Took a Lost Farm Super Boof live resin gummy half an hour ago at the Chiricahua travel stop along I-10 halfway between Las Cruces and Deming, headed west. My head was already a little tight from dehydration, vodka, maybe the bowl of Strawberry Pines last night, maybe not.
My wife is driving. The trains are running. It’s not as hazy now as it was east of the mountains east of Las Cruces. The air over White Sands and Alamogordo was thick. We stayed at the Pine Springs Inn in Ruidoso Downs last night. Like Brook says, the place is a step back in time.
If I had to do it all over again I might give more thought to geology. Rocks. I like rock, and rocks, more and more. I appreciate them. They’re part of the earth, a really important part but rocks aren’t asking anything from anyone. They’re useful. Erosion control, minerals, structural support, roads, drainage. It feels good to be in a place where rock is of interest. In such a place, you will probably find some other beauty. Rocks are possessed of such an unassuming richness.
What’s new in geology these days? Looking for lithium for our batteries, looking for rare earths for our phones. Cracking rock open to get at nat gas to power our AI, our social media. Breaking rocks, breaking into the earth so that we can grow closer to our computers and to our phones. To power the new intelligence. To make our lives easier. Progress through powdered rock. Rare earth, it’s always been such a powerful phrase. Metals, minerals, like time buried in the ground. Find it, you find a little bit of extra time, while the machines do the work we get to…
I put my 2026 music list on the car radio. I don’t have much on the list. The first song is “Fabienk” by Angine de Poitrine, a Canadian band. Good rock crushing music! [11:24]
Forty-four miles to Lordsburg. Lordy Lordy, my baby’s forty. I have an urge to ask my wife what she thought about the song but I don’t. It just ended. On to the next song. Drive on!
The Super Boof gummy is hitting. I’ve smoked Super Boof flower. I only ever had a gram but I liked it. Liked it enough to have written enough to make a post of the notes. That was Super Boof flower in Missouri, from Farmer G. (Link). The lineage is Black Cherry Punch x Tropicana Cookies. I still see Super Boof flower on menus but I never have bought more than that first gram.
I liked seeing Super Boof as a strain for these Lost Farm single-strain live resin gummies. I saw these on the menu of the R Greenleaf in Clovis, NM, and I could not resist the urge to try them. I was wondering if they were in the same form as the Lost Farm 707 Headband starburst-style candies (grilled peach flavor) I bought in Illinois earlier this month. I liked those individually wrapped starburst-style candies, something different. Strong background chill for a couple of hours.
These Super Boofs are more upfront, direct, let’s go. I am looking out the window, seeing yuccas getting taller as we slip further into the southwest. They are like a spiky, shaggy green thumb sticking up out of the ground. Then a thin antennae growing up out of the hair, adorned with bells, to help with reception or offer a jingle when the wind is blowing. Tintinnabulous yucca.
The train tracks are currently empty. BNSF runs along here, as well as Union Pacific. Speak of the devil now I see a train up ahead, also heading west. We are catching up. It’s a Union Pacific. [11:33]
I can’t think much about “what I’m going to write.” If I do I won’t write. I just have to click the pen, turn to a fresh page, and let it go. How do I know what I think ’til I see what I say? I lose all my charm in practice. Practice? You wanna talk about practice? Not a game, not a game, but practice…
There is an abundantly plentiful yellow flower along the roadside, in the near ditch. It is possibly rabbitbrush, aka chamisa. Low to the ground. Tumbleweeds collect against a short barbed-wire fence. Now sits a discarded, truncated section of train tanker cars. Unhooked, left behind, tossed away to reduce overhead. Unhooked and left behind but probably not forgotten. Say, where did I leave that string of twelve tanker cars? Oh yeah, somewhere in southwestern New Mexico, halfway between Deming and Lordsburg.
There’s nothing wrong with this Boof. Contrails are diving through the sky over the mountains. There are also some cirrus, way up. As they reach farther into the horizon they begin to lose their definition, morphing into a generic blanket of cloud, further washed out by the desert haze. The mountains farthest off look dark, darker. Are they peopled by trees or is that color difference an effect of depth, as if they were also wet, and brooding.
The rabbitbrush erupts like a sudden piñata of yellow, dumped out from somewhere above, falling like candy along the roadside, scattered by the wind, uncollected by the passersby. There are some white flowers too and in one brief glimpse I saw some orange flowers I took a snapshot of only with my mind. They were like orange-colored bluebonnets hidden in the median ditch. [11:48]
Otherwise, there isn’t much going on. A guy with a white minivan is pulled over onto the shoulder. I catch a few other bits of color on the roadside but the glimpse is so brief I can’t know what I saw. Am I sure it wasn’t trash? Film it all, then spend the rest of your life watching the replay.
Dirt, an old tire, more fence. A pipeline node I wish I woulda photoed. The white of the pipes coming out of the ground, then going back into it, bulging with flanges like a terrestrial octopus half in, half out of the earth. Or it had an extraterrestrial feel, the harsh white of the pipes against the martian red-brown earth. Above, another snaky contrail.
My 2026 list is already over. Nine tracks. I’ve got work to do. I haven’t been listening to Spotify much. Listening to music, and paying attention to it takes a lot of effort. And more screen time. I’m listening to music when I’m in the car, via Sirius/XM. It does get repetitive, especially if you camp out much on the same channel(s), if you spend a lot of time, too much time driving. I probably should queue up some Discover Weeklies from time to time via the car bluetooth, to give myself a break from the satellite. Baseball will also help in that regard.
Here’s Fraggle Rock, or a boulder with that phrase written on it. I used to watch that show. I remember liking it; it was weird. Mountains now appear due west, which means Arizona, state line. The mountains first appeared in the south, then to the north, and now to the west. An earthen Welcome to Arizona sign, out there in the direction you’re headed.
We drop down into a basin and it’s a semi-truck train coming the opposite way along I-10. Pieces of torn up tire abound. A small pond appears south of the interstate. These are the flats. I always think of this stretch as The Salt Flats. But I don’t know if there is salt in that water, or in the ground underneath. Another pond appears but even the flats seem dry. OK, here’s a long thin pool on the north side of the interstate.
Diesel is $5.19 a gallon. The gasoline we last filled up with was $3.82/gallon. It’s been a while since gasoline has been this expensive. There aren’t any fewer people on the road, not yet. I’ll be happy not doing any driving I don’t need to do once we get to our destination in the Catalina Foothills north of Tucson two hours or so from right now.
Weeds of Grass 