Truckstop Socrates

The place – sky city casino and hotel truckstop laundry
The players – me, doing laundry
deam, truck driver and unwitting Socratic philosopher

So I was doing my laundry at the truck stop laundry, doing my laundry, when this fellow came into the room. what followed turned into an hour long discussion about philosophy and other cool things. these are the things I learned from him
- the Acoma Indians on whose reservation the hotel and casino are built, actually have a mesa pueblo that has been in continuous habitation for more than 1000 years.
- lots of people who are in business who he has talked to cannot define what ‘capital’ is
- when you drive in your truck you are with your best friend and your worst enemy
- thoughts can kill; people who kill themselves end up having a thought that is the thing that actually kills them.
- everyone wants love and is motivated around love

in our talk, Dean would always talk around a question he asked, like what is capital? or what is thought? and being classically trained, I realized that in a Socratic argument the only way to ‘win’ is to admit ignorance. Ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. So we talked and it was actually interesting. Dean was 55 and been driving for 15 years after a life of interesting works. One of the things he said was how driving makes you forget how to do a lot of the things that you once knew. He was from north Dakota and he told me a story about how when he was young he would smuggle cigarettes to Canada and then talked the Canadian quarters that he and his friends were paid in back to ND where they would go to the casinos and load them into the slot machines and then cash out in American.

On his advice I went to the Acoma sky city pueblo and it was awesome. I could not take any pictures because cell phones were prohibited from the top of the mesa. It is the spiritual home of 7000 Acoma Indians. and people have been living there continuously since it was founded. Their mesa cemetery is in layers. when the cemetery filled up, they added another layer of clay dirt on top of the previous layer. the cemetery was over 700 feet tall, and the present layer is the last layer. what was awesome about the place was the quiet. there was no hum from any modern conveniences, and just the blue sky and the horizon stretching from end to end, with mountains standing on the flat plains under the sun was just peaceful.

I bought some very small pottery samples that I could bring back. it is really nice black work on white porcelain.

the NM dessert is all tan and brown under the wide blue sky. I like it a lot because no one can tell me what the colors are. brown and red just sort of meld together.

on the way to Kingman today I stopped for a short time at the Diablo crater in Arazona, very deep and very wide and many pictures were taken. I was not planning to see this, but a sign saying ‘Meteor Crater National Attraction’ and who am I to turn down a sign like that.

I am now in Kingman Arizona and I am hoping to make into California