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| Acmlm's Board - I2 Archive - Modern Art - Less Rant More Story |
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The Gift of Gabe Red Paragoomba Level: 13  Posts: 50/51 EXP: 8892 For next: 1375 Since: 03-16-04 From: Albuquerque, NM, USA Since last post: 260 days Last activity: 256 days |
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Unlike the thread title, this is my strange dissertation on what I consider to be the only remaining bastion of the American Old West. If you think it's stupid or doesn't belong here please say so, but even better if you like it then let me know. I realize that it's a complete rant but I had to put it up somewhere other than my blog because it's the best thing I've written in some time. It's also a little modified from its original incarnation as a post on said blog. I also realize that I haven't posted on this board since the few posts I banged out when I first found it, which was curiosly enough just a few days shy of a year ago. Enjoy and/or flame away.  ------------------------------------------------- My brother said that he likes Albuquerque. This surprised me. Granted, he hasn't lived anywhere else besides home, and yes, I too fell in love with this city when I first came here in '01. People who seek the wild west in sleek new pickups at Texas rodeos are morons. Arizona was completely wiped clean of it decades ago. New Mexico is the only state where the old mentality still finds purchase, and even our capital has finally been purged of what to me is the essence that drove outlaws and outcasts here for generations before. Santa Fe is a cruel joke, a caucasian-culture pimple ripening to burst all over the surrounding area. Californians feed its mad stampede, bringing its upscale vanity and modern-art pretensiousness to a dizzying climax that you can feel inside the city, sickening any who are pure at heart. White women lathered with turquoise go to native dances and buy postcards to send home, retiring to their penthouse suites and fake adobe mansions still swimming in the illusion that they are somehow part of an ancient culture that they are really doing their part to finally destroy. Hippies strike it rich and come to Taos to trade designer hallucinogens and raise smug children into neurotic trust-fund babies, injecting an apathy and cynicism not seen since the mid-80's into our state. The police have locked the city up tight, and the once-rebellious children of the 60's, who have moved to Santa Fe to live in the same decadent opulence that they still half-heartedly decry, are glad of it. But the reason it's such a blasphemy to people like us, and the reason most of these despicable people's predecessors came there in the first place is that it USED to be a frontier among frontiers! Where there are art galleries, there once were saloons. Where there are black-tie gala restaraunts, there once were whorehouses. Where fat hotel managers cruise their beemer SUVs, infamous desperados once had legendary shootouts! And this shit wasn't about cowboys and indians, it was the hard-of-heart-and-mind who were cut loose from society that peopled this land. But now it's been plasticized, formulated, and fundamentally, cancerously altered from the outside in. So those of us that can't stand it anymore come here to dirty 'Burque, where the land is cheap, the rules are loose, and the cops can't keep up. There is a mentality here. If you've lived here long enough you know it, you possess it, but sometimes it's kind of hard to put a finger on. I think that somehow a tiny sliver of the Old west has survived here. The sheriffs in Bernalillo will take you for a mind-shattering joyride if they catch you late at night without any witnesses, and quite possibly kill you. New York doesn't have shit on us anymore in terms of per capita murder and other gang-related crime. We just don't get coverage in the national media because we don't matter. Our city is wide, but it is nothing. A poor semi-metropolis in the poorest state in the union. A place where you can be completely clean and be friends with gangsters, dealers, murderers, playboys, schizophrenics, alcoholics, college kids, dropouts, sorority girls and crack addicts and get along with them, because here, everybody knows that the rules don't have to apply, no matter who's making them, the courts or the people. No ex-hippies stammering about the inherent worth and dignity of every person from an adobe den in a 900,000 dollar home. No tourist board trying to convince airline commuters in both coasts to drop in for some green chile. Just direct eye contact, a handshake and an easy smile, a friendly argument, an illegitimate transaction, maybe a ride across town just for the hell of it. A thug, a gun nut, a drug addict, an investment broker, an artist, and a gamer out in the foothills for a hike to a nice blunt and a view of the wasteland to keep it all in perspective. The cold ring of a gunshot outside the window at 4 in the morning. We come to understand that the rules are bent so that we can all live in relative ease, as long as we keep a small chip on our shoulders. It's not necessarily who you know, it's how you carry yourself, what you've learned, what you can do, how you react, or how well you bluff. It's getting mindfucked by somebody you give directions to. It's a meth lab in a children's nursery, or in a camper cruising the freeways. It's joining the army after being brainwashed on 9/11, snapping out of it in boot camp, then smoking weed in the barracks and refusing your duties until they throw you out in disgust. It's the most hardcore skating in the nation, without need of recognition. It's stopping to talk to an old girlfriend in front of the university while you and your childhood playmate are smuggling an AK-47 in a guitar case. It's seeing REAL (but needless) fear in the eyes of every man in the riot squad when you're at the front of a ten-thousand-head peace mob flooding Central the day we start bombing Iraq. It's getting assaulted a block from your house. The more I describe it, the more I lose track. You get the idea. There's still a vibrance here, a lust for life that many people in this country only know in formulated doses administered by an ever-encroaching media. People here are not docile, nor are they stupid. The harder they come, the more heart they have to throw around. It's no wonder the glory of this kind of life is romanticized by the popular culture of our nation, because when you live in a place like this, you can feel it. ------------------------------------------------------ For clarity, I should point out that all the events described above are actual events that have happened to me or my close friends within the last two years, with the exception of the meth labs, which are exceptions because we only saw them on the news, but the point is that only here are there meth labs in NURSERIES for fuck's sake. Family Guy made a joke in that vein (in the episode where Brian becomes a narcotics detective) but I doubt they knew it was actually happening somewhere .Also for clarity's sake, and more importantly to me, this offhand analysis was followed by my reasons for leaving this city and moving to california. As glowingly as I describe it here, there are many reasons to leave, and I cite most of them in the original blog post. Anyway, tell me what you think if you care to |
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