It’s now snowing. Windy and cold. My bare garden is infested with slate colored juncos. Always juncos. Those tough little bastards actually fly south to here. Or the the ones who just stay here, cardinals and crows and chickadee’s. I want a warbler, damnit. How about an indigo bunting just for kicks. The hawk is back though. Good hunting brother, get those woodchucks before I have to.

So I hear some interest in the story of the big burn. It will be awhile before I get to that one. I need to do it right and that means discribing the landscape and weather conditions and how they combined to create a fire storm. And I’m a little intimidated by the task of doing that clearly. It wasn’t a big fire by Yellowstone standards. Probably not even a thousand acres. But it was very intense.
I guess I make this time in my life look all exciting and romantic, but remember I’ve been verbally polishing these stories for thirty years. They make great party stories and help me compensate for the dork I really think I am. My plan after college was to work seasonaly jobs so I could develope my art on the off season. My goal was to become a famous painter. I ended up turning my back on art, drinking very heavily, not to mention other substance abuse, having truely nasty relationships with women, getting very sick, becoming so distant from reality I couldn’t figure out how to stop my beard from taking over my entire head and generally losing all confidence in myself. All this time, driven by an insane urge to compensate for my youthful athletic failures and suddenly blessed with a new body forged by fire, I became obsessed with basketball and spent the part of my life that sane people spend forming careers, polishing my game. And for what? So I can hobble down stairs like an 80 year old when I’m 55? So I can’t straighten my legs out and there are only a few positions I can sleep in without pain? So I can be stuck in a low level corporate lacky management job that requires more organization than you could distill out of a hundred of me and where I have to deal with managers who have more organization in their toenails than I will ever have? And artists who make me look like an organizational genius? And never, ever saving a fucking dime?

On the flip side….it was often FU-UN!