Author: jilldomschot

The River Valley is a culture distinct from Roswell. When I first moved here, I didn’t like it much. I thought perhaps it was too close to Texas, and I had silly prejudices against Texas culture. Now that I’ve spent a good bit of time in West Texas, I’ve come to the conclusion that Roswell is its own culture. Like most of New Mexico, it is (largely) composed of people who do whatever they want; however, they are the red version of this Wild West mentality, while the River Valley is blue. I always found the quietly rebellious people who vote for blue politicians to be an odd cultural mix, but that is a common attitude in New Mexico. There will be people who protest this aspersion, who claim that most people here are collectivists who do their government’s bidding, and I suppose that is more frequently the case now than it ever was. That is the end result of public school education, unfortunately. The more traditional attitude of New Mexicans is summed up in a conversation I had with a young New Mexican woman who used to babysit my children:

“My ‘buelito just got a deer,” she said.

“Oh, nice, I wish we could go hunting. I wonder what it costs to get a tag.”

“I don’t know. He never gets one. He just goes hunting.”

Being an agreeable libertarian at the time, I said, “I don’t believe the government should regulate hunting and fishing. The federal government stole huge swaths of land and now forces us to pay to use it.”

“There should be laws because otherwise people who don’t need to hunt will just kill anything and be wasteful.”

“But your grandpa doesn’t follow the laws.”

“It’s okay that we don’t because we’re really poor. We don’t waste it.”

“So, the laws are only for some people and not others?”

“You just have to know how to not get caught.” She shrugged. That was her final answer.

You see, people in New Mexico are like Hobbits in the Shire. The Hobbit doesn’t want to leave his Shire, and I very much doubt he would take kindly to being told he couldn’t hunt or fish without permission. On the other hand, Hobbits don’t like making waves, so they are quiet about any rebellions. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the people of the Rio Grande valley. It’s a beautiful valley — who would want to leave it? I certainly didn’t until Lujan-Grisham demonstrated what it really means to live in a blue state: baby killing up until birth and shut-downs that make little sense unless the government is trying to destroy the economy and create more dependence. Also, since Lujan-Grisham came into power, the homeless rate, which used to be one of the lowest in the nation, has skyrocketed. That is not to mention that in a desperate attempt to gain control of the Southeastern area, she gerrymandered so that roughly half of our congressional districting is now with Santa Fe. She did that in Socorro County, as well, which is mostly rural and hence more conservative.

All that griping aside (Texas sounds really amazing at this point), I’m still in love with my hometown of Socorro. That is where my inheritance property is, that is where my parents live, and that’s generally where I go for Christmas now that I’ve been relegated to Roswell. This last Christmas was no different, except that we had to stay in a hotel due to my mother-in-law adding an extra person (my parents have a very small adobe house). It was a pleasant Christmas with all my children and son-in-law to be (my eldest is engaged). Aside from the splendid view of the valley and mesas from my parents’ house, the best part of the trip was going to midnight Mass at the Old San Miguel mission. I’ve written before about this church, which is a treasure that doesn’t get the acclaim the old churches in Santa Fe and Albuquerque get. On Christmas Eve, candalarias grace the old plaza and park, and then light a path all the way to the old church. This tradition goes together with Las Posadas, as the candles are meant to provide light to the weary travelers, Mary and Joseph and the Christ child in Mary’s womb.

Las Posadas, however, occurs every evening from the 16th to the 24th of December, and it’s a kind of traveling Nativity play, in which Mary and Joseph go from house to house looking for a place to stay. Many churches have the final play at the church building before the midnight Mass. Las Posadas can be elaborate or simple — in the case of San Miguel this year, it was simple, with only a call and response from parishioners inside and outside the church. Covid has destroyed many elaborate traditions, sadly, and I wonder when they will return to normal. Las Posadas is, naturally, a Spanish tradition, and I relished the opportunity to sing in Spanish. I do this quite regularly; I wonder if someday, when I’m in a situation where I have to speak Spanish, if I will be more comfortable breaking into song: I’m sorry, I’m like Selena. I can only sing in Spanish. Except that I’m an Anglo. And I’m old and not gorgeous (if she had not been murdered, she would be older than I am, though. How heartbreaking. She might have had children and grandchildren by now). So just like, except…

After a quiet Christmas with my family, my husband and I decided we needed some time away to soak in the hot springs in T or C. T or C is along the trail from Santa Fe down to El Paso, albeit, it is a strange town. Its culture is different from the rest of New Mexico. You see, it had a heyday with Hollywood back in the forties and fifties, before being abandoned by that fickle set, leaving the town capsuled in its prime. Many of the hotel and spas there are what you might call shabby chic owing to the forties and fifties decor, with many old tubs still flaunting their original tile. We stayed in such a place, called the Pelican. The room we rented would make a nice vacation spot with its courtyard, its kitchen and reading room. Its bathroom was simply awful and a bit of a deal breaker. I am very thin and could barely fit between the toilet and sink. I can’t imagine anyone able to reach the shower for cleaning. That is the kind of oddity you find with shabby-chic.

I have many memories of T or C; it’s about an hour south of Socorro, but just under an hour, whereas Albuquerque is just over an hour to the north. We used to take the family to soak at the Riverbend, which I still highly recommend, although it is no longer family friendly because the new owners want to maintain a relaxing, meditative space. I also wrote my book Anna and the Dragon there, in the Charles Motel, which is yet another shabby-chic enclave with old soaking tubs. My husband and I have also stayed in the Firewater Lodge for an anniversary. That particular lodge has been completely revamped and was more chic than shabby.

We enjoyed our stay there, but it didn’t come without sadness. The town has always been down-at-heel, but it seemed more that way post Covid than it had in the past. For example, what few restaurants they used to have available were not open. It was difficult to tell, due to the general shabbiness, whether they were closed permanently or closed for Christmas — even though we went the week after. For a tourist town with hot springs, it seems short sighted for businesses to close that week, but we still concluded that it was probably a little of both. Almost no eateries did not keep tourists out; we had trouble finding a room, as we booked at the last minute. And we certainly were too late to soak at the Riverbend. We had to settle for the Pelican tubs. They aren’t terrible. They’re indoors, unlike Riverbend, which has gradient outdoor tubs that have a view of the river. By gradient, I mean they make use of downard water flow to regulate the temperature of the water. The hottest is at the top, the coolest at the bottom.

We are, of course, back in Roswell now. It is pleasant and sunny. The temperatures that didn’t rise above thirty last week have become more temperate. Outsiders are often surprised that you don’t need a passport to visit the Land of Enchantment; they are also often surprised that it can be well below freezing here in the winter. New Mexico, the Rio Grande valley, Roswell — they are the Land of Contradictions. Maybe the contradictions also make it enchanting. Hard to say. When I was back in my office at the church on Thursday, a local man regaled me with true tales of Big Foot and aliens. He is also one of the most devout Catholics I have ever met.

I’ve had a number of posts lingering in my mind that haven’t made it to WordPress yet. There are reasons for that, the first being that I found it more difficult than I thought to write a eulogy of my coworker who passed away just before Thanksgiving. I will eventually write that post, but I often don’t realize the emotions I have operating under the surface because I’m disconnected from them. They show up in unexpected ways such as resistance to action and daydreaming. Okay, so those aren’t exactly unexpected. Grieving still happens for logical people; it is uncomfortable when they wake up and realize they can’t make a logical argument to get out of the process. This is quite startling and can be entirely avoided for the less aware logicians in the population, who will instead use alcohol to maintain a pretense. Or they will conversely become grumpy, taciturn, and withdrawn.

The other posts that are in my mental queue are political or apologetic in nature. Political posts are an easy out, and so I haven’t allowed myself to write them. What I ought to be doing are apologetics posts, but I haven’t found a way to bridge the gap between where I was when I was younger — cold and argumentative — to where I prefer to be, which is more akin to my patron saint, Francis DeSales, who was gentle and kind, and through that method, brought many Reformed back to the Catholic church. That is fine for a man, but it is not beneficial for a woman to show that kind of weakness. When women show kindness or any vestige of weakness, their arguments are then written off as emotional. As a young woman, I used to make people, especially men, very angry, but I was never accused of having emotional arguments. I’ve only been accused of that after the age of forty, when I decided that emotions were important to humanity, even more important than logic when it comes to human interaction and connection. However, my ability to grasp logic is still unfortunately a point of pride for me that needs to be eradicated if I’m to move forward. I can’t go backwards; I understand that deeply. I’m therefore stuck in a state of apathy. That sounds emotional, doesn’t it? That’s because no one can get around emotion. At best, most people won’t acknowledge they are making decisions and arguments based off emotions and will rationalize — that is, use reason — after the fact. Rationalization is for a materialistic population that prides itself off eschewing emotion. This obviously will create much psychological conflict, which one sees in the world around. Ultimately, our culture has the special distinction of worshipping logic while simultaneously leaking emotion out the edges and never learning critical thinking or logic in school. We worship something *most of us* don’t understand. Not that we really understand God, either. So maybe the worship of logic is simply another type of illogic based off faith. Woe to those who truly grasp logic, for theirs will be the way without faith.

That was a little more than I meant to say. In other words, I’m finishing off the year very much where I started. I’ve long felt (emotion, ha ha) that God is prodding me to do more in apologetics, and here I sit, waiting for a bolt of lightning or something. I’ve been doing what I always do: writing fiction, playing the accordion, studying Spanish, and reading. I’ve read so many books this last year, mostly mysteries, but a handful of biographies and nonfiction. I will end the year with my two current reads, a historical fiction about King David (not my typical choice; a friend and coworker lent it to me) and a reread of Augustine’s Confessions. Speaking of an inability to understand logic, I find modern approaches to St. Augustine bizarre. Augustine tended to start with a premise, work it through a logical framework, and then determine whether the initial premise stood up. Why is it that moderns look at his initial premises and hastily decide that they were also his conclusions? That is so frustrating. Our educated modern population doesn’t hold a candle to men like St. Augustine. That was an emotional statement, for the record, though no doubt objectively true.

You know what gets me really emotional? Music. Spotify and YouTube have informed me (creepily) that my most listened to artist last year was El Coyote, and my most listened to song was Te Vas Amor. It’s true that I can listen to that song on repeat. It’s been one of my favorite songs for over twenty years*, I’m going to say. I’m sure I’ve posted it before, so I’ll spare you this time.

*it came out in 2002, so right around 20 yrs

If you live in the world, you learn early not to trust worldly authority figures. Even if you have even-handed, loving parents, you find that the authorities in schools are unjust, biased, and operate off bad information. In fact, they often don’t want their bad information corrected, especially if it’s coming from a child they’re biased against. That kind of loss of trust can happen before children are out of kindergarten.

By the time children are in middle school, they will begin to notice that the media also operates off of bad information, intentionally spinning stories the way they want them to be perceived. It will probably take a few more years for them to distrust government in general, but it can and should happen. I suppose that’s the purpose of a two-party system, to change the general distrust into distrust solely toward the party one isn’t a member of.

There is something of the Stockholm Syndrome in all or most of us that allows us to align ourselves with our captors, as well. People realize if they shut up and toe the line, do the things asked of them, their lives will be okay. They can go home after their mandatory schooling and watch their favorite show, play their favorite videogame, eat their favorite junk food. That’s not bad in itself, especially if authority figures want the best for their constituents, despite being hypocritical humans. If people live rule- and law-abiding lives, things will go better for them. That’s the reality.

But it’s not always the reality. Our authority figures can go from being unjust and foolish but largely benign to evil in a heartbeat. And when that evil comes, people will be blindsided. They might try to find refuge in their churches, but they won’t find it because their churches are run by worldly authority figures. Jesus warned us of this: hired shepherds run away at the sign of a wolf. Jesus is the only trustworthy shepherd. I want to repeat this. I want to pound it in Christians’ skulls who are demoralized by Christian authorities who have let them down.

Go back and review what happened during Covid. The pastors who stood up and tried to keep their churches open were almost nonexistent. This was true of Protestants and Catholics alike. I view the Covid time as a warning. If your pastors ran away over something that small, be aware that they might not be there for you during harder times.

I have never trusted authority figures, and yet, I’m like most “decent” people: I want to live peaceably as far as is possible. I want to follow a moral code. I even want to follow a code of conduct that prevents chaos. Even though I understand that hirelings are humans and will fail, I recognize that God left us human authorities anyway. From the beginning, he left us church authorities — his apostles — who ran away when Jesus was sacrificed on the cross. They were terrified and concerned for their lives. Later, they were willing to be martyred for the Gospel, but they certainly weren’t so resigned at the beginning. They were probably confused as well as being terrified. They weren’t so much different from the rest of us, in other words.

I want to trust, and I believe it’s right to trust our God-given leaders. I have a hard time doing so, but I find I’ve become complacent over the years. I don’t want to be watchful because it’s exhausting. Besides, look what happened to Alex Jones. He was martyred in a way, his money stolen and reputation destroyed, simply for being watchful, mistrustful, researching and asking questions. Alex Jones was not and is not crazy, as people imply. I’ve never thought so. He’s never called himself a prophet, and I’m sure his theories are sometimes wrong, but his behavior resembles the prophets of old, wild-eyed and appearing deranged to those who don’t want to or can’t believe our authority figures could be so evil, could betray us to such an extent as he puts forth…due to our Stockholm Syndrome.

I don’t want to be watchful, but I would be a fool not to be. I would be a fool not to remember that all the church authorities in my so-called “red” county betrayed their people. The local sheriff was stronger in his willingness to stand up for the people than the church leaders were. I can’t forget this reality. I won’t forget it. I would like to think it was a situation of fear and confusion, and that they will be willing to sacrifice even their lives in the future, just like the apostles and many saints in history. That’s the hope. At the same time, I’d much rather put my hope in the Good Shepherd, whose image I hold in my heart.

This subject has been weighing on me lately, no matter the busy-ness of the past week and the other posts I was supposed to write. Those other posts will come, God willing. St. Augustine pray for me.

Gentlemen Broncos is my longstanding favorite movie. It manages to combine weird comedy with good, heartfelt storytelling. When I watched the Weird Al biopic last night, I thought perhaps it could knock Gentlemen Broncos out of the top slot. The beginning of the movie hits all the right notes: a weird boy who plays the accordion, completely misunderstood by his family, sneaks out at night to be cool, man, and attend an illicit polka party. But before that, the door-to-door accordion salesman assures a young Al that he will be the most popular person in the room if he plays the accordion. I believe that. I STILL BELIEVE THAT; THAT MUST BE WHY I PLAY DEVOTEDLY EVERY DAY. When he gets caught, the moment is harrowing, as his father in slow-mo destroys his accordion. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and in fact choked on a chunk of potato in my soup, instead, and nearly lost my life. No movie has caused a near-death experience before. That must mean this will become top slot.

Well, probably not, even though the movie doesn’t fail to deliver what it is: Weird Al all over the place. He wrote it; he approved it, which means any heartfelt storytelling is lost in one gag and punchline after another until the final punchline at the end. It’s both hilarious and disturbing, as one of his jokes is that a rock biopic must have ginormous drama involving sex, drug lords, and alcohol. He also loves gratuitous violence, which is either good or bad, depending on taste. His gratuitous violence has an edge of judgement to it. As in, I’m guessing Weird Al has a judgemental streak and uses gratuitous comedy violence to express his ire. To be fair, he does pull out the heartfelt reunification with the father who destroyed his accordion, but even that is a gag. Weird Al is a comedian more than he is a storyteller.

Therefore, Gentlemen Broncos will remain in the top slot. On the other hand, the Weird Al biopic will forever hold the distinction of nearly killing me via a potato.

What of my own devil’s squeeze box, you ask? I’ve been managing four or five hours of practice time a week. I have to concede that paranoia will prevent me from carting the accordion with me on out-of-town trips, which drives down my practice hours if I have to go to Albuquerque or Lubbock. I’m only half joking. My husband bought me my first accordion spontaneously when we were drunk on our anniversary one year, and no accordion could replace that. It was harrowing when it was irredeemably crunched in my crumpled car. It did not, however, cost $4000 like my new one.

On the listening front, I’ve been obsessed lately with a classic norteño band called Los Traileros. Their music is pure happiness, and the accordion parts are catchy and fun to play. I will, of course, leave you with a video.

I was tempted to write a lengthy comment responding to this post, which resonated with me. My pursuits tend to be all consuming, just as she describes her passion for running. My problem is that I don’t have one: I have many pursuits that I cling to. The difference between myself and other ambitious people, and why my idolatry might not be as easy to spot as someone living in a large house and driving a Porsche, is that I care very little about worldly acclaim and riches. I despise spending money and don’t have time to shop, don’t care for it. I’m a classic Scrooge, in other words. And Scrooge was ultimately idolatrous, even though he didn’t care about material things at all. That was part of his problem. That was his idolatry — caring only about his pursuit as a banker and caring nothing about material reality. He wasn’t lapping up the luxurious life while others starved. The man wouldn’t even heat his house. He was starving himself and still managed to be idolatrous. That is why when he gives up his idols, he doesn’t disappear inside his cell and eat bread and water; he emerges from it and buys the biggest goose in the market and puts more coal on the fire.

Hard work is valued in our culture. People see someone who can put the effort in, and they admire that. My son is in cross-country; his team recently made it to state. Because one of the moms had my cellphone number, I was suddenly added to the text group, in which they discussed what special gifts they could give the runners, how they would help decorate the school, and I ignored the noise of endless, endless texts. I was thinking to myself, either they win or they don’t. Either they get a medal or they don’t. All of this nonsense is just teaching them that they will be lavished with attention just for working hard, and it makes an idol of hard work. I was critical of these rather nice moms, and the double irony is that I did not want to waste my time or money because I was too busy making idols of my own pursuits. These moms were encouraging idolatry in their children, perhaps, but they were also being generous and giving of their hearts; I was not.

On Thursday evening, the class at my parish was studying St. Augustine. Something he wrote struck a serious chord with me, too, just like the post I linked to: he came across a man who was stumbling drunk, and instead of criticizing the drunkard for his obvious dissipation, he realized that the man would wake up sober, and that he (Augustine) would still wake up drunk on ambition. Ouch. This kind of drunkenness can’t be slept off, and unlike alcoholic drunkenness, it appears to be a moral good. Dedication, hard work — these are moral goods, especially if the hard work involves studying and writing rather than commerce, as mine does. Or exercise, of course, as that is one of my idols, too, and one that is vaunted by my culture. Augustine’s culture was not any different than ours. They, too, valued the lofty goals of philosophy and the physical specimens people could become through athletics. If you look around and see that there are entire industries trying to make you poor off selling high-priced educations and exercise equipment, routines, and supplements, you know that these “moral goods” are truly our society’s idols.

This may be only peripherally related, but a week or so ago, Vox Day answered a “mailvox” question, in which a woman asked how she was supposed to stay intellectually stimulated as a housewife raising children. Some people are gluttons for punishment — maybe that is an idol? — because Vox is only going to give an abusive answer. It was mildly abusive, something akin to read a damn book, and then when you finish it, read another one. In today’s world, unlike Augustine’s, these idols actually come cheaply. Nobody needs to pay a high price or come from a wealthy household in order to be intellectually stimulated. This makes it very difficult for true idolators to give up this pursuit. They can remain Scrooges and cling to them — they don’t even have to leave their homes! This, of course, made the woman’s question seem utterly ridiculous to me, a person in the thrall of my addiction. I buy books on Amazon in a matter of seconds and read them on my smart phone every day. Perhaps his answer should have been, “You aren’t an idolator. Good job. Now teach your children math. That will intellectually stimulate you and keep you a decent, generous person at the same time.” But Mailvox the Advice Column was probably a doomed proposition from the get-go.

I have written before about being at the parish twelve hours in a day. Thursday was one of those days. I had promised to unlock and then lock the church up for the Sanctity of Life group that had planned a prayer and worship time in front of the Tabernacle (for non Catholics, the Tabernacle is where the blessed hosts are kept). Still pondering St. Augustine’s story, I went to the prayer time. But as usual, I couldn’t focus because I was thinking about how I would have the time and energy to complete my daily pursuits. I exercise at 6 AM before work, study Spanish at lunch time; there is an hour in between my clock-off time and the class, in which I can write 1000 words towards my books. However, I still had 50 minutes of accordion playing and my last exercise, an evening walk, before me. And don’t be mistaken: I always go to bed with a book. What if my son had math homework? What if my husband wanted to speak more than five words to me?

As the prayers proceeded, I lost myself to those instead. There is something about the rosary that stills my thoughts and puts me in a meditative mindset. Don’t follow your pursuits tonight, I heard the Holy Spirit speak. By the time the last prayers had been spoken, I was overwhelmed by grief. I don’t know how not to follow my pursuits. That’s what I do. Even my relationships are all bound up in doing things, like helping my son with his math homework. It turned out to be simple. I went home and ate the dinner my husband had cooked, and then he shared a podcast with me that he wanted me to listen to. And then we talked. I didn’t eschew this as I so often do; I didn’t try to talk while doing things. If I keep this up, I’ll be buying a fat goose soon or going Christmas shopping. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, though…