One more from the front lines of the civil war.

New Mexico’s ‘War Zone’ – The Most Frightful Neighborhood In America

25 years ago I dwelt on the far fringes of this hood. It cost me $375 a month for a nice small house within a mile of a food co-op, and an excellent 24-hour diner, and coffee, and a bunch of bookstores … all the good city things. For comparison’s sake I think I was making about 27K per year at UNM.

Now it’s a human disaster area. I didn’t watch much of the video, but I’ve been to Albuquerque a few times in the recent past, and I don’t need to visit it virtually to know and feel what it has become.

Moreover, in my current somewhat fragile condition I don’t think it would be healthy to sit through an hour of it. I have my own wars and they need all my attention to be handled with any semblance of grace.

Mostly I’m fighting with the aftermath of having too much stuff. It has smothered me for a long time, and now I’m engaged in managing the breaking jam of logs, and the memories slewing around randomly with every flailing and sodden wooden chunk.

I’ve carved out the hole for the Real Sleeping Space and the Conceptual Deskery. The bathroom and kitchen are not drained, but are functional enough. Elsewhere out in the yard and in the corners and in half of the big main loft room piles of chaos and boxes of unresolved damage still rule my life and mind.

I am both parrying and attacking, and fighting in a way that feels relatively smart. Whether that perception has any validity is a metaphysical question and perhaps even a metafictional one.

The story goes that the moon is my salvation, and the myth feels right on many levels.

One of them is that it is a place of wide open empty spaces.

An aspirational lunar Wyoming.

I want my rooms to look like that.