230 months.....

Yesterday, fiddling about with papers and pencils, i decided to write down some TR life stats about where i have lived, adding up the months. This is all part of a larger exercise - figuring out when i was most content/most depressed and what the parameters were among other things.

As someone whose life was marked by incessant moving, it was starkly obvious what has gone awry. Longest time occupying any one place - 230 months at LeisureLand before we started yearly migrations in 2017. Nearly TWENTY years. No wonder i got moldy, settled, depressed, isolated and stale. This bird needs to fly. Often.

Also, 42 total months spent homeless: on tour with bands, couch-surfing with friends & relatives, between bands on the streets. No address, no phone, living out of suitcases and boxes and storage units.....

....but in crunching numbers and memories, it became clear to me when TR's America was truly Great: 1966, from March to August. Six months of preschooler bliss, that time between when we moved from LA til I had to start kindergarten in Elmira, Oregon in the Fall. Life will never be that way again. I'm OK with that.

It also was pretty good for a 2-year stretch from 6-1978 to 6-1980, and again from 9-1990 to 1-1992.

Bad times? yeah they're in there too. The 9 month stretch of homelessness when i was 10 was awful. The homelessnesses of my early 20s were different, i was on my own and able to fend for myself quite well, as much as an autistic person can. Semi-feral, quiet, unnoticed....

Late Winter, Early Spring - When Everybody Goes to Mexico

Do you recognize that title? It popped into my mind this morning, i heard it in the theatre of my mind. Great reverb there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTNaO0xSYsI - hear it here.

It's early John Denver, a deep cut from Rocky Mountain High album. Released in 1972, an instrumental precursor to the Windam Hill acoustic guitar sound of the 80s. I used to listen to this repeatedly for hours as a kid of 11, wondering how it could be in the actual key of C, but sound like a D-shape chord on the 12-string. It didn't occur to me until I read an article a few years later by Leo Kottke in Guitar Player magazine about the necessity of tuning 12-string guitars down from standard E tuning to compensate for the higher tension on the neck. So John WAS playing in D-form, but it was actually C-sound.

Well then!
(slurps tea)

Woke up before sunrise this morning and was mildly surprised that the first orange rays of El Sol didn’t stab into my eyes like usual as i was sitting at the table with the first cup of tea. We're past the Solstice by 6 weeks, and the Sun is obviously rising substantially farther north now, having moved just out of the frame of my SE-facing window here at 31 degrees north latitude.

The Earth has moved in relation to the Sun - last Sunday was the first day of Early Spring, known as Groundhog Day in the US, Imbolc and Brigid to the Old Ones, Candlemas to the Church.  My chickens will start laying soon at home in Oregon. Here in the Borderlands, flowers are starting to bloom, things are green, the young male blackbirds are starting their rusty attempt at calls. Today’s temperature will be near 80F

I am coming up on FOUR solid weeks of good mood, no depression at all. Remission.

Is it the Sun, 

the addition of huge amounts of B12 to my diet, 

the lack of alcohol, 

the good weed ...

…. the onset of Baby Crone maturity as I approach my second Saturn Return and seven years of no Blood? 

Whatever it is, I like it and hope it follows me back to Oregon in another 7 weeks or so. 

Stay tuned. I want to stay tuned. The music is better.