It’s just above freezing outside, with that awesome mix of rain, sleet and the occasional lonely, half-drowned flake of snow. I find myself (post an undisclosed number of vodka martinis), at 10:30 at night, at the car wash.

The birds of downtown either ate something that didn’t agree with them, or quite litterally saw something that scared the crap out of them. Maybe Sarah Palin’s in town (wait this isn’t real america, she wouldn’t come here, would she?), who knows. Regardless, it looks like the zoo’s worth of avian life has had their way with my poor Subaru, and despite the late hour, the inclimate conditons, this will not wait till tomorrow, when it going to be sunny and a normal, sane person would go tend to the chore at hand. This affrontery towards my my vehicle’s honor shell not stand.

It then occurs to me that i could quite possibly have an unhealthy relationship with my car.

Man, I miss writing for this site. It’s seems silly, as it’s my goddamn website, but circumstances of late have left me with little more than a series of blockquaoted articles with little significance.

No, I find myself wrapped up in things that the wade of living-in-the-Jeep times would scoff at. Concerns of things like career and responsibility. Hippy Wade meets Yuppie wade. It’s like a narcotics market-model…first it’s just a flat screen TV, just to watch movies on…suddenly you turn around and there’s a townhouse and a personal trainer in your midst…and it turns out you really like it.

It’s fine, we killed of hippy wade a long time ago, after the organic toilet paper incident, and we even still regularly frequent the hotel subaru in the summer times road warrior reenactments (plus coffee, minus the post-apocalyptic bits). Still though this time of year especially, i do miss the prospect of getting the hell-out-of-town and heading out to the desert for a few days, whether it be to climb, ride a bike or just stare off at the naked expanse of West Texas. Something.

Lets face it, the 2000’s, or the aughts, ought to have been a lot more exciting technology wise (see what I just did there?).

No flying cars or jet packs. No utopian, or even non-utopian space colonies. Ok, we got the iPhone, but it drops calls like a bad habit and it doesn’t fly. The Internet was cool for a while, but ever since Facebook became popular the threat of being contacted by random people from high school makes firing up the old web browser an exercise laced with fear and despair.

About the only technological bright-spot of this decade was in Nerf guns. Enter the Raider CS-35 which appeared under the Christmas tree last Saturday, With drum loading cartridges, pump action semi-automatic fire capabilities, and a collapsible stock, for the close in work. And, yes you can be damn sure I’m buying the tactical scope and light addons. Welcome to your bright future.

Really, this is just fantastic. Where does one go about renting a tank for such purposes?

Take a city, essentially raped and pillaged by the failing automobile industry, where population shrinkage, and abandoned homes and lots are a huge problem, and make the best of it.

I saw a fella going down the street on a tractor. So, being a farmer, I flagged him down and said, “Man, what do you do with a tractor in the city?” And he said, “Well, I make $100,000 mowing weeds on vacant lots.” And I got to thinking, “Man, if we take that money and turn it into growing food on vacant lots….”

More…

Some random musings from the department of about to go on vacation…

• I came to the conclusion this week that I’ve been suffering form Heat Stroke since mid July or there abouts. Not trying to sound like a broken record but I went running last night, and still haven’t recovered. I normally dig the heat, but  it’s been pretty unbearable this summer.
• From the sub-department of Geekery, this MyAlltop thing that folks have been plugging on twitter for the past few days is actually pretty damn cool. Kind of like what RSS feeds always should have been, if someone had actually considered usability as being an important feature.
• On Wednesday, I hopped on my bike hoping for, if not a good ride, then at least one without injury or broken bike parts. Not so much. Two miles in, the front fork – normally designed to compress up to 100mm, decides it’s not going to do that anymore and turns completely rigid. It then starts making noises one normally associates with airline crashes, Las Vegas and animals dying on the Discovery channel. All this four days before the big Colorado riding fiesta. I have clearly pissed off the bike gods somehow.
• Back the geekery department, apparently yesterdays’ social networking outages (twitter, facebook, etc) were caused by one crazy bastard at the helm of a large network of zombified windows computers. Yes, you should be afraid.
• I resoundingly disagree that Texas (as quoted here) is “…as Red a Red State as they come.” The Texas Democratic Party used to be a force to be reckoned with until they allowed themselves to be neutered by Tom Delay’s Gerrymandering of 2003, however it’s interesting to see foreigners start to realize we’re not so homogeneous as they might think.
• Speaking of Texas politics, the new non-profit journalistic venture the Texas Tribune is getting of the ground wiht the soon to-be-former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith at the helm. Should be interesting to watch.
• Monday I leave to see what trouble I can get into in Crested Butte, Breckenridge and eventually Northern New Mexico. I have no specific plans, just a general string of destinations and activities (ride bike in non 100º weather, drink beer, etc.).

Look for the forthcoming post from the Hotel Subaru.

Pour one on the ground for the departed. Yesterday, my ibook G4 went to live on the farm so to speak – my mom will now be using him for non-processor intensive tasks like email and making playlists for her ipod. The little guy had been with me since 2004, making him my longest-lived computer to-date. He survived a broken trackpad, a fried motherboard, a lightning strike that cooked the power daughter-board, a busted hard drive, several road trips, the great domestic realignment of 2007, numerous flights and the accompanying trip through the x-ray machine, a blizzard, several moves, and of course my clumsy ass.

Stay well little fella.

Joe Cisneros is the kind of guy they should make movies about, and actually they already have. The patron saint of Questa, New Mexico, he fought the mining companies that polluted the drinking water and took a bullet in his arm, among other abuses, for his trouble. Among his most recent efforts for his home town was his procurement of a grant to buy hyper-efficient wood burning stoves for the less than wealthy in his village, to fight off the New Mexico winter. In addition to being on the local school board he also has the distinction of being head contractor on every construction job at our cabin, with the few exceptions being, in his words, “fucking nightmares, man.” He’s about two feet shorter than me, and can curse at me fluently in a couple different languages (especially when i do something dumb like leave the 4-wheeler on all night).

Joe works a small crew, I think so he can have an equal opportunity to boss everyone around. It’s interesting to watch my Dad, whose spent the last six month meticulously hand-drawing plans for the current renovation explain a part of the project to Joe – he stands there for a moment, ponders the particulars, and says “Ok, Steve, here’s what we’re going to do…” and proceeds to embark on some wild-arsed solution that nominally involves yanking a tree out of the forest and milling it into some incredibly beautiful beam, an act I’m pretty sure violates more than few local and state ordinances, and stretches some provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago to the point where we should now technically be at war with Mexico. He bounces back and forth between Spanish and English, but thankfully since most of his Spanish is cursing, I can catch the drift of what he’s saying pretty easily. With sentiments like “What the hell are you doing standing there with your arms crossed? I will sew those goddamn hands to your armpits if you don’t get over here,” or “What the goddamn hell do you think this is a vacation? Get you asses up here and clean this shit up,” it’s hard to miss the meaning, and yet somehow it’s all good natured.

Joe rounds out his crew with, Ivan, the classic New Mexican Chicano, Larry the classic New Mexican Gringo gone native (he has three white buffalo in his back yard, and a gray pony tail), and for this week at least, myself, my dad, my cousin Hiram and four of his buddies from school. We’ve spent the last few days demoing walls, building walls, tearing out wiring , installing new wiring and most of all, sorting scrap wood (a byproduct of the 40-year construction project that this place has been – you you really have a metric crap-ton of wood. There are 2×4’s here that saw Kennedy in office.

Today, Joe made chicharrones for the crew and the attending family, which seems to be more about the process than the end result. Here’s the method as far as i can tell – use 4′ cast-iron wok with legs. Build a fire under said wok using leftover 2×4’s and ample amounts of gasoline. After it’s appropriately heated, dump about two cups of lard on the hot surface and about two pounds of raw pork fat. Stir with a giant paddle until appropriately blackened. In a a sort of drive-by maneuver, pour coca-cola onto said mixture, hopefully without getting third degree bunrs as the whole concoction over flows. Then careful extinguish the ensuing grease fire. Serve with tortillas, green chillies and ample intestinal fortitude.

I haven’t thought about work in quite a few days, but I will say that, this is the kind of thing I work for – to be able to come up here and do a good days work, and sleep in a beautiful place. It’s a bit odd that I have to sit in front of computer for 40 hours a week to be able to come up here and preform the manual labor that I really enjoy, but I guess that’s the fucked up way of the world, and the strange tuning of my character that makes me enjoy things like drilling holes in studs, and destroying sheetrock.

Joe, Larry and Ivan – watching them work together is better than TV really. The pasta-bowl inspired wiring of the house has continued to pose problem fo us moving forward, leading to a general consensus to scrap most of it, pull what we can and get on with the thing. Running new mains without trashing any more sheetrock led to a delicate operation of inserting section of pipe into holes through the wall leading to plethora of inappropriate jokes between Larry and Joe, with Ivan just standing in the background laughing. Ivan’s a funny dude – the quietest of the bunch, normally from Albuquerque he’s working with Joe while up here taking care of his mother who’s been ill. As the day was finishing up we were talking about my normal existence and his kids who live in Austin. “Oh man,”he said ” my boys are great kids, they tried to get me to move down to Texas, even tried to buy me a house down there in Austin. You aint getting me out of here. New Mexico’s a poor damn state, but look at all this we have – you ain’t getting me out of these mountains.”

more pictures | view the latest on the cabin renovation