Verweile Doch. Du Bist So Schoen.

I've said it before but I'll say it again. Living in this world of action is very different for me, who read events and books and wrote all my life. Since -- basically 2005 -- I've lived in a world where events and things configured by me is all that takes place. It's very satisfying on a certain Faustian level. Very butch. I have become the husband of my dreams, as Glo Steinem promised me I would.

I'm really beginning to get the Marxist materialism stuff, and also the sublimities of German ecstacy. They're really, really carnal, those Krauts, as any reading of a German recipe book, or contemplation of the Isenheim triptych, will learn you.

( Smallpox Jesus )

Yesterday I spent at docent training for the botanical garden. We played with butterflies, tarantulas, velvet ants, silkworms, hissing cockroaches, some kind of lubbers, praying mantises, prickly walking sticks, vinegaroons, scorpions, and oogiest of all oogies, millepedes and centipedes. Also we learned about curanderismo and toured the curandera garden, which like most of the botanical garden here looks woefully under cared-for.* But the people are fantastic, and I am going to devote myself both to helping label the Hispano/Aztec/Native medicinal plants in the curandera garden and to chart the ecosystem of the arroyo which cuts through the [really arrogantly post-colonial] botanical garden.

Today I'm going to make an expotition to Belen, an hour down the Camino Real, for a hair cut with Jolene. Nothing else. Maybe I'll read about post-colonialism. It's been a long time since I read Anything. I did get the lede straight for the Trinity Site open house piece, and spent a very long time uploading and labelling the pix instead of writing. Such is the information age. You pump your own gas. It's Not Writing.

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*Strong vibes of administrative chaos here -- for example, workers picked, washed, and hand-dried thousands of apples on the heritage farm and only afterwards were told to compost them, that they were fit for neither human nor zoo animal consumption: hundreds of hours of labor without culling; key education staff person fired without the knowledge of the putative director -- which I'm staying totally out of.

Mi Casa Es Su Casa

You know you're home when the Aceynator opens the garbage with her prehensile and opposible black thumb talons, extracts a pound-and-a-half beef knuckle, rolls it around the house, and buries it in the bed. Because it's just too excellent to eat right away.

Jolene

I haven't got my big hair on today. I have big, big hair.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/purejuice/sets/72157622427001969/

Jolene, her parents and grandparents -- orchards, chiles -- were born in Belen, NM (pop. 6901). She has 30 first cousins who live in Belen.

There were about 15 women in Al's Styling Salon. Jolene was related to half of them. That's my great-auntie. That's my cousin. That woman in the orange? She's my uncle-by-marriage's second wife.



She tried to set up a young girl with a cousin of hers. She told me about her 14-year-old daughter who is the high jump champion of Valencia County.

The high school girls (Uggs, checkered Van's backpack) come in after school. There are beautiful women of 85 (including great auntie) getting their perms.

Me?

Jolene gave me the best $80 haircut I've ever had. For $23.

Lunched at Pete's. It is at the north-south/east-west conjunction of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad which made New Mexico. Or the Anglo version of it anyways. Galactic HQ of the best chile relleno I ever ate, a large family of geezers lunching under the skylight of an ancient adobe dining room, and discussing the PhD. theses of their children in Spanglish (which consists of she speaks English, varying her accent from American to Spanish. He replies in Spanish. Or English.) And so much more.


Left, Pete's chile, bean, and Marian kiosk. Right, the cashier counter. The red-lettered sign to the left of the Friday shredded beef enchilada special? Warns restaurant patrons that carrying a gun is a fourth-degree felony.

Discovered Belen is the galactic HQ of Judy fucking Chicago. For my sins!



It can't be for the haircuts.


Former Hotel Belen now Through the Erp Flower

Drove leisurely back up rural route 47 through the alluvial land grant oasis towns along the Rio Grande founded in the 18th century or earlier. Tome. Valencia. Peralta. Heaven.

Tome Hill. Penitentes.