Friday's Dispatch Southwest Edition

Found with about a dozen others at a rest area in New Mexico.

Real T-rex skull at Fox Cave

Huh?!

During the siege of the McSween home the front was set fire by the Dolan-Murphy faction. Billy and others escaped out the rear after fighting the fire all the way to the back. Billy made his way down to the Rio Bonito and followed it to safety- for a time.

Thousand of years ago the previous owner of this mask could never have guessed it would end up at Fox Cave on East Highway 70 between Alamogordo and Ruidoso New Mexico. Our world is a weird place to live.

• It is 06/07/2016 and Comfort Inn is sheltering me from the elements.
• The journey may be the destination and all that but the feds need to put miles on the their signage. Lincoln NF is huge and it is easy to drive for miles and then be convinced you may not have the right road so you turn around...
• Hey G Men: When you put a sign up with a place name and an arrow pointing the way  it will only cost another 50 cents to put the number of miles to the destination.
• The Pizza Hut guy brought paper plates with the pizza a minute ago. I have never encountered that before.
• Today a local business owner said some racist crap while we chatted. It seemed like an effort to bait us into some deeper racist interaction. I felt sick and left as soon as I could.
• The girl at the Lincoln County Courthouse could not act any more bored with her job and tired of peoples crap if she tried and I mean this literally as I had to ask her to repeat her answer to a simple question multiple times as her mumbling, sighs, eye rolls and glances down to her phone/computer were so distracting it was hard to understand her.
• Don't worry babe- you're right, you are too hot and smart for that job- you won't be there forever.
• On the way east as we headed home Cracker Barrel sounded good so we stopped. Listen, if you never heed any of my advice; have the green chili grilled chicken dinner and for your side have a baked potato, green beans and mac and cheese. It is not amazing but very- very good- especially considering the 9 dollar price tag.

Wednesday's Digressions

The backstory: I get it in my head I need to drink more water so consequently I ask for the loan of a drinking glass. One of the Asian den mother types in the office loans me a huge soup bowl type cup to drink from- it got the job done but looked ridiculous. When I took it back to her I joked I couldn't take being teased about it anymore. One or two days later I came into my office and this was on the desk.

Yes, I also immediately thought of the soup Nazi.

• A friendly acquaintance recently went to rehab for a short period of time. She said she was done with drinking and wanted me to know.  Today I saw her- she is trembling, speaking in word salad and bloaty. I don't know if that means she is definitely on the wagon or has definitely fallen off or if some of the preceding facts are related at all or purely coincidental.
• It is important to me that a woman takes pride in the care of her hair and a woman with pretty hair goes up a notch or two in my book.
• Recently I have seen multiple teenage girl children with tattoos that their moms must have approved. Crazy.
• In the past 4 years I have eaten Taco Bell three times; two of which were within the past week.
• There is an A and W Root Beer stand in Ruidoso although it is co located with a Long John Silver's. The last one I knew of in our area was in Bowie. It was there long after I would have presumed it gone but I don't know if it is still there.
• I oddly get Snyder TX and Sweetwater TX confused.
• When a kid throws a float ring in a pool and then jumps on top of it I always draw up inside as I am sure they are going to fall back and strike their head on the edge of the pool.
• Jack Johnson held a patent to an improvement on an adjustable wrench- that he designed while in prison. That and his fearlessness impress me the most about him.
• Laptop batteries still never- ever last nearly as long as advertised.

Notes From The Road

My new titanium spork has a bottle opener attached. I don't know when I would use it as such but it made a good tent stake puller

• Roswell cop cars are ugly.
• There weren't as many Mexican radio stations out that way as I thought there would be.
• A lot of the towns had a concert venue and/or performing arts center of some type. We just missed Clint Black and Don Edwards was coming some time after we left.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  

  Inside Artesia's visitors center. I couldn't get an answer why a safe needed a press attached to it.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Academically I knew NM was a big state for agriculture but I had to see it to believe it- cotton and grain fields that went on for mile after mile and stretched to the horizon in every direction.
• There weren't as many people there as I thought there would be from Texas.
• We didn't see any javelinas except in a zoo. There were plenty of animals though. I saw one rattlesnake and more lizards than I have seen in my entire life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The little zoo in Roswell is free and well worth it. Prairie dogs burrow right along the walking paths.
• We didn't make it to Lincoln National Park or the attractions in Lincoln County- there was just too much to see and do. We flat ran out of time.

Booties Pooches, New Mexican Scenery and Various Drive By Shootings

A weird thing about humans: I spoke to this lady multiple times and if my life depended on it I couldn't tell you her name but her dogs were named Rayne and Burke.

FG: My key poked a hole in my pants. Do you want to take a picture for your dumb blog?

Drive-by pic of a church building in Roswell

Why are water towers near old airfields and military bases often red checked? 

Sunrise as viewed from the tent

Same but more glary.

Why so far away mountain?

There- that looks better.

Aaaaaah- too close mountain. Personal space! Get out of my face would you?!

Mud flats

are flat and muddy.

You think you found a real Army-Navy store but instead, you find disappointment and missed/disregarded opportunities for the owner to make a lot more money and have an interesting landmark that would draw people from near and far but yeah- go visit anyway when in Roswell.

Contemporary Contemplations

Burt the park host at Lea Lake Bottomless Lakes SP is seen here setting the tone. I stopped short to ostensibly read some signage but mostly messing with him when I realized  what he was doing.. Yes- he literally glared at me like I was crazy and impatiently tapped his prop (mostly) clipboard on his other hand when he guessed what I was doing- funny. Like a lot of more or less menial jobs, the people who take them too seriously rightly open themselves up for some ridicule but our world  would spin out of control without them. They are societies duct tape and baling wire.  His nickname was Overlord

• The Matrix: what I'm watching (10/15/2014 @ 1959). It is still a very- very good movie with great music.
• Blazing Saddles: what we talked about on a break today- still an amazing movie. The self righteous censorship it endures is not a sign of our loss of a sense of humor as people suppose. It is a loss of our sense of self, a sense of overwhelming fear we are bad and a lack of critical thinking skills. People are afraid of being guilty of being racist by enjoying it when it's satire was a very harsh criticism of the stupidity of racism.

  

  Sopapillas are different in the Land Of Enchantment.

• When I was in the Army and we would be busting track on our vehicles I would exchange the line, laying track for busting track and act Slim Picken's part out. It was a wonder somebody didn't have a seizure it was so funny. I perfected and did the bit at every duty station. People have to still think about it and spray coffee on their dashboard on the way to work. Today 9 years after I could have possibly done a modified version for other soldiers I gave a SFW version at lunch in the break room and got some very good laughs. It was almost weird how much of and how quickly it came back.
• My mind can't process that Laurence Fishburne was Mr. Clean and Morpheus.

  

  To make a high volume easy to hit urinal that even a woman can use in a tent cut the top off a large soda bottle and invert the snout into the bottle after stuffing it with paper towels etc. Then tape the snout in place ( 100 mph tape is best). Keep it jammed in the corner of the tent with a pack so you can find it and there is no chance of it it tipping over.

• The news is prattling on about ISIS having planes and training pilots. Talk about, This is how the terrorists win! Expect military talking head to harrumph and poo-poo this and talk about how impossible it would be to train them effectively, how even a second string Western or regional pilot would blow them out of the sky... They don't get it- those things don't matter to ISIS. Really the facts would rarely matter- it is about the perception of their target audiences first- disaffected Muslim males and then poorly informed, easily frightened Westerners
• Committee on the Heredity of the Feeble Minded: the name of my band- if I ever have a band. Fans will call it by the acronym of COTHOTFM which will sound like Coth/ot /fum.
• My fans will be freaks.

  

  Big feet are huge. I wouldn't bring attention to them babe.

• Primo tickets for How The EDGE Stole Christmas are 150 bucks this year. That is crazy but no, I will not miss Weezer and to a lesser extent Big Data.
• Watching a Harrier jet taking off vertically in person is even wilder and more impossible looking in person and is unbelievably loud. Yes, I operated out of a Marine base in the Iraq.
• There is a bird that sings right at dawn (and just did at 0707 10/18/2014). For the the life of me I can never remember the species. Sometimes when I hear it I feel vaguely sad. It isn't clear to me if it's song sounds melancholy to me in general or if I had taken note of it singing in a former life during a bad time but I assume the latter to be true.

  

  Watching the Big Man eat was awe inspiring. I wanted to start a slow clap as he was finishing.

Images From The Road

Things are not working out in the Land Of Enchantment for this person as they had hoped

Same with this poor soul.

Mosquitoes are the devil

View from the tent

Lea Lake

The owners were a couple from Holland

Another example of the simple things that were familiar but different. The grill height is adjusted by friction on the bar at back instead of  notches like grills you would see at any park in Texas.

Big man little bicycle

Yes, that is a picture of a couple's two Newfoundland hounds on the spare tire cover. The pooches names were Burke and Rayne.

The water in Lea Lake is impossibly clear. The fish nibbling my toes are at least 18 inches underwater.

All aliens all the time

In front of an Army-Navy store in Roswell

What a bargain