I just started reading Cormack McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men”. Now this book has been around a little while. All my American pals have already read it I think. But here in Mexico, where we live on mañana-mañana-time I feel justified writing about a book that’s already been read by my American brethren.

I love this book. Each page that turns signals the coming of the end. The settings and descriptions remind me of Tony Hillerman, who’s work I love. And the depth of the characters and some of their particular speech patterns, and their tragedy remind me of William Faulkner.

William Faulkner raised me without knowing it. My father was a writer and was pretty widely published in his genre, and HE loved, lived, breathed Faulkner and would-have-smoked-him if he could. I didn’t realize this when I was young. But as an adult my mom handed me some Faulkner and told me how my father couldn’t get enough of him. And when I read Faulkner I understood the rest about my father, he just made sense after that. The rural southern upbringing, the need to escape to a cultured place and the failure to adapt to it, the poverty of the soul and the depth of spirit, the misery.

So I’m racing through this book, loving every page that flies by. And knowing that the Coen brothers have made this book into a movie gives the whole thing another edge. I’ve seen every Coen brothers movie made (I think) and many of them I’ve seen something between several and many times. The Coen brothers went to the same college I attended, so seeing their movies was pretty much a social requirement during college. Fortunately they are so good that continuing to see their films has not been any work at all.

The opening pages of the book read like a Coen brothers’ film. There are plenty of intelligent characters who feel real and tangible and whose dramas and insights make me think. And there are a lot of guns, all kinds of guns. And there’s so much action that it’s hard, very hard, to decide where to stick in the book mark and end that reading session.

This morning the one and only reason I put the book down was because someone, who owes me money, called and wanted to meet within an hour. Not much short of that or a family emergency would have convinced me to put that book down this morning. In fact, forget blogging, I’m going to go read it right now.

And I won’t tell you how it ends because you gotta go see the movie, which for some asinine reason doesn’t come out in Mexico until February (!). I may just have to fly to the States to see it before that.

Lots of unrelated and discordant thoughts are running through my head. Sorry for sharing the chaos.

First, my friend CancunCanuck has FINALLY started blogging!! It was a good thing waiting (and waiting) to happen. Watch her, she will need only moments to find her “blog voice”, instead of the full year of suffering it takes most bloggers. She is a sensitive and skilled writer with a big heart. (You rock Girl!)

Oh, and one of my cats is driving me nuts. He just wants to go out all the time and he cries sometimes for hours. But each time I let him leave he’s gone for days, and comes back with 3 or 4 ticks on him; not to mention that I have to listen to the husband whine the whole time the cat is gone. So it’s one whiner or the other. Jeez. Get over it guys.

I posted a while ago that I was worried that someone living nearby the condo we bought was a hit man. Well, he was, just like we thought, he got busted, he was forced to move out…so we are no longer watching for bodies falling from the roof. Now someone just needs to get rid of the drug dealer who lives nearby and fills the courtyard with pot smoke 18 times a day.

The condo is coming along. Our renter comes tomorrow to finalize contract language and see the changes. One change being that today we had a stationary gas tank installed on the roof. I hope no one steals it. The stationary gas tank will save our tenant money, since it’s cheaper to fill than the small portable dangerous tanks that most people have in rentals here. And we won’t worry about her blowing herself up hooking and unhooking those portable tanks, the only people messing with the tank will be the guys from the gas company.

And in other news I’ve fallen in love with that orange cat that I took off the street a couple of months ago. My sister agreed to take her, and I could let her go within the family. But I’m about sure that this is one of the best cats ever to walk this planet, so if she doesn’t go to someone in the family, who can continue the love exactly where I leave off, then I won’t let go of this cat.

It’s stunning to think that this amazing lovely creature was starving and alone and dirty living on the street. How could the universe leave her out like that? I can think of some people who might deserve to live under a car in the dirt like that, but not this magic cat.

And that leads me to my motto of the day, and it’s only for today, because it’s mean, and I try not to be mean, mostly. “A friendly cat is better than a catty friend.”

When I turned 35 my husband gave me Lasik surgery for my birthday. I think he was sick of seeing me suffer the pain of hard contact lenses. Back then I had to carry eye drops everywhere and could never tell when a speck of dust would force me to pull over the car, or dismount my mountain bike, it was a royal pain in the eye. So I got the surgery. And I stopped being nearsighted. And I never looked back (couldn’t resist, sorry).

Except I didn’t stop thinking like I was nearsighted. I still look at things closely. I still find myself stopping to enjoy the way the light hits a flower or a spider web. And often I find myself training my camera on things other people wouldn’t bother with. Sometimes it’s a fresh tire track in soft mud, or the bark of a tree, or the rust on a pipe that’s lying next to the road. If it has an interesting texture or color, or great light, it becomes the subject of my myopic photography.

People around probably think I’m weird, because I do stop whatever I’m doing when I see something that must be photographed. But maybe that’s the curse of my training as an artist. The art comes first, always.

Here are some recent examples of the stuff that stops me and makes me pull out the camera: