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.

The other day my dog, Vinko, and I ventured out to visit the local park on a day when they're not having a fireworks show.

It's not that they have a fireworks show more than once a year, it's just that's the only time I pay much attention to our park. It's located about halfway between the cabin and the Integratron, right off a paved road, and has everything you'd expect in a park.

There's an adjacent baseball diamond, a basketball court with one ten foot and one six foot basket, a barbecue (grilling) spot, some covered benches, a sandy play area, horseshoe pitch, and even a couple patches of grass. I have to admit the grassy areas surprised me, but didn't impress Vinko.

Because of its location here in the Morongo Basin, it has a couple Yucca (Joshua) trees, but no real tall ones. This one is about 1.5 meters tall (around four feet).

A rare type of cactus for this area reminds people this is a desert

And, before we left the play area ...

even got some visitors!

What Vinko found more interesting, however, was an artistic arrangement of boulders.

After doing all the exploring we could do, we left.

While everyone else has real problems and things to sort out, I'm wondering about my dog.

Here's the thing: Just about everywhere I take my dog with me. Leaving aside for the moment what that says about me and how pathetic that makes me sound, it's just how things are. While it's true that about the only places I go are to stores, I rarely do it alone.

Vinko, my dog, likes to ride in the Jeep, by which I  mean he has no choice in the matter but puts up with it. He doesn't stick his head out the window, doesn't smile or wag his tail in excitement or anything, but he sits quietly in the passenger seat and looks around or lays his head on the padded console. He doesn't complain, but probably enjoys the change of scenery.

This morning I have to take the Jeep in to see about getting rid of that pesky "check engine" light. The light isn't on now, of course, because it goes off after turning the Jeep on three times without being triggered again, but it still has me a bit worried if only because of how much it might take to get rid of it once and for all.

I've been able to do the Internet trick of turning the engine on and off three times (without starting it) to display the codes and, for the curious, the engine codes are P 2074 and P 0108. From what I can tell from looking those up, they're both related to some unexpected condition about manifold pressure. It might be just the sensor that's gone bad, or it might be more serious.

At the moment, the Jeep is running as good as ever, so I'm a little hopeful that if it can do that, the manifold itself or gaskets aren't totally hosed.

The error first showed up when I was running the air conditioner and climbing a mountain. The Jeep hesitated, acted as if it had an automatic transmission that went out of gear before finding the right one. The other time it happened, and the first time I took it in to be checked out, was in the same sort of situation, but this time on a much more gentle slope.

Then, last week, I got another, this time on a flat-ish road without the air conditioner on at all. So, I figured it wasn't the AC that was causing the problem but, looking back, it may have been that truck I passed. I downshifted to do that, ran the Jeep at a high RPM to get the speed necessary to pass, and later the error showed back up.

It took a day of driving around with the Jeep doing a lot of hesitating and having even less power than usual before the error went away. By that time I'd made today's appointment, and now it's time for me to take it into town and see if it will take all my Christmas money to get rid of the damn problem once and for all.

And this is where Vinko comes in.

Like I said, he almost always rides with me when I go anywhere. He's been to the dealer a few times with me so far for normal servicing, and the people there are "dog people" and don't mind. They sometimes give him treats, always make sure he has water, and scratch his ears.

He doesn't like hanging around in the waiting room much, there not being much for a dog to do on the linoleum floor, so we'll take walks around the lot and look at the cars for sale, disappoint the sales people, and stroll around.

Then, when the Jeep's all washed and ready, we drive back home and call it a day.

But today, it may take more than an hour to fix Jose. Once before, before Vinko, the car people drove me home when it would be a long time and picked me back up, but that was just me. I'm a little hesitant to put them through that trouble when I have a dog with me. Yes, he wouldn't have to come along for the return trip, but the driver might not like driving both me and my dog from the dealership back to Landers.

One of the reasons I take my dog with me everywhere is because, well, he expects it by now. If I don't take him with me, I have to leave him inside the cabin. Well, I could let him run around the property, but then I worry he'll run out the gate when I open it to get back in and into the street and get squashed.

Also, if I let him run around the lot, I'm always afraid of running over him myself.

So, I lock him indoors, which is both safer and easier.

I guess that's what I'll do today, but he won't like it. Not until I get back, anyway.

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)!