It’s Thursday. The connections between these sentences will be opaque. There was a bit of locally heavy rain and yesterday was the drying-out day. My kitchen is nearly perfected and there is a loaf of cold meat to sustain me. Over the weekend the nighttime temperatures are supposed to finally go off the cliff of winter and stay there for some months.

While that’s occurring I will be on the road.

In a perfect world I would leave early tomorrow and be down in the Cienega of San Vicente in time for the first sessions on Friday night. This is an imperfect world. I may and might spend tomorrow instead making ready in the deep way I tried to all week, and still haven’t.

The sessions I mean are part of the Southwest Festival of the Written Word, the only conference I still dependably attend anymore, in part because the 2015 version of the festival was the inspiration for starting this very project you are reading right now, a little over eight years ago.

In an even less perfect world I might not go at all this year, but stay home, prep for the cold, hunker down, and husband my thin resources (I use the word advisedly) with fierce finesse.

It would be better for me.

But I am assfucked with habit, nostalgia, prior commitments and obligations, and a witlessly misplaced sense of duty.

So probably I will split the difference and leave before the dawn on Saturday just ahead of the decisive cold front, picking my way past the Deuce of Clubs this time for reasons too shatteringly mundane to detail.

I still have not turned the furnace on, or even any little heaters. I just paid my gas and electric bills and they came out to less than one hundred dollars for October. I wish that would stay the same; it won’t. When I get back in some days the pouring front will have left it rather miserably cold in here and I will break down and start to burn some fossil fuel, dialing up the thermostat to minimum habitable standards while wrapped in layers of elderly cloth. I may even finally assemble and test the Chinese diesel heater–I may move myself largely into a smaller space and warm that, alternatively. I may at last pull the trigger on another lost zero-balance, and invest in that dreamy little coffee roaster as one of two steps I can take to start to remedy the situation caused by strangled trickles of income and the life they lead to.

In the meantime there should be some good road film and my heart cries out for editing and posting it where it belongs, in a timely and empowered fashion.