Preparing

The hogs are greased and out of the pen.  I'll be in New Mexico for awhile.  I'm leaving next week to learn how to make platinum, palladium, and gold prints from digital transparencies.  More foolishness for me.  I've booked days on both ends of the week-long workshop so that I can drive around and see some things.  Take some pictures.  I've heard that the area down around Roswell looks like the 1950s.  If any of you have any suggestions about places I should see while I am in the state, please let me know.  I will be, per usual, traveling alone, so I am free to do anything I want.  Sometimes this works out and sometimes I become catatonic.  I was more on the catatonic side of things when I was there two years ago.  I'm hoping for some life this time around.  I'm hoping to take more pictures. 

There is an illusion of life when you travel, of the life you believe you are meant to live and that you deserve.  I am ready for that lie.  I need to get away so terribly badly that I would be content to simply sit in the square in Santa Fe for a week without moving.  I've told myself, though, that I will move slowly, that I will not be manic to do everything, that I will simply focus on what is in front of me.  I tell myself many things. 

But I am nervous about leaving the house, the cat.  Something disastrous happens every time I go away.  A tree branch snaps and falls through the roof, a water pipe breaks and floods. . . something.  I have no one to take care of the cat for two weeks, though I do have someone for the second week.  I am desperate to find someone for the first.  Poor puss-puss.  She will die from a broken heart, I think. 

But that is the point of going away.  Once I'm on the road, all that will melt away and mean little.  I'll know that I was meant to drive long highways and sleep in cheap motels.  It is there a person can think and write and be creative. 

Oh. . . I'm rough and tough, alright.  I will be staying in an old motel that is on edge of a parking lot of a cheap shopping center on the edge of town.  When I travel, though, I don't know. 

I fly into Albuquerque.  If any of you have suggestions for accommodations there, please let me know.

My life is topsy-turvy just now.  Anything can happen.  Let's see how it goes. 

And for the record. . . I am completely take with this photograph.  It is one of my favorites of all time.