Go dog go.

I was thinking about Indian summer because I thought it might be–night temps dropping into the lower sixties finally–but it’s not, because this isn’t a rewarming after a cold spell. Anyway, I thought about the Indian part next.

Like most of ‘our’ names for important things in this culture, this one is ridiculous. Indians get called Indians because the merciless first conquistadors thought this was India or at least the outskirts of the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t. But the roughly indigenous still get called that most of the time. Indian Country. Like this is the suburbs of Delhi. Feh.

The correct politicizing is no better. Native is sort of true. But Native American? No. Because the name (US of) America sucks. It comes from a twisting of the first name of Amerigo Vespucci, some Italian guy who might or might not have made a couple of voyages to what was then the New World from his perspective. And even if he made those quasi-legendary trips, the places he ended up were essentially in what is now Brazil. Nowhere near Miami or Cleveland or Houston or Seattle.

So we ended up with: Southerly America. And then its northern counterpart. And then the bloody colonials of Virginia and Rhode Island co-opted the whole name to refer to themselves and their upstart country, rightly pissing off everyone from Chile to the Yukon who has an investment in being a resident of ‘the Americas’ too.

Some of the people who were here before being ‘discovered’ called the place Turtle Island. That would be better. No one but poets of the Gary Snyder kind think so, however.

Inside my own head, the house that Jefferson et. al. built is just The Empire now. I’m partial to its allegedly southwest corner (the part that’s ‘southwest’ of Jamestown and New Amsterdam), but calling it the Southwest sticks in my craw for that very reason. Sonora, as in the desert, is more like it, but my true heartland isn’t even the emblematic desert. I favor the higher ground, the sky islands above the saguaro and petrified forests. In my heart I live where the mullein and the piñon and the juniper grow. The oaks and the drier spruce. The pica pica bird and the horned toad and the stray jaguar and bobcat and ringtail.

So screw being ‘American’ (for a whole list of reasons), or even a Westerner because … West of what? I don’t define myself in relation to Boston.

I live when I live best with the Ponderosa. Not on it. With it. It’s not Deseret because I’m not a magic underwear person. It’s not Aztlan because I’m not of ‘Latin’ descent (whatever that actually means, a whole ‘nother story).

I’m just Dasoda-hae (“he just sits there”), and I live up toward the Mangas somewhere around where it hits the river of Helay. Sure, I’m a citizen of the Empire as an accident of birth, but that just gets me through their checkpoints expeditiously usually, until one of their stupid dogs dreams up or is given a cue to go nuts over a false positive. It means I can travel to Ajo without dying of thirst in the desert on the way. It means I share guilt in what the Empire has become. Cue the stormtrooper music, and spit in the eye of Lady Liberty.

That will be quite enough. About what I’m not. The next part is wondering what I am instead, other than a juniper lover and a Dasoda impersonator. Two things leapt instantly to mind, about who I was forty years ago and who I still am now.

A writering is one, or said better upon consideration, Belletrist. Of the spilling kind, ‘that’s not writing that’s typing’ and all.

The other thing always true is that I’ve been an an-arkhos-ist or one who believes in life without leaders, a zealot for the premise that things are always better when authority of any common kind is absent. Colonels, weedy landlords, self-described experts, cryptofascists of every stripe, and paternalists inclusive.

Where I ended up with it all is

I think there should be a morning ritual that does include coffee like the existing one, but also a brief meditation on those two things I am, and upon what else I might be; I’m sure there’s more.

“You acquired a post-it note. It menaces with spikes of ink and catclaw acacia.”