ruminations over a kansas breakfast.

It's Christmas morning (or really it's afternoon), and just like every morning that I've been home in New Mexico, my father just made me what he calls a "Kansas breakfast" including a massive steak and barely cooked bacon and eggs with bacon grease dumped on buttery toast, and blackberry jam to put on top of it. Except I can barely eat now because my nose just started pouring out blood like a faucet fully turned on. I missed it though—the feeling of my own redness running out of me until I'm not feeling it, the liquid material of "you" but removed from "you" and coloring a toilet bowl boldly. The high elevation and arid climate aren't doing the trick until they make your nose bleed. Growing up here, March was blood month, like clockwork every morning for thirty-one days. I'd be late to school and get out of my mother's car with a rag hanging out my nose. Who knows, maybe it's also due to the way I eat here. I don't remember. Did I always have a fat-fried steak? Sometimes I forget it wasn't me who cooked this steak or hitchhiked to ranches or wore a washcloth over his mouth through the Dust Bowl. Sometimes I think I try too hard to make my visits to Albuquerque into visits back in time. I was so outraged when we got a Trader Joe's, and then an Elephant Bar, and now a 52-acre movie studio in Rio Rancho. Los Angeles is invading New Mexico, I always worry. And sometimes I feel really anti-immigrant and wish Albuquerque's booming suburb Rio Rancho would stop growing. Why should I be happy for population growth or economic growth or earth being devoured by the human virus or my computer telling me to upgrade to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox? At least the nose bleeds never change. Some guy online just offered to lick up the blood and then my pee.

I just heard my father in the kitchen making the sound of a gagging cow. It's kind of amazing that he's still alive and so cognizant and in this era. We were at the boot store two nights ago because Robert gave me boots and my feet just don't seem to fit in them. My father tells the eighteen year-old shoe expert, "we walked across America in those boots." But to get to discuss things like "late capitalism" with someone who watches The Grapes of Wrath for nostalgia. Or that he's painting in a German expressionist style in 2007. You can see his artwork at waltervandyck.com which I made for him. He's been mad at me for writing a "bio" for him on it, worrying that people will judge his divorce. And he made me remove information on his being a conscientious objector during World War II because he thinks people support the war in Iraq. He just said to me, "don't say I'm the tenth of fifteen children, it sounds like I was born in a litter." Thankfully he doesn't understand the full extent of what it means to have a MySpace or he'd make me take that down, too. He's able to look at his website though, and check his e-mail and stocks, has a cell phone, stays up late. He was at the casino playing poker until 2 AM last night. He does something spacey and people suggest to me he's senile. I explain to them that he's been that way since my age, which means things aren't looking so good for me. Maybe I am biased; constantly hearing his life stories growing up, I'm more fascinated with them than with the paintings. He just wants me to put up information on the three disparate occasions in those eighty-five years when he bothered to be exhibited, and not bother mentioning how he's designed and built two houses, been a beekeeper, a hunter, a certified pilot, cattle shipper and a chef.


My father raising the blinds so we can look at the snow.