Slowing down…Book Tour 2014— Borrego Springs California
Sitka for the book launch: lots of friendly people but no books to sell them. Anchorage had a great number of people and a only few books to sell, and Fairbanks had a few people and no books to sell, plus it was thirty below zero. Since I don’t understand the book business anyway, I came to the desert in California where there are no fans for my books and no books at all PLUS it’s ninety degrees Fahrenheit above zero in the sun, which is more exotic than being naked in the middle of Paris, France.
I have a conviction that place, that is, actual landscape, shapes culture and therefore character. I have become an Island rainforest person, that is, I get a little nervous if my skin gets dry, and I’m always considering my escape by sea.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the hot and dry… I just don’t know who I am in the hot and dry. It’s as if I’ve undergone one of those science fiction mind wipes that happens periodically to characters on the starship Enterprise, I am perfectly relaxed but blank in the heat, the memory of my other life, in the cold and the damp… is dim. The fact that I have a book out about unhappy people who live in a wet world on the North Pacific is a wonderful memory to me now, a hazy dream like the recollection of a party I went to and ate someone’s marijuana baked goods by mistake.
I am a soggy person wandering in a strange land. Desert people seem to like small dogs and loose fitting shorts. Their knees have extra skin, everyone looks older than their stated age but that’s okay because it’s not a race after all. Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Forget the reading. Today is the day to round off the edges. Let the Buddha doze and give in to the heat. jhs
