Earlier this year, in a kind of hazy beef frenzy brought on by the New Mexico Beef Council’s Gate-to-Plate tour, I made a handshake deal with a couple of ranchers to buy half of a steer—not as a partial pet, but as more meat than I can possibly eat. It’s the best food purchase I’ve ever made.

I would like to know exactly how many hours of city staff, councilor and attorney time went into passing Santa Fe’s new indecent exposure ordinance. What did it cost us to create and approve this laughably useless legislation, notable only for its abuse potential by police officers looking for an excuse to hassle someone?

One must be resigned these days to encountering Taco Bell. The fast-food chain is a ubiquitous presence on the social-media frontier, not to mention on nearly 6,000 street corners in the US. But I find myself reluctant to encounter Taco Bell at the corner of Cerrillos Road and Alta Vista Street.

The first rule of democracy club is you have to talk about democracy club. No repeating slogans without understanding issues, no reinforcing falsehoods because you can’t be bothered to investigate the truth yourself and, most of all, no laying claim to your rights as an individual under the Constitution if you can’t also accept the responsibilities of individuals in participatory government. Democracy must be an ongoing public dialogue.

Domestic abusers apologize for their behavior, and they often mean it. But that doesn’t stop them from doing it again. It’s the same with drunk drivers and other drug addicts. Why would we expect it to be any different for corporations—in particular for corporate “farms” with a history of health and safety violations?

Peregrine Honig is a Kansas City, Mo.-based artist and entrepreneur. She was the runner-up in Bravo TV’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist and will be exhibiting her work in a show called Loser at Dwight Hackett Projects in Santa Fe from Oct. 9-Nov. 6.

Early in September, while Santa Feans readied their gloom for the combustible catharsis of Zozobra, I snuck into a friend’s metal shop and prepared a descanso for my father. He died in June of this year, in a sudden accident on Highway 395 in California.

A bored chef is a boring chef. Nobody wants to go out to eat with the image in his or her mind of a tired stove jockey—a resentful grunt in a dirty apron endlessly churning out cookie-cutter meals and pushing steaks off the line with stamped and approved regularity like auto parts on a conveyor belt.

As election season points toward us with stunted political logic—blue or red? Left or right? Bad hair or worse hair?—we need to remember how to identify ourselves with the values that really matter to us as individuals. But we also need to identify others with similar sensibilities so we can form blocs and get out the vote that best represents our needs.

The gaudiest expressions of Santa Fe style are far from unique to Santa Fe. Much of the Southwest—along the trail of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, in particular—still bears the hallmarks of a fantasy created for tourists largely by hotel magnate and evil marketing genius Fred Harvey.