Here I am, giving you my monthly report when I have nothing to report.  Autumn creeps on apace, summer is gone (though I kayaked across the broad belly of the Mighty Pacific yesterday and swam through its seething waves), and my life goes on in the best way possible: placidly.  Each day is like the last, work in the morning and on into the afternoon, followed by a hike or paddle, then home for a glass of wine and dinner with my wife, a book, a movie, bed.  I am not bored.  Much.  I like the elastic stretch of the hours and I make my own fun at the beach or in the yard or out on the hiking trails.  As for work, I am absorbed with the new novel, Blue Skies, even as I prepare to do the last of the interviews in support of Talk To Me, all of which have been virtual but one, in which an actual flesh-and-blood reporter actually came to the house.  Mirabile dictu! 
     As for live music, I do yearn for it, and live company too.  California is the most-vaccinated state in the union, and since Frau B. and I have now received our booster shots, I’ve been thinking about taking a few overnight trips locally, just to see some new dead trees and dead brush.  [Please see my story from The Relive Box: “You Don’t Miss Your Water (‘Til the Well Runs Dry) in this regard.]  The drought is now predicted to last forever.  We all yearn for rain in the way we yearn for love and food and music.  Yesterday afternoon, we had a very rare thunder/lightning event, and we did see thirty-seven drops of dust-flecked water hit the sidewalk, but we need more, much more.  A Friend of the Earth, which I published in 2000, projected to 2026 and portrayed the meteorological and epidemiological catastrophes we are now seeing, which was depressing then and far more depressing now that the reality has caught up to the fiction.  Many years ago, on my first German tour, one of the salesmen for Hanser Verlag, my German publisher, said to me, “We are publishing an English novelist who writes about a little village where everybody is nice and they do things like have tea together.”  Pause.  “But you don’t write like that, do you?” 
     I leave you with a picture I took last week after climbing back up the hill from the beach.  I’d been in for a swim and had spent an hour or so lying under a crude wickiup, over which I’d thrown an old blanket for a bit of shade, reading and gazing out on the sunstruck water.  Then I went back home for a glass of wine with Frau B.  I there anything to complain about in this scenario?  No.  Nothing.  Not a bit.  But I sure wish it would rain . . .