Green Hills of Albuquerque

Descending Tramway Road to Tramway Boulevard.

Down, down, to Goblin-town, you go, my lad!

Well, not exactly. There’s some gobblin’ at the corner of Tramway Road and Tramway Boulevard, all right, but it involves barbecue at The County Line.

The place smells wonderful when your snotlocker works, which mine mostly does not, thanks to seasonal allergies (oak, cottonwood, juniper, mulberry, grass, etc.).

Between being all boogered up and tweaking my lower back the other day I have been in something of a mood. Maybe watching part one of the Hemingway documentary on PBS last night helped a bit. Wasn’t anyone pulling a couple hundred bits of shrapnel out of my legs in an Italian hospital, and I’ve managed to hang on to my first wife, too. So, yeah, winning, an’ shit.

True, global literary fame has proven elusive, but that’s not exactly a surprise. My agent warned me against titling my debut novel “A Farewell to Arfs.”

20 thoughts on “Green Hills of Albuquerque

    1. For Whom the Mad Dog Tolls. That’s a good one. I wonder if Robert Jordan (aka: POG, is able to demo cord and blow up the overpass before the pigeons attack and get bird crap all over him. Oh the horror. Oops, that’s another story.

      Of course there is also the Old Man and the Bike. It’s about a man that makes a bet in an Irish pub that he can ride his old vintage steel framed touring bike around the world without replacing any of the parts. He starts off well but when he crosses the Pacific from Asia and starts the leg through the United States, tweekers begin to steal parts from his bike. By the time he crosses the Atlantic and begins his journey back to the pub, all that is left is the bare frame with a broken fork. They even stole his bike bell.

      Regarding Ernest, I like to think that I’d be a lousy journalist too and help chase Hitler’s army back across the Rhine.

      1. Or, For Whom the Breakaway Rolls, with Chris Carmichael crawling under a bridge in France to demo it after the Blue Train passes over a gorge in advance of the chase group. Meanwhile, Miguel Indurain is approaching in the van and as a USPS domestique tries to hold off the chase group after offing the referees, a gunfight ensues. Afterwards, and exhausted and injured Carmichael, whose leg is broken as he tries to cyclecross away from the Tour Loyalists, waits on a hillside for someone to pilfer some of Armstrong’s blood bags and give him a transfusion.

    2. He was a complicated fella, hey? Sometimes I think it’s better not to know too much about writers and artists and other people whose work you admire.

      “He did what? He likes that? Ho-ly hell.”

      I came to prefer Steinbeck over Hemingway. But then he had his own problems. I’m surprised it took so long for people to realize “Travels with Charley” had a good deal of, um, “creative license” in it. The actor he encounters along the road was a clue and a half. Dude was a Steinbeck character if ever I saw one.

      Did Meena use Woody Allen’s “Lost Generation” bit when she taught Papa?

      1. No, she wouldn’t have done that.

        I took a class at Renesan in Fanta Se a couple years ago on the Spanish Civil War. We read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemengway’s Bell Tolls, and Malraux’s Man’s Hope along with the class lectures. Was really good; got some smart people up in this town. Got me back into reading literature again.

  1. Your novel is what the world is lacking right now. But, the agent was right about the title. How about “Curse Of The Wheelsucker?” “The Saga of Homer?” “The Wind Always Blows?” “The Brooks Always Bites?” “The Stem Also Rises?”

    1. “The Stem Also Rises” is excellent.

      Maybe I should’ve gone with “Green Hills of Arfica.” Or “Over the Bar and Into the Trees?” “The Old Man and the Seat?” “For Whom the Bike Bell Tolls?”

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