8-25-09 into the Barrio

8- 25-2009

Have we really been here for a week?
The Barrio is not as bad as I had feared…Folks are ,generally , quiet…it’s the constant traffic, not even on our street, necessarily …any where within a mile, or so…
Damned country-boy dog-ears…
When one lives down a dirt road in the Wilderness for so long, the ears get sensitive.
A car coming down the road, there, is most likely coming to you, or lost…
Here, one has to consciously resist that habit of looking…else ya spend your whole day looking out the window.
Very frustrating.
I’ve got the place mostly livable,tho it still needs considerable work…
I plan on getting a back porch in, for the washer/dryer, and fixing the electrical in the boy’s room, and calling a moratorium on construction for a while.

On the house, itself, at least…
I still require fences, and a chicken house, and a place to blacksmith.


Sometime, ere Winter, I must insulate and repair the kitchen ceiling.

After all that, I’m done…till I can gain greater security…
Ie Buy the damned place.

I’m taking a Pain Day, today…
All this labor has caught up to me, it seems…
I don’t think the MRI helped, either…
The two gigantic magnets I got between, two days ago, hurt just like a cold front…
I could feel them pulling at the screws and plates in my legs.
The images look ominous…
I’m no expert, but I am a Genius…and have a working knowledge of anatomy…
Where the left femur is filled with white (marrow), the right is black.
The acetabulum, trochanter and the whole top part of the femur is obviously deformed…hopelessly marred.
I can’t wait for the report from the actual experts…


I got a lot of dismantling ,and cleanup, yet to do out at the country place…
I just haven’t had the body…or time…or gas money…
And it’s been so fucking HOT! At least 100 degrees, every day, for 66 days…
Hottest Summer on record.
I’m looking out the front glass door at the little park across the street…baking….waves in the air from the heat rising…rusty tin roofs and white clapboard houses with peeling paint…old trucks in backyards…chickens and goats…
Conjunto in the afternoons…and folks driving past, looking…
It’s a Mexican thing, I think…
The staring…
I just wave, to everyone…and they generally wave back.
On the weekends, one can smell Bar BQ…folks cooking goat, ribs,what have ya…
Lotsa music and beer-drinking going on…
Quite lively.
Thankfully, they seem to start early…and, thus, are passed out and quiet by 10…only heard one “domestic incident”…

Drunk Uncle got drunk last Saturday…threw a hissy (about what, I couldn’t determine)till his girlfriend hauled him off to Menard…
He came back Monday, been quite docile…staying in the RV I set up for him.
Seems happy with it…It’s cleaner than this place was, and has everything a Drunk Uncle needs…TV, fridge, AC, and a place to take a leak…
Anyhow, that was the Deal…
And he’s only here for 2 more days, then he’s gone for the Winter.
He seems kinda surprised what a crippled Guero has been able to do to this place (and the RV) in such a short time…
We fed him and let him into the shower yesterday…he was looking around in obvious amazement that it looks like a real house.

His buddies have mostly got the memo that he’s in the RV, I think…although there were two who banged on the door at 11:30 last night…they figgered it out quick enough…never knowing that there was a naked hippie with a 357 mag on the other side of the door, watching them.
I expect that behaviour to stop as soon as he’s gone.

All in all, things are moving right along…so long as Uncle holds his end of the Deal, we’ll be fine.
And I’ve endeavored to coat him with honey, without appearing to…so he ain’t got a thing to bitch about.
Till I can make an offer.