She turned me into a newt! Thursday, March 31, 2005 Desert Update #4327-A: the newt in my bed I watched him swinging the pick in the sun, breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock, and the rocks into dust, and the dust into Earth again... I watched as he swung the pick into the air and brought it down hard and changed the shape of the world, and changed the shape of the world again. - poet Cecilia Woloch, from The Pick, a poem in her debut collection "Sacrifice"   Someone wrote me Tuesday and said they hoped I'd had a nice Easter. I read this email and thought, "Easter?" Was it Easter? Awake. Shake dreams from your dreads, my little hippie chick, my ripe hiker babe. Eat the day, the day's divinity, first chocolate you see. I awake this morning, open my iBook and the first thing I hear is, nope, not Jim Morrison, but Luciano and his band Big Milk in a bootleg recording from an amphitheater in Orange County where Big Milk opened for Perfect Circle. Despite that it was recorded from somewhere in the audience, the sound quality is enough to convey Luci's powerful passionate voice. According to his mother, tall Luci was doing "his Frankenstein walk" throughout. I wish I'd been there. No chance of that now. I'll try and figure out how to attach the mp3 file for you to download and hear. It's intense, or maybe it's just more intense for me because he's an angel now. But it is another bright sunny Arizona desert day, windy as usual here in the Ides of March, and on my plate for today: a trip the 12-miles to town to print out fifty or so more pages of my AT tome to edit, maybe a trip to Safeway! whoohoo! the post office to pick up my meds from that kind and accommodating Mel's pharmacy in Idyllwild, then back here to edit and no doubt steal time from the editing to work on my latest baby, Nathan & the Scarlet Sea, a short story whose protagonist hooked me and now I can't stop. Maybe an hour of scraping the exterior trim rimming the roof, another of painting it, a small price to pay for my free squat here at the zen little octagon of straw (and one I volunteered for), and a pleasant physical activity to engage in as the sun sets in its ritual Arizona desert splendor. Crawling into bed last night, I was reminded of the night Molly and I discovered a newt between the sheets. I shit you not. A newt. Of course being of the lizard variety and not the stinging biting 8-legged type, we let him go with a warning (rather than psychotically smashing him into a spindly pulp - the fate of the scorpion, should I ever find one in my bed or anywhere else in my living space) and the newt crawled off into my Bukowski collection where he no doubt dreamed the night away with visions of drunken biped debauchery and postal drudgery. That next morning I saw him scooting off away from the two of us. Speaking of scorpions, every night I have a police escort home from old town the 12 miles I gotta drive out into Boonieville. It's rather flattering. I feel like a former Head of State. They think they're being discreet, but what pro driver doesn't know the headlights of a cruiser. And I can feel em, you know? Like a disturbance in the Force kinda thing. Of course, their dangerous proximity to my bumper also helps. It makes it a drag, not being able to drink more than two beers in Old Biz before I gotta jet back and hunker down in the Bunker, but I'm fairly religious about the two-beer maximum. And then again it ain't such a drag, cuz two tall PBRs at $1.50 each up at Hot Licks, a total expenditure of five bucks with a dollar tip on each beer. Five bucks, two beers, and an hour or so with the Internet, a visit with the locals, and I'm ready to slither back out to the desert anyway. Here's an irony worth noting. Today, while working on the short story "Nathan and the Scarlet Sea," while working out the very details of Nathan's BTU power jack, I was running in and out and bump-starting the BMW, rolling it down the elaborate and steep ramp system I built for just said purpose, and switching this plug and that plug and running the poor car forever like a generator, dealing, in essence, with power plant issues of my own, using power to write a story about a guy who taps his own body's heat to run his computer, his mp3 player, etc. I know, Matrix. Not a new idea, but tweaking it a bit, carrying it on, breathing more life into the idea in the hopes that one day it will be invented for real and we'll all be free of our dependence on oil, coal, wood, smashing atoms, all that. If someone could just tap the energy that emanates from everybody fucking like monkeys, damn, we'd have it. Here's an eyebrow-raising bit of commentary on the current activities of the U.S. in its so-called war and the terrible catastrophes befalling poor nations worldwide, a kind of karma imbalance. "America needs a reality check! Where's our tsunami? - Daniele Parsons, singer for the band Green Machine And on a lighter note, this came to me from my good friend Rebecca The Tank Girl: When Hunter S. Thompson's wife Anita was asked recently about his abuse of his body, she replied, "He loved his body, he gave it everything it wanted." † -RSM, Operation Desert Edit   Copyright 2005 Richard McKinney All Rights Reserved (Just ask & I'll likely let you reprint anything!)