Sitting in my warm little trailer, dog sleeping in a donut on the bed, evening cooling outside sun sunk over the manzanita hills, frost creeping up from the valleys, sky clear and black. Just ate sweet potatoes, brussel sprouts (non-organic), pork sausage from a company of questionable ethics. Before that went running, up into the hills through the poison oak but felt sort of anemic, didn’t want to listen to my music, only ran for an hour. Worked today, drove far on the sun-warmed country roads listening to a library audiobook and thinking about oppressive societies, humans, how to be a good person. Ate the lunch I packed and an orange, a hard-boiled egg. Took Kinnikinnick along on the passenger seat and she looked at me with dull, bored eyes in the afternoon, twisted around in her little circle bed, stood up and put her paws on the cracked window and “saw” the world with her nose. Carried expensive bread through the back doors of small, empty grocery stores and stuffed it onto the shelves smelling its good bread smell and wondering, who pays seven dollars for a loaf of bread? But somebody does, thank goodness. Let Kinnikinnick out to potty in the rutted grassy lot between the Shop n’ Kart and the train tracks. She walked around, blinking in the sun, did downdog and updog, peed on some things. Smelled the recliner there, forever reclined, where the checkout clerks smoke their vaporizers.

I’m 34% to my campaign goal! Thanks to everyone who’s pre-ordered the book so far. If 120 people, about a quarter of my blog followers, bought a copy of the book right now, the campaign would be all the way funded. You know what that is? That is magical crowd-funding arithmetic. So if you read all my PCT posts and loved them and want to give back somehow, right there is how you can do it. Check it out.

Incentives for you! I have six more postcards left from the desert portion of my PCT thru-hike last year. A few of them are very good; one of them is kind of boring. The picture on the front (wolves) repeats itself as I bought a fistful of that postcard at a little shop in Idyllwild. These postcards are a time capsule from the first seven hundred miles of my first thru-hike- everything was new and bright then and overflowing everywhere, all around me! The next six people who pre-order my book will get one of these postcards! I’ll mail them out on Tuesday, from the little post office in Jacksonville.

My dear readers, you are awesome.

Update: The postcards have all been claimed, and will be sent out on Tuesday. Thank you!!