traipsing water and Tiger Woods drive

an old route through acres of bare pecan orchards into El Paso, Texas. Pass abandoned gas stations, homes, towns, grocery stores. There's so much derelict, that I have started seeing it in a new light. In the city once something is abandoned, you have maybe a week or two before it is removed, replaced, and vanished from the city's consciousness, from history. Here, history simultaneously exists alongside the present, and billboards of the future.
Get into the city, into an area resembling a chinatown, in regards to the loud incomprehensible music, the vast amounts of people who somehow all look alike, and the merchandise that is for sale, cheap flip flops, sunglasses, plastic jackets, individually wrapped denim jeans with designs on each butt cheek, cellophane jewelery, etc, only there aren't any chinese people, they're hispanic. Sunday or Saturday, cannot recall, people walk over the foot bridge into Texas from Juarez Mexico, maybe to stock up on clean socks or see the sights. We walk through the downtown core, deserted store fronts, a strong wind careens through the skyscrapers, I see several plastic bags soaring twenty-five stories in the air, taking on flight as if seagulls tumbling through the air, catching the sunlight, reflecting and bathing in it, wingless.
Drive to the University, a tan massive wall separates the two countries, I see shacks bathing in dust. They are drowning in one another climbing up the hill, there's thousands. I look around where I stand, skyscrapers, palms, an alligator fountain, and a man preaching desperately and exhaustively to an empty town square, he is yelling.
This city has a history, but its hard to find.
It is a spring day in the winter.
Coffee at Circle K, a painter or a construction worker wearing overalls and shades covered in plaster or paint in front of me is yelling at the cashiers, "I am superman," several times before he leaves without buying anything.
Doug and Chris's first time at a Walmart. An experience onto itself.
Take the car along "Tiger Woods Drive" back in Los Cruces.

On the airplane, a crowd of people all wearing the same color of orange sharing a high of ecstatic thunder when they all successfully board the plane as stand-bys, blow horns and cheer before take-off.

On the train home into Vancouver, I take the last sip of stagnant, chlorine water, leftover in my water bottle from Texas. Over the loudspeaker: Auburn 16 and the Ducks 11.