This is part of Medicine Bow National Forest. I’ve posted pictures of this place before, from my last trip through Wyoming. If Xanga’s search feature worked, I’d link to the images.

For this trip, the wind was steady at 20-30mph and it was 15 degrees farenheit. I stayed in the car and snapped this pic, rather than getting out and hiking around.

This is not a blurry picture. That’s snow blowing around in hypnotic, smoke-like streaks.

A couple ‘blogs back, PennyDreadful comments that I write and my life sounds more interesting than hers.

Well, lemme tellya. I have to wonder about that. I sometimes think my ‘blog probably reads like a huge long whine about how horrible my life is. Or reads like a tremendous excuse for tremendous pretense. Or is just essentially valueless to people who only care that Michael Jackson is a freak.

But really, it’s a snapshot of whatever I was inspired to write about. There’s plenty of boring shit I don’t write about, just like there’s plenty of happy stuff I don’t talk about. My ‘blog is more coloring book than definitive statement.

I love you all. Some of you I don’t really like, but I do love you all, and both the love and the fact that you’re there to receive it are things I give thanks for.

While I was driving to my sister’s today for T-day festivities, I was listening to the local Pacifica station. Pacifica is a lefty sort of radio network. KPFT is the local station, and it helped to keep me sane while I lived here.

Anyway, the point is that they were playing tapes of speeches protesting Columbus Day celebrations. It was great. Not the speeches themselves; many were horribly reactionary and offered only griping and no solutions. But I was sitting at a Texaco where I had just filled my car’s tank with gas, and was in line for the car wash. The car in front of me was a white Corvette, and when the driver entered her code into the car wash keypad thing, I clearly saw: Late 30s, leopard skin print, bleach blonde, heavy makeup, blue-green iridescent nail polish. She daintily punched the code keys, careful not to scratch her nails. She looked pissed, late for some important event, like maybe impressing some people at some Thanksgiving dinner. Meanwhile the speaker on the radio was talking about Leonard Peltier, the few hundred billion dollars the government had misplaced rather than send to the Indian reservations, the idea that globalism wants to turn the world into an Indian reservation.

Her car was already clean. She didn’t even need to wash it. She paid $7 for the deluxe wash, which takes a full ten minutes. I stared at the back of her car the whole time, listening to some angry Indian talk about the Italian-American groups who were aligning their ideology with Nazis and the KKK (a sucker-punch if ever there was, since what the Italian-American group said was that they were using their free speech just as neo-Nazi and KKK groups had).

White Corvette, approx. 20 gallons of dear, precious water. Then it was my turn to go through the machine. Would I emerge as a middle-class climber? Or would I put war paint on my face?

Finally made it to Houston. Woo!

John Ashcroft criticizes Clinton’s cyber-wiretap policies in 1997.

Yah. Evil, bad Clinton.

Whew. What an absolute relief to have moved from getting ready to go to actually being gone.

I’m thinking about the Fool card in the tarot. There’s the fool wandering around, not a care in the world. Never mind that he’s about to walk off a cliff. But he’s content. He’s got his satchel all packed and his colorful garb, and there’s a little dog. What’s the dog saying? Is it leading him over the cliff, or is it warning him?

Ah, well. Cute little dog, yapping happily. “Hello, little dog!” (The little dog’s getting more frustrated by the moment..)

Anyway. I cleaved myself from Seattle on Saturday and made it to eastern Oregon. I slept in the car in a brand-spankin’-new rest area in the mountain pass above Pendleton.

In the morning it was cold as hell, in a manner of speaking. Crows were fighting over some scraps in the parking lot. In the silence between passing semi-trucks, I heard an eagle.

There’s a cliche in movies. If you see a vast panorama of unspoiled wilderness, particularly if the scene is a valley, you’ll hear a sound effect of an eagle’s call. It’ll reverberate artfully in the air, in such a way that you’re not even really aware that you heard it. If you only ever watched movies and didn’t go out to the wilderness, you’d think the sound was somehow required of the place.

Well, I heard that sound. Then I heard it again, and it made me smile. And I thought I could follow it, so I did, for a little while. Then I realized that yes, it was still cold as hell.

That day of driving was uneventful, except that I was tired most of the time. I stopped in a rest area in Idaho and slept for a few hours. I woke up to realize I was hot as hell, so to speak. Closed car windows and a bright sun. A victim of the greenhouse effect!

All that day I saw birds of prey. Hawks, mostly.

Today, driving through southern Wyoming: Wind. More wind. Snow. Ice on the road. more wind. The usual for southern Wyoming in November.

The snow turns ugly badlands into the surreal surface of a windblown moon. Elk Mountain looked like a a happy accident at the wedding cake factory.

That’s a mean way to describe Elk Mountain. Let me describe for you in a thousand words the picture I would have taken if I had a camera that was worth a crap:

Elk Mountain is not a huge mountain, but it is very large. It sticks out of the north end of the Rockies, creating havoc for the people who design interstate highways; open an atlas and look at I-80 west of Rawlins. Today Elk Mountain had a tuft of cloud hovering just above its pinnacle, like a huge UFO trying to find a place to land. Next to the mountain, about a mile south, was a huge cloud formation, exactly the same size and shape as the mountain. The cloud, itself, had another tuft of a cloud, exactly the same size and shape, hovering above it’s pinnacle. The wind blew crystalline snow, about as fine as confectioner’s sugar, in plumes and rivulets off the cliffs and crags of the mountain.

This same sort of snow washed across the interstate in the same way. It reminded me of trying to drive through a flood. Which it was, just frozen.

Oddly enough, in the midst of this utter whiteout of snow and wind, I saw at least three birds of prey in winter plumeage. I know hawks migrate, so this seemed strange, especially on such a bitter day. One picked up some roadkill right in front of my car; I had to swerve to avoid hitting it. Another flew right down the centerline of the road toward traffic (which at that point amounted to me and no one else). It was at just the exact altitude to make me think it might crash into the windshield, but it was just trying to yank my chain. What’s with the raptors?

There’s a wind farm to the east of Elk Mountain. Hundreds of 5 or 6 story windmills churning in the stiff wind. The whole trip east across Wyoming had this 30mph tailwind. As I approached the wind farm, the blades were facing me. They appeared over the horizon like blooming flowers.

Denver sucks. Denver always sucks. I’m in eastern Colorado, almost to the Kansas border. I can still see the halo of light from Denver, half a state away.

It’s 3:10am, on Saturday morning. I had hoped to be gone, snoozing in some rest area in Idaho right about now. (Probably the one just east of Boise on I-84. Yes, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of rest area locations.)

The point being that I’m having a lot of trouble getting my ass out the door.

I couldn’t find the freaking title for the van, so I can’t give it away just yet. I have to go through more red tape in order to do that. Hopefully the evil neighbor won’t get it towed while I’m gone for a month and a half.

I couldn’t get rid of the computer junk, even though some people from usenet expressed interest. I was just too overwhelmed to tell them when to come by and get stuff.

And, to top it all off, today I got a letter from the courts, calling me in for jury duty ON CHRISTMAS EVE. Why? Because I’m not stressed enough, and it’s important that I feel really awful before I go, apparently.

I’m inflexible. It’s a fact. It’s known. I’d rather be the image of flexibility, the poster-child for gliding through changes like an Aikido master swimming through an onslaught of attackers. But that’s not how I’m allowed to operate.

So here I am being pissed at myself and whoever ‘randomly’ picked me for Christmas Eve jury duty which I have to get out of. Not because these are big deal problems, but because they’re just more red tape existence issues, and they demand that I change my priorities and refocus and cross things off the to-do list that I haven’t done, simply because they will never get done and it’s no use leaving them on the list.

The term is ‘executive dysfunction.’ You might see that term and think of Ken Lay, but you’d be wrong. ‘Executive dysfunction’ gets defined in the context of everything from ADD to schizophrenia. Essentially, it works like this: If you’re too busy being crazy, you’re unable to do things like plan ahead and follow through.

The executive dysfunction label tears my heart apart when I realize it applies to me. I just want to deny that I’m having trouble with it. I want it to be true that, once I get this mind thing all straightened out, I’ll be able to enter the workaday world. But it just ain’t happening.

Anyway. Here I am at my desk at three in the morning being overwhelmed.

One of the most annoying things about being me is having to sit and watch while I ‘recover’ from stuff.

For instance, I just called the cable modem people, to change the billing over to me from an ex-housemate. This is a few months after the fact to begin with; I’ve been putting it off to avoid having to talk to someone on the fone and tell them to switch the billing over. (This is one of the other annoying parts of being me. I proceed at a glacial pace, and it screws up so much of my life it’s not even funny.)

Anyway, I’m now listening to old, reassuring music and doing Xanga and reading usenet in order to ‘recover.’ This will last one or two hours. No amount of psychology will help me not need to do this; there’s only relative urgency to do other things. This need to ‘recover’ can be superceeded, and in such a case the need to recover will compound with the added stress of the superceeding urgent need.

So I have to manage stress like a diabetic manages blood sugar, and I’m fucking tired of it.

Speaking of the Fatherland… er… HOMEland Security crap, today’s music du jour is:

Roll The Bodies Over by Stump, from their ‘Fierce Pancake’ CD.

The first time I heard Stump, I was ecstatic. It’s anti-music, but it grooves. It’s nonsense, but it’s political and brainy. It’s loud and desperate, complicated and transcendent. Don’t listen, but listen carefully.

“Depressed, me depressed?
I shouldn’t wonder
All the people I detest
Have inherited the plunder.”

I just want to comment on something.

I put that Michael Jackson story on my ‘blog to see if anyone was reading.

I’m a little depressed that ex-black-man Jackson can generate more comments and props than my personal anecdotes of being stoned.

Of course, if I were Michael Jackson, and I got that stoned, and told people, it would be a huge buzz.

Why does celebrity happen the way it does? And why is it more acceptable to talk shit about a crazy man than to talk sense about the Homeland Security police state?