Err, not really, I'm quite happy being a soft city dweller, but this site does have a definite Southwestern theme. Almost everything on this site relates to the West, most (if not all) of it to the Southwest. This first shot I took in Cerillos, New Mexico, of the horses somebody had tied up in his front yard - about as thematically Western an image as one could hope to find from this era.

That's why we travel, right? Little moments like that which leave one with no doubt as to just how far home is from where one is right then. Most often, as in the case of the Western photography and Tex-mex-free cooking section currently under construction, the experiences were thoroughly pleasant, which is why this site has the theme it does. For those with a more masochistic bent, there is some small amount of genuinely unpleasant material, all of it located on other sites, most of it part of (or relating to) a consumer report I wrote about a travel company with which I'll never do business again. Read it and be happy? I try not to judge, or think about that one any more than I have to.

Why would that be a blessing? Because land which hasn't had its price bidded up through the stratosphere is land on which one can build on and be left alone to be oneself, and that allows for a level of individuality that is difficult to pursue in more congested places like Chicago where, any day now, I expect to see a bunch of my neighbors drop down and start grazing in the middle of Grant Park, so used they have become to letting themselves be herded without protest. A basic part of what it means to be human is being lost in the process, and with it, the very capacity to be even slightly creative.

To give you a taste of what the more easterly urban experience is getting to be like, I might mention what happened when, for example, I tried to get a cooking SIG ("special interest group") going in my local chapter of MENSA. Somebody called up, and in seeming sincerity asked "so, you'll be going to different restaurants, and sampling the cooking at each?". No, I said, we'll be staying home and preparing our own dinners. "So, you'll be ordering takeout?" No, I insisted, we'll be doing our own cooking, using our own recipes - and he just couldn't get it. Did I mention that this is supposed to be a high IQ organization? Barely stifling the urge to yell "retest" into the receiver and hang up, I tried to explain the concept of creative cooking to somebody who couldn't even seem to conceptualize the notion of cooking one's own dinner. I think that you can guess how far I got. What our very orderly, very corporate local culture has done is beat the spark of individual initiative out of its people. They go where they're told, think what they're told, and expect direction at every waking moment, and demand that others to do the same as well, and then mistake the stifling reality that results with freedom.

(Next, we see some of the wildlife at Bandelier National Monument. So, what do you think - would she go better with a red sauce or a green one? "Mother! Mother!" "Your mother's the lunch special at Don Juan's now, little Bambi!" And then the scene could have shifted to the happy diners digging in with a little fiesta music in the background ... yeah, that would have been a much better ending.)

Creativity is not going to come out of such ingrained passivity, and that is part of why I like the Southwest. Somebody might take a look at the Albuquerque museum and say, "Joseph, you come from a city where you can go down to the Art Institute, and see Monets, Rembrandts, and the works of any other of the great masters - where's the thrill in going to a small museum where nobody has ever heard of any of the artists whose work hangs there". But Monet and Rembrandt never walked down Michigan Boulevard, you can be sure. What you see in the Art Institute isn't what our people created, any more than that takeout our friend from Mensa wanted us to order would have been our cooking. What you see in that museum is what was created by the inspiration of other cultures, and is here only because some of our local rich people had enough money to be able to buy it. Period. What you see in the Albuquerque museum is the work of local artists, and if you like it, you'll be glad to know it's still being made. There's a gallery of more recent works just around the corner, and work of comparable quality is still being made locally. Chicago can not make a similar claim, and hasn't been able to for some time.

That's the difference between the places we're used to and places like New Mexico: in Chicago, culture is something we preserve in what is always a losing fight. Go there now, and you can see what little remains of its much vaunted architectural heritage falling to the wrecking ball, one piece after another, more often than not because some very small person wanted to throw his weight around - but the notion that a new piece might be created isn't even up for consideration, unless one wishes to play make-believe and pretend that a featureless glass box is "architecture" in the same sense that the work of Louis Sullivan was architecture. But in the Southwest, the culture is still alive, something to be spoken of in the present tense, not just something to be preserved but to be looked forward to as well, and to witness something like that, I think, is an experience well worth the trip, even if you do have to pay for your own air fare.

If you enjoyed your visit to my site, and I hope you did, you might want to sign up for my homelist, which I've ever so humbly named after myself. That's where I announce any updates I make to my websites, and I think that you'll find that subscribing to that is a lot less time consuming than periodically checking back to see if I've gotten around to doing anything. Yes, sorry about any frustration on that score, but we do all have lives offline, and those come first. Yes, I am going to get back to work on these pages this fall (2005).

In response to what I expect will be a concern, yes, one of the topics covered on those sites is unpleasant behavior, mostly online; I'm guessing that most of you would not be looking forward to reading a lot of e-mail about that. Well, you won't be. I keep those pages online mainly because they serve as a necessary standing rebuttal to rumors spread by certain people who don't want to let go of past hostilities. That much having been said, I've more than learned my lesson. The kinds of places I used to get into those virtual scraps are places I just don't go any more, because experience has taught me that toughing it out doesn't make sense - things just don't get better in the end. How to put this? If you keep pounding your head into a brick wall long enough, odds are very good that sooner or later you'll understand that the wall is not what is going to give way.

If you'd like to talk about your own travels through the Southwest, there is a forum associated with this site, part of a site which I've named the Saguaro Lounge, a member site on a philosophical satire ring, which I set up in December of 2005, whose homepage is on this site. Should you be interested in exchanging links, I do maintain a FFA link page, for submission purposes. Perhaps you might leave your own url off, before joining the countless multitudes who have signed my guestbook. Please be one of them. Somebody. Anybody? Rough crowd.