I could say “Natives,” but that doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more about spirituality, and respect for same, which simply doesn’t exist in most of the other places I’ve lived.

Last Friday night there was a very sad accident on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe. At around 9:00 p.m., a 34-year-old driver (possibly drunk and carrying a suspended license) crashed at what must have been very high speed into the back of a car carrying four members of a Navajo family from Naschitti, north of Gallup. The impact was so violent that three cars in front of the vehicle that was struck were also involved. Killed in the crash were two sisters, 17 and 20 years old, who had just come from playing in a Class AAA girls state basketball tournament. Their parents are both in serious but stable condition in the hospital.

But this is what happened yesterday: Santa Fe police blocked off the southbound lanes of busy Cerrillos Road at 3:30 p.m. for a whole hour, so that a 66-year-old Navajo medicine man from the family’s home community could conduct a healing ceremony, asking for “physical and spiritual healing of those who were injured, those who helped the injured, and those who were left behind to grieve.” There were 50 people present from Naschitti and 20 cars parked right in the middle of the road. The mayor of Santa Fe was present, and the police chaplain assisted in the service.

From this morning’s Santa Fe New Mexican:

Nez prayed in Navajo and used an eagle feather dipped in water to bless members of the gathering… The medicine man, with the gathering following him as a cold rain began to fall, then proceeded to the exact spots on Cerrillos Road where the two sisters were struck, and more prayers and blessings were offered.

Friends and relatives placed roses in the median dirt, and planted other flowers and laid balloons along the west side of Cerrillos in remembrance of the sister.

There are five surviving siblings, all of whom had played for the team at one time or another. Another sister on the current team had injured her ankle and didn’t go to the game!

It’s not often that an article in the morning paper makes me cry, but this one did.

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Why I Live Here

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We had the windows and front door open for a long time late Sunday afternoon, airing the place out. That worked out pretty well, since the wood stove was still cranking. Below is a view of what would be the front steps, if we had any.

I’m posting this at just a little before 3:00 a.m. Sunday night. There was some rain earlier, and thunder, but now it’s snowing again. Good thing I have a tarp over the woodpile! More news later. For now, it’s off to bed.

(All is well, believe it or not.)

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Almost Spring

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Time for a change around here: enough with the bleeding screeds (therapeutic though they may be), we need some ACTION! Punch the “play” thingie and crank it up…

Note to Blip.fm enthusiasts: Blip appears to have deleted the embed feature, but I’m using a javascript bookmarklet available here that pulls up the same functionality, at least until they kill it. They might not, though, since that would screw up zillions of previous blog posts all over the Internet. (The bookmarklet works just fine with Safari and Mac OS X 10.5.6, haven’t tested with anything else.) Good luck with your embeds!

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Anthem for a Sunday Morning

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An atmospheric location piece. We’ll just let this one speak for itself. (And who are those people in the window?)

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Apple Store Video

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The scene below just struck me in a certain way tonight, and I had to take a picture of it. A lot of things hit me this evening, actually. What’s striking me now is that when I don’t have my own little path through the world to write about–or need to–what do you think I would do?

(Heh-heh-heh)

Tonight was amazing, though. I talked to my wife. No, I mean, I had a mission and I talked…

I talked about guilt, about Johnny the forever-guilty boy. Like about how when I was in third grade, I came home with a report card with a notation from my teacher that I had “exceptional talent” for art. At the time, we were living in Blacksburg, Virginia, where my father was an Air Force captain teaching ROTC at what was then Virginia Polytechnic Institute, or V.P.I. (How strange is it that now as I write that, I can remember how his face smelled?)

My mother was taking painting lessons at the time. She would end up making art off and on for most of her life. There were paper, paint, and brushes around, in other words, but nobody thought to see if I was interested. That’s hard for me to imagine now, knowing how I’d respond if I were a parent, but that’s the way it was.

For absolutely certain, my father and probably my mother, too, were worried by that message from my teacher. They’d have been much happier to read that I was a math or science whiz who might become a doctor or an engineer, and athletic prowess would have reassured my father that I wasn’t a threat to his sexual identity. (The arts, you know…) No one could completely stifle me, thank God, and I was a very inventive and creative kid, but the point is that I got the message. They never knew quite what to do with me, and so they tried to make me into something that they understood by withholding love and approval until I got it right. Or didn’t!

[sigh]

It wasn’t just the art, you know. Way bigger than that. And after 50 guilty years (!) of looking for solutions on the outside, I evidently needed maximum life-shock therapy and moved us to New Mexico. Once here, I promptly failed at creating any kind of secure, comfortable life and have been scrambling ever since. For ten long years, in fact. The hurt and guilt, thundering along such well-established channels, have been dangerous and ghastly. Contemplating what I made my wife give up, what I gave up that meant so much to me, is like holding a wolverine by the tail while he eats my entrails. I’ve had more fun, I’ll tell you that!

But this all had a purpose, I see now, like these things mostly do if we but pay attention–50, 60 years is nothing to the psyche–and tonight it all came down to talking to my wife, to speaking of the taboo guilt. I don’t know how I managed it. In the process, I laid down all kinds of weapons, any one of which she could have used to chop my heart out, but she never did…

It wasn’t supposed to be a ten-year rolling crisis, but a Great Adventure, making the most of our lives, and I just wasn’t up to it. Hamstrung by shock and guilt, I couldn’t replace the things we lost. Becoming personally fulfilled by relocation wasn’t ever going to happen, anyway, but something else did, and one thing leads to another.

Geez, can I retire now, or did the party just BEGIN?!?

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Art Guilt V: True Grit

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I met this fellow outside a Trader Joe’s in Albuquerque. It almost defies description, but he had at least three birds (two parrots and a parakeet) and two or three dogs on this rig. Actually, one of the animals may be a cat–I couldn’t quite see from my vantage point. Pretty damn mind-boggling, no matter what, and I have to say I admire the guy for having the guts to live his own life the way he pleases.

Sorry I didn’t get his name, but then under the circumstances, he may prefer privacy to more attention.

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Birdman of Albuquerque (Video)

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This may show up on FotoFeed eventually, but I thought everyone deserved a look at Callie the New Mexico Wonder Cat right now!

UPDATE: Must remember not to leave comments on political blogs when I’m angry at my mother, so to speak. Or the old man. Yes, I know. I only visit three or four regularly now. But when I’m in a certain way, I just crank out these idiotic doomsday rants or piss in the pool, you know? What for?? Bah. I have done this ever since the Internet was invented, and it’s truly tiresome.

The CAT, man, the cat! Look at the cat and back away slowly…

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Cat Break [Updated]

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No, that’s really what this is. Unfortunately, I have no pictures.

I was on my way to bed, unbelievably, and considering a bath. As I passed by the table in the living room, I saw the license registration renewal sticker for my wife’s car lying face-up, demanding promised action. (“I’ll do it, I’ll do it!”) The next day was the first of March, and if she drove the cat to the vet at 8:00 a.m. like I knew she’d planned, the car would be illegal. Not that this means much in New Mexico, but still. There was a full moon, no wind, and snow on the ground. I grabbed the sticker, a paper towel, and a flashlight, pulled on my vest and hat, and headed out the door just before midnight.

It was marvelous outside: the mud was barely frozen but I could walk on it, and I didn’t need the light to see. At the top of the drive, I squatted down beside the car and exhaled heavily several times on the expired sticker–the directions said the license plate should be “warm and dry,” in February no less–cleaned it with the paper towel, and carefully applied the new sticker over the old. (Well, that was easy, even in the almost-dark!)

Then I walked out to the middle of the road, taking in the moonlit vista. There were low, misty clouds over Picuris Peak extending southwest toward the Jemez Mountains, and more low clouds to the east. I could see for miles in the indigo-tinted night and couldn’t believe I wasn’t cold. To reward myself for being such a kick-ass husband in our hour of need, I unbuttoned and let loose a good long stream, melting a jagged, steaming yellow hole in the hard-packed snow.

Somewhere in the near distance, a dog was barking. The road was mine now, you bastards, I thought to myself. The sky of course belonged to God, because I couldn’t reach that far…

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Pissing in the Road Report

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See that image? There’s your life on new age Taos woo-woo baby-pucky horseshit. It can hit you almost anywhere, but here it’s often fatal. At the very least, you’ll get divorced and run back to where there’s actual pavement and people think that how they live is sturdy and secure.

Not that anything like the above has ever had a thing to do with my life, of course! I could tell you that I saw the ghost of an eight-foot tall Apache shaman on my front porch in Maryland, back when all I had to worry about were termites and changing soggy T-shirts three times a day, but you might get the wrong impression. And yes, I did, although you’ll note I couldn’t afford to run away and never got divorced, knock on wood.

I suppose I could always rob a gas station–they ought to have lots of cash on hand these days, no? Or maybe I could make a fortune selling ‘87 Ford truck taillight assemblies on eBay, but who would ever want one of those?? No, El Senor has bigger plans, for me, I think, the dirty karma-swilling Bastard. No doubt one can take that either way, but probably it’s both, and a helluva lot better than never trying at all One can take that either way, but probably it’s both, and a helluva lot better than never trying at all.

Not Trying at All being the rallying (?) cry of western civilization these days, no wonder I persist in phasing back and forth between my own condition and the state of our messed-up world. Waking up this morning to another heavy snowfall was the log that broke the idiot’s back: after all that mud had finally begun to dry a teeny little bit, KA-BOOM we get another shot of misery catalyst! (They’re cheering in the ski valley, though.)

[rumble, rumble...]

“I CAN’T TAKE IT! I’m cracking up!” I said, beginning to show the signs, but more angry than unnerved. “It’s never been this bad. I’ve tried for three years now to get us into a better place, and nothing seems to work. I just don’t know what to do.”

[sputter, snivel]

“We have to LIVE IN THE NOW!” she shouted back, stamping her foot. (You’d better pay attention when she does that.) “Guilt is STUPID! Regret is STUPID! We need to be happy RIGHT NOW!”

She went on in this vein for quite a time, and it was worth the wait. God, I guess I really love a crisis. I know exactly what she means, however: that’s the whole point of this ridiculous exercise. We’re both grownups with incredible experience and accomplishments between us. At this stage, we ought to be Masters of the Universe, not feeling like a couple of refugees bounced out of the back of a truck. The funny thing is, in many ways, I’ve never felt so good-crazy, spiritually strong, and full of fire. I’m even mostly happy, pretty rare in my experience. I’m attracting great roaring weirdness to my sphere. Here I am almost dead, and the world is actually opening up before my eyes.

I call that explosive and the true spirit of this place, so BAH! and HAH! and never mind. It’s time to drive off in the snow for “Sunday Sonic,”* anyway.

(You all have a great time, now, and turn off that teevee!)

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Taos for Wimp-Simp Dummy Losers, or Thank You Jesus for the Nails

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