Before you get somewhere you have to go somewhere.
The collection of airports this trip will be those in Albuquerque; Denver; Newark, Houston and Santo Domingo. With checking in, security, eating, waiting, layovers, flight time, twenty hours will go by as quick as a Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry marathon on Saturday afternoon television.
At eleven this evening, waiting for Newerk ticket agents to check in to work and get us boarded, all the familiar sights are in play..
There are transport golf carts picking up stragglers who have trouble walking long distances between terminals and gates. There are security men and women with walkie talkies on their hips, blue ball caps, and whistles dangling around their necks,looking vigilant. There are pilots dressed for work, standing in line for coffee but able to whisk past security easily. An announcement, repeated often, advises us ” not to take luggage from strangers and report such incidents immediately..” Bartenders do inventory and waitresses make sure they have two pens for taking orders.
The Newark air terminal is clean and a United Airlines hub. There is shopping here for those that want it and many travelers, even at this late hour, are plugged into the internet, charging cell phones, playing video games or watching movies.
Some hours later, leaving Newerk, flying at night around eight hours, Scott is coughed up in Santo Domingo feeling like Jonah exiting the damn whale that swallowed him.
Picked up by Berluis at the Santo Domingo airport, whisked down Avenida of the Americas past palm trees with the Caribbean Sea on one side, industrial areas, hotels, restaurants on the other, my Airbnb accommodations are waiting for me.
Escaping snow is one of my main directives.
If I see a penguin, I’m going to check my airplane ticket, call the pilot a drunk, and demand a full refund.
If I wanted to be cold I would have gone north instead of south.
The map on one of the Starbuck’s walls shows several continents.
When you spread the world out, pin it to a wall, you take out all its bumps, contours, unknowns, inconsistencies.
When Columbus laid out his world map on the sturdy table in his Captain’s quarters his map didn’t show him his crew’s fears, terrible ocean squalls and rolling waves taller than the three little ships in his expedition, stacked one atop the other..
When John Glenn walked on the moon, the maps in NASA headquarters didn’t tell the consistency of the sand that he hit his golf ball off of.
This world map focuses on longitudes and latitudes best suited for growing coffee, just one of Starbuck’s many products.
Our world has knitted together so tightly that we can enjoy foods from far away, foods that Kings used to have difficulty procuring. Now we don’t have to travel to a coffee zone to enjoy fresh coffee.
This little girl is talking to her mother on her Apple wrist phone. The only person on the planet using wrist communication devices when I was her age was the newspaper comic strip hero – Dick Tracy. Kids have come a long way since the 50’s.
What new technologies will come true in this little girl’s lifetime?
This morning I’m reflective.
It is good to have children in our world but they have to grow up quicker than we did.
Eric, a retired Army Ranger, who patrolled streets of Iraq in full battle gear, has told me violence is a way of life and controlling or neutralizing it was once his mission as well as his livelihood.
When I talk with a man who has had to take another human life, regardless of reason, it makes me listen closer.
At Dion’s Pizza for lunch, the inscription on the man’s T shirt ,ahead of me in the order line, reads, simply, “ Deliverance of Controlled Violence. ”
I am at a loss to fully understand what this means? Is violence bad, or does it depend on what force is used to accomplish? If you use violence to subdue a violent person are you breaking the same law they are? Does this guy’s uniform legitimize his kind of violence? State violence- acceptable? Individual violence not acceptable?
I don’t know violence like Eric ,or this SWAT warrior, but I know about words.
You only need to get a few cattle to head for the barn to get the whole herd moving in the same direction.
Sweet talk and glorious words beat violence any day when you want to control, suppress, or channel human behavior.
The war for our minds is always being waged.
The New Mexico Rail Runner is New Mexico’s foray into mass transit in a state that is rural except for four larger cities along the Rio Grande north to south. In 2018, our entire population was just over two million. The impetus was to spend federal money on a project that was doomed to failure from the start but gave governor Bill Richardson something to crow about besides knowing the leaders of North Korea. The project started in December 2006 and has proved critics to be astute.
” Ridership on New Mexico’s commuter rail system has tumbled so far during the past decade that legislative analysts now recommend closing or limiting service at one location -in downtown Bernalillo….. the state should not open new stations and focus on making the Rail Runner Express more competitive with those commuting by car…. ” (from Train ridership continues to fall in New Mexico, Albuquerque Journal, 2019)
” Last year, the train made 2.8 million on fares, while the cost to operate the Rail Runner was $28.4 million. Plus, the department estimates the total debt repayment over 20 years amounts to $784 million….. “(KRKE News-May7,2015)
This train, Scotttreks suspects, will be here long after Scott is gone.
Closing the Rail Runner and putting the savings into free health clinics would have been a better return on taxpayer money than subsidizing government workers who lived in Albuquerque but commuted daily to Santa Fe.
It’s hard for all of us to find a Doctor in New Mexico, especially when we need one.
Knowing this state like we do, residents don’t understand,or like, the waste and abuse of power by their elected officials, but they keep voting them back into office, decade after decade.
It takes a lot of hard and dedicated work to stay one of the poorest states in the Union.
Growing up in the 1950’s, there were only three channels on our new black and white TV. The programming was sports, talent shows, westerns, game shows and nightly news.The broadcast day ended at midnight. In the 1960’s,Johnny Carson got people to stay up later and tucked his audiences into bed.
Back then, we went to our television sets like an older generation went to their radios before us and listened to TV anchors tell us ” how it was.” In those days, we trusted our institutions to do what they said they were doing.
At Wal-Mart this morning, Scotttreks runs into a TV crew filming a segment for the local evening news. These days, entertainment and political correctness saturate each nightly news story and finding truth comes last in third or fourth place.
ThIs news production, promoting a Wal Mart sponsored winter coat drive for kids, is only seconds long but takes a crew of five most of the morning to produce.
I don’t watch news anymore.
News people want to do all my thinking for me and make sure I don’t have trouble coming up with my own answers.
Discerning truth from fiction, I believe, is still my responsibility, as a living being.
Newsmen and used car salesmen have much more in common than we previously thought.
Sometime last night this homeless statistic rolled her shopping cart onto Ronald McDonald’s premises and parked it.
The Albuquerque homeless problem is ubiquitous even if un-employment is low and jobs are rumored to be everywhere. Most intersections in the better parts of town have panhandlers holding ” I’m Hungry ” signs right under City Hall notices that tell you not to give them a dime.
When McDonald’s opens at five this morning, Javier will come out and shoo this squatter off but she will be back tomorrow unless she finds a better place under a freeway overpass where homeless people’s cell phones, at night, look like bedroom night lights as they lean against overpass stanchions and surf the net.
This country has wealth but people are evenly divided on whether we should steal from the rich to take care of those who have and give nothing, or whether people are entitled to keep what they have worked for if they have broken no laws to earn it.
This cold morning, our squatter will come into McDonald’s and slump in a booth. We will buy him,her, or he/she a coffee and burrito. Even though we talk tough about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, we know bootstraps are not always handy.
Using band aids to treat cancer isn’t the best strategy but to leave a homeless hungry, with change in our pockets, would be criminal.
Pets, in America, have become more than pets.
At the Marble Brewery, the limits to their importance are clearly stated on step risers leading to the second floor.
It is only a matter of time before this road house rule against pets going upstairs is summarily challenged in court, ruled on by learned men and women wearing robes, with a jury chosen by prosecutors and defense attorneys that has no thinking animals to make decisions complicated.
If a dog’s master breaks house rules and takes his pet upstairs, can the dog be held responsible for what his master does?
I’d like to be sitting on that jury.
Seeing a dog barking in its own defense would be worth hearing.
In 1965, this gym was state of the art for our time in high school.
It had locker rooms for boys and girls, a weight room,offices for the coaches and staff. It had polished hardwood floors on the basketball court that gleamed and rows of wood bleachers that could be rolled out and back in depending on event requirements. In the gymnasium, band geeks performed concerts,the school had Homecoming, Pep assemblies,and yearly Prom. In P.E.,we guys rope climbed from the gym floor to the ceiling, touched an I beam and came down as fast as we could while our classmates watched and nervously waited their turn to climb up like Jack going up a beanstalk.
Money has been appropriated this 2018 to build a new state of the art sports complex for Manzano High School. The new facility is almost complete and all that is left to do is demolish this old – functional gym, scoop its pieces up with a big machine to be hauled away by another big machine.
In a world on the move, chasing its tail, collateral damage is just part of the new game.
Newer,Bigger Better keeps our country’s economy percolating.
Looking back is just for fools.
Brick and mortar are way too old school for our progressive modern lifestyles.
This is an All Gender Restroom at the UC Irvine Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
The worst thing about this sign is having to figure out where all these genders are suddenly coming from, and whether I can open the door, safely go inside, and use the bathroom without breaking any laws?
Life has turned complicated.
I’m going to have to find a special California State Dictionary so I can understand this state.
Apparently, your sex/gender is what you personally decide to call yourself, and, we just haven’t been looking at things the right way over the past several thousand years.
Not certain about the bathroom, I go ahead and use it and am careful to lock the door behind me.
None of us are exempt from nature calls despite what we call ourselves.
Route 66 is the most famous United States highway that joined others to became the U.S. Interstate Highway system that linked our 50 states, made remote places accessible, let restless spirits roam to where they belonged, spawned a history of music, posters, legends and stories.
From November 26, 1926 until June 26, 1985 the 2,448 miles of highway joined Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico,Arizona and California. It started in Chicago and ended in Los Angeles and brought millions of people to the Pacific Ocean, the end of the line for souls tired of the Depression, the Crash of Wall Street, the Dust Bowl, World War One, World War 2., conformity and financial ruin. California sparkled in their eyes like the gold in its rivers and mountains.
Roads have notoriety in human history. The Romans built roads to link their empire. Jesus rode a donkey on a dirt road into Jerusalem. The Oregon Trail opened the West to city slickers looking for a better life.
If Route 66 kept going, across the Pacific to the Orient, I would put my bicycle on it and pedal all the way till everyone I met spoke a different language.
Roads that take me to new places are hard to say no too.
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