Volume One

Delilah and Me

I live with Delilah, my kitty of four years. Together, we are trying to find a place on this earth where we can live in harmony. We started living together in Columbus, NM. Where she was born and I was passing through. I have been passing through Columbus, NM for fifteen years, just coming and going. It’s a very small border town with nothing ever to do that is till recently when the drug lords got bored and started shooting everything in sight.

I arrived like so many others, dead broke. I drove a van minus a back bumper and a pop up trailer. I had heard of a community called City of the Sun and talked them into letting me join. As a member, I received a plot of leased land, with connections to water and Electricity. I dug a large six foot deep hole and buried my trailer in it. I had no skills, money nor tools but proceeded in cementing a cover over it preying all the time to the gods not to have it collapse on me.

This was the image of my place in my mind's eye. The following is reality. I have an art gallery and from time to time, I will be giving a hyper link where images depicting the subject are shown. www.pbase.com/koyote11

At that time, I arrived as a craft person, creating ocarinas, musical instruments made of clay and fired in my portable electric kiln. I was exposed to this art form from a good friend in Taos, NM. Upon learning enough so that they were sell worthy, I traveled to the west coast settling in Eugene, Ore. I was exposed to Saturday market and survival of the fittest. I discovered Raku technique and started a career of manufacturing unique clay musical instruments. When I started rusting, I came back to the southwest traveling in my van to craft fairs selling my wares. I had a string of bad craft fairs and wound up broke in Columbus. After becoming a member and had a home in a hole, I spent the winters there manufacturing my stock and in late spring hitting the craft shows in the SW.

I made a meager living making and selling clay ocarinas until my soc. Sec. clicked in and bought a computer and started learning Photoshop and later getting a digital camera. I have been digitally manipulating images for nearly ten years and photography for seven. I still point and shoot so I consider myself a phtotoshopper who uses a camera. I point and shoot and hope Photoshop can do the rest.

I was able to get social security for my fine work as a research chemist, retiring early due to boredom in 1978, then to pursue a career in metaphysics. I received a PhD from a prestigious university and went to work in industry and soon learned the price paid for such a choice. When I left the ivory tower, I was full of idealism of conducting interesting research on the nature of chemical molecules and their fascinating interactions. Industry introduced me to inky polymers and boredom. I put in an appearance for five years and left one for another and was introduced to new boring polymers. I lost that job and was out of work for three years. I then learned the total danger of having an advanced degree when the world no longer needed such expertise. I was totally useless in anything else except the most mindless of jobs.

I finally found work in the Midwest and went there with hope of a new start. What followed were five years, I called my years of glamour. I bought a sailboat and later, another big enough to live on and became the hit of Detroit. Each week, I would choose from people eager for a ride on the great party boat.

I had no illusions of the excitement of the job; it was a dead end job for someone like me who just needed work. However, I wasn’t there for three months and was introduced to a very big plant problem that required considerable effort for a solution. I was chosen as the liaison man between research and engineering and I was expected to be around at shift changes and whenever a critical polymer was made. In short, I lived at the plant for three months. The study was fascinating and I came up with a solution, got a few patents and was the fair hair boy for a while. I let them know that I was unpromotable and constantly asked for time off instead of raises. But no, I had to live on two weeks vacation. The money received for such good effort went in the purchase of my pleasure machine.

I knew I was very lucky to find such an interesting project in a dead end job and that the odds of finding another would be astronomical, I wasn’t surprised. It dragged on for five more years. In the mean time, weekends were full of hedonism and endless parties. I later learned that these years were my early forties and technically called mid life. I only knew that a new me emerged, a side sensitive to others. As a result, I had a lot of girl friends and lovers.

It didn’t last long; soon I tired of pleasure for the sake of pleasure and wanted something else. I met a young woman who pointed another direction to pursue. I gave my notice, left work and moved to Calif. There to learn metaphysics, namely Astrology. The day I gave my notice, she told me that she was pregnant. Although, our relationship didn’t last long, we were always together when Nick was involved. Now, nearly thirty years later, we hold our head high for what a great person he turned out to be. I have four other children from a previous marriage. Some have children and they have children making me, king of the mountain. I was lucky, all my children turned out to be intelligent and wise with good hearts.

I love studying Astrology; it allowed me to bring in my logical mind in understanding the nature of cycles and my intuition which was being developed. I found, however, that I lacked that bedside manor so necessary to keep clients coming back. I lacked that knack to tell only so much rather than blabber what I knew as a way of showing how smart I was. I scratched a meager living teaching and doing charts along with other work I found for a while. I wrote a book on Astrology, “Astrological Life Scripts”, which sadly went out of print its first year. I continued studying other related disciplines and I started relating all this to the nature of the chemical elements. Since there can only be elements with finite numbers, 1,2, 3, etc. I started relating metaphysical properties to the number of the elements and then looked for physical properties expressed by that number. This fascinating study has been going on for twenty five years.

I left the west coast and went to the Southwest and discovered everything I knew in science and metaphysic wouldn’t get anything here so I needed to find other pursuits. I discovered clay and ocarinas.

A nice part about retirement is that it allows one to pursue a new field like digital art without having to make money to live. The downside is that without the wolf at one’s neck, one loses that killer instinct to survive so I haven’t made much money with yet. Social Security made it possible for me to leave Columbus, coming back whenever I was going into or our of Mexico, or when I needed to save money for a new venture. These ventures took me to the east coast to visit some of my children there as well as Canada to visit another. I took many trips into Mexico and Guatemala in the hopes of finding a place to live. For many reasons, mainly due to my inability to learn Spanish, I returned back to Columbus. It was there on one of these passing through that I met Delilah.