1st August

Desert Hot Springs, or the DHS as it is known to locals, is a cottage community set in the small rising hills to the East of Palm Springs. It’s where the workers who serve the community live. It’s also home to the spring-fed spas for which the place is named.

The ghosts of Hollywood’s past haunt the streets and locations of Palm Springs – Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, the Rat Pack – but it’s the digital generation that travels to this community now, most significantly when they descend upon the city once a year for the music festival at Coachella. They have no idea who Bob Hope or Dinah Shore were. Los Angelenos still use Palm Springs as their getaway and that’s whom one sees (and overhears) here most: the prattle of their superficial, unexamined lives.

After driving 1500 miles from central Texas, across New Mexico, Arizona and the Mojave, I have come to a spa with spring-fed waters to relax, while Sylvie, my beloved automobile gets a full work-up for inspection and smog certification and registration at the Palm Springs Nissan dealership so she can become a Californian. We are both getting pampered.

This trip has been a ratification that I exist and I am well. I mustn’t make excuses for not being well-adjusted anymore. I have survived the blows and it is time to rise above them.

In 2022 I went around the world as a reminder that international air travel was still possible after coronavirus. This summer I proved to myself I can still road trip. These acts slowly rebuild my psyche after the death of my father, the Covid Pandemic and the death of my sister last year – blows that weakened and reduced me significantly. As I sit here in the healing waters of the desert and reflect on the side-effects of these sad years, I realize I have gained weight from the depression and slowed down significantly from a kind of ‘softness.’ I allowed myself to succumb to life instead of maintaining my position as master of my own fate.

Why?

When life deals us blows, how do we react? Why?

In my case, I tend to fold up and retreat from existence, a tactic I adopted as a child in a foreign place surrounded by strangers with strange views and values – Americans. Worse, holed up, I tend not to exercise and rather to eat too much. These are both mistakes that I have to combat actively. Just as negativity is something one has to defeat actively. The essence of emotional retreat is giving over to depression and negativity. But the mind is far more powerful than that. It can, through practice, effort and training, create positive coping mechanisms. These are the ones I must develop to continue this existence.

My plan is to hire a personal trainer, a doctor and to begin micro-dosing mushrooms.