Sometimes the trains are too loud, and sometimes the backlot neighbors are ignoble savages.

The shedless reality of boxes pressing in on all sides is sometimes, currently, oppressive, and currently the waterless way of life might be the worst of all.

Or no: the worst of all is that this is a hollow shell monument to the failure of dreams, because I’m not living on the torn ciénega and maybe I won’t now, ever. A Western town at the other end of the quality scale, and half its size, puny, maskless, ugly, a manifestation of the victory of fear.

Counterbalanced against all those truths is this.

When I wake in the late morning and gaze out through the new screen door at the greenery and at the gentle monsoon cloud light, I am for a moment happy, and make tentative coffee.