So after that Sunday taken up with filling water and worrying about the antics of the turkey geeks on Turkey Creek there was Desireé, Welly, Debby the acupuncturist and then Friday enough rain out west to force BM to close the gates [actually dust closed them Thursday night]
as their Big Weekend was about to begin whilst we began ours by removing
the scattered remnants of the once magnificent “Casa Mesa” [1987, above] aided by Leon,
Corey [neither shown] and Arielle [above, with L.] trucking everything except the piers,
shattered pate de verre and all,
down to the Habib
where they now reside safely inside…
Following that last flurry of activity there was Saturday’s Movie Night where Linda presented Jeanne Finley’s documentary “A Radical Thread” to a dozen or so parties interested or invested in communities and then things calmed nicely down for us while out west, wowee,
the Man raised his puny arms preparatory to being burnt and Sunday, “leaving not a trace”,
the toxic waste [there’s always more in there than just wood – more like burning down a house, truth be told] took off down the desert. We celebrated with beets and smoked salmon,
I wandered the area,
always
back up to the bike
and Sunday night, lovely here,
they burned again…yippee! The Temple, ugliest in memory to my mind but hey…it’s all rote
by now; pay the money, do the drugs, trance to the EDM, go through the rituals….damn! Out here, good fortune; a skittery baby horned toad as big as my thumbnail…and a few steps later
its mother [above] in our parched “meadow” then
the next day a three inch juvenile so well camouflaged I barely caught its picture, but way glad
that the little carnivores are still here…even if hard to find. Plus by then we’d had four
unprecedented uninterrupted days to catch up, wander, dream in the studio and watch bits
of the BM “strike” on IG before Thursday when it was off to the Gardner P.O.,
down the interstate for the transfer station, Walsenburg for onions, avocados, tomatoes and
lunch in the shade of the Habib’s ancient pear before 2 1/2 educational hours in the
County Courthouse wherein the Planning Commission’s incompetent explainer attempted to navigate GroAway’s byzantine land use proposal*, tried to answer some of the commissioners’ [notably only the women’s] questions after which we were subjected to a robotically staccato eastern European accented rant from GroAway’s abusively threatening borderline pyschotic
“Vice Director” Kristjan Bauer during which a couple of cops, discreetly summoned by the Commission, quietly slipped in the side door and remained for the duration of his recitation and beyond. Bauer, above and below right, next to “Operating Director” Truely [sic] Seawell,
“woman owner” of this “women-owned business”. Bauer is a truly offensive person, unrelentingly rude and dismissive of not only the commissioners, the process and the packed gallery [literally every neighbor within miles] who’d shown up to protest and speak out against the risks of locating an industrial farming and waste recycling operation in among small family subsistence farms fifteen miles up a dirt road on the edge of the National Forest. By early the next morning he’d put up their summation/response of the meeting on their website…
with no mention of the comments and contemptuously indifferent to the project’s impact on the neighbors. Of course; in truth I have never [not even after all these years of Trump] experienced a more arrogant asshole. Not that he’s not wicked smart and extremely dangerous, which he is – by Friday morning he was demanding that the two commissioners most active in questioning him be removed as well access to all their phone records and texts. WTF? If only they could just throw the bum out…
The beat goes on…and twenty five years to the day after “9/11” the Houthis own the west coast of Yemen where it’s looking like Netantrumpoo’s New World Order isn’t exactly panning out they way they expected.
*Briefly calling for the approval of, though after the news above less important; “a cat sanctuary, materials processing, anaerobic digester, biogas recovery, thermal destruction unit, biofertilizer and biochar output, sale of excess gas, residential buildout, employee housing for twenty people, wellness building, storage containers, agritourism camping**, helipad and a 45,000 gallon watertank” all squished on to 14.9 acres of a forty acre parcel with dubious water…they also plan some industrial strength food producing greenhouses, all great ideas although as anyone who farms [or tries to] up here among the rocks it’s really not that easy.
**It might be interesting to give them the go ahead just to see what sort of agritourists show up to camp between the 200 sanctuary cats and the thermal destruction unit but the actual neighbors unanimously think it’s a really bad idea.