I would tell you about Thursday.

It began with a shudder of wondering why they haven’t called back yet. Then I sorted the last box haphazardly and got in the truck and tried to find a different way across town using the new ridiculously expensive GPS system.

The first road pleased me with its indifferent green poverty, but the map system failed me. A road that looked like it went through on the screen turned out to be rough dirt and then it ended abruptly in a pair of yards. I picked one of them and it too ended almost immediately. So I started very carefully backing up around a couple of vicious curves. About halfway down an unseen woman began braying alternatively “Hello?” and “Can I help you?”–to the first I answered Hey and to the second I just said No, repeatedly. I have no idea if she heard any of it. Her cries only focused me in getting the hell out as efficiently as possible. It probably took three minutes to accomplish it, from the time she started up.

I tried the second road and it got me over to the hospital part of town, and I knew where to go from there to get two breakfast burritos, and I ate one of them on the spot.

Then I went shopping and a bought:

–the small kind of chrome rack, to serve in the short term as a nightstand,
–a lamp that has no wall plug and no regular batteries, but can instead be charged via USB, or by a small solar panel built into the top of it, or by a hand crank concealed in the bottom of it,
–some of the kind of refrigerator magnets with hooks for hanging for example a bamboo spatula that won’t scratch enamel,
— and a home version blood pressure cuff.

Then I tried the third road and it went a long paved way, rising another thousand feet in elevation beautifully before also ending abruptly, but at least not in someone’s yard. This I addressed not by backing, but by one of those one million point K-turns. It is a very long old luscious truck, about twenty feet. The dropoffs on both sides of the long road were not catastrophic, but only concerning. Care was taken, believe it.

Then I got a coffee and went home and assembled the chrome rack and charged the light by USB and hung the fridge hooks and took my blood pressure without going calm and still for fifteen minutes first like they tell you to in the pamphlet. The preliminary result were in the yellow range, initially suggesting a case of mild hypertension, which I think is correct. I also hung the fresh wet clothes on the new drying rack as it got dark.

Afterwards I felt tired but laying down and reading did not lead to sleep. I read the entirety of a short later John Nichols novel about September, and a very short story by E. Hemingway called Soldier’s Home.

Toward the end of that, still feeling nowhere near restful, I cracked a bottle of wine for the first time in my two and a half weeks here. It is the Cab I liked best from Esperanza’s.

Having had two short glasses and done my proper work by telling you all that, maybe sleep will finally come.

Listen: I live in heaven now. Shit still blindsides me. Like the doorknob. Like the invisible braying woman.

I’m not always perfectly in my right mind and in fact I think the utter freedom of this new life inclines me toward finally feeling some pretty awful things after years of suppressing them more and then less and then more. Feeling them finally leaves me also feeling mildly hypertense.

By the end of his apparently purely autobiographical novel, all Nichols has to his name is a heart condition, a truck like mine, four thousand in the bank, and some kind of weird prep-school boy inner assurance that he’s never going to get a regular job again.

At the end of Hemingway’s story, the soldier cuts all emotional ties, moves to Kansas City, and gets a very regular job as a newspaperman.

In some ways I’m better off than either. In some ways not. In still others the jury is still out.

Some say comparisons are odious, and others will tell you that what they are is inevitable.

I don’t know who is right about pretty much anything.

Nevertheless, consciousness in all these forms is miraculous and dear.

The monsoon is taking a break and that fills me with nostalgia, but soon there will be a winter and new kinds of shivery beauty at six and seven thousand feet to notice within it.

Maybe the first movie will go into the can then.