The temperature is pretty nice right now, the breeze is coming in off the Bay and the sun is still bright as it moves toward the horizon, the light line moving up the back of the house just outside my front door. None of this makes me think of the desert, but let's see if I can fake it.

After I got out of the Army in 1969, I drove to Mexico with a writer friend with the idea of hanging out in San Miguel de Allende and writing a book. We drove down the coast from Seattle to Los Angeles and then inland to the desert through Tucson in a Volkswagen bus. My first time entry into the desert: hot, hot, hot, but low humidity and you could buy a big tall gin and tonic in a refrigerated bar for about 80 cents. This, at the time, seemed right.

I'd thought about writing a book because I'd done some writing in school and given a choice between gainful employment (a rude and controversial subject) and writing a book in Mexico, the book won out even though I didn't have more than maybe two paragraphs inside my head. The actual attempt to sit down and write a book came years later, but then, out of school, out of the army in one piece, I was ready to play it by ear and not sweat career until later, like maybe when I was 40 or 55. My parents had already done gainful employment (marriage, kids, house, cars, vacations in the islands) and I'd been paying attention and had no intention of repeating their experiment.

So after the army I drove into the desert with a typewriter and a friend who owned a Volkswagen bus, found god, saw the light, wrote three pages of wretched writing and returned to San Francisco where I put down roots and I've been here ever since, fuck the desert, it's too hot and you can't buy gin and tonics anymore for 80 cents.

Doesn't sound like much of a desert story, does it? Kinda short. Like that book.