Abq2. It rhymes, so I'm sticking with it.

Oh the lament of New Mexico and this one's voyage through it.

Hey kids! Our last story time left off in the exotic hippie town of Taos, and since my lazy brain prefers its tales in a largely linear format, that's where we'll pick back up.

The mom decided that we should take a detour on the return trip and mosey on through the Sante Fe National Forrest. I seconded. I still am not sure why I would make this choice, but that is in retrospect. In retrospect, I can see that I had a long weekend still ahead of sitting in the back of that car, staring out the window as a landscape of unrelenting shades of brown slowly crawled by. Yep, there was tan, and reddish brown. Ohh, that's a nice little bit of common European Standards weights and measurements brown. You may call me a brownoisseur. But if you do, I might feel inclined to give you one helluva pinch for ever saying something so astoundingly stupid in my presence.

Self-inflicted pain is the best kind, that's my motto, along with Not in the Face! So I voiced my agreement for the plan. Two positive votes beat out two ambivalent votes, so the clan meandered off the beaten path back to the city and onto the beaten path up into the mountains. So, we took 64 east, and here's the thing, the map made the detour seem a lot shorter than it was. Stupid lying maps.

I think that I was hearkening back to the scenery in Alaska. Sights from my childhood that I would like to see again. There are mountains in both places! How different could it be? Rivers, lakes and waterfalls. Trees marching up snow-capped mountains. And such a vivid rainbow of colors! Yay Alaska. And there were trees – alas, where between them I would expect a bevy of pleasing undergrowth to add a wealth of color and texture to the scenery, there was only sandy soul. BROWN.

There was little else in the spring of memory to remind me of my childhood.

Well. Aside from the creepy little settlements that lie way off the beaten path, settlements where a visitor might feel a bit wary of stepping out of their car, just in case the banjo music suddenly started up. New Mexico shares that in common with Alaska.

New Mexico is a poor state in so many ways. You know that fundamental building block of life? If you said Cheese, I'll grant you that, but it wasn't the answer I was looking for. I was hoping that you yelled out 'Water', that simple chemical that makes up 80% of the human body. A chemical that covers 75% of our planet's surface. In terms of bodily needs for our species it goes AIR>WATER>FOOD, in that order. We can survive maybe 3 days without ingesting it. WE need it to grow food. Waterfront property goes for a premium. Water has replaced earthship for my word of the day. But only because you can't drink Earthships – which does not make a bit of sense, but I am sticking with the sentiment regardless.

Our collective human civilizations have built most of their cities around sources of water. As it happens, water is not very common in the desert. My mind is blown! Deserts are dry? You think that would be common knowledge, causing people to avoid living in deserts. But it's true. And people seem to choose to live there! Or maybe I am being Naive, and many of the residents have become mired in the shifting sands.

Some people do. I am left to wonder if many of these people are trapped there by economic circumstances. Who would chose to live like this? Rural dwellings in Alaska, I can understand. Alaska has abundant natural resources that can be harvested with hard work. Sure, winters are long and importing food and fuel is expensive, but that seems to be a fair trade for living in Alaska.

New Mexico seems to be less so. Though it must have some mineral wealth at the very least – one still needs to overcome the water problem – and all of the challenges that accompany a water poor landscape.

All along the highway there were clustered settlements of homes, usually bunched with a small Catholic church in the Spanish/Mexican style. From time to time, one will see signs announcing a Land Grant community. Back in days of yore, the various Governments of Mexico would entice citizens to move in to the vast, and largely empty, territory by offering them huge tracts of land. Tracts that would number in the tens of thousands of acres. Some of those villages and families still reside on that land.

I do not know what services that one needed to perform for king and country to gain such a boon, but a little research has revealed the outlines of the process involved with the actual grant. I only know that the various governments used the grants as a way to settle land. Rather like our own government has done. As has any society with a vast new frontier to conquer.

First, the land had to be uninhabited by people(including natives – good on you Spain). Second, the grantee would need to stay on the land for four or more years, after which, in the eyes of Spain they owned that land and could do what they pleased with it. Most of the land seemed to be used for ranching and some subsistence farming. Though I find it difficult to believe that one could do more than scratch out a living there. Some of the land grants were made to entire villages, where individuals and families were assigned a small plot to homestead while the rest of the grant was communal.

After the Spanish-American war, the entire region changed hands. The American government seems to have largely respected the claims of the preexisting communities, but America being what she is and always has been, justice hasn't always been done and after the Mexican American war in the late 1840s, Land Speculators stirred up quite a mess. Now there are legal questions being raised about who actually owns the land.

Our route wove up, down and around the mountain, taking us through several flyspeck little settlements as previously described. Places which the mere existence of boggle my mind. They're like communities on a foreign planet and I cannot understand how they continue to exist. At least in some part, many of them are supported by the illicit art trade that runs through Taos. Of course it's illicit, Hippies are involved. Some of the views from well up high was actually rather pretty. But don't tell anyone I said so.

Speckled along the highways from Albuquerque to Taos are more mobile homes than I have ever seen before in my life. Many of them seemed to be in poor shape. And the further away into the boonies you got, the worse the decay – a surprising correlation to exactly 0% of the population of humans who are capable of understanding the word correlation and using it in a sentence. As well as pretty much anyone else as well. Except perhaps movie executives. Those assholes are idiots.

Seriously you assholes, stop remaking the good movies. A remake of Highlander? What's the fucking point? If you need to revisit the past, due to cowardice on your part and a lack of ideas, then revisit the thousands of broken movies that your factories have churned out over the last hundred years. You can start slow, maybe with Highlander 2. Then when you've got the hang of it, jump in deep and try to unbork the library of Ed Wood. Dicks.

There are some run down locales, even entire cities, in my home state. But New Mexico seems to have us beat(or vice versa). I think that seeing those sad domiciles was the most depressing reality of the visit. It was like someone had torn apart the worst neighborhoods of Detroit, ground them up, and sprinkled it all over the desert.

Eventually we crawled back to the city and called it a day. At home we continued with our grand family tradition, camping out on the couch while bathing in the cold glow of the television. Letting the depressing images of poverty fade from our consciousness as we followed the adventures of the Incredible Hulk as he made his way through Latin America. If only the Hulk, like some cosmic green rage driven god, could smash all of our social problems. If only.

Monday crept in slowly in a manner that Mondays so rarely do. But alas, there was more sitting in the back of the car on the schedule. The mom wanted us to see the Ruins. Which I would find out later to mean ruins of old Spanish Missions. Who knows, somewhere in the wilds there might be an ancient city of a lost civilization that is lined with dangers for the daring adventure to endure. Mutants roam trap riddled streets and in its very heart lies The Greatest Treasure of Them All. Since The Greatest Treasure of Them All is absolutely subjective and based on an individuals desires, I'll let you fill that part in. Will it be wealth? Magic powers? Or maybe a vibrating, 12 inch, fully prehensile penis?

Or maybe all that lies out there is unending desolate brown countryside. With the only ruins being those in National Parks run by the Forest Service. As a man who majored in history, I guess that's almost as cool.

Have I mentioned brown lately? How about Earthships? They tend to be on the brown side as well. I really need a new word for brown. I'm sick of typing those 5 letters. Tan? Dung? Umber! Now that sounds posh! Man, when I get my Earthship I shall name it the Nostromo and I will be damned if it is going to be Umber.

On the road west we encountered it. The most delightfully honest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Now, Taos had Italian Restaurant as a jewel in its hemp belt. There was no further name to the dive. No Luigi's, or Fred's or Mama's. Just Italian Restaurant. Straight forward. The sign leads me to think that New Mexicans are a rather honest, straight forward, and extremely unimaginative lot. Nothing more, just big red letters that declare that within one can acquire Italian cooking.

What does this mean? Is the food so astoundingly good that the owners only feel that they are the alpha and omega of the cuisine? Italian Restaurant, the dizzying heights to which all other establishments purporting to make Lasagna and pizza are trying to aspire?

Perhaps I am misreading the intent, and actually the food isn't that good. It could be that Italian Restaurant is like a cheap ripoff of Olive Garden that was founded by people who had only gotten so close to that franchise as to see the middle three seconds of one of their ads. A place so sketchy that in fact the twin specialties of the house are DiGiornos and Spaghetti-os. With an unlimited And since this is New Mexico, both are loaded down with your choice of green or red chillies.

Here Taos gets its Italian food. Or a facsimile there of. I shall leave them to it.

Italian Restaurant is great and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to the magnificent sight we encountered on monday. BEHOLDs: ROADSIDE ATTRACTION!

Roadside Attraction. That was it and all. I could be mistaken, but for the sake of this narrative, I'm not. It was brilliantly generic. As we had a rather hectic schedule of driving in a giant loop ahead of us, we didn't stop. I didn't get to venture inside and explore the wonders. I don't know how I feel about this, as I have seen far too many horror movies in my time to walk into a seedy join that is clearly tourist bait.

Roadside Attraction! Maybe it was owned by the same folks who owned Italian Restaurant. Honest, hardworking folk who were skipped over by whatever force instills in human beings the ability to instill interesting (if not memorable, as I am talking about it now) names. People who have named all seven of their children , boys and girls alike, a variation of Brad. Brad, Bradly, Bradford, Bradette, Bradina, and Brad 2. Child four doesn't get a name, as it is hidden in the basement and never talked about by the family.

Certainly, the sign could have been a bait and switch scheme. Oh, did you come from very far? Does anyone know that you're here? They might ask with a knowing wink, a long bladed kitchen knife in their hand as they waited for someone to step into range.

Then again, there are so many tantalizing secrets that their vaults could have held. I don't know what wonders were cradled within those four walls, and the mystery burns my mind!

Maybe there was an arena where reanimated, heads of Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were attached to bionic dog bodies and forced to do battle in an eternal death match pitting evil vrs slightly more evil for the entertainment of the locals. Gears and circuits would fly in the dimly lit and dank basement. All while color commentary flowed smoothly. Meanwhile, off in an even more shady and dank corner, an old man with a squinty eye would be selling some rather questionable objects.

What else can you expect from a place named Roadside Attraction? A freaking giant ball of yarn? Though not enough to hop a plane back to New Mexico to find out. Cause if I did, I'd only find strings of dried chillies, post cards, touristy hats, and other brickabrac. And I'd probably be kicked in the junk. The Earthship tour experience seems to have jaded me some.

But for some reason we skipped on by the cannibalistic, Hitler-Disney-headed-robot-dog-fighting-ring running hillbillies. Dunno why. We had to go see the ruins, and not get kidnapped, raped to death and eaten by the inbred family of nuclear mutants that lived in the shed out back. Worst vacation ever.

There are three different sets of ruins in the park. We only visited two. Because the reality is that one stack of stones that used to be a church looks almost identical to every other stack of stones that used to be a church. That, and after searching desperately for the secret entrance to the dungeon/entrance to hell, and finding bupkis, TWICE, I was sorely discouraged. I don't know about the rest of the family. They just seemed bored. I can't blame them, as we didn't have to fight a passel of animated skeletons once. Not once. Lamest temple ruins ever.

There isn't much to describe. We got out and walked around. I took pictures, trying to use my art degree to create interesting images. I failed.

The exploding schoolbus signs! Yes, that sentence was intentional. This is a thing in New Mexico. As are cattle crossing signs sporting UFOs. The latter are expected. The former were a surprise indeed. The signs were posted in a hilly region and I took them as a warning about school buses being in the area. School buses that exploded when they got angry, and were ever waiting in ambush for unwary travelers.

But what can you expect? In an environment as harsh as that, only the most well adapted will survive, and I'm willing to lay dollars to donuts that the exploding school bus is at the top of the foodchain.

One final thing that I noticed was that it seemed like a quarter of all the houses had bars on the windows and doors. I don't know if this is a cultural quirk or if the crime is that terrible. It was true in the nicer/newer neighborhoods as well as the rotting old ones. This, as much as the...well everything else to be honest, made me not really consider it when the folks asked if we wanted to move down.