American Fez

Selections From A Southwestern Dictionary

Cactess: a prickly green woman, rooted to the spot, often employed as the waitress in cheap restaurants where bloggers dine.

Albaquirky: An obese, heavily bearded man in a ten-gallon hat, spangly shirt and decorative boots trying to cajole you into taking a stagecoach tour around town for $25.

Adobe Pueblo Architecture: what's left of Le Corbusier after you beat all the pretentious modern nonsense out of the man and leave him out in the sun to sober up. 

Traditional Crafts: Transplanted northern American, wearing moccasins and wrapped in a colorfully variegated blanket, trying to sell you cheap jewelry in the shadow of Adobe Pueblo Architecture (see also Albaquirky)

Bleached cow skull: free art supplies found in the desert.

D. H. Lawrence: Anthologist of bawdy stories told by louche cowhands around their desert campfire.

Georgia O'Keefe Richards: Lead guitarist of ... oh, the Cactress has finally bought my lunch.   

The Middle of Nowhere

I'm flying into a tiny southwestern airport tonight. There's only one runway, shared by commercial puddle-jumpers and private crop-dusters alike, and it might just as well be a dirt road leading to a ghost town. Air traffic control is essentially a guy sitting on top of a stepladder with a pair of binoculars and an air sock. Googling ground transportation options, I came up with a picture of a donkey and the dictionary definition of "charabanc."

I'm pretty sure our luggage is strapped to the fuselage with bungee cables, so after being rummaged through and not properly resealed by TSA, I expect our bags will distribute most of their contents somewhere over Colorado. Expect to see a few Oxford shirts and some Argyle socks caught on the cacti if you happen to be in that area. Still, it's been a long time since I was last in the middle of nowhere. I wonder if it's changed.

The Former Great Britain

Poor old Scotland: stuck between a Stone of Scone and a hard place. Their independence referendum boils down to a choice between politicians with cut-glass accents or politicians with smashed-glass accents. Who cares if parliament is four hundred miles away or just across the glen if the corporate stooges who lobby and gerrymander there never take the people's concerns into consideration? Never has a case of "meet the new boss same as the old boss" been so obvious, except the new boss will be wearing a kilt and painting his face blue.

Zeros and More Zeros.

There's an old truism: those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

Alas, in these days of instant downloadable digital technology, as it becomes increasingly difficult to get paid for doing things, more and more erstwhile doers are devolving into teachers. Even I, an enemy of newfangled college curricula, now cast my eyes enviously at former colleagues who are pontificating full-time on local campuses. I'm suspicious not only that they might be getting paid more for teaching than I am for doing, but also that they have more job security. 

Fortunately, such teaching opportunities are not confined to institutions of higher learning. All kinds of start-ups and pop-ups are offering classroom-like environments where desperate people laid off from defunct professions can learn the ins and outs of digital this and that, hoping to transition into the brave yet extremely casual new world of shaving your head and wearing thick rimmed spectacles. 

In fact, I often think that the future of this digital world we have created will just be loudmouth bores speaking at such seminars about the future of this digital world we have created, and the only way to make a living in that digital marketplace will be to hold such workshops about how to make a living in that digital marketplace. God knows there appears to be enough credulous students willing to pay to attend such worthless events that good money can be made by enough unscrupulous teachers. But, of course, by the time I summon up the energy to start teaching all the human teachers will already be replaced by Professor R2-D2 on Skype.

A new truism: those who can, don't; those who can't, watch TED talks.

Dystopian Drive

This past Sunday, enjoying a casual afternoon jaunt through the countryside in our jalopy, we drove along the Old Post Road until we reached Old Mill Way. There was, predictably, a pond nearby, where indolent visitors could over-feed already obese ducks, or just sit on a decaying wooden bench to gawp at ripples on the water.

In a hundred years time, I remarked to my wife, as we tossed hunks of bread towards an especially greedy grebe, in the dystopian future, people very much like ourselves will be driven along the Old Fed Ex Route in their self-driving car until they reach Old Shopping Plaza Way. They will walk past the quickweed and crabgrass filled jungle that used to be a Best Buy store; toss hunks of cloned chicken meat at the dog-sized rats in the rubble of the food court; then they will go and get a mocha latte from Starbucks because, like the proverbial cockroach after a nuclear holocaust, Starbucks will still be there, brewing coffee in the ruins. Or perhaps people will have stopped drinking coffee by then. Our descendants will be all about the ultra-hydrating, super-fortified water for sale. At restaurants, instead of choosing between bottled water or tap, diners will be offered either stagnant or fresh; the fresh water will obviously cost a small fortune and arrive at your table in a bottle labeled Nestle or Coke or whatever.

I turned to my wife for a response to my depressing prognostications, but she had wisely moved away to the benches and was watching the sun disappear behind a line of trees in the distance. You've got to enjoy the moment while you can, she always says.

Famous Men of New England, Number 48

Unctuous Mather

Unctuous Mather was born in 1707, the thirty-fifth son of Increase and Exhausted Mather, custodians of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an exclusive seaside resort franchise. Raised in a strict Calvinist household, Unctuous was told "thou shalt not" from an early age, so it is surprising that anything came of him at all. 

Fortunately he inherited his father's fiery brand of tourist exploitation, establishing a successful line of Olde Towne Carriage Tours and Witch Burnings in his early twenties. But it is for the Puritan theme park called Matherland that Unctuous is chiefly remembered. Featuring rides and entertainments such as Scripture Island, Smallpox Experience and Indian Wars, the park attracted many visitors from far and wide. 

A contributor to Ye Trippe Advifor, the popular eighteenth-century broadsheet, described Matherland as "The best thing to happen to Massachsetts since the Wampanoags finally put some proper pants on." However, the park was also frequently criticised for its Sabbathizer ride, which, according to one visitor, was "Just a bunch of dour-faced people in boring clothes sitting around doing nothing for hours. What a rip off!"

Unctuous Mather died in 1797 at the ripe old age of ninety. He never married for he claimed that residing under the same roof as a woman was shameful, leading to a life of drunkenness and sloth. His remains are buried beneath a commemorative slab in Boston's famous Quincy Market, although the site is currently a changing room in a Victoria's Secret.