Death Valley Equinox, more

So I had the two wisdom teeth out on Wednesday morning. That went well. I think I have les horrors about general anasthesia than I did before, but it's still disturbing that I have this hole in my existence there -- it's not like sleeping, where you have a sense of having been asleep -- you just don't have anything, it's like the plane of your existence has been folded and stapled and you walked from one point in time to another. Anyway, after I came home and crashed on the couch for a couple of hours, I threw together a strange anasthesia-haze collection of objects and the nice fellow and Frank drove us off. We had a strange huge dinner at the Roadhouse Grill in Bakersfield (it was pretty good, really, but huge) where they want you to throw peanut shells on the floor and the wait staff line dances at closing time. It was really adventurous getting to Wild Rose campground where we were to meet Zak because the most obvous road was closed and all the roads were narrow and windy and steep and had warning signs about falling rocks. I was naturally useless as a driver all this time because I was pretty heavily medicated.

We did get to Wild Rose after 3 in the morning and then slept in the car until about 6:30 and woke up to find Zak already making chocolate and wondrous little flowers all over the slopes of the campground and loud birds singing different songs from what they sing around here. Then we spent the rest of the day slowly tooling around the valley heading towards home in a way, ending up at the town of Shoshone for a late lunch where they were out of half the menu and refused to make milkshakes because they were overwhelmed with customers because of the "fucking flowers."

Some of the flowers smell like honey and some of them smell like tansy. On the valley floor they tend to grow in swathes -- one dominant species and a handful of others, the exact ones changing from place to place. And probably from time to time too but what do I know? I was in the valley for maybe eight and a half hours to see anything.

When you look at the desert you can imagine the earth when the first flowering plants grew. Now -- this is not what the earth looked like then. These are highly evolved, modern plants, even the ones that belong to "primitive" groups. But in most of the desert there is no loam. The ground is basically gravel. There are no ground covers. The plants grow spaced apart to give themselves enough room to take up moisture. And in most of the desert there is no grass, which is a very late plant group. So you can imagine it.

Edit: looking at my pictures I see there is much more grass than I remembered.

The most common flower I saw was a kind of evening primrose, and many of the flowers were entirely new to me.

In the next day or so I'll be putting up a gallery of my photos. You'll be able to see the elusive Zak, the orange fellow, the nice fellow, and me, among the rocks and flowers.

some work, anyway

I'm pretty messed up still from the teeth and other adventures, I guess. But I took another pass through the landmines story which got rejected this weekend, found some weird typoes that shouldn't have been there, tightened it a little, and printed it and got its envelopes ready for mailing to Absolute Magnitude. I don't know. I'm not a very adventurey writer, but the protagonist is risking life and limb here, and takes action, and what could be harder science fiction than a self-aware minefield?

And 538 words on the Washington future story which is giving me doubts though it's writing okay. The doubts -- does it address the theme, or is it just set in Washington?

And I did a little more market research.

I'm going to take a nap now, and later, clean the kitchen which is nasty because we keep dropping in long enough to mess it up but not long enough to clean it up.

In other news, it's cool and rainy again. (it will be rainy pretty much through April, based on past experience, and then in May it will dry up a lot and stay that way, with very minor exceptions, until December)

okay, that's it for the day (Clearing mailed: 550 Afterwar: 560 Washington)

Not a bad day, considering. I took Emma to the DMV, took the dog for two walks, washed the dishes, painted a cabinet, and wrote some stuff and mailed some stuff and helped Emma with scholarship applications.

She's doing a yeoman job on it, I think. She just wrote this essay on why Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act (not open shop, as I thought before, but quicker, more honest elections for certifying unions and more penalties for employer abuses in the election and contract negotiation process).

I read soime more in the immense farmworker book, too. There's something here about slavery. A while back, a participant in rasfc, Wildepad, was trying to argue that slavery wasn't all that bad. I was thinking about him as I was reading about the Indians in the missions -- it was both like and not like the system of slavery in the antebellum South. Not like, in that the padres' primary purpose for being there was to save souls, and all the brutal things they did to the Indians were in service of that. Which makes the whole brutality and cruelty thing bizarre. But like, in that the Indians' work was bought and sold by others than themselves and they had no right of free passage. And like in that they rarely rebelled but frequently ran away.

Some of it is grim reading. But there are parts which are merely fascinating -- the primitive agricultural technology, for example. Generally, the missions' grain was ground by hand, on metates, rather than by mill, and when it was a mill, it was a primitive burro-driven mill and not a water mill. Other things were done by hand which in other parts of the world were done by machine or animal, or by hand with more sophisticated tools. The Spanish even yoked their oxen wroing -- they lashed a pole to the poor things' heads! Soime of all this was due to the backwardness of Spanish agronomy and social organization at the time, and some of it was due to the expressed desire of the padres to fill the "neophytes'" lives with labor so that they didn't have time to get drunk and horny or wander off back to their pagan homes. And that was what the brutality was too. Partly it was the routine way to treat farmworkers in Spain and partly it was a purposeful strategy to drive the Indians to religion and away from behavior the padres thought would send them to Hell.

I've gotten to the break up of the missions, and how that transition was handled in the worst possible way, managing to land the Indians in even worse straits than they were in before.

The rest of the week, among the other things I'm doing, I will finish and mail this Washington story and the new query for Esperanza Highway. I also intend to get a third of what's left of this chapter in Afterwardone.

Another thing I have realized in the last week or so is that I can and ought to cut out the last vignette. This means that the book ends with the scene of the man without a country accepting the teenaged mother and her baby as his family. But it also means I don't have to spread the vignette material so thin.

For every discipline in writing, there is a counter discipline. Some time back I came to the conclusion that all other things being equal a longer book was better than a shorter book because it had more room for richness, complexity, and precise pacing. But now I'm working on more streamlined stuff. I think, for example, a story I have tried to write four or five times -- one about the men who turn into wolves at Advent and fight the forces of evil to preserve the fertility of the earth -- originally I was trying to write it night by night as one person uncovers the mystery of another person's participation in this. Now I think the pacing will work best if I write it as two nights: the second to the last night and the last night. Everything that could be accomplished with the series of nights could be accomplished in the one (second to the last) night, and the climactic scene won't have so much weight behind it, allowing it to be climactic instead of it being kind of a watershed after which the reader expects the real climax.

Which means, I think, that I may have figured out how to write shorter, sort of in general, or at least more than before.