Green chile teardrops; Albuquerque in retrograde
How living in the past fosters a buoyant, yet untethered sense of false hope in pockets of thin air
If a dreamer were to hop up on the moon tonight and look down on earth, it would appear as if Albuquerque, New Mexico was in some sort of retrograde, compared to its neighboring clumps of compacted humans. Two clicks out, and it reveals America is now in retrograde, compared to her far more advanced, more efficient, and more nurturing ethnicities and cultures abroad.
Albuquerque’s layered origin:
They came; they saw; they occupied. The colonizers.
They did not conquer. Lessons learned from both the British and Spanish empires before them. To conquer would have meant extinction. Genocide. The expansion of both the human race and the manipulated consciousness at war with the pursuit of happiness and “all men are created equal” fallacies.
Instead they moved east from the obdurate old town and rose gently above the horizon, the ones who brought the balloons. And trains. Descendants of colonizers and cousins of exploratory mischief. The ones who made a “new town” and set out to modernize it while the farmers, gatherers, nurturers, and caretakers found community in simple, shared, and sustainable life. The modernizers brought the new town to the railroad, which alone explains much of the dysfunctional past, but regardless, they knew it was going to be a tuberculosis healing spot in the desert and chose wisely to build a modern hospital and rail station away from the established old town. They also built banks, hospitals, schools, created newspapers, loaned money to businesses, surveyed regions for settlements and industry, all in the name of advancement. Modernization for all generated wealth for few.
Individualism.
The occupied and resilient indigenous spirit and discarded pueblos celebrated their ancestors and told stories of blue-water valleys, natural wonders, becoming through hardships, enslavement, and violently removed identities at the mercy of nondestructive lobotomies of mental and physical agency over the centuries of ethnic incarceration. Deeply intwined with Mother Nature, the caretakers worked the fields, shared resources, conserved water, and nurtured young ones, all in harmony with the seasons and individual actualizations within their tribe. Ever mindful and grateful for the abundance of it all.
Community.
Perhaps the most mystical, if not the most elusive draw to balloon season, late September in New Mexico, is not the smell of roasted green chiles 200 feet below the upside down floating teardrop; it is the mystical and bizarre accomplishment of regional and mental imprisonment in the guise of tradition; monetized as such. The observable mosaic of low atmospheric pressure being filled with illusions of progress and advancement; riches of a better tomorrow. Seemingly in rapid decay to those on opposing cosmic trajectories.
A cinematic tethering of false hope in a skyline of prevailing emptiness.
About that retrograde thing:
On April 29, 1975, the last publicly-confirmed US-owned aircraft churned out of Vietnam and with them, a twenty-year end to a concocted global war to “contain” a fictitious belief that a thousands-year old way of life was out to destroy the western world based on the very intentional disinformation that all communists were nazi, a theory necessary to fuel global fear and build allegiances with western allies.
With fear, comes control.
Four short months after the fall of Saigon, I arrived on planet earth as a farm boy in rural northeast Arkansas of all places, to do a thing while suffering the thing and little did I know, the Vietnam war and prevailing atmospheric pressure would push millions of dinner tables toward the living room TV and around the confused void of senseless human loss of post-war reality. The dominating high pressure of hate also filled my ears in the womb, nurtured my development in infancy, founded my primary education, and cemented my entire psychological construction after full, biological adult brain development. Post-Vietnam rhetoric, anti-communism (hate), and pro-democracy (nationalism) shaped my adolescence and experimental years and well into my explorative years, but always left me feeling empty and isolated by all the boring and endless hoopla. Never really bought into it all. Democracy. Not fully.
The world would then be led to believe that Vietnam was doomed in 1975, yet another mass ethnic victim of the great white colonial expansion. The fall of Saigon subsequently influenced both a psychological culture of fear in one group and a global movement of peace, harmony, and love for all humans in another. Western media convinced the world Vietnam, and her spirit, would be lost forever. The people of Vietnam, however, did not get the memo.
Today, for the fourth consecutive year, in 2024, Vietnam has been named the most affordable place to live; in the world. Food is phenomenal. Public transportation is efficient, cheap, and utilized. Nightlife is energetic and stimulating; youthful in all creative realms, further nurturing the country’s innovative, yet humble spirit. Automation is implemented in areas of necessity, not profit. A working way of life there is sustainable and overall, the people of Vietnam are content. Living a very prosperous life and sustaining the earth’s resources through their proven method of community living, developed thousands of years ago.
In just forty nine years, since the total expulsion of all militant colonizers, Vietnam has soared in the eyes of global onlookers after being bombed to smithereens by the western push of democracy. The modern people and ancient fishing villages of Vietnam coexist seamlessly with technology and the harmony there is contagious. Infectious even.
Conversely, the humans who occupy Albuquerque and its surrounding zip codes of expansion, have been left to their own devices since 1848, by the country’s standards, and re-stucco’d when “new Albuquerque” moved east from Old Town and became known simply as Albuquerque, incorporated in 1891, on Railroad Ave, now known as Central. The strip of modern-day contention begins at the depot and ends at the roundabout; the east and west artery of life in a host body of institutionally roadblocked veins, blocking prospective commerce from entering the city center. Unironically, in a town where the automobile rules over common sense and progress.
In just one hundred and thirty three years, the founding site of downtown Albuquerque now has a public brewery. A social taproom of activity on Central at the opposite end of social decay, formerly the genesis of the new town’s incorporation, the rail depot. The brewery anchors and displays the only form of agreeable and observable human density of community since the social bleed out and colonial capitalist expansion began in the 1950’s. The great strip mall expansion leading far away from downtown Albuquerque.
Today, in late September 2024, every step forward in reviving community through the human arts taken by the shadow workers of First Friday Art Walk, the thriving downtown music scene (Launchpad, Sister Bar, Echoes (on Gold), The Historic El Rey, sometimes Sunshine theater, the Jam Spot, Studio 519, and the profoundly under-utilized, but beautiful Inside Out) the city, the observable resistance of authentic expression and community, takes three steps back into the comfortable decay it has obviously grown to enjoy. A dying legacy of trampling human arts in favor of storefront commerce and corporate profit based on a booze forward industry.
While the rest of the world moves toward sobriety.
What makes the early-morning New Mexico sky in late September eerily mystifying, yet inexplicably gorgeous as the temps cool and wafts of roasted green chiles sing through the cottonwoods in the morning bosque air of tranquil activity?
The visual and alluring blue-sky teardrops of fruitless ascension in pockets of false hope.
It’s all a very real, and a very present reminder that we, the people of Albuquerque aren’t moving in reverse on a numerical and observable timeline; the mathematics of life.
It gives our beloved city and country of birth a deeply concerning appearance of moving away from its life source and closer to extinction. And unlike the planets in our Milky Way, there is no orbital (predictable) path of prograde to its life source.
We don’t know how much more the thin air can sustain before it looses all oxygen.
But it appears we’re about to find out.
No story of progress, or in this case, regress, would be complete without the red queen making her grand appearance, doing her only job to keep the tables of resistance balanced for all living players in the game of life and evolution.
The popular brewery on the west end of Central was a hail mary. It worked. The citizens of detachment and board members of dysphoria rejoiced in the name of commerce and human density centered in a booze-forward industry just as the red queen of progress taps in for the match.
Central Ave celebrates victory within restricted areas of consumption in legal entities (the enforceable states liquor laws), and the illegal drinking establishments of privately-owned parking lots across the street, just in time for the rest of the world, and most of the country to move away from booze-forward venues and lifestyles. Sober and sober curious are the new individual and social stimulant and authenticity is the new lubricant of exploration.
Sobriety may have found significant mobilization in lands absent capitalizing colonizers and within the emerging and admirable philosophies of the global Gen Z.
In the late September skies of reality over the lands of bound enchantment, based on historical events, the sobering movement gives me a glimmer of hope for a better, more prosperous 2157 Albuquerque.
Stringer.