1. The highest possible fidelity electronics.

2. Moon & Spruce

3. “If it’s a lamp, why does it need shade?”

4.Cold, flowing waters.

5. More high fidelity electronics.

The snows have begun falling in earnest. Yet the winds sneak past, around, and damn near arrow straight through the heavy, antiseptic door labeled Pure Winter Wonderland. So, the world around me blows and shrieks, tearing at trees and sanity alike with murderous success. Flakes fallen jump and race away. They fly into corners and build gentle looking, slightly shapeless sculpture to all things not leeward. I find my respite, my solace, in books. The warm, easy months having come and gone, I must now hunker & protect myself, enduring this colorless season with thousands upon thousands of pages. My body has been running at speeds without records, sights seen all filed under Marvelous, Still Wanting; it is now my mind which needs sustenance — to snatch from the second dimension that portal to the third! Motivation is not always easy. Moving around in either world requires want, determination, and a willingness to see what you see. Reflection means looking at yourself. Each day I wake and try, the question of what are you doing here? considered then tabled. I’m no jet engine, no screaming champion of intellect. I am of thin build and moderate endurance. The question should be, what will finally crush me? I hope nothing [soon], but I’m aware of payment one day being required for past present and future misgivings, however dispassionate they were. I’m aiming to be something, someone. I think I may already be both.

Seth Katner’s Shopping For Porcupine, Barry Hannah’s High Lonesome, McPhee’s Encounters With The Archdruid, and Rick Bass’ The Wild Marsh. — Katner’s an actual person, and his books make you feel like one too. Hannah is a man you read, twice, realizing quickly that second time that you’ve never had a thought to match his. McPhee is just a man we ask for details, a writer who is solid enough in language, but brilliant in the dimension of his observations regarding all the Big Picture men and women he spends time with. And Bass, Bass, may he always treat the world with respected wonder.


Curiously enough, Katner and McPhee write from much the same place — a place of mysterious loss, change, and from beneath the weight of a press too finely manufactured to fail without ceasing all else too. Forty years apart and in vastly dissimilar places, both are feeling out change, one more objective than the other. Relevant and lucid, they seem curious humans, always wanting, finding it necessary to share.


And if that weren’t enough. It isn’t. Today, I tore apart All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy today. It is the first of his Border Trilogy. I bought a beautiful, gold thread bound hardback containing all three. While I know that a great many people believe him to be a good, grandiose, and dramatic storyteller, I am now finding this out. His vision sweeps a canvas so large that we should land, drive any native peoples to the least desirable plots, slaughter slow moving, near prehistoric animals, declare our independence, and carve up states. His sight is continental, utterly, completely beautiful without being wasteful.


I await more phone calls. Be no bashful. Commandment 11. 307.733.6262

Because everyone wakes up (and some eat breakfast).

Light snow tinkers down. Nearly vaporous white souls, they mix with the steams pouring from my coffee cup into marvelous evaporation. I’ve a belly full of blueberry sourdough pancakes, peppered bacon, cantaloupe and fresh squeezed orange juice. Black coffee is handheld. I sit bundled on the deck to watch two bull moose clash mildly. They roam out across the meadow, ostensibly grazing, witnessing each other.


A raven as referee. Squirrels as ticking clock managers perched in the trees.


At river’s bank, they cross, then re-cross the water. The quick snap click scrape of antlers riveted to other antlers. They part. They move off. They rejoin, charging each other, circling dazed, but not confused.


Current readings: Melville’s Moby Dick ended Sunday night and Don Delillo’s End Zone will be finished today.

Today the snows do fall; lightly, brightly, but still, falling. I wake to a gray world which I don’t so much see through as see. Dancing out the door, there are millions of winter verities dropping from the sky like birds that, having finally given up flight, are now coming to be amongst. The world addresses itself with needed silence. I sit beyond all conveniences, within the weathers, listening to nothing. When the machinations of your head are the loudest thing you hear, the gear whine of thought upon thought upon thought seems almost quaint, manageable.


(The coming season demands quite the tower of books, so I dutifully, obsequiously, fastidiously obliged. Avast! Adjectives as poisons of meaning. They’re in no real order, will be read in an order, and I’ve ordered myself to keep any and all curious of my current literary status. Tuned, stay.)

What’s with all these trees, in the woods (of the Bridger Teton National Forest)?

Today marks the 1st [or the 5th]. The first day of again living beyond in the Gros Ventre mountains of western Wyoming – though the Winds and the Tetons aren’t that far off – and the fifth day of the month, my father’s 60th birthday. Both are ideal moments that will, and have, stretched themselves into lifetimes. There is much to cherish, more to know, much more to cherish. I plan many things for the coming winter — silences and seeing through ravens among them. This site will be a satellite for shared thought. Check back often, I’ll be here. Or, please do call: 307.733.6262. The phone line will soon be above ground and hummingly connected.