Doing a movie makes obsessive-compulsive disorder look like a form of relaxation; it's a medium of tedium, of the relentless balancing of the tiniest of details on top of each other so perfectly that when the thing is done none of the pain shows. For the guy behind the camera, the effort is too easily its own reward. Working hard to make any thing, frankly, is a kick, and even if what we've made doesn't say much, we get what we needed from the process and move on to the next. The guys and gals swarm out of the film schools with their cameras, now. There's never been a time like this when there were so many and it was so cheap and easy. Godspeed. Work hard until you are good enough so that when you finally have something to say we'll hear it and see it.

It's June 22 and the White Man turns his back on us; he walks on, regardless. If he hears our prayers he gives no sign, and his feet fall with no sound in the corridor, one after the other, marking his path just as certainly as the steady fall of the days mark ours. I should be happy that at least I wake once more to watch him leave, and to know he will return at the appointed day just as surely as he goes now. I should be happy that I wake with hope, knowing that his depature is of little consequence for the work I must do, the work I choose to do, these next six months. But such thoughts are no real comfort to me. The White Man turns his back on us. The days grow shorter. My path towards darkness cuts straight across these circles he walks. If there is no meaning here then I must make it myself. I must put colored ribbons on my coat.

Let's say for your thirty-third wedding anniversay you weren't planning anything at all because it had been a busy time, and relatives had been visiting for a few weeks. But the Texas relations had been looking for an excuse to party, and there were some extra balloons left over from your daughter's graduation and the evening was warm and then friends dropped by with the fixings for gin and tonics. At some point you would be compelled to put a CD called Delite on the player and give yourself up to that marvelous driving beat and find that despite your best intentions you were in the midst of a celebration of more years of wedded bliss than you can count on the fingers of both hands and feet.

The cat doesn't get out much, because if she did, she'd eat all the little birdies in the neighborhood, so when the bunny comes to visit, the cat clears her schedule. The cat has never been real solid about what sort of creature she is, and consequently seems pretty eager to take clues from any other being who is roughly her size, shape, and possesses a fur coat. So when we serve the bunny her standard menu of dandelion greens and clover for breakfast and dinner, the cat bellies down to the table as well. She will study the bunny for a minute or two, as the bunny tucks into a pile of leaves, and then she shrugs her shoulders, puzzled as always, and begins to eat, herself. She is always game. She tries, and tries, and tries to get as much pleasure out of the greens as the bunny does, but always comes up short. The cat is as persistent as the bunny is inscrutable.

He's been doing a lot of sitting and looking at clouds these days. Sitting in chairs looking up at clouds, sitting in airplanes looking down at clouds, sitting and rubbing his eyes and looking at the clouds that form inside his head, wondering why he's not doing much of anything else and then he reads this piece about Ken Kesey and that crowd and suddenly he's thinking back thirty years and is surprised to find no regrets for having missed some of that, but even as he begins to close that drawer of memory a line or two of a Joni Mitchell song spill out and now he's got that tune and that sappy but annoyingly smart lyric stuck in his head and he knows it will be days before he will be able to wake without hearing it while he drinks his tea.

Just before we left for the airport, some family members posed in front of the county bomb disposal unit which, in the company of an ambulance and a large, very red fire truck, had gathered at the family homestead to remove a half gallon jug of methyl tert-butyl ether from the garage where it had been sitting innocuosly for well more than five years. Now, you may want to ask quite a few questions, but at the top of your list might be questions such as, "Just who ARE those people posing in front of the bomb disposal unit?" and "Why don't they look guilty or worried? Are they terrorists? Were they making methamphetamine in their garage?" Excellent questions, and I'm sorry to say I am not at liberty to answer them. What I can tell you is that one family member on Tuesday morning decided that the substance in the brown glass jug very clearly labeled as methyl tert-butyl ether was serving no useful purpose in the household, and should not simply be poured down the drain. So this family member called city hall, and asked what should be done with it. City hall sent their crack haz-mat guy, who warned us not to touch the jug, lest it explode. He looked up the name in a couple of thick books, and then told us that he would take care of it. Two hours later he returned, at the head of a parade involving a police cruiser and the above mentioned ambulance, a fire engine and the county's best, and only, bomb disposal unit. The police cordoned off the street, the bomb disposal crew donned spiffy black outfits with helmets and masks and unrolled thirty feet of bright orange remote control cable with which to operate the crane that would lift the dangerous item from the bucket into which it had been placed and deposit it in the bomb unit. All went according to plan, with no mishaps. What? Another question? Curious, aren't we? Yes, you noticed that the acronym for methyl tert-butyl ether is, um, MTBE. Rings a bell, doesn't it? Say, isn't that the horrible pollutant that's an additive for gasoline that they are finding has polluted wells all over the place? Well, yes. Matter of fact. What was it doing in this homestead's garage? I'm not at liberty to say, but I can assure you the story is completely innocent. And, oh, before you go, there's one more interesting fact. MTBE doesn't appear to have, actually, any serious long-term health effects on humans other than, like gasoline, it can make you feel mighty sick and whoozy for a while. And apart from its use as a gasoline additive, you'll find it in hospitals where it's quite effective in dissolving gallstones when injected directly into the gall bladder. What a wonderful world we live in where a chemical that can boost octane in gasoline can also serve an important pharmocological purpose. So, what can we do next weekend for fun. Hmmm. I wonder what's in that dark green quart jar up on the top shelf. Seems the label has peeled off.

Half an hour before the warning sirens curdled the air an explosive burst of driving rain and lightening ripped over the city at 50 miles per hour. Then the clouds began to twist and contort, dropping whirling pigtails from their bellies. We stood outside on the wet grass and watched, thrilled by the ferocity of it all, listening through the open door to the TV and reports of two tornados on the ground just a few miles away. The news guys called them "working tornados," a curiously neutral phrase when you consider that the work a tornado applies itself to when its tip is on the dirt is exclusively an industry of destruction.

In Indiana the cherries are ripening, marble-sized globes of sweet, tart flesh hiding the hard pit, the seed at the center. The season is about two weeks early this year. Peonies are already past their prime and the corn is ankle-high. It's odd that the birds haven't yet found the cherries, and it may have something to do with the early ripening, or maybe just the luck of the draw. This year, for the first time, we'll beat the birds to the fruit, because we will pick this afternoon. Ahh, fresh cherry pie.

It was nothing more than a wall in the subway where advertising posters had been pasted one over the other and then ripped without any obvious purpose, but it caught my eye and then drew me to it because it seemed at that moment to be wildly beautiful, the kind of beauty that makes you catch your breath. Later, I realized that I still don't know if I would have been so struck by it if I had seen it in a gallery with a dozen other similar pieces by the same artist. And I don't know why, or if, that matters.

So you may wake one morning and the smell of lilacs born on the moist early morning air and the reverberation of the songs of too many kinds of birds to count pull you outside with your tea and your book and your pen and a bit of paper to write on, and rather than reading or writing you sit astonished at how you've let the connections wither that, frankly, are essential to keeping you alive and you think so this is what it is to have been for a time among the walking dead. This is what oblivion means.

He became his own chia pet. There's no accounting for taste in grass. Hair hat and photo by Joan. Shirt by Goodwill. Attitude by Golly.

Little Mikie went down to the river to talk with the fishes today. It's been almost a year, and he worried that his questions hadn't changed, and that the fish might be bored, and that if a fish was bored it might choose to relieve its boredom by satisfying its hunger, and though Mikie was older, he was no bigger than he'd ever been. As it turned out, the fish who came when Mikie called was a brown trout with ambitions and dreams of her own and no interest, or ability, to deliver wisdom or wishes to Little Mikie. "You got a minute?" said the fish. "I wanna try some new material out on you. Tell me what you think. You know, you gotta be honest with me. See, I'm trying to work up this bit with a lot of 'hooked on' jokes. It's what people expect, you know what I mean? When I break in I can change my material, but now, no go. So there's this fish who walks into a bar. What'll you have says the bartender. Gimme a worm on the rocks, says the fish. You want a hook in that, says the bartender? Are you crazy, says the fish. You know I'm trying to quit..." Little Mikie looked at the fish. "It's not bad," he said, "but I'm not sure I really get it. Maybe it's your timing."

Only a fool stops before he's written three pages every day. So for the remainder of this month, I'll be doing what I gotta do, and will offer up only the most occasional Daily Screech. If you have been reading the Screech from time to time, and in spite of your better judgment nevertheless want to follow the bit of writing I'm needing to pay attention to now, email me and I'll give you the web address.

So he told me he was drinking with this woman in a little bar in Phoenix and out of nowwhere she asks him what he knows about the Barstow-Kleint Junction effect, and he thinks its maybe something that long-haul truckers experience when the meth wears off, but no, turns out the woman claims she's a cortico-physicist living in research commune in a missle silo about 150 southwest of the city, and that they've actually managed to begin producing the first theta-substrates in some of their own volunteers. He's wondering, of course, what she's talking about, but she doesn't answer his questions, shuts her eyes and suddenly tells him she's got to leave. She pushes a thin, battered paper back book into his hands. Keep it, she says, and somebody will contact you. She rises and walks quickly towards the door. Two men follow her from different ends of the bar. She breaks into a run. He feels a thumb dig into his collar bone. The book, says a man behind him. He hands it over, and the man whispers, don't follow me or you'll be killed. Shaken and frightened, he waits for the man to leave, then picks up his beer glass. The paper napkin sticks to the bottom of the glass, and he sees, lying where it had been hidden beneath the napkin, a sheet of film, dark red, laced with whorls of color. He tries as casually as possible to cover it with the napkin. He showed me that film. Hold it up to the light, he tells me. But just glance at it for a second and then look away. I did. Now I understand.

And she said you oughta stop what you are doing and look at the sunset. So he did. He really stopped. Doing. And just. Looked.

On a walk through the desert a man tells his friends about a reading he had with a psychic a couple of years back. One of the things she told him was that he had been carrying a burden which he could now lay to the side. In the desert there can be no doubt that anything you waste could threaten your life, and that anything extra you carry that no longer serves you can kill you as well. The migra, as the Mexicans call the Border Patrol, picked up some 17,000 migrants around Sierra Vista last year and sent them back across the border. Most of those will try again and again, and finally get through to follow the track to temporary jobs thoughout the U.S. They'll rent apartments, buy used cars, and send enough money home so that their families can build the second story on their houses. I fly back to New Hampshire and spend several days wondering what burden it is that I'm carrying that I no longer need, and why it seems that I could have wasted so much and am still alive.

Copper is an element, a metal that is made of nothing except itself. But atoms of copper joyfully combine with other elements to produce lots of other stuff, and much of that stuff turns out to green. When there is water in Bisbee, it still carries copper through the rock and down the faces of mine cuts and leave it to form soft, spongy crystals on the red dirt. For nearly a 100 years, men with bigger and bigger machines dug bigger and bigger holes in, under and around the town, until they made something called the Lavendar Pit, named after a man, but curiously washed with shades of dusky lavendar at its nether reaches. The pit is what you would have if you picked up a pretty good sized mountain and slammed it back into the ground peak first. Some 7.7 billion pounds of copper came out of that, and other holes, and most of the people in the U.S. have probably, sometime or another, made toast with electricity zipping through wires made of copper from the Lavendar Pit. What if God, or Buddha, said, "Put it all back, and you will have peace of mind, body and spirit for 1000 years." Would we?

In 1917 the sheriff of Bisbee and a posse of new deputies drew their guns on 3000 striking copper mine workers and herded them down the narrow main street of the town. The U.S. had just entered the war, and it wasn't hard for the average citizen to agree that the strike was a foreign plot fomented by the I.W.W. (a radical union known as the Wobblies) to undermine and weaken production of the metal that was vital to the war effort. The strikers were sorted out, and the 1200 who couldn't find local people to stand up for them were loaded into box cars and run out of town on the rails to a suitable distance into the desert from Bisbee and dumped. After the mines closed in 1975 hippies and artists and finally tourists discovered Bisbee, its living museum of little turn-of-the-century Victorian buildings, and its strange collection of shacks and houses crammed precariously onto terraces on the hillsides of the narrow canyon. Bisbee likes to think of itself as a funky little arts town, and that works as long as you realize that the funk runs circles around the art, and when the funk gets tired of being what it is, what's left is a narrow canyon crammed with a torrent of stories as wild as the flash floods that used to wipe out Main Street until the townspeople figured out how to built a concrete channel under the street big enough and strong enough to contain it all.

The Catalina Mountains rise some 10,000 feet a few miles north of the city of Tucson, raw, ragged masses of granite thrown up from the bowels of the earth back when the bowels of the earth were young. Early in the morning sunlight touches the eastern shoulders of the mountains, and those who live in the rising flood of houses can, if they choose, be brought to tears by the nearly sacred beauty of what lies just beyond their backyards. But the houses jostle for space on the ridges of the hills, frantic for position, and developers who slide the right stuff into the pockets of city officials continue to push the level of the city higher and higher against the Catalinas. Tucson writer Barbara Kingsolver wrote an essay titled "High Tide in Tucson," a title which unwittingly refers now more to the urban flood than to the moon-driven rhythms of ocean critters. And as the housing creeps higher up the mountain sides, the water level in the aquifer beneath them, which flushes their toilets and waters their lawns, continues to drop. A few years ago some of the last trickles of the Colorado river were diverted to replenish the aquifer. And recently, the suburb of Winterhaven, which mandates that residents have lawns and water them, sued a resident who decided to shut off her hose and grow a desert landscape in her front yard. The president of Winterhaven explained that Winterhaven owns its own well, and can do anything it damn well pleases with its water, including forcing its residents to use twice as much water as anybody else in Tucson. A city official, who is apparently not yet beholden to any of the powers that be, countered with the observation that it may be Winterhaven's well, but it is the whole city's aquifer.

In the Sonoran desert, east of Tucson, the photographer, enthralled with the otherworldly beauty of form and color, crouches and backs up to frame the photograph. And backs up into the merciless thorns of a prickly pear. No photographer's assistant was on hand to photograph the photographer, pants around his ankles, yanking some two dozen inch-long barbed spikes from the tender flesh of his posterior, wincing and yelping and cursing the pursuit of the perfect picture.