I’m down in New Mexico today, filling in for my friend and compatriot, David Waddleton [Fun Fact: David is about to take over as dev lead for GotDotNet – congrats, mister :) ]. It’s my last week of MSDN Events for the fiscal year.

It’s weird down here. On the flight in, I was lost in an episode of Dr. Who that I was watching on my Portable Media Center, but managed to tear my eyeballs away just long enough to look out the window and see one of the stranger landscapes I’ve encountered in the states. The sun was setting over the desert, and everything was glowing red. It looked like a photograph of the surface of Mars, complete with crisscrossing dirt roads to take the place of Lowell’s canali.

Things didn’t get any less weird when we touched down. I picked up my rental car and headed west on the freeway. Scanning the radio, I came across no less than twenty-seven stations blasting the word of a fearsome and vengeful God. There wasn’t, as one radio preacher put it, any talk of a “syrupy, milk and toast, loving [said with disgust] kind of Lord.” It was all fire and brimstone, like the scenery.

A loud thud distracted me for a moment from the sermon. At first I thought someone had thrown a rock at the car, but it turns out to simply have been a pterodactyl sized insect which was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It exploded on my windshield like a puss-filled water balloon dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. I don’t know what it was doing out at that time of night. Probably hunting cows or something.

It’s no wonder there’s so much weirdness down here. If I saw scenery and giant bugs like this on a daily basis while listening to a spit-soaked talk on the Book of Ezekiel, I’d also probably be inclined to believe in Strange Things like…

…saucer crashes.

I’ve figured out that I’m about four hours from Roswell, and I’m quite tempted to go. To think that there is an entire city nearby awaiting my unbridled scorn and mockery is to mine senses like a sweet and unguarded pot of golden honey.

One preacher on the radio this morning warned me not to stray from the straight and true path, not to be tempted by temptation.

I turned it off. I’ve always been a sinner.

I wonder if I could get a flight out to Roswell for the day…

After Blog Mint [?] :

Buy my junk, you freeloading bastards.