Life goes on here in the desert southwest, working every day on something I hope is meaningful, but might wind up being nothing at all. Trying to balance the good and bad to find the truth. It’s there for everyone, we have to learn to see what we are looking at.
This website, ronbarbish.com, is one half of the complete project. It is the good. The other half, to be named later, is the bad. The very bad. Lately, it’s been mostly work on the bad. It’s depressing, but it has to be finished. I think I’ve got most of the basic framework in place, but there’s so many bad things, it’s like a black hole. Even if you know the world is going to end in a year, you still have to do something for a year.
To counter balance the depression that comes with documenting the demise of the civilization I live in, I get up every morning about 0530 and go for a walk in the desert. The moon and star light are bright enough to able to move about without using any lights. Aside from the night sky and occasional shooting star, there’s not many distractions. A good time to think and sort things out. Sleeping in the back of a pickup truck is not all that comfortable, especially on cold nights, I have to get up and move around. This is the time of day I would hope to be kayak fishing, but the combo of low Colorado River water levels and relentless desert wind has meant no kayak fishing lately.
Those are not clouds or fog in the photo below. It is a desert dust storm driven by 30-35 mph wind.
Every day, up before the crack of dawn, walk a few miles and when the sun comes up, I put out the solar panel, set up the computer and go to work.
If I’m working on good things, I can go on until the sun goes down. When I’m working on bad stuff, I can only take so much at a time and I have to stop. I’ll play a few computer games to relax. If I play on my laptop, I have to fire up the generator because playing video games uses a lot of power. I play on my Android tablet as well. Internet coverage is very sketchy and limits online game play.
I feel like I’m on a mission and I don’t want to get too far off plan. Creativity is not something you can dial up at will. When the spark is there, you run with it.