It's been a few months.

I should probably use this thing a little more to "keep in touch," but it's been hard to figure out what to say. There's just too much, but somehow also nothing.

For the past five minutes, I've been staring at the wall and trying to decide what goes best after George Jones: Simon and Garfunkel or The Soviet Army Chorus Band. I've been thrift store shopping for records.

Also, my brain is generally scrambled. I should take out the garbage.

I'm at home. It's the same place I've lived for the past six months, since moving here. That situation came real close to falling apart during the past couple weeks, but it's been salvaged. My landlady tried this weird scam, and I called her a bloodsucking liar, and she called the cops on my friend, so I talked to the cops about her, and then I refused to pay the rent, and she eventually caved. Now we're cool, I guess.

"The silence is like thunder as the enemy prepares another round."

Thank you, George Jones.

Without getting into any serious philosophical talk, my notions of trust and honest communication (basically: what is a lie?) have mostly adapted to northern New Mexico by now. It's frustratingly difficult to verbalize, and I won't try. But it's approximately as unsettling as it sounds. On any given day, the landlady might be the third or fourth person to speak to me in a way that at one time (like, a couple months ago) I would have termed dishonest. But it's really not...somehow.

Everyone is a fucking cowboy.

There is this bizarre sensation I've been getting more and more often: everything I know — or really, my image of what I think is everything I know — is pivoting on some axis I just realized existed. That sounds like bullshit, and it is bullshit, but that's what it feels like. The word, pivot, sort of echoes in my brain every time it happens...

And it's not "culture shock." At least, I don't think so. When I think of culture shock, I think of the new reporter from Wyoming who seems weirded out when drunks at Tiny's sing karaoke in Spanish. Or this time when I stopped at a taco stand and tried to order from a guy who didn't speak English and somehow ended up eating half a pepper that burned my mouth for about two hours. Maybe I have a pretty superficial understanding of culture shock. Or something...?

The copy of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" I bought from Somebody Else's Treasure is apparently scratched to hell. I guess it's "Hymn to Lenin" then.