Home?

I'm there. Wherever "there" is.

Some of y'all know my new location because we've communicated directly, but I'm going to be vague about it here for now.

I many not have many friends, but those who have been inducted into that category are, to be blunt, the best in the world. Not because I put them there, you understand; let's just say I've been incredibly fortunate to to have them fall into my life.

"Home" is the second bedroom in a smallish but elegant place. It feels like "home" -- a word longtime readers of my babblings may remember I use in place of "house" or "apartment" sparingly at best. This feels like home; nowhere I have stayed in my adult life has qualified for that word.

Well, there was one other place that was damn homey, but my residency there was brief and ended rather poorly. 'Nuff said.

So all I have to do now is find a job, my own place and clear up a daunting number of details that make things "difficult" (in this case, that word ranks as the classic understatement of the year, if not the decade). Then, I'm good to go.

Being in a place where I'm anonymous (to everyone but my kind hosts) and unreachable (to anyone but the very few who have my phone number) is a Good Thing. I am in contact only with good people. If you are blessed with a life where friendship, compassion and happiness are the rule and not the exception, you may not understand what an immense relief that can be.

Getting here was an experience. That's two massive understatements in one post! I could write a book about 30-plus hours spent riding The Hound from Los Angeles to, well, here, via such happening burgs as Quartzite, AZ, Lordsburg, NM, Van Horn, TX and points east, and I may. At a minimum, the 17 pages of semi-legible notes I scrawled over the course of my journey -- had to do something to keep myself from losing it completely along the way and, aside from calls to and from two of my last connections to sanity and humanity, scratching out notes about what I saw and felt was all I had -- will make a hell of a blog entry or two when I am a bit calmer and can look back with some detachment.

I'm a writer, you know. It's a disease. Hell, I bet someone was taking notes as the Titanic went down....

Not much more to say for the moment. I'm where I think I need to be and, even if it is only temporary and in time I'm cast adrift to venture Elsewhere, I needed this.

I got it, and I'd call that a damn miracle, one brought about directly by the efforts and goodness of four people. I don't want to hear ANY complaints about my mentioning them often here. Gratitude is not the most common emotion for me; I hardly know how to express it properly...they (and you) will have to put up with it.

A cowboy song keeps echoing through my head, as it has since approximately the time I passed through Pecos, TX. It's the only cowboy song that ever made it into my (now gone) collection of recordings, and the only one for which I know the lyrics. It was performed some time in the 1940s and, thanks to changes in society since then, its lyrics have made the transition from okay for kids -- for whom it was written -- to hilariously inappropriate. My mind played it over and over as we crossed endless miles of desert.

If I can ever find another copy, I'll have to make an MP3 and figure out how to post it here. I have it memorized, but y'all do not want to hear me sing it.

That has nothing to do with anything. But so many things I think about fit in that category.

Which means it's time for me to close this.

Later.