sure, but I think USA stands for Underground Systems Alert. Before any digging related to construction type things takes place, the first thing that I know of that happens is somebody has to go out and paint USA on the street or sidewalk where the diggins is to take place. That, incidentally, is a job I think I could handle and one I might be pretty good at.

Within a couple days of that alarm going out, all the utility companies send someone out to mark up the area using a fairly simple (which means I can sorta understand them) system of abbreviations, symbols, arrows, number and the like. That's another job I've wanted for quite some time now.

Now, in the civilized world, just about everything is being placed underground, mostly, I guess, to make things look prettier and to frustrate birds. I think that's happening here, too, biut with a couple important differences.

The main one, of course, is the number of utilities that have to respond to the USA call. Back when I lived in the city, the water company had to show up and mark water mains and sewers, the telephone and cable companies had to indicate where (and how deep) they'd hidden things, the electrical company let the diggers know where not to dig so the electricity could keep flowing and those doing the digging could avoid being fried, and the gas company did the same to prevent ruptures of gas lines and reduce the liklihood of visually appealing fireballs on the local news.

Each company had its own color for marking, and by the time the process of showing where all the underground stuff is located, there was an attractive display of colors, letters, arrows, and so forth all over the street or sidewalk. I guess the area to be dug up dictated the boundaries or the marks, but all-in-all, you'd end up with a damn fine idea of what was where.

For those who've never seen it, as memory serves the electrical company used red, the gas company yellow, water was blue, and I don't remember what the telcos and cable companies used. I just know they all put their company's initials by the marks so there wouldn't be any confusion.

Here where I live I expect this to be a much simpler process, mostly because half those things don't exist where I live: There's no sewer to worry about and no gas lines. As far as my cabin is concerned, while there was once a telephone line, there isn't any more. There's never been any cable for television, so water and electricity is about it. And, of those two, the electrical company is the one doing the work so I don't know if they have to mark their own stuff or not.

Anyway, this morning to fulfill their obligations and give Vinko something to get upset about, some guy drove up here and wrote No H2O on the sand just outside the fence between the pole and the dirt road. He did it in blue, so that's gotta be official.

It's also kinda funny, in a desert sort of way. Yes, there is no water. It's the desert and also why we call it that.

I'm not sure if the other companies have to show up just to let the electrical company know that they have nothing to do with this property or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it. What I (and Vinko) will be delighted to see is our new electrical pole stuck in the ground and the wires moved to it, something I'm sure will be done by some sub-contractor.

No, I don't have any say in the size, shape, or design of the new pole. My thinking is that it would be silly of me to even offer a suggestion or express a preference. I suspect the best I can hope for is whoever puts it up reciting William Mulholland's immortal words upon completion of the aqueduct that brought water to Los Angeles from the Owens river, "There it is. Take it."

Note that I, along with Mulholland, only mean Los Angeles in the legal sense. He didn't bring water to the part of the city where everyone lived, wanted it, and voted for it, no, he was far too clever for that. Instead, what happened is that the nearby San Fernando Valley was annexed and the water dumped there. And, yes, those fortunate enough to purchase huge lots of wasteland miles away from city center were surprisingly quite well off when the water started flowing. I think the movie Chinatown touches on this, but is worth watching just for Jack Nicholson and one of my favorite lines of all time that he gave to some rich bastard -- "How much better can you eat?"

So, yeah. I have some writing on some of the sand I own, but while discouraging and obvious on its face, it portends great things (as long as you consider a new pole something great)!

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.

There's a guy running for office up here whose campaign reminded me of something I've been thinking about.

Over the past couple presidential elections a whole bunch of people have been talking about the US debt and deficit spending, often mentioning saddling the grandkids with repaying all the money we've borrowed to pay for things they don't think we should be spending money on. Their very simple fix, of course, is to stop spending money on things they think is wasteful (which is damn near everything).

That sounds pretty good on the surface, and I'm sure there's lots of money that can be saved, but it got me to thinking.

This candidate guy boasts that he was mayor of some town and managed to balance its budget and maybe even saved some money. Considering how easily statistics, especially economic ones, can be manipulated, I'm sure there's some way he can be telling the truth about that. I've also noticed, now that he's no longer mayor, that his town is doing a lot of road repair, putting in traffic islands, generally fixing things up.

Which leads me to my problem.

It looks to me as if instead of saddling future generations with debt, we can stop spending money and saddle them, instead, with future spending. It's sort of like putting off borrowing money to get your car fixed or a water heater replaced and, instead, letting your kids inherit something that needs repairs in order to work.

To put it simply, the money's got to be spent either now or later. Not spending the money now doesn't seem to me to be saving your kids anything at all and pretty much just puts them in the position of borrowing the money.

I'm not sure there's a great deal of real difference between inheriting debt and inheriting expenses.

Not spending the money now doesn't mean that it will never have to be spent is my point. Worse, any good feeling we might get from not giving our kids a bill might be short lived if they look at what we give them as being a piece of junk that will cost them a fortune to keep running.

I'm no economist and never even studied economics, but I hear that interest rates for borrowing are very low right now. As someone who inherited a distressed property (and admittedly let it get worse), I'm fairly confident in saying there's no easy way out of the situation.

Also, I'm not gonna vote for the guy.

Since I’m typing this on a computer, odds are it’s legible. I’m fairly confident it makes sense, too, so that’s a plus, but whether or not it expresses my thoughts accurately is another thing entirely.

And that, as they say, is the rub.

When I was in my twenties I first started hearing from people that I didn’t talk like everyone else, and I took some pride in that. Maybe even too much. Maybe part of it is a family thing since I also heard that my younger sister, who’s still older than me, and I talked alike. But I hoped it was something more than that.

In my schooling I was forced to learn to be specific and clear in my thoughts and how I presented them. That took time and effort, but I ended up thinking that it was something I was good at, unlike many sports, life outside of school, or having any idea what to do with my emotions. I could, when I made the effort, be specfic about things, could replace the way we commonly used speech with less ambiguous words and phrasing, and, I thought, let people know exactly what I was thinking.

I may or may not have been right then, but I’ve I don’t think it’s true any more.

Since that was one of the very few things I’ve ever been proud of, it only makes sense that it’s been removed. I never had much in the way of looks, maybe some boyhood cuteness in my face, but never the type of body that anyone gave more than a first glance at. And, then, only if they had to.

I wasn’t a great student, so I never really thought of myself as all that bright, but I was pretty sure I had a way of thinking that wasn’t ordinary. Just for the sake of argument, I called it “conceptual,” feeling that I was more comfortable thinking in terms of concepts instead of their individual instances, and being far more interested in the ideas of things than their concrete examples.

But that’s not the point, which is good because I doubt it’s very clear. Let’s just say, for example, that I’m more intrigued by talking about the proper role of government (which has no definite answer) than I am about arguing about whether or not our current U.S. president is a dictatorial, tyrannical, socialist Muslim communist or not, at least until they define what the hell it is they mean by all those adjectives.

Anyway, later in life I took up writing the usual kind of things: short stories and tried my hand at a couple novels. I enjoyed it immensely and for awhile, thought I was pretty good at it. When I had something I wanted to say, I thought I had the ability to say it and, more importantly, to let others know what I thinking without getting all confused.

It turns out, if I ever could do that, I can’t any more.

Without much in the way of physical attraction (I liked Edison’s comment along the lines of being concerned with his body only as a way of carrying his brain around), all I had was what was between my ears and behind my eyeballs. I’ve always been eager to be liked and developed a pretty good sense of humor. Sometimes I could actually be really funny, and I enjoyed that. Other times, pretty much no matter the subject, I liked to think that I could add something to the conversation, if only some tangentially related point.

Now, when you think in terms of concepts, you can relate concepts more than what is being talked about so that when people are talking about 1987 Ford pickups, it’s as easy to jump to boats, which also move people around on the planet, as the 1986 pickup. Everyone can do this, and does, but it was very comfortable for me.

None of which matters.

The one thing I was most proud of has been taken, perhaps because of my age and declining mental acuity. Instead of speaking or writing with clarity, everyone gets confused at what I say and this hurts me more than it should. I often have bad dreams where I end up yelling in an effort to be understood, but I feel no one gets what I’m trying to say.

I’m not sure what I should do about this. Yeah, it hurts to see myself as not as capable any more, to be less than I always thought I was. I never prepared for this and am worried that I may never be understood. I still want to be liked, but now I may have lost my best weapon in that fight.

I feel like just giving up. It’s too much to learn all over again, if I ever did know it, and to end up being so completely misunderstood should be a lesson. When all I ever had was words, when those fail me, I’m not sure where to turn.

A year ago today I woke up here in my desert cabin for the first time, and I have no idea how much has changed or was supposed to.

In some ways, of course, my entire life is different but it's also very much the same because, well, I'm still the one living it. The things I do are very much the same, but not what I look at when I can pull my eyes from the computer screen. That's nothing at all like what I saw for the first sixty years of my life and I like the new scenery.

I think the biggest change in me is one of degree, not of kind: I'm just more of what I was. I have less confidence than ever, more insecurity, and an increased sense of not fitting in with the rest of the world. Up here, alone, there's no one to contradict those feelings, so maybe that's why they're growing.

I've done far less to make this place my home than I'd planned to, and I have no idea if that's a good or bad thing. One thing I've noticed is that this first year was spent pretty much putting off doing anything with the excuse being that I wanted to see what the weather was like and to make it through the first year discovering what it would be like to live here. That was an excellent way to procrastinate, and I just about wore that excuse to the bone.

Maybe it was there all along and I'm just using it as an excuse, but I've really taken a hands off approach to life and living. I love it up here and do want to make it my home, but I don't want to be responsible for changing any of it. The bushes, plants, and wildlife were all here before me and I don't want to get in their way. I'm not planning on making any of this the way I want it to be, I want to let it all be and mostly watch and respect it.

I've taken a lot of this, of course, to extremes, but I think that's because one of the things I brought with me from the civilized world was me.

I haven't met very many people up here and haven't yet met anyone I want to spend a great deal of time with. I'm frankly scared of many of them, not of what they might do but that I won't fit in and that they won't like me, anyway. That sort of fear has pretty much ruled my life and, once again, I brought it with me.

Living in the desert isn't very close at all to what I expected, but I came up here with very few ideas about what to expect or what it would be like. It was a place I knew about, had visited and could afford, and that's really the only reason I came up here. I think I'd only seen this area at night before being driven around to look at properties by my real estate agent, so the whole scenery thing was a total surprise. It's not a view of much, I admit, but it's a great place to view the desert and what people have done to it.

The desert, like the world and everything else, is what it is (to be profound), and I don't feel comfortable judging it. It's harsh, except for those of us who live in homes, and I like that. It's patient and minimal, and I like that, too. It's very much different from the city, and I like that best of all.

Although they could have named it anything, the owners of the racetrack outside Austin, Texas, chose to call theirs the Circuit of the Americas. I don't know what the other choices were, how they came up with that one, or why they decided that was the best, but there you have it.

The name doesn't make me mad, but it is embarrassing, and I wince a tiny bit in shame whenever I hear it.

For decades Formula 1 has determined its champions by having races at a series of races at different tracks, mostly one in a country and primarily in Europe. Over the years there've been a number of attempts at having one in the US, but for one reason or another, none of them have lasted very long. Last year marked another return to having a grand prix in the United States and this time it was held at a racetrack specially built for the task outside of Austin, Texas.

It's a decent enough racetrack, don't get me wrong, designed by the only guy in the world who seems capable of doing such a thing, Hermann Tilke. It has ups and downs and lefts and rights and all the things I like in race courses. But it also has an unnecessary letter S at the end of its name.

I'm used to the United States calling itself America, and had they called it the Circuit of America, I'd probably have been pretty happy. But, no, they had to go all out and call it the Circuit of the Americas, which I can't see as anything but an implication that it's the only one in the Americas.

It isn't, and isn't even the only grand prix circuit in the Americas.

For quite a number of years now they've held races in Brazil and Canada. Canada, of course, is in North America and Brazil in South America, so I kinda figure those are races held in the Americas. Soon there may even be a race in Mexico, another nation in North America, which would mean there'd be four races in the Americas, all at different race tracks.

It's not only dumb to call ours the Circuit of the Americas, it's factually wrong.

Since I wasn't privy to the selection process, I have no explanation for why Circuit of the Americas was chosen as the best name. If they'd called it the Best Circuit of the Americas, okay, we could argue that, or Hilliest Circuit of the Americas, or Ideal Circuit of the Americas, all of those might be boastful, but they wouldn't be necessarily incorrect. The Circuit of the Americas, however, is.

If we wanted to go all out and insult everyone, we could have called it the Circuit of the World, but presumably that may have been seen as a step too far. So, instead, we just insult Canada and Brazil by pretending their tracks don't exist or count, and call ours the only one in the Americas.

It strikes me as either the owners of the track ignoring or dismissing the rest of the world or not being concerned enough to do some simple research and understand what words mean. I know there are jokes about Texan's arrogance and America's stupidity about geography, but I don't know that we need to work so hard at living up to those stereotypes.

No one would seriously think of calling their restaurant “The Restaurant of Idaho” or any other state, much less “The Restaurant of the United States,” with the definite article implying that your restaurant was, in fact, the only one. It's great that we have our own racetrack for the Formula 1 series and I hope it's successful for quite some time and hosts lots of great races, but, really, we could come up with a better name.

One that doesn't insult other parts of the world would be a good start.