Matthew John Conley's Pad in Austin

Family, poets from ABQ are family.

Former ABQ city champion and staple on the scene from 93-99, friend, and easily one of the funniest people I've ever met, Matthew John Conley opened the doors to his house and let 3 of us crash here before we check in at the Hyatt.

He opens his doors, calls OhioJake and friends, and we start talking and drinking even though he's working at 5 AM.

After a lengthy rehearsal, the team shows up, beer and other goodies in hand at 10 PM and we commence to get it on family style.

Laughing, sharing stories, ribbing each other and MJC heads off to bed at midnight.

At 5, he dances out and only my dysfunctional sleeping allows me to hear him.

Today the festivities unofficially begin as most teams show up at the Hyatt. Even though I don't even know where the airport is, I volunteered to run a shuttle to get poets. At Nationals, you never have enough volunteers . And ABQ has a unique perspective because we just hosted one of these and want to have fun but look on as the organizers stress and make furious phone calls. It doesn't seem that long ago that we did this very thing.

Sorry, no reports from Dallas as I was here: passing out flyers, hitting up a couple of thrift shops, doing some data entry and trying to be helpful.

From NPS 2006, Don needs a lot more sleep and he's signing off.

Comments

Peregrinating the Albuquerque Bosque

The Map. Overview: Starting in the San Juans in Colorado, the Rio Grande "is the twenty-second longest river in the world and the fourth or fifth longest in North America" ( Texas State Historical Society ). While the river is characterized by the area it flows through, the river from Elephant Butte Dam to the south to Cochiti Dam in the north is called the Middle Rio Grande. And in the middle of the middle Rio Grande is the roughly 20 plus miles that flows through Albuquerque. From an airplane, the Rio Grande is a brown ribbon bordered a green ribbon. That green ribbon is the Bosque . I've always been fascinated really exploring an area, getting a sort of overview of an area then drilling down to really get it. It's led to me hiking the Sandias from end to end and then hiking outlying trails multiple times, biking all the trails in the Cedro Peak area because someone put them on a map, trying different routes to get to ...

"That's Scaughtland for ya!"

The United Kingdom Up at the top of that map, basically the top half, is a tiny nation with a big footprint. With roughly the same population as Minnesota, Scotland has a land mass the size of South Carolina, yet there are more people in the United States that have Scottish and/or Scotch-Irish ancestry than live in Scotland. My family is one of those. In the course of growing up, I was indoctrinated to celebrate my Scottish ancestry (primarily by my grandmother but we'll talk about that later). So a year ago, my wife took a trip with her mother to Japan. I looked at the pictures that she posted, and when I'd talk to her on the phone, I noticed something. She was happy. This is not to say she's always unhappy, but this was different. She was having a good time, engaged in the world, curious, and happy-like no matter what the challenge. And traveling to Japan with her mother posed some interesting challenge...

A Year of Thursdays in the Bosque.

Ran into a friend in the Bosque, and we both remarked about how low the rio was, and I jokingly said, "I almost feel like I should take a picture of the river every week to sort of document it." She said, "Yeah. That'd be interesting." As she continued with her dog walk, I thought, "I should do that." With rare exceptions, I walk my dog in the bosque every Thursday morning. And with rare exceptions, I walk the bosque behind the National Hispanic Cultural Center (sometimes parking at the NHCC and sometimes parking at the small pullout lot south off of 2nd Street). My idea is to the take a picture in the same spot every Thursday for a year to get a photographic record of how much the river changes over time. I understand a lot about this caged and managed river. Indeed, Reining in the Rio Grande is probably the first sort of scientific, historical, political book on the river I've ever read. That's not a genre I usually read. ...

Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Search This Blog