Soy de Burque.  Me.  I am of these streets and this sky.

It's in my love of big earrings and cruising down Central--though my car, much as I love her, will never be pimped out quite like those classic trucks, ragtops, and other vintage rides lovingly restored and paraded up and down that old main street on Sundays like a row of chrome peacocks. 

I can feel the magical and mystical permeating these streets as if the land were infused with an otherworldly essence completely at home in this off the map desert town.  The people, too, are a little off the map--valuing good food as much as good karma, chakra-opening yoga, and mind-opening microbrews.

Yes, my favorite big small town where the best places to eat are usually in some old adobe or restored historical building and you can pretty much find someplace to salsa dance every night of the week.  It is because I cannot live without freshly baked bread from the panaderia on Mountain Road (yes, the panaderia, because really there is only one worthy of the name).  Or because I could never stay long in a place that doesn't understand that I go both ways--red and green--and never in a city, never with a person that doesn't know what that means.

I need to feel the beating heart of this city as I wake every morning and go to sleep at night, feel the raw power of Mother Nature--the river, the mountains, the cottonwoods--just as part of this town as our adobes and streets, keeping us rooted to our desert land.  I take pride in the fact that my freeway can touch the heavens as it bends and curves over the city in a blaze of turquoise and concrete.

It is in my love of the people warm as the sun that bronzes our skin.  We live with an unapologetic ferocity, wearing our passions--those messy, violent things--like badges of honor, refusing to be silenced, refusing to be anything other than loud, open, dancing, breathing bundles of humanity.

Me.  This city is me.  Soy, soy de Burque.