Saturday

I rode my bike out to Buffalo Park, in what's become a regular circuit. It's a faux-training facility, which means there are lot of people there looking silly in loud expensive nylon. They choose a number of different tracks depending on what kind of workout they want. I usually just turn around once I'm there. Sometimes I don't have a choice. Last week there was a race on and the time before that I stripped my crank arm and my pedal fell off.

Instead of going home I acted like I was going to the Grand Canyon (74 mi) and hit the museum a few miles down. I'm now at a family-run corner eatery eating a jalapeno burger, staring at Humphrey's Peak. I thought if I moved outside there'd be fewer flies and I was right. I'm glad the proggy classic rock that I heard indoors is still thumping and wailing away out here from some wire and speaker deal. I'm writing with an Eraser Mate. Fuck don't buy an eraser mate. They can't write with a darn and they cost a pretty penny.

This is a really good burger. The girl serving me sure is glum. I wonder if she's always like that or if something terrible happened to make her act that way. The other possibility is that it's Saturday and she's inside on a beautiful day serving half pound burgers and she's vegetarian and her chihauhau just got taken by a hawk. The call came through just before I showed up. I was feeling glum too until I went through the Ed Mell show at the museum of northern Arizona. That perked me up. Ed Mell does these cubist clouds and rocks capturing the impossibly weird depth perception of these one-of-a-kind landscapes. His cloudburst visions are heavenly. This infernal one is called Surrounding storm and it's a beaut. I wish Mia was here with me to see it

Maynard Dixon's a big influence on Mell. Funnily I was just reading about Dixon yesterday. Thomas McGuane had this to say:

"To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it."