April 27, 2004
Back from the four day Bull & Boze border roll. Went deep into The Bootheel (NM), found Old Hachita. Also cruised Locheil, Naco (took photos of beer drinking vaqueros riding horses down the main drag on a Saturday night), ate a ton of excellent Mexican food from a carne seca gismo at the Crossroads Drive-in, to adobada tacos from a street vendor in Nogales, Sonora, to huevos rancheros (everywhere) to a damn good mole burrito at Gaviota’s (Seagulls) below Tin Town outside Bisbee.

Drank more beers than a roomful of Monday Night Football fanatics, stepped in more history than a janitor at a NOLA convention, bottomed out in more arroyos than a pregnant javalina and laughed at more asinine and juvenile humor than an all-male junior high lunch room on crank.

Heading out of town last Friday in a borrowed F-150 XLT Ford pickup, I looked down on the floor, saw the crate of eclectic, customized tapes the Bull is always known to carry, and I said, as a challenge: “Okay, play me something I’ve never heard.”

The Bull popped in a tape and I got my ears primed, and out of the blue comes Hans Olson playing “Western Winds. ” It was a change-up and I was floored. First of all, Hans played at Kathy and my wedding ceremony at Pioneer Living History Museum, and second of all, in this context, it was as if I was hearing this amazing, powerful tune for the very first time. The irony was thick, but the music was even thicker, and better. And that’s how the whole four days went. New tunes every mile (Professor Longhair, Doctor John, Jimmie Rogers, Bob Wills, Michelle Shocked, Patsy Montana to name just one typical five-mile stretch).

Clear skys all the way, big broken border country. A great-horned owl shat upon The Bull’s head, we missed an African Massai dance by a timid whisker (mine), and I blew $271 at Va Va Voom in Bisbee. More of the bloody details later.

Speaking of bloody, we’ve got a new poll up and I really want to know what you think on this one. Which movie did you like best? The new John Lee Hancock's The Alamo, or John Wayne's The Alamo?

Got home last night at ten. Read this e-mail from Fred Nolan in England:

“Don't you find it at all amusing that the Sheriff of DeBaca County's name is Graves?”

“When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London.”

—Bette Midler