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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Charlie Visits Walmart

by Rudolfo Carrillo

He is driving a car that is colored like ashes or the far reaches of intergalactic space and will be good and goddamned when an oil-smeared and dusty—like the petroleum gathering machinery of Oklahoma in the Thirties—group of humans stops right in the fucking road, and he has to turn the wheel sharply to the left, else those folks be rendered lifeless components of the inanimate galaxy all around them.

They are waiting for a straggler who is still on the other side of the wide avenue. Leonard is taking a piss on the big, green electrical transformer that sits next to the rubbish dumpster behind the Walmart Supercenter. Yelling and cajoling him to be done with his relief, fearful of the heat which such watery pause often brings, at least one of them is also thinking about the simplicity and order of life in jail. None of them see the car turn the corner on a vector that might well forcefully intercept their desperate but satisfying congregation.

Thanks to Charlie's lightning-fast reflexes, a collision does not occur. He is past them and gliding into a parking space before the group's laggard finishes his work and passes out with his pants around his knees. The man's associates are fairly howling with laughter and recrimination and head on down the street, leaving Leonard to rot in the bright sunshine while our protagonist pulls himself out of the driver's seat using a kind of leverage that is ordinarily reserved for those obsessed with the weather.

The doors to the Walmart Supercenter slide open automatically when you approach them. Before he is in range of that miraculous technological demonstration, a sun-flattened man wearing a mesh baseball cap—with the name of a natural gas supplier in Lubbock, Texas embroidered roughly up front—rambles up casual-like and asks about the rain and wind. Charlie tells him it ain't ordinarily this dry and just wait until October. When the conversation veers toward money, Charlie draws out a fiver from his left front pocket and hands it over with stormy admonitions accompanying the transaction.

It only takes them a few minutes to account for and bag up his purchase: objects designed for consumption, the mysterious high-tech life-saving devices of probable Venusian origin that generally come along with those solid, liquid and gaseous forms. Charlie rushes home afterward so he can spend the rest of the early morning investigating other worlds.

He did not see the humans in the parking lot again. Charlie believes they retreated toward the tool section of the Walmart Supercenter. Maybe some of them are watching the tropical fish in the pet department. After unpacking, admiring and then storing his new acquisitions, he falls into a deep sleep and dreams that a navigable river flows through the midst of the Sandia Mountains, that there is a colorful restaurant on the edge of town, down a muddy road, where anyone who asks for a meal will be fed until they nearly burst.

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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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