bloodyrosemccoy | Rust and Dust

Knights Of Columbus Founders Day
National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day
Birthday - President John Tyler (10th President)
Texas Love the Children's Day (Tx)
Commemoration Day (Madagascar)
Youth Day (Taiwan)

Heather, a musical genius if ever there was one, is performing a concert with some symphony or other down in St. George today.* I really want to be there.

And as much as I want to be there because Heather is one of my closest friends, and because I am incredibly proud of her and her talents, and because she would like the support, I have to admit that that’s not my only reason for wanting to go.

I just wanna get back to the desert.

I get this every spring. I start longing for the unbearably dry heat of a blazing day in the Southwest in early summer, for the stark blue sky forming a harsh seam with the rusty orange of a mesa, and for all the grey-toned greens and violets of desert foliage. I miss the way the sand smells. I miss the lizards. I miss the rocks.

Trust me: there is something heady about the Four Corners area. If you ever get a chance, I say go through there and hike about a bit. It’s easy to see why it inspires all that irritatingly introspective first-person present-tense prose crazy desert people write. I try to limit it to a paragraph or two every year, but you’ll get what I’m talking about when you go. Just sit in the twilight and tell me you haven’t had Deep Thoughts about how we are specks of cosmic dust in this big universe.

Of course, St. George kind of takes away from that with its very Utahn cultural weirdness. But I could handle that if I could just get a day down there.

Not to mention I’d love to hear Heather play. Jeezus, she’s good.

*And yesterday she turned 21. Not that this means much to Heather, who once called her mom to ask if she could have tea during a sleepover at my place, because I drank it every night. Together we decided that probably the bad kind of tea is the kind with caffeine, so we let her try some herbal ones. I don’t think she even knows what alcohol looks like.