By Dylan R.N. Crabb

Albuquerque isn’t a bad place to be (for New Mexico). It’s an urban oasis for city slickers trapped among the eastward migrations from the over-priced west coast, but the city is still a couple decades removed from the millennial generation. I’ve been living in Albuquerque for more than a year now and I still feel like Paul Kemp on his first day in San Juan, Puerto Rico, trying to make sense of a city plagued with vice and optimism while being flooded with hopeless venture capitalists. Two soul-sucking jobs in food service are paying my way through my latter 20’s while I try and force the words in my head into a coherent collection on paper with an intent for monetization. All the while, temptations of the mind are all around me, luring me through their doors with carefully crafted messages promising to take away from the daily despair to a heavenly euphoria. Tension seems to be the only thing driving me to get up in the morning, “the tension between a restless idealism and a sense of impending doom (Hunter S. Thompson, the Rum Diary, 1998).”

As long as I put aside the cash for next month’s rent, I’ll survive this city just long enough to get the hell out.