Random thoughts for a cold April night, no particular order:

I will read a bit more of the Sebald collected work called Campo Santo, a mix of scholarly work and short essay, travelogue and analysis of the post WWII German psyche. I will get my fill of stylish prose on the ranging beauty of Nabakov’s images, and wonder why a lady at the coffee shop, seeing my book and its title, nodded in approval and said, aloud, “Campo Santo.”

I wondered if the wind would come from the west so fiercely, could it uproot the scraggy creeping vine from the front yard and send it tumbling into the arroyo behind the house, leap over the split rail fence and the hard-raked clay-flecked path between the cowbells and the shy ponil, miss the small dog and his larger companions sniffing their way around the trash-strewn pinon tree near the paved walking path, and rest slanted and wind-battered against he barb-wire fence near the city open-space boundary.

The little attenae of my writing self hasn’t perked up in a while. I’m reading more, finding more authors to read, revisiting older favorites, and contemplating classics to tromp through this summer.

Blitzen Trapper’s song “Furr” is beautiful in lyric the way old folk tales are beautiful, and tromps along in time with a leisurely hike in the mowed-down fields at the edge of a dark wood.

I miss the warmth of March in northern New Mexico, but not the onset of allergies.

I am sleepy, and it is National Poetry Month. Despite the welcome daily email of new poems, the rusty poet in me is silent, but thinking on some stool in the more wintery corners of my tired skull.

My favorite European races happen this month. I’m excited, and eager to find out if my predictions come true.

This is the summer in which I ride further in one sitting than I have ever in my life. I hope to extend this personal record a few times this year.

To wear a cotton shirt to a small coffee shop that also sells whole bean is to carry the smell of finely roasted coffee with you for the rest of the day.