Wow. You sure as hell can’t get these in Roswell.
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Author: Larry
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Water Bottle Boat
I was going to build a raft out of water bottles, really, I was. Now I don’t have to. I figured it would probably occur to somebody else. Sure enough.
This is way better than I was gonna do. I was gonna make the sail out of plastic bags, but I wasn’t gonna sail it to Australia. 
Here’s the article. link
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Jimenez’ Devil Horse
A year ago today, Luis Jimenez‘ 32 foot fibreglas mustang sculpture was installed at the Denver International Airport. It had killed him the year before at his studio, an old apple cannery in Hondo Valley, which is just up the road from here. We used to see him at some of the Art Museum events here in Roswell. I ran into him at ABQ once on my way to California to paint a ride. We talked for a minute or two, I gave him a couple of my comics. He was a nice guy. That’s a scary horse. Biggest thing he ever did. And it killed him!
It’s the middle of Winter, which has been marked as, or by, a big, ritualistic, ceremonial, symbolic, dogmatic, enthusiastic, sacred, profane public & private celebration for thousands of years, at least in the cultures that happened to thrive well enough in the northern latitudes, where the middle of the cold part of the year is a big deal, because everybody is depressed in all the cold & dark & they’re getting tired of having to mostly stay indoors in the same place with the same people & everybody is getting on everybody else’s nerves & cabin fever is becoming normal & they all really needed an excuse to get together & get high & acknowledge that thet were half way through the time after which things could quite possibly get much better… or not. One never knew, back then, for thousands of years. Things could always be worse, & sometimes they did so. Sometimes not.
In the tropical latitudes, not so much. Polynesians didn’t really know what winter was, how would they? So they didn’t have this Death & Rebirth thing going on like the Norse Folk. South of the Equator, what? Is there, was there, an ancient midwinter celebration in Tierra Del Fuego? If so, it was not well reported.
Out here the air is so clear, the light is so bright & pure it hurts your eyes. No, really. Less shielding (by rain clouds, smog, whatever) means more bad nuclear radiation from the life-giving Sun is frying yer eyeballs so yer more likely to get cataracts in yer eyes if you stay here too long. I don’t have any sources to cite to back this up, I happened to hear somebody tell me that during a Thanksgiving celebration in Albuquerque & I believe it. It’s so beautiful out here you could go blind looking at it. Nature is cruel. Out here on the Desert (it’s not really a desert out here, it’s a prairie, the Lone Prairie, as in bury me not thereon) life is cheap. It’s traditional.
Another solar revolution goes whistling by. Nothing will ever be the same.
As always.
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Robert H. Goddard High School mural
The principal at Goddard High School wants me (or somebody) to uhhh, redo the mural they got there.
My first thought was, “Aaaww, that old mural is kind of dull & flat & I could come up with something really spectacular on the same theme & make everything better & be an art hero here in Roswell & it’d be fun & stuff…”
So I ran up there to take some pix of it with my nice little digital camera. I walk up to it & start looking at it & almost immediately this guy comes up, well actually I think it was more like he sort of floated by & mumbled something as he went, until I showed some interest & then he was there.
“My grandfather was the head architect on this.”
Robert H. Goddard High School is named after, well, Robert Hutchings Goddard, who did a lot of experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets in Roswell after he had to leave New England because he kept setting his neighbors’ fields on fire & they didn’t like that much.
“Robert Goddard used to build rockets in my grandfather’s garage.”
Goddard High School was built in 1964, when Roswell was still a thriving Air Force Base town. It is Roswell’s 2nd high school. Roswell High School is about 7 miles south of here.
“There was nuthin out here at all back then.”
“Just cows wandering around, an jackrabbits, right?”
“Yeah.”
They were real proud of it. It was state of the art. It was Tomorrowland. Actual military rockets on pylons out in front, sticking straight up. The offices, the gym & the cafeteria (no longer used as such) comprised the ground floor. The classrooms were (& remain) all below grade. They are underground. There are no windows, oh wait, there might be windows like in the doors that look out (in) from the classrooms into the subterranean hallways, but no openings to the outside world, no way to admit either fresh air or sunlight.
It was 1964, at the height of the Cold War. And this was Roswell. Home of the 509th Operations Group, the guys that deliver atomic bombs. A military target. So they built their new school as a fallout shelter. At my high school in Bakersfield, California in 1964, they just stuck little cardboard signs up above the entrances to hallways with one or more stories above them, transforming existing structural configurations into ‘fallout shelters’, at least in our minds. But this place was built that way, to be exactly that: a fallout shelter. A good one. Nobody thought it was weird, they thought it was smart.
And the mural was apparently Original Equipment. I spotted a signature, of sorts; Helvetica letters hand painted about an inch high, saying ART CLUB, right on top of the wing of the space shuttle.
“They don’t even have an art club any more, do they?” I asked.
“Naw, they got this one guy, he teaches an art class, but he’s, well, y’know…”
“What?”
I think they don’t have music classes there any more, either.
Wait a minute. There was no space shuttle in 1964.
“The space shuttle was added later.”
“Yeah, I guess so. ”
Okay, so the Art Club did the shuttle much later on. Who did the original mural? Did they do it as, or immediately after it was being built? So who were they? Kids from Roswell High? At any rate, it’s historical; this mural was Original Equipment. It wants to look like it did back in ’64, I guess. It’s a preservation/restoration job. Oh boy.