Monday, July 2, 2007
Welcome to the Land of Enchantment! Don’t ask but here I am now living just outside of Santa Fe. Everything people say about New Mexico—good and bad—is true. Sprewell, I don’t think we’re in California anymore. Sprewell’s our cat. We just traveled 1,200 miles together in my car (Pammy caravaning in her car). It was more than one hundred degrees driving down the Central Valley, across the Mojave Desert and through the high desert of Arizona. Then it cooled down to the low 90s in Santa Fe, where it’s 7,000 feet and one gasps for breath during the night, doesn’t one? The nights are cool, though, like the Bay Area, and thus the mornings and early evenings are great. But between, say, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, forget it.
The sports section of the local paper, The New Mexican, does have box scores but naturally they are the weak, abbreviated box scores that major newspapers abandoned decades ago. TNM ain’t major. The NY Times has good box scores but none on Sunday (!) and not for Giants night games, or any west coast night game, because the games end too late for the early edition (or even the for the late edition in New York, if you really want to know). Even The New Mexican (have I mentioned their weak, abbreviated box scores?) won’t have the Giants score if it ended late even though it’s only one time zone away. USA Today (the only sports section in the country that posts extensive team stats every week), also has good box scores, but is also a day behind for west coast night games. Acute box score withdrawal.
Trying to follow sports out here is laughable. Give me a sec to mentally count the professional teams in New Mexico. Let’s see, roughly none. Zero. The big time in New Mexico is the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (“Go, Lobos” is the war cry) and the Triple A Albuquerque—are you ready?—Isotopes. Again, don’t ask.
In the southern part of the state you have New Mexico State in Las Cruces. Obscure? You bet. I would think there’s more interest in UTEP, just over the state line. Texas, I think it’s called. Yes, I do live in a state that borders Texas. This is what happens to defrocked Jewish intellectuals from the Bronx.
The biggest news in the state when I arrived was that Reggie Theus, head basketball coach at New Mexico State, was leaving to coach the Sacramento Kings. Not a bad item, but the emphasis in the Albuquerque Journal and that old standby, The New Mexican, was not about the challenge for Theus to jump all the way to the NBA, or what plans he might have to revive the mediocre Kings, but rather who on God’s green earth is New Mexico State going to get to replace him. Hey, all I can tell you from my vantage point here on the ramparts is that the search is on. Rumors abound, dude. I’d tell you one if I could remember. Damn I gotta take notes.
For the first time I’ve got the blogging vibe. No longer am I satisfied talking to my mailing list. Now I’m talking to Everyone. Watch out, world. I’m a little late to the party but I’m packin’ some good shit.
Lenny, techno-artist, is my blogmeister, dragging me into the 21st century. It’s 2007, for god’s sake.
Someone’s knocking on my door and yelling in, “Five minutes.”
--Eugene Lesser
