For my vacation, I flew to Arizona, rented a car, drove out to the kind of rural town where broken-down machinery is thought of as sculpture and my iPhone is only useful as a small cheese board, and paid someone hundreds of dollars so that I could do days of back-breaking labor for him.

We know the lucky winners in our municipal elections are going on to grueling and thankless jobs in local politics, but what about the arguably luckier losers? Should they vanish back into the fabric of the city or is it possible that their respective campaigns have revealed new potential roles in government, activism and business?

I recently took my son London along to the gym. After I had inelegantly completed my routine and he had demoed all the machines that would not land him in traction, we hit the locker room. He was giddy at the exclusive father-son time in an exotic locale where adults wearing hiked-up shorts throw medicine balls and slip on booties to skate back and forth on polished wood.

What if the anti-antenna activists are right about Wi-Fi rotting our brains? Western, industrialized civilization with its banking scandals, factory farming, military industrial complexes, colonialism, energy consumption, spectacle-based society and technology fetishism would die a horrible, self-inflicted, tumor-riddled death. So, why are they opposing it?

We're told there are big issues at stake in our municipal elections: public safety, city budgets, jobs, crime, annexation, police and fire services, economic development, affordable housing, public education, family values, the integrity of neighborhoods, the future of the creative economy, and the soul of Santa Fe. But what really matters?

Like the state of New Mexico, I bank at Bank of America. I don’t know what the government’s excuse is, but I got fed up with faceless bureaucracy a long time ago and switched to a local bank. But then it was bought by a bigger bank which, in turn, was purchased by Bank of America. If I switch again, what's my guarantee? What's the state's guarantee?

I felt a calm feeling wash over me. I had nowhere to be, no students to win over for books void of sensational plots, no DSL hassles at home (damn you, Qwest!), no extended family members’ birthdays to remember (damn you, nieces and nephews!).

Once (and future?) land commissioner Ray Powell argues against putting New Mexico's White Peak under the control of private interests.

The giving spirit and the economic power of US citizens, as demonstrated in Haiti, is genuinely remarkable. The vast majority of us can give something in an emergency, if only a few dollars, and we should. That we are able to so rapidly deploy a commitment of wealth and resources is almost magical. But magical thinking is part of the problem.

I’m kind of a survival of the fittest advocate, so my solution to people stopping on the train tracks is to outfit the Rail Runner with deluxe, spike-riddled cowcatchers complete with saw blades and lasers. We'd eventually be whittled down to a population that’s smart enough to avoid stopping on the tracks and, with luck, the instinct would become part of our genetic code.