TWNW #6

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Oh.

It's you.

No no, by all means please do sit down and read. You just...startled me, is all.

You're looking fabulous, by the way.

Me? Oh nothing, really. Still in Santa Fe, still enjoying pretty much everything here. The winter before last, when I was here working on the vampire movie, I decided that my reward for suffering through all those long, freezing nights at work was to be a summer back here in northern New Mexico. Seriously when I was thigh-deep in that river in the mountains, at 1:30 in the morning, ambient temp. 7 degrees, the full green trees and the flowers here in the backyard were exactly what ran through my mind to keep me going.

So here I've been, taking my reward. It's pretty great, but I'm getting antsy to be back on the road. If I leave Thursday, as I'm planning to, I'll be on the coast in Washington by the 17th to see my Dad and stepmom, and Kiki too. From there it's down to San Francisco to see Zana and Mark, and then down to Los Angeles to see Jake and Gordon, then back to Texas by the 2nd of August.

The fires around Santa Fe are still pretty bad but it looks like they're being contained little by little. They aren't spreading, anyway, and the smoke has been blown elsewhere for the past couple of days. There's been rain these past few afternoons which usually happens but hasn't much, this year. The sunsets are fantastic.

Loren hosted his monthly brunch here at the house on Sunday and that was wicked fun. A random girl showed up that Loren got all cartoonishly excited about, and I worked an intricate Machiavellian ploy to get her to return later that night for cards, so I could be what the kids call a "wingman" for my buddy.

He's shy, Loren is, and he's still getting his sea legs vis-a-vis women who aren't his ex-girlfriend. So do you want to know how it went?

I'm the very worst wingman of all time, is how it went. Sure enough she showed up all cute and perhaps even ready to spend some raunchy quality time with Loren, but two things happened to derail the action: one, Loren hid behind his hand of cards all night long and never came over to visit where she was sitting; and two, she and I got along pretty well and she invited me to come gardening with her the next morning.

Now listen, I'm not up on all the new words the kids are using these days but "gardening" sounded like a hell of a lot of fun so I said yes. Yeah I'll meet you for some "gardening," it's been a while but I love to "garden" and as far as I can remember I'm pretty great at it. Born to "garden"!

Wanna know how that went? It was literally hot and dirty and sweaty and nowhere near as fun as all of that sounds. Actual plants were involved, and the digging of soil, and implements for same and nothing else no matter how hard my imagination was working. Girl is a gardener, not a "gardener" as I now know.

(It was actually pretty fun; we planted plants and she brought me strawberry pie and I got to play with a wheelbarrow.)

I've been doing chores and stuff around the house while Loren's at work, and meeting fellow Don Juan Street peeps like Lilo, who comes by sometimes to promote a hand-rolled cigarette from Loren and who has lots of tattoos of clowns with razor blades. Nice guy, Lilo is. I think he might be the Mayor? I couldn't really understand much of what he said to me.

I painted the moto, too - halfway into the faux-rust project I decided that it looked pretty cool with the layers of primer/blue factory paint/bare metal and so that's how it is, and I'm hoping that by my third day or so on the coast the bare metal will grow a nice patina of rust, and then I'll clearcoat it. Jake's working on a name (along the theme of a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold) and when I'm in L.A. we'll laser-cut the decal and that'll be that.

Not a whole bunch else going on, and sadly all the annoying parts of Santa Fe have kept themselves hidden since I've been here. The closest: last night we went to Atomic for some frito pie and the place was crawling with Santa Fe-specific neo-hippie-dirtbag dudes. Why look like that? Why not bathe sometimes? Why not wear clothes that fit and eschew the sort of neck tattoos that'll make things weird with your dad forever and ever? Loren knows all these dirtbags and he says that most of them, rather than having grown up in the landfill as their appearance suggests, come from pretty loaded families. That makes it 10,000x worse. I realize that I'm just one leap of judgment away from screaming at them to get off my lawn etc. etc., and certainly I've dabbled in looking homeless and unloved myself, but Jeeeeeebus these guys look like goobers.

I'm digging, though. There's really nothing here so far that I can get all pissy and hopefully funny about. Good news, though - soon I'll be leaving for a big run across the more desolate parts of Colorado, Utah, Idaho and eastern Washington (collectively, "America's Meth Lab"), so there'll be at least one of these postings where I'm dehydrated and indignant about something stupid and half-insane, and so that'll be funny. Maybe.

When I finally leave here it'll be early in the morning; the goal for the first day is to make Salt Lake City in time to set up my hammock at Cherry Hill, a.k.a. The Happiest Place on Earth, a.k.a. A Pretty Good Argument for Turning into a Mormon. More on that later, from there.

Thank you for reading.

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Photos

Oooooh.
Ahhhhh.

Horale!
Spidey y Osito jugando el Uno, bro!

Here,
a house.

Moto Apocalypto
(working title)