Christy Finally Goes to Colorado. Part I.

With all the ease in the world we decided to take the band on tour, to one place. Denver Colorado. Having earned $35 (by passing around a hat) we figured we had enough money to finance our trip! And so we set off for Colorado with two guitars, a banjo, a churango, a tiny tamborine, and a new name: Albuquerque Boys Choir (we don't have a myspace yet, but look us up soon).

Albuquerque Boys Choir (Bethany, Christy, Stef)

Arriving at the Pitchfork co-op was surreal. We walked in the door and I recognized everything. First the smell, then the posters on the walls, and the dirt on the floor, and the man sleeping on the couch (a guitar tucking him in like some wise and sturdy blanket.) It all sunk into me with such but-of-courseness that I giggled all the way up the rickety stairs to the attic library.

We slept there and in the morning got to know Denver in the best way possible: picking up food for Food Not Bombs. Bethany, Stef and I piled into the truck with Eric. I use the word "piled" entirely on purpose. The passenger seat was not affixed to the floor in any way. It was wonderful. We then headed to the markets that give donations to food not bombs. I believe that this is the best way to shake hands with a city. Here's why: A) Often when you go to a new place the majority of your interactions with human beings involve money. B) It feels much better to pull up to the backs of grocery stores in a big brown truck and politely ask where the huge pile of free food is waiting. Everyone smiles as you lift box after box of perfectly ripe tomatoes and one-day-past-expiration-date crates of soy milk into the back of your truck. They dig around and shout things like "hey I found some eggs you could take! And how about an amazing fuckload of beautiful grapes?" (No one actually said fuckload, but I felt like they were saying it. And fuckload was the most beautiful bountiful word ever uttered). We were gifted a small mountain of bread, a bursting bag of pastries, pears, boxes of the world's most lovely peppers, clove after clove of garlic, and miles of smiles...




We brought back our moving van of food and got to sort it, chop it, taste it, and cook it! There is nothing I miss so much about living in co-ops as chopping mountains of vegetables on huge cutting boards with 3 or 4 other people.




At some point we drifted away for naps and band practice and evening came.

The Legendary Explodin' Jesus Christs opened up the evening with some soon to be hits. The band consists of two of the co-opers, a piano/alternately guitar, and a very small casio keyboard. They're lyrics are really to dirty to repeat here, but in person are hilariously appropriate. After the rousing show we were nervous about our soft harmonies and folky acousticness, but it went off very well. And we had them dancing by the end! I want to make more dance music just to see people dance!

After the show the night imploded into the usual sort of co-op party activities: a bonfire (eggs being fried on top of), bottles of wine, banging on pots, throwing things out of and at windows (Bethany attempted to push someone out of a window, but the only victim was a potted plant), a game of sardines (Swooning with melancholic reminsings I encouraged everyone to sing "Row row row your boat" while we hid in a tiny room together in the dark),

--Note: Of course, nothing compares to playing Sardines in the JS when it was closed down, what with the rats, the hobos, and all of the ghosts standing invisible in the hall--if you know what I mean.

and an unexpected trip into the night to play zombies on a play structure across the street.
Then sleep on a library floor, and morning.

As we left I noticed the clouds were exploding in ways I have never seen before.

Albuquerque

Albuquerque, I have heard recently, is a land of the brokenhearted. This idea interests me because locals are forever cryptically calling this the land of entrapment --although the license plates insist it is the land of "enchantment." What is it about Albuquerque that has it stepping between love and loss?  Neil Young wrote a sad song about Albuquerque.  I am downloading it now, so I can listen, and hopefully, understand.

Here is comes!  Now I am listening to the strains of "Albuquerque." As I listen I will muse.  

Driving back from the community center where I work in the "war zone" I was drawn into a discussion about the garish lights and signs that are so central to Burque's mystique.  The conversation lead me to proclaim that 'some people don't do things to do them beautifully.'  But then I realized that after they do these things without beauty in mind, beauty still comes.  Once, I wandered into the reference library downtown and found a book of photographs documenting the signs of Albuquerque.  They advertised fuel, fast food, and hotels- and they were beautiful all seen together like that.

That's how the signs are here.  They are grouped together, lining the longest, most tired stretches of roads.  My favorite garish and aging advertising remnant is sculpture of a lumberjack sitting on a pole twenty feet up and reaching twenty feet higher.  I have never found out what he's advertising. There aren't many lumberjacks here.

Actually there aren't a whole lot of trees here either.  The only place you can really find a lot of trees is down by the Rio Grande which is quickly becoming my favorite part of Albuquerque. While the streets are crowded with loud reds and bellowing yellows on all the signage, the river and all that surrounds it is a comfortable range of browns.  The river is chocolate milk, the leaves are aging orange, the ground is thick brown, the goat-heads are a kind of blonde, and the wood comes in a variety of shades between stark white and black.  The overall effect is extremely calming.  I feel that I am being reintegrated into the earth when I am by the river because there is such a contrast between the low brown everything and the exemplary unending sky.

Maybe it's something about the difference between the land and the sky that makes this a heartbroken place.  We are exceptionally close to impossible empty beauty from the vantage of our brown river, and our prickly plants.  Maybe the gaudy yellow and flashing neon signs intervene in this relationship: each glowing "El Rey" and "Red Ball Cafe" a lonely love letter to the sky.