MOONBURN

What the hell is that?!?

The little red numerals on the clock my wife insists she has to be able to see from her side of the bed read "5:30 a.m." So why I am awake? Is this a raid? No?? Then why are those police floodlights whitening the gloom? Nobody's banging on the door. Maybe it's not the cops. Maybe it's a flying saucer. (Hide the cattle!)*

I get up. No need for a flashlight, that's for sure. Wait a minute. Oh no, Jesus Christ, it's the moon! The bleeping full moon, about to set on the western horizon, too bright to even look at! Not that I don't try. (But you'll scar your retinas, I swear.) You probably think I'm making this up, but think again: moonlight in dry air at 8,000 feet is a different animal than most of us have ever seen. I turn to the east window. Holy hacienda! I can see colors!! Yellow flowers, green grass, brown rocks. Ye gods. I fall back into bed. There's a metaphor here for something, I just know it. Turn. Flop. Snore. (Zzzzzzzz. . .)

Man, if weather were an operating system, this would be the one to have. (And it's freeware!) We walk down the dirt road to the post office, early too, since it closes at 9:30 a.m. on Saturdays. Bright sun, totally clear sky, air temperature in the shade a cool 48 degrees fahrenheit, and I'm wearing shorts and a T-shirt! My arms and legs are cool, but the sun is like a heat lamp against my back. On the return trip, I'm huffing and puffing -- 8,000 feet is 8,000 feet, after all. I'm also facing the sun now and sweating bullets, but my shirt is dry. As soon as we reach the top of the hill, so is my head. Dry as a bone. I'm comfortably warm, but walking through the shade of the little front porch is like passing through an ice cave: 52 degrees on the thermometer by the door!

It's the air. Dry air. Clean air. And the altitude. Fewer molecules and less crud for the sun's rays to push through. What a difference! (A slumbering metaphor twitches slightly, shifts a leg, but does not awaken.) Well, nothing to do but sit outside in the sun and have another cup of coffee. Wearing sunglasses and a big hat, naturally.

No sounds except the for the gurgling of a nearby "brook" (acequia) and the buzzing of a few flies and honeybees. A few feet away a small gray lizard suns himself on a big white rock. Half a cup later the lizard moves a quarter of an inch. . .by the time I empty the cup, the resident reptile has ooched a tiny bit farther up the rock. Why??? And then I see the shadow, about an inch and half from his tail. Of course! He feels the approaching chill on his little lizard butt and keeps just far enough ahead of the moving shadow to feel cozy. Me, I'm getting fried, so it's back inside the house. Temperature in the shade, 58 degrees. Is this legal? (The metaphor blinks, yawns, stretches, and stands up. AHA!)

("Emptiness. Simplicity. Power!" he muses. . .)

I sit in front of my Sony monitor and stare at the icons stacked around the edges of the screen: text clippings, disk images, applications, stray JPEGs, geez. What the hell is "mvd10002.pdf," anyway? I am seized with an impulse to trash them all, but resist, curious packrat fool that I am. Along the bottom of the screen, a patient row of neatly-labeled pop-up folders full of things I'll never open waits to be clicked. Hmmm. I give in and hit "Email Downloads": 147 items! (Oh, the shame and horror.) Endless PDF files, baby pictures, silly jokes. . . I click on "WebCams": Mount Everest? KremlinKam?? It's been months since I looked at those, years maybe. This is ridiculous! Complexity sucks. (Don't even THINK of opening the "Applications" folder.) Where's the emptiness? The simplicity?? The power???

There's so much extraneous crap on this machine, you'd think I'd been installing Microsoft apps in my sleep. Last week I opened my Emailer "Sent Messages" folder and found 2,873 copies! The others were just as bad. (No wonder Emailer was eating my hard drive. Delete, delete, delete.)

When my iBook comes, if it ever does, I won't put anything on it, hah-hah, but maybe I'll have better sense. After all, one of the reasons I'm getting an iBook instead of a PowerBook G3 is because it has fewer doodads. I just want to surf the Web, send email, write stories, and upload files. Well, maybe do some drawing, too. Watch QuickTime movies, buy one of those USB mics and record some sounds. OK, OK, I know! But you get the idea. It's not a replacement for the Big Guy (my bulletproof PowerMac 8600/200, one of the best computers ever built by the hands of man). It'll be relatively simple: no latches or itty-bitty doors, only a few ports to play with, and no phone cord. (AirPort! AirPort!) Yes, and ESPECIALLY after I trash all that Microsoft sludge, there'll be lots less B.S. between me and what I want to do.

Macs were simple once. They still are, by comparison to you-know-whats, and at least most of the guts are branded by Apple. The latest designs really are physically simpler, easier on the hand and eye, and more powerful than most of you need. Just like the sunlight at 8,000 feet. (More ultraviolet than any sane human can use!)

And now: D.H. Lawrence! (Hoo-hah, fooled you, didn't I?) No, he probably wasn't simple, he might not have been sane, and if that name is drawing a blank, you're out of luck and should have paid attention in English Lit. I have better things to do, like tell you about the place he lived and worked for a while, a place he may have loved better than any other.

As luck would have it, the so-called "D.H. Lawrence Ranch" is just a few miles from where I'm writing this. I say "so-called" because it wasn't really his (a lady named Mabel kinda gave it to him) and it wasn't a working ranch, at least not when he lived there. What it was, was a place to work. To think, to write, and also to relax. A productive haven and refuge from the world. Georgia O'Keeffe used to visit and lie on a bench that's still sitting under the "Lawrence Tree," a tall pine she painted once. (Closer to our own time frame, Dennis Hopper actually owned Mabel's house for a while, a few years back. Maybe that'll get you to fire up Sherlock and learn something!) But talk about empty, simple, and powerful. . .

You drive about 5 or 6 miles up the side of this immense mountain, Lobo Peak, on a winding gravel road that climbs through piñon and juniper forest up to where the Ponderosa pines grow, waaaayyy up there. Way up. I dunno, maybe 9,000 feet. Maybe higher. Needless to say, there isn't anyone or anything up there except trees, rocks, and 80-mile views. (And these days, a few folks from the University of New Mexico.) Lawrence lived in an old homesteader's cabin, a tiny low-ceilinged shack that's still there just as he left it. There's an itty-bitty lawn smaller than your bedroom, and a few feet away is a meadow that slopes away toward the south with an open view to die for. Ol' D.H. wasn't there long enough to write more than a couple of works, but he loved it. He'd bake bread, milk the cow, ride his horse, and write a few pages out in longhand, which Dorothy Brett (someone else to look up) would transcribe each evening on a now-ancient manual typewriter.

My wife and I went up there last week and were stunned by the solitude and silence. Here I am, complaining (mildly!) about not having any TV to watch in our rented adobe, bitching about a temperamental Internet connection and no daily newspaper, and up there. . .up there they had nothing but kerosene lamps and a view. No mass entertainment, no Amazon.com, no cheeseburgers, no good or bad drugs, no motorcycles, no SUVs. No Macs, no PCs, no libraries, no damn Internet. Nothing between D.H. Lawrence's brain and his novels but a No. 2 pencil and a pad of paper!

The dude is buried up there now, sort of, in a special memorial. I say "sort of" because his ashes were mixed with the concrete that was poured for the memorial. It's a very special place, at any rate. Just walking around up there and seeing how "primitive" the living and working conditions were is startling. And realizing how little each of us needs, in contrast to how MUCH most of us have, can rock your world.

At least he and I have one thing in common: moonburn!

The only thing I wonder is, when he rolled out of bed to see what was going on, what did he think it was???

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives have links to all past columns and occasional snippets of biographical info.

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*This part of the world is known for "cattle mutilations," which if you don't know are thought to be UFO-related and are very weird...

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January 08, 2009