Yesterday, when my nose was all clogged up, I bought some chile from this guy in Chimayo, a little village that happens to be a heavy-duty pilgrimage site (there’s a church with healing dirt in it), as well as a super-sketched-out heroin zone, although that’s subsiding a little. I’d meant to just dash in and grab some red stuff and run, but this guy wanted to do his whole spiel, feeding me pistachio nuts and making me try all the different roasts and so on: “Yeah, you’re really going to trip out on this one, chiquita!” I won’t stoop to trying to spell his accent phonetically, but one of the great things about the NM idiolect is that even old-school Spanish dudes and super-cool cholos use hippie language. So, soon enough, we were rapping, and he’s telling me about all the heavy dreams he’d been having, and how he’d been tripping out on these totally spiritual customers he’d had the day before. One was this really intense lady who’d come running up and pushed everyone else out of the way, and asked for the hottest thing he had. He showed her the powdered green chile, and she grabbed a pinch and went and snorted it. So, of course, he then tried it later on, and damn, it cleared him right out. After the pain subsided, of course. He said his one nostril was totally clear, while his other one still sounded like a spark plug not quite firing.

To congested me, this is sounding pretty good. But for the record, I’ve never even seen powdered green chile before. It reminds me of some friend of a friend’s story about trying to sell burnt-up banana peel to his friends as “Turkish black dust,” or “TBD” on the streets. So maybe I just stumbled onto a little Chimayo specialty—I must’ve missed the part where the guy asked me if I liked to party.

And a tiny part of me is thinking, Gosh, if I stick this green chile up my nose, I can write about it on my blog. Which then reminds me of how I once saw Jeffrey Steingarten talking about how even though he does seem to get up to crazy stuff in his essays, he tries never to make a story, only follow one. Snorting powdered green chile does smack of making a story.

….

So I just did the half-assed thing, and snorted a little bit. Not very far up my nose, because I’m a chicken. And it burned like a mother. But now it feels kind of good, in exactly that same pleasure:pain ratio as good hot food ingested the normal way, through your mouth. I kind of want to try it again.