Do you want beautiful Santa Fe to be turned into an overdeveloped, gridlocked and polluted Southern California? Hell no, you don’t. Just like you don’t want the US of A to be turned into a socialist haven for freeloading bums, gay junkies and thieving, opportunistic brown people from some other damn country.

There aren’t a lot of savory items on offer at Dulce, the new bakery and sweetshop that has dropped a cream-filled and flaky-crusted bomb on the South Capitol district. But one can find there a quiche as delectable as any ever offered in, as far as I’m concerned, the history of the world.

There are many people who believe, with some justification, that Santa Fe is in the twilight zone. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, however, Santa Fe straddles zones 6a and 5b, but mostly exists in zone 6a.

Back when people cared about the future, New Mexico was stoked to have Tesla Motors—the high-end electric car company—commit to building a $35-million plant in Albuquerque, for the manufacture of an (somewhat) affordable, mass-produced sedan.

There are a lot of questions lingering in the minds of voters about what happens now that the midterm elections are over. How will the results affect the economy? Health care? Financial regulation? But one question is particularly vulnerable to shifting sentiments in Congress: Will Jack Daniel’s birthday become a national holiday?

OK, you bastards…this is how the midterm elections are going to go. Every single last one of you is going to show up at the polls and vote your conscience. This is going to happen around the country, and the story line we’ve been fed in which Republicans sweep races and reclaim houses and stupidi-tea party candidates teach a lesson to big government will end up as nothing more than a particularly sick fantasy.

Who among us does not know the shame of the bussed plate? There you are, sated in the completion of a fine meal, when staff comes by and clears your empty plate, revealing a bizarre flurry of crumbs and morsels that were hidden beneath the rim. It’s like waking up to a murder scene in your apartment. Is this a dream? Is this a set-up? Did I enact this violence with my own hands and mouth in some kind of blackout rage?

John Heywood—that 16th-century, itinerant playwright and language buff of whom no one has ever heard—included the following wisdom in his 1546 collection of English proverbs: “No man ought to looke a geuen hors in the mouth.” Sometimes, though, you want to see those teeth…you know what I mean?

El Campanario restaurant looks as garish as the Vegas Strip on its faux belfry exterior, but the inside offers a few surprises.

Gas station mini-marts and convenience stores are not really my favorite businesses to patronize. They are bright, tiny, oxygen-deprived tableaux of everything that is impersonal, awkward and irrefutably tragic about America.