The Southwest

Two nights in Bisbee, two nights in Sedona, one night in Santa Fe. I definitely have some stories to share. Firstly, let me thank Yoni and Merideth for hosting me for two nights having never met me before, sheerly on the recommendation of our shared friend, Ben. And thanks to my mom for getting me a hotel room in Santa Fe right on the plaza.

I walked across the border in Naco, Arizona (just south of Bisbee) to Naco, Mexico. Naco is a much safer border town than Juarez. It was quiet, the border crossing was easy. It was interesting to see the Mexican flag flying on one side of the fence and the American flag flying on the other. The landscape is the same on both sides but the language and money and laws and customs are very different. We put these arbitrary lines on the earth and build our culture around them.

We got tacos in Naco. The tacos were great, and they came with a flight of more than 10 different salsas. Fantastic! We each had three tacos loaded with double meat and cheese, and we left a generous tip. The total for two people was $20. Amazing how a line in the sand creates two entirely different economies. I don't know if I could have gotten that much food for that price at Taco Bell... Just to be clear, this was much better than Taco Bell.

In Sedona I climbed to near the top of the Bell Rock Vortex. I didn't feel the energy emanating from it in the way that mother might have, but I did feel pulled to the top from miles away, like I couldn't stop until I had reached the destination.

Later that day, I met and hung out for hours with some super radical hippies. It's not often that I feel like the most conservative member of the group I am standing in, but I certainly felt that way with these new friends. One self-identified as initially being from the Pleiades but had been on Earth for 300,000 years. At various points he mentioned he had invented government and was once the King of France many lifetimes ago. He said someone else was Andalusian, telepathic through their skin. Another person self-identified as "The Truth." And someone else told me that Sedona is the place that the government puts all the extraterrestrials who have ended up on Earth in order to let them acclimate to human society. Are they wrong? Or am I wrong for being skeptical? As Sean informed me in LA, people used to believe that fire was something called phlogistons being released from the burning object. They believed this so profoundly that when it was determined that objects gained mass after burning (gaseous oxygen bonding with the solid matter through the combustion process), instead of throwing out the phlogiston theory, for several years the dominant theory was that phlogistons had negative mass. The things we think are laughable now may be honest-to-God fact in the future.

My few hours of waking time in Santa Fe were spent in the Meow Wolf exhibit. WOWOWOW! I highly recommend it if you are in Santa Fe in the next few months. It is a completely interactive house full of pocket dimensions and a mysterious story as to why the pocket dimensions exist, created by thirty artists. Apparently it takes five to eight hours to fully understand the story. I pieced together what I could in the one and a half hours I was there. Standalone, the art was incredible. When put together with what I pieced together through various clues, it was mindblowing and probably the best interactive art exhibit I have ever seen/been a part of.

And now I am in Fraser, CO, at my Uncle Eric's house. Between here and my Uncle Tom's house in Longmont, I will be in Colorado for about a week. It's nice to have a place to settle for a second after a whirlwind tour of the Southwest.

I have started writing some songs about the journey. I might put little acoustic versions of them on the website if I have the bandwidth and time.

Expect more words soon in any case.