I wake, decently rested, before the dawn, before four.

There’s an image in my mind of a day spent downtown, some open ground with casual access to a public, to both sun and shelter. I don’t seek out converts. I let my signage speak silently, while I write. It happens a few blocks from the co-op, across from the community radio station, underneath the cottage business in a strip mall that used to be the downtown Chevy dealership time out of mind.

There was a guy I watched in Albuquerque when I worked and lived around the Uni.

He was a militant nudist, always wearing the bare minimum for clothes, his bicycle and its trailer always festooned with placards about gay rights, vegetarianism, and various elaborations on a kind of Thoreauvian socialism. The one time I spoke to him he told me that he rented a room in somebody’s house a few blocks away. His was a low-impact life based on a well-considered orthodoxy. He was living his own true self.

My vision for my own life in waking was something of the same kind, only more given to subtlety, and grounded in the land I do now own, whether property-owning is consonant with my values or not.

A vintage stylishness to the clothes. Meat, in moderation. A ripe hetero connection too.

***

Earlier than ABQ, in a broken time in the Hell Valley, there was another trope man. This one was clearly an aging trust fund baby and he’d given his life to the bottle instead of a vision. He rode a bike too. He’s the example of how not to do it.

***

There’s a night vision version too. Little Toad Creek for one drink maybe.