The man in the street
dragging his feet
don’t want to hear your bad news
Imagine your face
there in his place
standing inside his brown shoes
You do his nine to five;
drag yourself home half alive
and there, on the screen–
A man with a dream.
***
I heard it was you, though rumor is a fickle Mistress.
Where I am is what I am used to. I can work around 10 or 14 one hundred degree days, and at the other end of the year, a couple of icy snowstorms that melt off the next day.
I do dream about it always being perfect, and I do dream about making that happen by becoming semi-nomadic.
She wanted another trip, so I said okay.
Let’s go where it is worst now, so that we know what it’s like in the nearby places where it’s the best in January.
An average winter day, way down at the Big Bend, the high might only be sixty. But the low at night only drops to 38, and that is cheap to remedy, compared to 51 and 22 in SandRock, or 49/27 at Cienega. You might make it, with no pellet stove to feed either.
Out there, even when you get up to 4500 feet on that average day in January, it doesn’t drop below freezing.
It’s a critical ten degrees of extra heat that comes for free.
Also, they don’t care if you are staying warm in a nomad rig instead of a house, and the land is still very cheap.
You could, were you prepared for it, live almost as if there were still buffalo, which is to say: very nearly free.
Free as in beer, gratis; free as in freedom, libre … I’m finally starting to see that there isn’t as much difference as I once thought.
Once I would have thought it unacceptably ugly, too, and far too far from the lifesaving hospitals and coffee made for you by poor little wage slaves.
My thoughts on death and servitude are changing along with my ideas about freedom.
Some rich people will pay a quarter mil for the privilege of dying in a tin can in the middle of nowhere.
If I can do it for 400 an acre …
I just might.
Not in July, though. I do still have some standards.