by Rudolfo Carrillo
I am busy tuning in on the local weather and the data I am receiving seems to indicate the possibility of snow. The information is coming to me in electronic pulses distilled by the formless agents of technology into decipherable graphic objects and text-strings. it is iterated in such a strictly conditional tense that its transmission only serves to multiply the electric tension swirling around, in front of, and ultimately, through me.
You can't trust the weatherman. Especially as regards Burque. As far as I'm concerned, and on this account, I am convinced he's sitting in the same lofty castle as the economist. For your information, the air-traffic controller lives far away, in a totally different kingdom, hanging out with the likes of civil engineers and such.
If you get my drift, I'll take it a bit further and reckon that all that weather forecasting, even the sort backed up computer models that come out of the fertile minds of the most recent top-notch graduates of the most high-faluting computer science schools in the country, can't say with any appreciable degree of certainty what is going to happen now or in the future as regards Burque's weather.
Oh, I get the global warming thing and I will be damned to admit this is the driest year I have seen this time around, with a summer basically bereft of monsoons except in their most truncated and momentary variations and an autumn wind on Friday that seemed like it had risen up from hell, mostly because it sustained itself violently for hours, which is something I imagine a demon would do, before being absorbed back into the earth.
I happened to drive through that diabolical draft, just as night began its ascendency and humans everywhere in the city retracted themselves toward home.
I saw a Honda Element on Coal Avenue and it was blocking both lanes. I thought it had broken down until I finally crawled past past. Somehow the SUV had become momentarily entangled with a tree that had continued past. An act of rampage had been played out here and now the human participants shouted into their cell phones and made wild hand gestures, walking as if on stilts, up and down the adjacent sidewalk.
Now the wind has blown and blustered about for a couple of days. Some snow came to visit, but only late and unannounced, with every intention of disappearing into liquidity and ultimately the cruel evaporate of drought by midday. It's really cloudy and cold and maybe it will snow.
The interwebz say yes, and at 11:27 pm on Sunday, the fourth day of December in the year of their lord dos mil once, one discrete electronic data emission source gravely intones:
Areas of light snow and fog will continue to develop over portions of western and northern New Mexico...including the upper and middle Rio Grande Valley. Before midnight...snow will increase in intensity and areal coverage. In addition...gusty southeast to east winds to around 35 mph will be encountered from the Taos vicinity south through Santa Fe and then eventually into the Albuquerque Metro. Visibilities will drop as low as one half mile at times in snow and blowing snow.
Areal coverage, eh? I just had to turn the thermostat on the furnace up, so that the room where my terminal is remains comfortable, sabes? So, maybe it will snow after all.
Or, it could be clear and cold in the morning, too, with the only clouds around being the low-lying, generated by piñon kind that you get all over the city when some Burqueños are trying to stay warm on dark, dry mornings.
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