Ed Abbey had a wife and kid in the trailer with him in Arches while he wrote some of Desert Solitaire. Despite the opening of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the old fighting tomcat did not actually leap in through Annie Dillard’s window and knead her chest with bloody paws in the mornings: it was one of her graduate students.

Annie and Ed came in for some criticism for the discrepancies between implication in their writing and real life. With that in mind, I feel compelled to admit to you that the last month and a half has not been an unbroken stretch of desert dwelling for yours truly, at least depending on your definition of “desert.” I have indeed spent time these days lounging in desert canyons with excellent views of curious bats, sweltering over this overheated keyboard in Nipton, and hauling myself up into the Wee Thump Joshua trees at one in the morning when sleep proves elusive in my non-airconditioned solar box cooker of a house.

But there’s been a little bit of visiting the Getty Museum, eating Westwood pho, and drinking Echo Park coffee mixed in there as well.

I’m going down to Los Angeles again on Thursday, in fact, to socialize, and also to take advantage of The Raven’s highspeed internet connection. I have to find a place to live starting in October and a paid job of some sort shortly thereafter, and this task is significantly easier with access to over-designed Flash-heavy apartment and job-listing sites, and my home here in Nipton does not count reliable net access among its many inarguable charms. Posting this Letter From The Desert — not writing, just posting — will likely take fifteen minutes, for instance, if past experience is anything to go by, and to do that I need to carry the laptop across the road, and given the number of insects lying in wait there the byte per bite ratio can’t be more than about 20.

Also, The Raven’s shower comes with actual hot water, which phenomenon has much to recommend it.

So it hasn’t been all desert all the time here. More like all desert 6/7ths of the time. It occurs to me as I write this that I arbitrarily count Las Vegas and Bullhead City and Laughlin as being “desert” here, despite the fact that when I go to any of those places for groceries or other errands I generally find myself in refrigerated surroundings. Come to think of it, Los Angeles probably deserves the desert designation as well, despite its well-watered aspect subsidized over the last century by the ghost of Owens Lake. Try to define “desert” these days and you have to refer to Jane Jacobs and Lacan as much as John Wesley Powell. But I don’t want to be accused of bioregional rules lawyering, so when I drop down south out of Cajon Pass I will not refer to myself as being in the desert. Please make a note of it.

Where I’ll be after October is yet undetermined, though it will almost certainly be in one desert or another. I have my eye on Tucson, of course: it’s at the top of my short list of Perfect Places For Chris. Bishop is compelling in some respects: the Sierra, and the White Mountains, and the utter joblessness, excepting that last one. I have an old friend in Taos with a business proposition. I could probably find work in Vegas. I have an invitation to hang a few photos in a gallery in Searchlight, and maybe I could parlay that into a staggeringly lucrative career somehow.

Until then, I’ll be mostly here in Nipton with the Joshua trees and the creosote and the bugs. But there is an exhibit on colonial Peruvian art at the Getty, and I’d kinda be a fool to miss that. Also, hot showers. Ah luxury.