Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

"As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air." - Prospero, The Tempest (Act IV, Scene I)  + + + A young man with a thick Midwestern accent is smoking pot, crack, and who knows what other things, in the Crack Shack behind my squat at Carlito's Cafe. He is speaking loudly, via speakerphone, with his girlfriend who is somewhere cold and complaining, no shit, about how the tractor is broke and Old Man Rogers (again, no shit, she actually called her neighbor that) needs help and her daddy is just working himself to death. [[The first and last bit of art on the walls of Carlito's Cafe during my stay there.]] I wonder if this wholesome young white guys (I peeked, there is a hole at the top of my wall adjacent to the Crack Shack where an AC unit used to live) paramour knows he is in a back alley in Mexico smoking crack next to a strip

"She lives like tomorrow isn't coming and yesterday never happened." - Crystal Woods, Write Like No One Is Reading + + + Friday, Day One: Nuevo Senorial "Around the outside of the room other beautiful women wearing little or nothing at all flitted between the infatuated, intoxicated men, sometimes luring them away for a private dance. The men would follow obediently, weighed down by lust and credit cards."  - R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room [[They have a sign on the front of the building, but I suspect this is how most random clients discover what waits beyond the privacy curtains at the end of the entrance hallway.]] There are a lot of strange places I expected to find myself in my life. Sitting in the corner of a darkened Mexican strip club in a dusty border town wasn't one of them. 2:30 in the afternoon, beer in one hand, pen in the other, making observations about the club and its clientele for my weird little travelogue. Somet

New material coming shortly. Between the spotty internet down here and several other writing projects taking up my time I have not had a chance to finish the upcoming post. It will appear shortly. In a day or two. Expect weirdness, strippers, and general shenanigans from south of the border courtesy of your friend and humble narrator, me. Until then; courage. + + + This post and its original content copyright James Radcliff, and has been brought to you by Mexico, tequila, and generally poor decision making. If you would like to donate to support this bizarre little travelogue, feel free to do so via Patreon or PayPal. As always, this strange and debaucherous adventure has been brought to your screen by viewers like you. Thank you. https://www.patreon.com/jamesradcliff paypal.me/jamesradcliff  https://www.instagram.com/dispatches_from_the_field/

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas + + + The day started like most others here in Nuevo Progreso; wake up, be angry with the alarm clock, pet Tessa, shut off or forget to and be angry with secondary alarm (I'm not a morning person, at all), "morning constitutional", wash face and brush teeth, pet Tessa, get dressed and ready for the day, pet Tessa, inform Tessa she is in charge of la casa until I return, lay out her duties for the day (hunt any vermin present, eat healthy, nap frequently, don't go too hard on the 'nip, generally be a good gato pequeño until I return), and leave to walk the arduous one quarter of a block from Carlito's Cafe to Vampiz. After arriving I retrieved my flyer (theirs are laminated and thus reusable), said my usual pleasantries

“This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.” - Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses + + + Today I saw a man sell cocaine in tiny bags from a bicycle. He has been around the block you might say. I've seen him with the other street level cartel dealers, the same ones who occasionally keep me awake by blasting their music from the shit car they sit in on cold nights. Not nearly as nice as the vehicles that deliver them their products and collect the cartels cut of the money, no sir, not at all that nice. Its a shit car, with a great sound system, and if they we

"Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape."  - William S. Burroughs + + + Some of my faithful readers, more so those I count among my friends in the real world (meat-space, as some say) have had one question above all others for me in the last few months; " Why the fuck are you moving to Mexico? " [[To the right is the United States, to the left is Mexico, don't go swimming here on a hot afternoon.]] So this post shall at long last attempt to answer that question. To a lesser extent other questions that went along with it, some of which were somewhat insulting to my intelligence, but I don't hold grudges. OK, that last statement is a total lie as anyone who knows me can attest. I've always blamed being half-Native for that (the other half being Hispanic, a people stereo-typically not known for controlling their anger in the moment)