After spending some time at the Colfax Guitar Shop, it was totally disheartening to read the Santa Fe New Mexican regarding how horrible things are in Santa Fe. Really, between CYFD and late City of Santa Fe audits, it feels like things in Santa Fe are on a downward slope to death.
But at the guitar shop, I felt hope and potential. Listening to the team talk about how the original owner sold the shop and retired to fish all day in Costa Rica brought to my mind former dreams I once held. They’re long gone, now. The reality is that the circumstances in my home town are drawing me into a pit of political despair.
I watched the guitar shop guys work. One filed some frets while another adjusted the action on a Strat. The benches where tools and pending projects sit were like little soldiers prepared to enter battle on a moment’s notice.
But in Santa Fe, the current administration is ushering my once-beloved city into its final breaths. Political and economic vultures hover around and in cityhall, taking their turn at the carrion they find. Homelessness, drug abuse, teen dropouts, potholes, and late audits are Dante’s rings of hell and there aren’t any solutions. I had hope, at one point, to find some, but there aren’t any to uncover.
The guitar experts at a shop like the Colfax Guitar Shop don’t exist in Santa Fe. Anything musical or literary in my home town are the domain of the rich and elite. Santa Fe holds nothing cool. The only options for business development are raping land or lining pockets from bloated government salaries. I used to wish that I could open a guitar shop, but with out-of-reach rents and a workforce that is simply not able to support a new business, there’s simply no way to do it.
At least I can visit Denver. There, life exists and there aren’t stairways to hell for which a blind mayor serves as the guide. I love guitar. I love music. But Santa Fe had grown silent and we should abandon hope that strings will ever sing again.
