A quote from my story, “The Five-Pound Burrito”: “We each live through our time on earth in an accumulation of milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years, and life is a path we must follow, invariably, until the end. Is there change—or the hope of it? Yes, but change is wearing and bad for the nerves and almost always for the worse.” So it was for Salvador, protagonist of the story and creator of the burrito of the title, but what about the rest of us? In one of Woody Allen’s movies, the wife says, “You’re afraid of change” and the husband replies, “Change equals death.”
For my part, I like a nice smooth path, sans surprises, and I want novelty only in my work. Thus, the course of the past month or so has worn a familiar, relaxing and salvatory groove. I made two trips—to the Tucson Book Festival and to Port Angeles, Washington, for the Raymond Carver Fest—but they were remarkably hassle-free and a small joy in their own right. In Tucson, I gave a solo reading and sat on a panel with a couple of authors I know and like—Lisa See and Viet Thanh Nguyen—and in Port Angeles I entertained the crowd with a performance of “Chicxulub” and the burrito tale, by way of contrast. For the rest of the month, though, I resisted change of any kind, though of course, every device in my immediate environment was broken at all times, but that’s a kind of continuum lodged in the very vascular system of life: change equals wear, as Coetzee reminds us in the motif of used/used up in Disgrace.
Lately I have spent my days in the way I like best—writing, reading and dwelling in nature as much as possible, and yes, sleeping in my own bed, with the windows wide open to the cool of the fog-hung night. My adventures in nature were harmonious too, though I did wind up bringing fatal change to the lives of a few hundred of my fellow creatures—mosquito larvae, seething in my rain bucket. They will never get to pupate or taste even the faintest molecule of mammalian blood—in the book of vectors and the diseases they transmit, this is a real tragedy. On the other hand, I did have a magical experience with a bobcat, which stared into my eyes at a distance of maybe thirty feet, and kept staring for a full five minutes until a car passed on the road behind me and it vanished like living smoke.
I will work today on the new novel, even as I celebrate the release of the fat Spanish translation of my selected stories and the coming publication of the latest collection, "I Walk Between the Raindrops," in German translation. When I’m done for the day, I hope to go back out into the chaparral and commune with all manner of creatures, curious bobcats and soaring hawks at the top of the list, mosquitoes way down there at the bottom, along with their fellow blood-sucking arthropods, the ticks. I plan to keep the full measure of my blood right where it’s meant to be, but then one never knows . . .
Ciao.