Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Good Words, Good Weapons...

Those of you who know me, know that I've long had the dream to find some nice, mid-sized university town in a western state with lots of nearby public land for hunting, fishing, and roaming, and open up a used book and gun shop. I've even laid out my vision here

What I envision is a bookshop where you can browse the stacks for books, then walk over to the gun rack to check out the used shotguns or maybe take a look at the vintage Ambassadeurs in the reel case.
Yep, a combination used book, gun and tackle shop. The kind of place where you can walk out the door with an obscure first-printing, a box of AAs and a classic pre-owned baitcasting reel, all in the same bag. In essence a literary and sporting junk shop. I think it sounds cool, and it's the kind of quirky, off-beat place I've always been drawn to. Not too stuffy, tradition-bound or pretentious, but not too weird. Just a mellow, funky spot for freethinkers, hippies, gun nuts, literate rednecks, bookworms, fishing bums or anyone else who possesses an artistic bent and an appreciation for firepower and spinnerbaits.

Well, it looks like someone else is living my dream. or was, at one time. The date on the ad for the coin guidebook says 1969, so perhaps rather than being forward-thinking, I'm actually way behind the times. Either way, it's cool...

A picture that FB friend and blog reader Todd Shaffer posted on FB. Now this is my kind of book store...

Monday, March 24, 2014

A Movie About Wannabe Writers? Why Not?

I've never - aside from the thousands of fairly typical, late-night, beer-and/or coffee-fueled conversations with the like-minded friends of my high school, college and near post college years - been a part of a "writer's group" or anything similarly high-minded. Not that I'm opposed to the concept, but I started writing decidedly non-creative, non-artistic, workaday yeoman's copy for money while still in college and have been doing it pretty much non-stop since. As a result, the creative, nurturing, let's-talk-about-our feelings-and-such group setting of the typical writer's group is totally foreign to me.

Which is why I want to see this movie.




I know nothing of the movie itself, but anything starring Jonathan Banks (Mike from Breaking Bad) or Dennis Farina can't be all bad, right? What I'd really like to see is Christopher Guest do a movie about aspiring writers, but until that happens this is what we've got.

 Anyone ever been part of a writer's group? We've got a local writer's group in my town comprised almost wholly of sweet, blue-haired Republican grandmothers writing Christian romance, heartwarming Billie Letts-esque light fiction and books about quilting. I thought I might join and see if I could get some feedback on my Chuck Palahniuk-inspired experimental fiction...

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Water, Water No Where...


Nor any drop to drink...

A few weeks back I wrote a little blog post about the ongoing drought on the southern plains. Well, it's still here, and yesterday when the winds in this part of the world were gusting to almost sixty, the dust got so bad that out in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, they had to lower the snow gates on the main highway north into Colorado.

From this story in The Oklahoman

— Spring break travelers driving through the Oklahoma Panhandle on Tuesday might want to choose a new route.
Northbound U.S. 287 in Boise City is closed and the snowgates placed down because of blowing dirt that resulted in zero visibility, said C.F. David, managing editor of the Boise City News.

Zero visibility on a sunny afternoon. Think about what it means to achieve something like that. And the beat goes on, here and elsewhere. Read Slate's Eric Holthaus' excellent (so far) series on drought in the west for a glimpse into the future of just one area.

But back to mine...

Several years back, while coming home from an assignment at Black Mesa (Oklahoma's highest point, which is in the NW corner of Cimarron County) I decided, on a lark, to drive the lone public road that traverses the northern half of Cimarron County.

Contrary to the popular image of flatness, this is pure mesa country, a geographic anomaly that extends in a finger pointing east from the canyonlands of northeast New Mexico across the northern border of the Oklahoma panhandle until elevation and contour are finally vanquished by the inexorable flatitude of the plains a few miles east of US 287. That highway, the same one closed yesterday by dust, is where this lone county road finally terminates some miles north of Boise City, Oklahoma. It is a staggeringly beautiful, incredibly remote and almost completely unpeopled region. Some of the darkest skies in North America are found here, which is why one of the nation's largest stargazing parties calls Black Mesa country home.  There are no towns, no other roads, no houses. Just heat, stone, sky and solitude. My kind of place.

The road quickly degenerated into a rutted, washed-out, low-gear two-track that wound through low-water crossings and deep, winding pinyon canyons begging to be explored. I spent the entire afternoon lost (metaphysically if not completely physically) in that enchanting world and never saw another soul, never passed another truck, never heard anything relating to Man or the outside world. A few hours later, I finally made the highway, pulled south onto US 287 and left it behind. I've been back to Black Mesa country a number of times since then, but haven't driven that county road again. I've made tentative plans to return to Black Mesa later this spring on a promised camping trip with my oldest son, and I may have to drive that road one more time before the land, ruthlessly transformed over the years into something it was never meant to be, completely blows away.

Water will be the defining issue of the future. Everywhere, for everyone. For many of us, it is quickly becoming the defining issue of the present. We are living in interesting times, indeed, and they're getting interestinger by the day...