Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” - Nelson Mandela + + + Woke up feeling good despite some setbacks. All in all it wasn't a bad day yesterday except for Tessa running off in the middle of the night and no coming home after an hour or to as usual. So far she has been missing almost 20 hours, so I have been unable to administer her medication... then my right front tire went out on me (It developed a bubble the size of a tennis ball) and I had to use the last of my cat-related savings to keep Greta from becoming an expensive lawn ornament. Thats life, you win some, you get kicked in the balls with a steel toed boot. Many hours later, nearly 24, Tessa has returned. She is clearly fond of our giant yard and the local businesses nearby, Thankfully the neighborhood is fulled with generally nice folks, and her collar clearly states where she lives, That said, seeing a couple of apparent cart...

"Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."  - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House + + +  It occurs to me that I have written extensively about the squat Tessa and I called home our first few weeks in Mexico. Despite its difficulties such a lack of shower, sleeping on essentially a cement floor, the lack of insulation, or windows that weren't just particle board haphazardly nailed to the window frames, the rodent issue (which Tessa dealt with in her typical brutally efficient manner quickly, she even left one of the rats dead and disemboweled in front of the hole the were entering through) or the frequently used Crack Shack in what would have been our backyard.  [[ "La Cabane à Crack", French makes it sound so much more respectable. ]] Despite all of those problems ...

"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 ...

"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)...