Come to Albuquerque

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The world called Albuquerque is where you want to build your life. There is no shortage of lumber in the mountains north and east of town; someone decided to build a shanty by the arroyo. If you drill into the clay bearing sand,  the small stones pushed perpetually down to the river by rainfall and large diesel powered tractors, you will find plenty of water to drink.

The hint of petroleum distillates wafting up from your favorite clear crystal vessel and into gas-permeable membranes is there to remind all of us about the inflammatory potential buried everywhere and permeating even the best homes, despite our best efforts to contain it. Somehow all of this has to do with a project designed to take apart very heavy metal objects.

Spicy food is on the menu. Soon enough we all make the transition from bread to tortillas. Notably, some prominent geographic features are called after a watery produce or the tree that bears such pleasant edible forms. The number two breakfast at the Frontier restaurant is decent.

If you wander about town in a relaxed and confident manner similar to that affected by the conquistadors or their minions, you may encounter a snake with two tongues, a rabbit with thin veiny ears, a parrot escaped from a six thousand square foot home. Cactus plants hover, moon-like in their presentation.

Residents here have no problem restoring automobiles to their pre-revolutionary glory and have been known to use autoclaves and special paint made from cobalt in preparation for their clandestine meetings at the train yard, at the ruined chapel, a square building that will always be made from red ceramic bricks.

Of course, the sun continues to blare and is trumpet-like and bright as that instrument, but alarmingly forlorn in sustained utterances, too. I will continue to insist that it snowed here during the last decade of the twentieth century. You may be surprised and fascinated by the lack of insects available for inspection on the wide swath of next summer's conquering mower; digging will result in more ghosts.

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Three Eternal Devices for Navigating the Fall

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The clock on my computer says summer is over.

We have a few of these sorts of graceful machines—note to local burglars: I also have a ninety-pound red hound dog with a blue tongue and white teeth who is trained to devour strangers—but most of the time I do my work on a G4 that runs Tiger, Motorola processor y todo.

It can be slow and is ornery as hell, but it is just fine with me and I would keep it forever if I could. I've been through a few keyboards. (Flat white is a damn poor color if you like to eat pizza whilst typing.) But I think there have only been two times when the thing did not boot. 

Using the G4 is part of a personal ritual. My rite late last night, taken up with due gravity as the Pleiades swung into view, was about how everything before now continuously leaks away into the air, leaving consequences turned out into the world. The retrieval of the past's output as image and narrative is one result of this process.

I've been marking time this way for years and years, though meaning creeps toward abstraction and into sudden sea change as the middle of my century rises. The procedure also has the potential to mutate into cleverly shitty, multi-paragraph introductions designed to defend the use of a type of symbolism based in the neuro-mechanical reflections and quantum entanglements that comprise the past.

If your universe does not work in the manner I just told about, that is just fine with me; every head is a world. But I probably could not make anything at all from the temporal residue data collection area I've built from starlight and bad decisions, if not for dreamy mechanism.

I have bound myself variously to elaborate and arcane techniques perfected in the foothills of the Himalayas or else incorporating passages from all American television broadcasts into my skeletal structure with the specific purpose of gathering evidence of the discomfiting presence of magical postmodernism among a representative collection of widely divergent human organisms.

I hope you think that's funny. It is important to me that you have a good laugh while reading this, because I sometimes see my memory as a curse, and you ought to, as well, I reckon—when every moment is just hanging there like a big iron rock in the asteroid belt waiting to be mined by the well-intentioned but nonetheless colonial forces of some eccentric Earthling's half-ass literary career.

Eleven years ago, when a very different summer was declining, I met a dog that had been run over by a fellow I happened to know from art school. I saw that dude the other day in Nob Hill. He was driving a bright green convertible and hell, he is my age. I was going to walk over and bust his balls about the car or how he split after the accident, leaving me with a bloody and frightened dog, but "Karma Police" came on the radio and I kept driving. I figured he had probably forgotten all about me and was probably late to this or that country club anywho.

Back then, the dog lived, and she turned out to be a good friend of mine. I wrote all kinds of stuff about that day, about the years that followed. Now, this has been the second summer she is gone from here. I did not notice the summer before this one. I stayed in and wrote and dreamt. That summer of two-thousand-and-twelve I dreamed I left the back gate open—that her owner had finally seen a found dog sign I left at the community center ten years before, and had come to take the dog home.

She had the worst kind of cancer. The doctor ended up amputating her left leg. Her right leg had been busted on the faraway day in September I told about. I was always worried about her legs; she could not stand the rain. The night she died, I was sitting next to her, trying to convince her to contemplate the goodness of water.

She was unconvinced, was weary of earthly stuff. The dog looked up at me, nudged me with her nose and as death washed over her, an elaborate, elusive, smoky and oscillating structure appeared between us briefly and fluttered. I reached out with one hand, and the form vanished. She left behind an empty vehicle. It had the shape of dog, but it was not a dog.

After that, and at night, asleep in order to reckon with the permanence of that passage away from the land and the food and the flowers, I began to employ an all-access, backstage pass to Tlalocan, given to Cabeza de Baca after years of servitude and lonely wandering. I inadvertently scavenged this talisman from a landfill in Hermosillo in 2001, while searching for a G4 possessing magical properties and applications from beyond the stars.

The temporal displacement unit usually lands me in a vast laboratory with astronomical qualities or a byzantine transport center filled with thin locomotives and speedy aeroplanes. Sometimes, I see Rosie and the dog hops up into my lap or leads me to a telescope where I can see planets on the very edge of the galaxy, against the darkness of the void. In the morning though, the sun is bright. I am surrounded by life; yet she is nowhere to be found on this earth.

The ritual begins again as I wander out into the living room, shoeless, and greet my wife. The rest of the pack circles around her and then follows me out the back door, into autumn.

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Summer's Lease: Mysterious Quantum Forces Unraveled

by Rudolfo Carrillo

I dreamt I went to a party in the Northeast Heights. Esta accion was up on Montgomery, near Morris. For those of you with an interest in psychogeography, that vecindad is where my brother and I delivered the Albuquerque Tribune in the late nineteen-seventies.

Some of the houses around there were awfully deluxe, and now and then we'd run into a pool party complete with roast beef sangwiches and mimosas. We soon found those were the types of habitations with owners likely to tip around the holidays, especially if the paper was laid out by the front door, neat and regular.

Otros chantes thereabouts were shambling testaments to the fragility of the middle class with cars parked on the lawn and porches that smelled of dog shit and Coors Banquet Beer. You'd more likely get bit than collect, so we usually let those customers be until the Albuquerque Publishing Company cancelled them for non-payment.

Anywho, my dream wasn't anything like that because the fiesta que estoy describiendo took place in a high-rise apartment, but you could still see the Sandia Mountains from the balcony, sabes? I did not know a soul there. I mostly spent my time in one of the bedrooms staring at a wooden cabinet that somehow seemed familiar. In the hallway, folks were admiring the carpet and talking about a bat flying around the light fixture.

When I looked away again, the place was empty. Even the murciélago was gone.  I checked the refrigerator for pizza and sat down in front of an oversized plastic television set with a cold slice of Godfather's. Star Trek was on. It was the episode where two planets are waging war by computer and the losers have to self-disintegrate. Kirk and Spock destroy the computers in the end; fear of real war brings peace. Bárbaros, that's some cold war shit, I said to the dreamworld as I got up to leave.

Outside it was an emergency because the entire building was on fire. Everyone from the party was standing on the corner watching the flames wag their tongues like hungry leaves all around the doors and windows. Since there were a number of cool ranflas parked nearby, I picked a nineteen-seventy-one Saab 96 with pneumatic controls and switches designed specifically for underwater use, and I got the hell outta there.

The sun was just flickering back on as I made the corner of Morris and Lomas Boulevard, turning west toward our headquarters, where I let the old car float away and promptly crawled back into my sleeping skin. I was waiting for the alarm to sound.

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The Colonist, Day 17803

So far, the weekend has been decent. 

The sun is visible in these here parts; now it comes into view earlier and earlier with light from yonder star filtered into invigorating shades of vermilion and other colors that have citrus analogs but begin transmuting into purples and blues once the fiery orb is aloft over the city.

I counted thirty Inca doves roosting on the dead apple tree in the backyard. I'll be good and goddamned if the tree comes back this time. The cold snap two winters back conquered it, mostly. There was one live branch left over, but I reckon those cold early-January mornings did the rest. The birds like it fine as it is, but all of them, in a grey flock like that, make the dogs bark unreasonably.

After watching them flutter and gambol like feathery hands, and when the hounds were done with nature and I with the winter light, we all retired to the atomic stove by the window. It popped a couple of times during the ignition sequence, but otherwise came on just as expected. We were all warm and I drank a mild stimulant beverage common among the planetary stewards of the era. The other animals et processed meat, by the way.

The computer was still on from last night.

For one thing, it glows. For another, it has some sort of tunnel in it. The tunnel connects to a library and information center that is like a circus, but infinite, if you get my drift. You view it all through a glass screen.

There was some snow in the mountains, for instance, but not enough to ameliorate the rage of drought that now follows the yearly solar ascent. It is possible to cross most of the rivers here by walking through them, I thought.

Just then, a woman with a neck tattoo of an eagle, the words "La Perrona" drawn in black ink above the crudely drawn predator, knocked on the door. So, I detuned the nuclear heat approximator, rose and said, who is there, as I spied her, from out the velvet-curtained window.

Well, she goes on about how she is my neighbor from four doors away, and I yell through the door that I know better because I have an electronic tube that sends me information and have heard all about the burglars and cretins combing the southeast heights. They are looking for easy prey.

You have to let them inside for crazy, unforeseen, and potentially life-threatening scenarios to arise says I to the dogs who are going crazy. One of them is biting the door knob like it is a ten pound pork chop.

After a fashion, the inky interloper crawls back to her car and it chugs off, missing on a cylinder and leaving a half-pint of dirty oil on my driveway.

I wander over to the glass screen, say hello and start reading about how two visions of public education are currently at odds and being debated by a legislative body that meets sixty miles north of here, where they still get snow once in a while.

Before you knew what happened exactly, except that it must involve celestial mechanics, it is dark again and so I sit down and type this out to let you know how my stay in your city, on your block, in your town, in your state, and ultimately on your planet, is going, more or less.

Like I said at the start, so far the weekend has been decent.

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The New Mexican Astronauts

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Hey carnales, two-thousand and thirteen is pretty bitchin', so far, eh?

Everyone's talking about how far they have come along into the twenty-first century. It's just plain glorious to think about where we came from to get here. All that shiny newness reminds me of a fable I heard one day at Ghetto Smith's while wandering through the dog food aisle.

It's a story about the New Mexican astronauts; los recuerden? They came from the south with their sister the scientist in an attempt to reconcile el norte with la neta, if such a thing is possible.

I imagine there is all sorts of stuff on the interwebz about all this. Maybe you ought to google it when you are done here. Anywho, this story is about the time those two, nursed on atomic infusions and the dull knife of continuously magic circumstances, were gifted with petroleum-powered caballos mecánicos.

La historia suena así.

The dirt bikes were a good idea because they introduced a format for exploration that was dangerous and therefore had to be studied, modeled, processed, and then undertaken with the utmost gravity.

Additionally, there would be no supervision or support on actual missions, just the endless sage, wrecked cars, spiders, and occasional cows encountered on trails that had been carved out by the agents of men who had been making movies about an imaginary version of Albuquerque, who wanted a way to conveniently strand their hero in the Sandia Mountains, near the end of the fifth reel, like he was el vaquero más solitario del mundo, or something like that.

One of the motorcycles was painted green; the other was red. This configuration had nothing to do with the mythos of the popular culture in those parts regarding two fruitful colors; in this case let us say that the patterns and spectral traces differentiating one vehicle from the other symbolized springtime and blood.

The devices were put to use, a process concerned with the depiction of new experience was inititated and lonesome guitar songs played over the top of things as a plain reflection of the awesome and empty mesa that folded outward from the main observation laboratory. The two New Mexican astronauts prepared a mixture of gasoline and oil, imagining the far shore as just over the looming mountains, a bright thing seen vaguely from the corner of one's eye, waiting to be fully observed and made real.

And so with their sparkly protective headgear properly applied, the two New Mexican astronauts zoomed through several very compact iterations of the eleventh dimension which were craftily disguised as this or that neighbor's back yard, and right out into the middle the desert.

En ese desierto, algunos de los cactus estaban brotando plumaje colorido, and birds made from stones and mud lept up into the air as the spacemen approached. Here was a shift in the sand where a serpent had slithered by; there was a beverage storage unit abandoned long ago by another explorer, whose size was determined to be in excess of three meters, and therefore probably from one of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem was that the whole scene lacked music. The two New Mexican astronauts fiddled with the idea of strapping a portable radio-wave receiver to one of the dirtbikes but decided it wouldn't be the same because meaningful tuneage would just get lost out there in the vasty arroyos, sabes?

On the journey back, one of the spacemen, the one with the name like a wolf (the other was called after the highest of clouds) ran over a small rodent. Basta, each cried out to the other. They hauled ass back to their space chante, parked los motorcicletas in a dark room filled with ghosts and spent the intervening days listening to A Night at the Opera and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; smoking Salem brand cigarettes stolen from the captain's quarters.

At night they would take out their microscopes and consult encyclopedias while the wind churned and rattled as if telegraphed from a much heavier planet. The New Mexican astronauts retreated into their labyrinthine headquarters and shortly after the solstice, the dirt bikes became small birds that flew off towards the sea.

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Allá En El Rancho Grande

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Told breathlessly by the folks who reach this destination through wires and star-crossed radio wave networks that I ought to write more about weird or off-key things I have seen or heard or felt while drifting through Nuevo Mexico, apparition-like but still bound to la tierra by enchiladas and old farm implements, I have revised this post to reflect the aforementioned outlandish directions observation sometimes takes in consideration of home.

Mostly, it is la gente que no viven aqui, or maybe them just arrived, who want to hear about an elaborately eccentric and baroque version of New Mexico, but I think that if you are from here or stay long enough, you will probably dream of the state's astral relations and configurations anyway, a situation which makes for infinite possibilities, considering the one million five hundred thousand or so souls traipsing or crawling or flying around the province at this very moment.

So, in a vision conjured during my mystical association with a relational database code-named la neta, este estado still practices a form of political feudalism while lavishly entertaining powerful wizards from abroad. Subsets of that version invariably include alien visitation and miraculous images on tortillas. All of this is okay with the citizens of the alternate universe because they are happily ensconced at home, decoding lottery tickets, cleaning weapons imbued with religious significance, and interminably replaying depictions of violence, fictive and otherwise, on a million view screens in a million homes.

Humans from as far away as Chicago, New Bedford, or somewhere in the frozen tundra and perpetual frontier twilight which I am told exists up north, display trance-like behavior and quirky, involuntary hand movements when, in the course of telecommunications made using mildly radioactive materials, they describe esta ubicación geofísica to the folks back home.

The story of this place sure ain't square and therefore invites random gesticulation.

Such representations are, more likely than not, the imaginings of dreamers and inward looking butterfly correspondents who came out here for the weather or else in search of the freedom found under every extant cactus needle, in the gut of a spider traversing the lonely desert, in the mud you mixed up with straw to make your walls.

Those seeking solace in the dry communion with myth, available here on most days, found such readily available on the poorly paved back roads, ruined mining towns, electrified quonset huts, and rattlesnake dens scattered blamelessly, perfectly, among the sage and pointy little rocks that fill up the empty spaces between towns.

They often accessed that particular form of structural magic in the murky hours before the sun rose in obliterating glory, baking every damn thing to a sunny, leathery representation of the thing itself. This process grows roots. Más tarde, los comienzos de hojas aparecen.

Consequently, y en defencia to the continued presentation and preservation of this imaginary state, texts generated by observers are often infused with the subtle tension, mystery, and allure that results from being produced in a location whose modern basis was mainly a response to the existential needs of the service workers, soldiers, and scientists that came out, built, and continue to utilize an atomic powered outpost here in the middle of  a desert that presents lightning bolts and scorpions when asked.

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