Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

FADE IN:    EXT.   MUSEUM-DAY A glass and brick building with sculptures made of bronze and metal arranged around a grassy lawn encircled by a sidewalk.    A middle aged white guy with a baseball cap walks into the shot, up to large glass doors and steps into the building. DISSOLVE TO: A small sign with a graphic of a the iconic "Hollywood" and below it "Southwest" announces the exhibit behind the double doors. Middle aged white guy is now standing in front of a movie poster for Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's 2016 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot , starring Tina Fey.   He writes in a small notebook, "I was watching Whiskey Tango Foxtrot , a movie based on reporter Kim Barker's time in Afghanistan, when I was jolted out of the moment with a landscape I knew.   So as the credits rolled I kept reading until it confirmed that landscape that was standing in for Afghanistan was actually New Mexico."   DISSOLVE TO: A wing in the exhibit. ...

The year was 1998 and I’d recently freed up my schedule so that I could go to this poetry open mike at a place just down the road called Best Price Books & Coffee .  At the time there were a lot poets every week.  We’d meet up before and write or talk and get to know each other and then the host would come in, set up the mike on the patio (during the warm weather) or inside in the back room of the coffee house.  There’d be poets, musicians, comedians, random street people who’d stand up and ramble for a few minutes until the host would sort of shoo them off stage, but everyone got to speak if they wanted to.  The notion of hate speech was a relatively new one, and I didn’t really get all the nuances.  I’m a white, cis-gendered male that comes from a middle class family so I have never experienced discrimination or been the victim of hate speech but I know that the people who I liked to listen to did not look like me or share my background.  The...

Overview:   In June, around the Summer Solstice, my wife, my dog, and I set out to hike the Albuquerque Bosque from end to end over two days .  It was well over a hundred degrees and after starting later than expected we didn't make it as far the first day as we hoped.  But we did make it. Now, three months later, around the Autumnal Equinox, we set out to do it again.  Our route was slightly different and, with the weather being a lot more pleasant, broke the day into a thirteen mile day and a five mile day:  eighteen total miles from Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge to the Alameda Bridge right on the border between Albuquerque and Corrales. The things we wanted to do differently this time were pretty straightforward:  1) don't get lost at the south terminus and get into the bosque sooner, and 2) walk even more on the westside.  So, the route was a follows:  we'd walk on the east side from Valle de Oro to the Rio Bravo Bridge, cro...

  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 ...