December 29, 2005
Unseasonably warm here on the desert with highs in the mid-seventies. The Snowbirds are out in force along our main street, walking this way and that, gawking at every thing they see. I saw in one of the local papers that Cave Creek has about 4,400 residents and is expected to grow to 10,000 in the next several years.

My right eye (the one with the retinal tear) feels sore and blurs out when I look up and to the right. I assume (and hope) it’s just tightness from the laser surgery but at my age you have to take these things with a pound of salt (as opposed to a grain). In other words, every morning I try not to look at the obits in the paper, but all too often—like this morning— I glanced at a photo of some bright and cheerful 45-year-old deceased youngster smiling out at me and I think, "Hey, Bob Boy, your eyes work today, better use ‘em, eh?"

Last night I started reading the Zane Grey book I talked about yesterday. Man, oh, Man, I had no idea! We think of groupie behavior as being a phenom of the latter part of the Twentieth Century, but The Zane Boy took these long desert trips (1905-1930s) to remote places like Rainbow Bridge and brought along these gorgeous, young things, and well, here’s a snippet from the book:

"Women regularly accompanied him on his trips, sometimes as many as four. The few scholars aware of these relationships have assumed that they were paternal and platonic, but they were, in fact, romantic and sexual. There exists an enormous, totally unknown cache of photographs taken by Grey of nude women and himself performing various sexual activities, including intercourse. Of the women discussed in this book, only Nola Luxford and Lola Gornall are not in this collection. These photographs are accompanied by ten small journals, written in Grey’s secret code, that contain graphic descriptions of his sexual adventures."

Shades of Bob Crane! Or, is that pre-shades?

"He who sips from many cups, drinks of none."
—Old Vaquero Saying