Why So Many Dog Canyons

In Alamagordo on my way to Three Rivers National Petroglyph Site coming from Oliver Lee. I only made  it up Dog Canyon a quarter of a mile. Last time I made it to the line shack at 2.9 miles. I considered stopping in Lincoln National Forest but every nook and cranny was packed with the RVs and pick-up trucks  with hunters riding around on quads with big bellies and wearing camaflauge (I'd wear red - or dayglow orange, if I were them).  Its deer hunting season and all the deer have gotten out of the way by now. Spent two nights barely in Texas (1,000 feet on the other side of the New Mexico state line – Guadalupe Mtns National Park – Dog Canyon Campground). The National Parks all prohibit dogs on their trails. So what’s Trail Dog to do? We stayed two nights and moved on – besides it was cold up there at 6200’ and it had rained the day before. Several hikers came back off of the ridge having been defeated by the fierce winds. Now I and the dog are just fine. It was seventy degrees at 11 and I slept without the rain fly on the tent watching the full moon rise and watching the full moon set. What is a Dog Canyon? I'm not sure but there sure seems to be a lot of them here abouts.

Fall, when women
Put on
     Long pants
     Wear sweaters
Drink tall cups of
     Cappuccinos
Sit around the table
     And talk
Anything can be
     Performance
So long as it mundane
So long girls, gotta get
    My husband off
         To LA


The tall one in the grey
     Stretch pants
Went out and got into
     A black SUV
She drove away


She tasted of cigarettes and expensive food. I tasted of cigarettes and cheap food. But both kinds of food were good – Roberto Bolańo – The Savage Detective, 1998 p73

Lonnie came by – how’s the fishing he want’s to know? Ain’t even trying, I say. Just as well, he informs be, cause there isn’t any. The lake is shallow and the summer was hot and there hasn’t been any rain nor wind to stir up the surface and aerate the water. They all died off. How long ago was that, I ask? Bot four years now. There are a bunch of small channel cat from the hatchery but they only gain a pound a year. So, I say, won’t be for another four or five years that fishing will be decent again. That explains why there are no boats out there. But if the pelicans get enough shad there won’t be enough for the game fish to eat, I add. Them pelicans are might good at fishing. I’ve been watching them. Besides, he says, it ain’t agonna come back like it was before it has come all silted up from the construction they are doing or Route 11 – up to your knees, and he shows me. The flock of pelicans are a white glistening flurry flapping of wings on the horizon –settling down, rising up, circling around – about a mile across, about a mile away (take about 30 minutes to drift this way). Lonnie had sold his farm up near Liberal. Bought a place in town down here. First started coming here about eleven years ago.

False ideological propaganda… preserves within people outdated structures of feeling and thinking whilst forcing new experiences upon them. It transforms them into puppets – whilst most of the strain brought about by the transformation remains politically harmless as inevitable ‘incoherent’ frustration. The only purpose of such propaganda is to make people deny and then abandon the selves which otherwise their own experience would create – John Berger – Selected Essays, 2001 p79

The income gap between the top 20% of earners and those below the poverty line has doubled since 1968 when it was 7 to 1. Based on pre-tax income and excluding capital gain it now is 14 to 1. The poverty gap between the young and the old has doubled since 2000.

Money acquires its own virtue – and, on its own terms, demonstrates its own tolerance – John Berger – Selected Essays, 2001 p157

Up into the eighties yesterday. I didn’t even put on the rail fly.I saw a shooting star while lying in bed. When I got up the sun was only a glow in the eastern sky. I toured the cavern. I was the only one (besides the guide). I couldn’t get her to talk other than that she was from near the panhandles and that she had been doing this for 21 years. So let see now, if you did on average two tours a day that would be about 20,000 tours that you have conducted. Not that many, she said. I don’t necessarily do them every day.

Unity in a work of art is achieved as a result of the limitations of the medium – John Berger – Selected Essays, 2001 p99

What is human, has now being assigned to the machine to perform

Encounters with nature of the ultimate super intense type seem to morph into something like… extreme sports – Thomas De Zengotita – Mediated: How the media shapes the world and the way you live in it, 2006a p215

They want to know how I managed to do that without an assureity bond. I have a relative (my father in fact) who a trustee of the institution. I am technically still employed here, I tell them and although I have been laid off, I am still on the payroll for another month. Both my father and a representative of the union testified on my behalf. And besides it was not I who would be liable if the contract was not fulfilled but my former employer An officer of the firm accepted by assurance that I would make restitution for any reimbursement for which they may be responsible as a result of my actions. I had gotten into the back office through a teller’s window and had chatted up an acquaintance (a former mate). He told me about another mate (a fellow alumnus) who now had just received a management internship here. Should I make contact with her and congratulate her? He told me that her name was Jeannie Wise. I was unable to place that name. No I don’t think I went to school with here, but you can’t tell with women because they often change their names. No I don’t think I knew her in either Washington or Colorado, maybe it was in Oklahoma?

I know now, it was Jeannie that drove that big beige Cadillac. A short stocky girl with blond hair. No, I don’t think I’ll send her a note. I’m retiring from this profession. It’s time to move on. I started to leave by the same window that I had entered, but one of the officers invited me to exit through the door. It was marked “authorized officials only” and no one below the rank of assistant manager was allowed to use it. I can see the room in my mind’s eye – the table tops and desk have white marble tops with black graining in them. On the back wall is a mural of a beach with sailboats just offshore. There is a woman sunbathing on the beach. She is lying on a red and white-stripped towel. She looks so real. I want to help her oil herself. I walked out the door instead.



A constitution sustained by representations can never get enough. It needs to have too much – Thomas De Zengotita – Mediated: How the media shapes the world and the way you live in it, 2006 p190



Do you have an amber? Amber is a color. Other brew pubs have an amber. Well it is a color and not a type of beer. You’re just being a hard ass. No, amber is a color. What are you looking for in a beer? Something malty. Something like an ESB. That would be our Pony Express ale. Although we don’t currently have it available. Here try this. Have I had it already? No. Is it an Albatross? No, an Emperor Norton. Ok, diffidently a lager. I am not real fond of lagers this one is not bad for a lager

No dainty dolce affetuso I, / Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-nak’d, forgidding, I have / arrived / To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe – Walt Whitman – The Complete Poems, 1975 p61