Oh, man. I may never go back…

Just unpacked my first Xmas present to myself, a 49-key MIDI controller that plugs into my MacBook via USB. Jacking the Fender Twin Reverb into the MacBook and launching Garageband opens up a whole new universe of NOISE, glorious noise! I’m in heaven. There are normal instrument sounds, synthesizers, sound effects, all kinds of stuff to play with, and I just realized I’d spent the whole morning without reading a single post at Daily Kos, Huffington Post, or any of ‘em. Thank God for that, eh? And what do you know, the sun still came up anyway.

No, my wife wasn’t in the house, which is just as well, because real musicians will hate me for what I can do with this thing. Not because I’m better, oh no, not at all, just louder and stupider. Compared to what she can do with a fine piano, the sampled sounds in Garageband as played by me come off like a troupe of psychotic whores on acid. The real secret is decibels, probably. A cow mooing louder than a 747 at takeoff is something idiots like me want to play over and over (the cow sound is middle C on the keyboard, just three notes up from the bleating sheep). There’s a fabulous bugling elk sample, too, that sounds hilarious blended with seagull cries and cathedral organ!

Oh yeah, I can do strings and guitars and stuff, too. Geez, I don’t want to do website work or anything else. (Hey, I wonder if I can figure out how to play “96 Tears”??) If you have any keyboard experience at all and own a recent Mac, you have to get the MIDI thingie, less than a hundred bucks at the Apple Store. But you’re going to want a real musical instrument amplifier, unless you already have one hell of a stereo system. Now I need my own studio, a place to write and produce podcasts where I won’t drive my sweetie insane.

Life is loud and getting better.

We’re back in Alamosa for the day. I have my trusty guest pass for the campus wireless network at Adams State, and I’m camped out in a sunny corner of the student center with a nice big latte. Things could be worse.

It’s always fun to be in Alamosa, especially after Taos. The difference in topography, facilities, and general ambience couldn’t be more pronounced. I know I’ve said all this before, but it truly is striking. For one thing, from where I sit, I can see actual curbs. The houses are frame and stucco, and the yards are covered with grass. The streets are wide, paved, and clean. It really does feel like a small Midwestern college town, if you ignore (?) the jagged, snow-covered wall of 14,000-ft. mountains to the east.

Alamosa is only about 130 years old and looks like it’s been here forever, in American terms. Taos isn’t America, at least not in this context. It’s much older than that, for one thing, and was built out of mud — people who want to move here need to understand that. It affects everything. Even if you have a modern house, we’re all living in the natural dirt. This both inspires and drives one to other extremes. Alamosa, then, evokes a soothing memory of familiar civilization, the kind of thing that makes you say to yourself, well yeah, it’s kinda nice to be able to walk outside without carrying a stick.

It was glorious and stunning on the way up here, as usual. The purity of the unspoiled wide open spaces always gives me a kick in the head, something the plowed vistas of Iowa or anywhere else can never accomplish. We saw two herds of antelope (pronghorns), a couple of dozen altogether. On the north side of San Antonio Mountain, the inch of snow from last night’s cold front had gotten packed and turned to ice. This was very weird, because you couldn’t see any snow except on the asphalt, and the sun was shining brightly. I had to hold it under 55 mph to keep from getting all loosey-goosey in the wind blasts from the monster hay trucks heading south.

UPDATE: I drove us back in the dark, leaving just after sunset. On the way past San Antonio Mountain, we saw several antelope by the side of the road, ready to bolt. There was hardly any moonlight. We went miles and miles in the empty darkness without seeing another car.

It’s just all so damned bizarre. That’s over 50 miles without a latte or a gas station or any lights at night.

(But there’s at least one stupa, yow!)

Hosting arrangements for FARRFEED.COM are almost complete.

The all-new, whiz-bang, content-rich version of this blog will shortly be undergoing extensive testing on my very own staging server (actually a secret subdomain). I’ll be running the very latest version of WordPress with a heavily-customized premium theme, installed at root level this time inside its own domain — no more forwarding to JHFarr.com from GoDaddy. Don’t worry about the links, we’re gonna 301-redirect all over Creation here. Geek heaven!

As hinted at before, the new FarrFeed will be not only a blog but a digital potlatch: everything I’ve ever written, including the book, will eventually be accessible here for absolutely free. Once this is up and running, FotoFeed will be in line for conversion to a WordPress CMS. I seem to have discovered an ultimate secret of webmastery, and I’m very excited to put it all into action.

Go have a look to see what’s in the Creative Suite Four Master Collection. This is a general overview sort of article, the first of several heavy-duty reviews (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, etc.) I’ll be doing over the next few months.

This day will not end well.

Hobbes the Wonder Cat has an appointment with the vet late this afternoon, and it may be his last. The poor little bastard has lost a third of his body weight, and not because of our having starved him as I first thought. He simply isn’t eating, and he smells awful. I think he’s uremic (kidney failure). He just staggers around or sits all day in a weird position and stinks. The old boy is not well, as they say. Thirteen years we’ve had him, too, I believe.

I told my wife that if the verdict was bad, that I wouldn’t have him put down today, but would bring him home to “say goodbye” first. How pathetic is that? Just shows you where my psyche is at these days. I’ll have to bring him home anyway, dead or alive, and if he’s still breathing, I won’t need to dig a hole. Jesus, I hate coming back from the vet with a dead animal. I hate grieving, for that matter. Seems like I’ve been grieving my entire life, but I must not be doing it right. Not feeling the full impact? Probably.

The poor little guy just urped a little pool of mucus and barf on the coffee table, then climbed up near my chair to gas me out with his ammonia breath. That’s renal failure, I’ll bet you a thousand bucks. I don’t want him to die, though. For the two and a half years I lived here alone while my wife was in Dubuque, he was my only companion. He slept on the bed every night and shared every nap I ever took. It just isn’t fair for a creature so loving and helpless to fall by the wayside when family criminals and murdering heads of state get off with no reckoning. I remember the last time I took a seriously ill cat to the vet and brought her home in a box. That wasn’t quite as bad as taking my last dog to the clinic and coming home with an empty collar. (Lady, dear Lady, where are you now?)

And now it’s the awful holiday season. “Family” this and “family” that. Family, family, family… As far as I’m concerned, I’m simply an orphan. I have my siblings (I think), although I rarely hear from them, and I have my wife’s family. But every time I hear about a halfway normal parent, I want to drive back to Maryland and start pissing on graves.

Still.

It might not sound like it, but I’m okay. It’s just the Great Sadness: Hobbes, my mother, the millions of people the government has killed in my name, all the lost species, the garbage-filled oceans… It’s like I’m tapping into a universal source: feel one heartache, get pounded by millions.

I don’t know what this means, but I think I have to process it. At least I know I can. I’ll start by taking Hobbes to the vet in just a little while. If I come back with a limp kitty, it’s going to hurt like hell. More than it should, perhaps, or would, except for the Great Sadness, where everything resonates.

(Tears, meditation, and a very long nap…)

UPDATE: I already had my cry and was ready to come home with a dead cat, but Hobbes is still of this earth. He’s also 14.5 years old, not 13, and he has lost a full third of his body weight over the last year. THAT can’t last… The little bastard passed all his blood tests and doesn’t have kidney failure after all, so aren’t you all sorry you didn’t take me up on that bet? What he does have is probably cancer of the lymph nodes, for which there is no cure, although he can have kitty chemotherapy to gain a little time. So I don’t know what we’re going to do beside just keep an eye on him. No chemo, though. The normal life span for a cat like this is about 15 years.

The Great Sadness is still here, however. It’s like I sent out (down?) a probe, and that’s what’s coming in. I’ll just have to put my poet’s soul to work on it and see what I can come up with.

UPDATE #2: Progress of a sort, with stupendous insight! The Great Sadness is related to abnegation of self. (Aren’t you glad you asked?)

As regards Hobbes the Wonder Cat, grieving is essential, but so is compassion. Love balances loss. And if he suffers, we suffer, too. That wouldn’t equal compassion for anyone. He’s eaten maybe half a teaspoon of wet food today. His meowing sounds strangled, and now I know why: the swollen lymph nodes and likely tumor pressing against his throat. Other than that, he doesn’t seem to be hurting, but he hardly moves all day. The era of Hobbes is drawing to a close, but what a life he’s had.

I’ll probably write about it.

Have you noticed?

Over the last couple of weeks, it’s become increasingly obvious that there is little to no reason to keep reading certain political blogs. (I still visit, but just to skim the post headers.) The world is so far ahead of anyone’s opinion or grasp of reality, anyway. Events are cascading faster and faster. The Obama victory is part of this ongoing, inescapable change, of course. People would be better off centering themselves and opening their hearts than looking for trouble where there isn’t any.

I posted those exact words in reply to an article at Huffington Post and immediately attracted a swarm of people who don’t understand that the world reflects what they believe. (If you know someone like that, wish them good afternoon and keep on walking.) This basic building block of the universe is almost universally ignored, because most of us think there’s an objective world out there apart from the sparks of light inside our brains.

‘Tain’t so.

Nyah, nyah.

And with that, I’m diving into Sunday.

Back again, with a few new shots. I don’t know why I haven’t been keeping up, but there’s a new “White Death” (snow) series you might find interesting. Just go to FotoFeed and work your way back. And if you don’t, we SHOOT THE BUNNY! (He’s here, by the way.)

Cottontail preparing to attack

[Sometimes I get scary personal here. If that bothers you, come back later. -- JHF]

Well, someone has to do it.

On the one hand, I hesitate to put anything like this out in public, but on the other hand, if just a single person is lifted just a little bit by understanding and seeing a portion of himself reflected, then perhaps it’s worth it. It certainly helps me to put it into writing. And the absolute goddamn TRUTH is that I don’t get better unless I do go there, as often as I can.

To be thoroughly pre-briefed, you’d have to search for and read the “Helen Chronicles” on this site. Then again, maybe you shouldn’t. Thousands of words and a world of misery, and all of it is true. What’s true? Well, that there are mothers who eat their young, basically. This would be the anti-maternal instinct of emotional infanticide… Just writing that makes me squirm, turning my legs in my chair, so I know I’m on the right track. And don’t think I haven’t had dreams.

What happened to me last August was that I saw my biological mother fulfill the role of the exact opposite, a full-blown psycho-emotional killer. Call it Alzheimer’s, call it psychosis, call it just plain gut-level viciousness, I don’t care. It was the biggest thing, the worst thing, that had ever happened to me. My solar plexus shook for hours afterwards. In the morning, there was even a potential threat that she would send the sheriff after me (long story), and I was literally on the lam from my own mother! I couldn’t believe it. That looks comedic in print, but believe me, it wasn’t funny in person. The whole thing may sound like something any sane grownup can brush aside, I suppose. I wouldn’t know. But when it’s your own actual mother, this is about as elemental as you can get. Where do we get instructions for something like this? It doesn’t happen to most of us, or there wouldn’t be a species, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. There was a real and present danger. It was the end of a world.

Not that I had no foreshadowing, of course. There’s been a lifetime of that, and the child-killer thing in her has come out at several points in my adult life. When I was still a teenager, I remember her throwing a drawerful of kitchen knives at me. Seriously. None of them hit the mark, but still. (Your mother???) The other night my wife and I were looking back over all the times we visited my parents or my mother in the 30 years we’ve been together, and we both agreed that there hadn’t been a one of them without a horrible fight or outright emotional attack. I won’t deny a few good stretches, but it was mostly tears and screaming, every time, for OVER THIRTY YEARS, remember. Yes, I took it. I took it because I naturally felt it was my obligation as a son to look after my mother and get as right with her as anyone could. That guilt is the other side of not getting enough love in the beginning, though. If there’s love, it’s not an obligation, it’s just being a son, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Usually this isn’t so black and white, more like fuzzy gray. But the lights came on in Tucson back in August — brother, did they! And suddenly, I was free.

Ever since, that has been the biggest thing that ever happened to me, only this is something good. It’s huge, in fact, a wondrous Rip van Winkle saga of the soul. It’s inspirational and deeply gratifying. I’ve even been caught smiling and being nice. The other day I realized, right out of the blue, that everything was fine and I was happy. (Such a weird sensation.) So all of this is wonderful, right?

Except it takes more than one epiphany, more than one enlightenment, for the energy to flow. And I’m a freaking geezer, too. This shit has been going on for decades, I’m like the godforsaken petrified psychic forest here. That’s why the dynamite was welcome — only I seem to need a little more.

This time all it took was remembering the simple cheapo Xmas cards from Walgreen’s with a little check inside. That’s right, just a note from Mom. She could always turn mean and crazy on you, but it was something, somehow. I thought of this because I emailed my sister and joked about using Helen’s checks to write all five of us a whopping Xmas gift in Helen’s name (my name is on her bank account). That made me wonder whether she’d have it together to send them out herself this year, the amount carefully written down to be subtracted from our shares of the eventual “inheritance”… and THAT made me wonder whether I’d just tear the envelope up, if it appeared, or if I’d take out the check, but not read anything else. Oh, geez!

For two nights straight I couldn’t sleep longer than a few minutes. I’d wake up totally consumed with indiscriminate rage, legs twitching, rapid breathing, hot and crazy. Last night I dreamed about an aborigine shaman standing beneath the swollen branch of a giant tree. He carved a big “x” in the bark on the underside of the base with his spear, then pushed the point part-way in to demonstrate, right there where the lines crossed, saying, “This is where we kill it…”

All day long I paid the price, and now — why, now, it’s almost safe for me to drive. A few minutes ago, one of the cats made me laugh. I’m back in my body and I feel fine, except for wondering who hypnotized me into digging ditches all night long.

So maybe it’s okay to write about this stuff. Maybe it’s not, but I just did.

What is it about alleged “holidays”? Maybe because aside from siblings and cousins, most of the family deserves plowing under. That’s always a hard one to get past. We’ve now entered the six-week gauntlet of hell, and January can never come soon enough:

“LOOK OUT, here come the clichés again!”

They’re like Stukas. Relentless dive-bombing by homilies. It’s all I can do to stay sane enough to pay decent attention to my wife, who incidentally in regard to all of this is utterly blameless and pure as the driven snow. Without her, in fact, I might never have experienced the real thing.

The best time I ever had this time of year was that pre-Xmas week of ‘99, when I was all alone in San Cristobal and went to Las Posadas with a bunch of neighbors who didn’t know who the hell I was. I had never been so lonely, but sitting in that warm, crowded kitchen afterwards with all those Spanish grandmothers, I wanted to blubber into my posole. Walked all the way home later in the moonlight. It was 10 degrees, and the snow squeaked under my boots. Coyotes were howling, the moon was bright, and God loved me.

[It's in the book, ya know!]

I think this is so cool: http://change.gov/

Pretty damn slick, too! (Your next government in action, assuming there’ll be anything left to govern.) Right now the Obama-Biden Transition Team site is taking comments on the American health care system — the very phrase makes me angry — and I just added one. You can, too, by visiting this Join the Discusion page.