No political or economic content ahead.  Read on if you must.


The desert town had come to fit almost too comfortably.  As he sat on his terrace overlooking the Alameda, he realized he was beginning to know a lot of people here, as well as their cars, trucks, and horses.  It was unusual now when he spied an unknown dog wandering the plaza.  As the season advanced he kept to the side of the street bathed in sombra, (shadow).  How many years had passed since his acquaintance with the she-wolf of that name?  Pleasant memories of that canine and her son, Sol, flooded his waking mind.  In a linear universe the shadow would be born of the sun.  This once, the sombra had given birth to the sol.  What delight it had been to watch them run together over the desert mesas those many years ago.

Something about sun-baked lands draws one's self down to an empirical kernal of...  hard to put a finger on really...  The line between delusion and consciousness is baked to a thin and brittle membrane in these climates.  Osmoses betwixt the two can become a torrent of tidal surges between synchronous shores with only a dimly perceived chronology to lend order to the day. 

He couldn't remember when he began listening to the song.  It had remained a repeating soundtrack for some of his finer moments;  bringing him back to a center of sorts.  It became harder to judge... anything.   Empiricism had grabbed hold of him as it does inevitably in all harsh climates.  Still, the question nagged.  Nibbling about his consciousness with a determination and thoroughness that would not be stopped.  Like a cerebral mouse infestation the crumbs of perception fell to the desert heat. 


From his terrace the comings and goings of the townspeople below reminded him of moving pictures.  Their smiles and small talk reassured him.  There had been pleasant distractions:  the hotelier and restauranteur who had taken him to heart and invited him into their lives.  The trading of complex sentences and thoughts while travelling alone in a foreign country, where the bulk of one's speech is confined to determining the price of one's room or ordering a meal, takes on a pleasure of its' own.

More and more, the dogs had taken on an importance to him.  He fed them his take-home bag of dinner scraps, when he saw them on his nightly return to the hotel, and was pleased to see the butcher in the Mercado throw out two huge bones each morning which the dogs heartily shared, two to a bone.  As they lay under trucks during the mid-day heat, tongues lolling, he began to feel that they were on to something that eluded the Brownian movement of humans all around them.  Their eyes seemed to be saying, "Don't you get it?".  What?  The cessation of Brownian motion?  The answer I suspect is simpler than the question.  What else would you expect when conducting hypothetical discussions with dogs?

And still the song was there in the back of his mind, bringing him forward, focusing him like a primative lens;  reminding him of who he is, where he came from, what he's gained, and what he's lost along the way.  He turns and envisions Patti Lupone beside him on the balcony as she noiselessly mouths the words to a different song, and he laughs aloud.  The tides crash instantaneously on two synchronous shores.  Blessidly, life reads like a comedy at times.  Maybe you can't write this stuff.

His thoughts stray to Soli and Sombra, the wolves, the sun and the shadow, and the dogs under the trucks in the Alameda.  What was that line in yet another song?  "Religion, is the smile on a dog"?




Afterword:  This was written as an personal experiment in anecdote, stream of consciousness, and creative writing in real time on the balcony of my small hotel overlooking the Alameda in the town of Alamos, Mexico.  One tends to anguish over losing his, (or her), audience when the curtains part even slightly to give that audience a glimpse of the demons, real or imagined, that have taken up residence.  In the end I wonder who we would be without them.  Would our stories ring true,  to the audience and to ourselves were we to abandon them for the sake of a more cogent story?  Regardless of the answer to that, I think this accurately reflects my state of mind as well as place when I wrote it a week and a couple of towns ago here in  Mexico.  No need to recommend.  I offer it to you, (especially those in colder climates who love dogs), for what it's worth.