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purgatory

1. in Catholic theology, the stage of the afterlife where souls suffer for their sins before they can enter heaven
2. any situation causing suffering

While the first definition doesn’t apply here, I’m certainly in a situation that causes suffering.

I’m currently taking an intersession class at UNM. This particular one is History 161 (US History to 1877.) I’m not taking it because I want to, but because I still need one last 100-level history class for my major (not to mention that I need to maintain 12 credit hours for last semester.)

The big problem is that the instructor might possibly be the most boring person on Earth. It might not be so bad if I didn’t already know all of this. In fact, I’ve known all of this for literally decades. 

I know why England liked having colonies. They like having money. They like trading. It’s not that complicated, though by the looks on the faces on some of the mouth breathing morons I’m sharing this classroom with, it appears to be surprising information.

I would guess that I’m probably the only person in here with any real interest in History, other than the professor and his very bored teaching assistant. It’s ironic that all three of us are in this classroom for less than academically valid reasons. The instructor outright admitted that he’s in here because he likes money… much like the British.

At any rate, it could be worse. He could be one of those instructors that insists on everyone paying rapt attention to him throughout the entire class.

I’m seriously thinking about not buying the book and seeing how much of this I already know.

Time for a break. I thought it would never come.

I don’t have a car. This is a normal state of affairs. I’m a college student, and to be honest, I live close enough to school that I don’t really need one.

Something happened on Saturday that is making me want to rethink that position. In ‘burque, we have a express bus service called Rapid Ride. On the front of each of these buses, theirs a bike rack so that you can take your bike with you when you ride the bus. It’s a great thing. So I ride my bike to the bus stop, wait for the bus, inform the old homeless dude that, no, he cannot borrow my bike, and get on the bus when it gets there.

I sit down on one of the benches, and immediately in front of me, is sitting a really sad excuse for a human being. This woman might actually be younger than me, but she looks like she’s forty going on dead. She’s wearing this skimpy shirt that is several sizes too small for her. She’s got this crazed look in her eyes, and her bag is overflowing with random crap. Upon closer inspection, it would appear that, yes, those are crack pipe burns on her fingers, and I really don’t want to know what that sore in the corner of her mouth is. She doesn’t smell too great either, but it’s not an overwhelming, make you want to puke smell, so I’ll give her that much. This alone is not a problem. She’s not talking to me, and with my headphones on, I can pretty much ignore her all the way there.

Except I can’t. About fifteen seconds after the bus starts moving she stands up, walks straight past the yellow line just behind the drivers seat (the one with the sign next to it that says in big red letters, “No Passengers Past this Point while the Bus is in Motion”) and starts yapping to the bus driver. This annoys me somewhat, not because I’m actually afraid of getting hurt in accident or anything like that, but because if he gets distracted and rear-ends someone, my bike, which is very likely to take the full brunt of any collision.

Then she starts caressing his arm.

What the hell? How the hell could this bus driver be willing to put up with this? The answer is forthcoming, but bear with me a bit.

So we cruise up Central Ave, lurching each half mile between bus stops in a way that feels positively glacial to me. People get on and off. The woman talking to bus driver pays no attention to this, and resolute continues to caress the guys arm while getting in people’s way.

A little background real quick. The Rapid Ride bus usually goes up Central to Wyoming, turns left onto Wyoming, and then another left onto the freeway on it’s way to the Uptown Park & Ride station.

As we’re crossing the intersection of Lomas and Wyoming, I begin to wonder when the driver is planning to move over to the left so he can get on the freeway. He starts way too late, and is forced to continue on Wyoming. OK, fine. Except that when he misses the turn for the freeway, he lurches the bus all the way back over to the right lane and nearly sideswipes a car. This is not normal bus driver behavior. I look behind me to see the other passengers reactions. This is when I realize that there are no other passengers, and now the bus driver is weaving all over Wyoming Blvd. This is understandably disconcerting to me.

It gets even more disconcerting when I notice that the creepy woman is still right next to the bus driver, only now she appears to have her hand in his shirt and is stroking his chest. This is about when I cleared my throat. The bus driver looks back with this sort of “oh shit” look on his face, and mumbles and apology about missing the turn and literally starts hauling ass down the back streets to get to where he was supposed to be going. Now, I am slightly worried about my own safety, because this is a bloody articulated city bus, not a damn Formula 1 car.

He somehow managed to maneuver the bus to it’s intended destination without killing anyone (namely, me.) I walk past him to the front door of the bus. He mutters something fairly incoherent and I get hit with a blast of alcohol fueled breath. The creepy woman giggles at me.

So I get out of the bus, and go to get my bike out of the rack. As I’m doing this, I happen to look up, and notice that now I can only see the bus driver, and not the creepy woman, and the bus driver has a look on his face that screams, “Yes indeed, I am currently enjoying a blow job!”

That answered one question. The creepy woman was in fact what my first impression said she was. A crack whore. I jump on my bike and ride off.

I’m getting a car.

Albuquerque’s South Valley is a very unique place. It is really the only place in the city that has a ungentrified cultural identity. You see a lot of things there that you don’t typically see in most American cities. Sure, southern California has areas that are heavily populated with hispanics, and so does Texas. The difference is that those places tend very much towards the ghetto side of the social ladder. The South Valley is not a rich area, but it is not really a ghetto either. It’s a place where most of the population speaks Spanish, though for the majority there, it is not their only language. You can drive down Bridge Avenue, and see a vacant lot full of little carts selling every imaginable product that is made in Mexico right next door to a Wal-Mart. You can also find carts at the intersection of two-lane roads that carry far too much traffic, selling food until 2:00 in the morning.

When you enter the South Valley, you find yourself in an area that just feels different from the rest of the city. The people who live here may be poor, but they don’t let despair set in. They revel in their culture, celebrating it with every action. I was driving down Bridge Ave. to cross over to the Westside to go feed my cousin’s dog, and just past the Rio Grande, there was a small Karate school holding a barbecue to raise money. In any other part of the city, this would be a paltry affair. There would be maybe four or five small families, looking bored and wondering why no one seems to care about something that contributes to their community.

Not in this case. At this barbecue, their was close to 500 people milling about, eating, and talking. One man was playing a guitar, and while I couldn’t hear what he was playing as I drove by, I could see people dancing to the music he was creating. The thing about the Valley, is that the vast majority of people in Albuquerque, even those who live in other parts of town, have their roots in this one district. This is where there parents and grand-parents live. It is where they come home for Christmas, and the place they leave to go out into the world. No one lives in fear in this place, no more than anyone living in any other part of the city does, and quite a bit less than someone who lives in Los Angeles.

The Valley is the place that makes Albuquerque more than just another city. It’s what sets ‘Burque apart from El Paso or Tiajuana. It is a place where the culture stretches back to roots that came into being more than 300 years ago. The Valley is what makes this city home.

I went to Chaco Canyon on Saturday with my cousin. I drove, and she spent most of the trip breaking New Mexico’s open-container laws with the help of a bottle of OJ and a half a fifth of Grey Goose. It was a fun trip, though I managed to lose a pair of sunglasses my cousin lent me.

Chaco Canyon is a very odd place. For one thing, it’s very remote. The nearest town is a good 70 miles away. There are two roads to get there, and they’re both dirt. Strangely, a lot of people can be seen there on any given day. The other odd thing is, of course, the Anasazi ruins that can be found there. 800 to 1000 years ago, at least 10,000 people once lived in this dry, remote, desert canyon. Of course when they lived there, it wasn’t a desert. It was a valley through which a river flowed.

It’s strange how transient things can be, especially when it’s something that the average person thinks of as permanent. Mountains and Rivers are not as permanent as we like to think, and these people found that out first hand, much as the people who lived around Mt. Saint Helens in the 80’s did.

They did alright for themselves after all. The theory is that the Anasazi left Chaco and the various satillite villages they built around it, and moved east to the Rio Grande Valley. It was there that they met the Spanish for the first time. It was there that the Spanish gave them they name that they go by today; Pueblo.

After walking around the ruins for several hours, and then going on a nice little four mile hike, my cousin and I jumped back in her truck and headed home. As we crested the last hill on US 550 and began the drop down into Bernalillo, it occured to me, that someday some future people might be walking around in the decayed ruins of our civilization.

I hope we make a good impression.

P.S. My cousin took some pictures. I will upload them when I get copies.