Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

"All right, Popeye's here! Get your hands on your heads, get off the bar, and get on the wall"  - Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle, The French Connection + + +  Of late things around here have been less than ideal. I prefer to not go into the daily minutiae of my difficulties. Suffice to say that thus far none of them have been caused directly by living in Mexico. So far, Mexico, its people, its culture, its food, and its shockingly polite drivers  have been very good to me. In happier news when I must cross the border into the forsaken lands known as South Texas there is a recently discovered beacon of hope I can always look forward to. About 18 kilometers or so (I have my GPS set to metric as that is how they roll south of the border, and I like to avoid speeding tickets in any country) from the border amidst a never ending sea of strip malls, tire salons, car washes... the dust.. the dust gets on and into everything, auto dealerships, pawn shops, and chain ...

"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)...

"There is a curse upon my every waking breath, and I cannot escape the darkness. It feels like every step is gonna be my last, and I cannot escape the darkness. Some have tried to lift me up, but I only dragged them down with me, for I cannot escape the darkness." - Those Poor Bastards, I Cannot Escape the Darkness + + + Caution: Pretentious melancholy writing ahead, but fuck, you should have expected that at some point. I'm a poor writer living in a country where you can get cheap booze and drugs more easily than you can get a permit to drive a car from another country. + + +  "Have you ever heard of exorcism? It's a stylized ritual in which rabbis or priests try to drive out the so-called invading spirit. It's pretty much discarded these days, except by the Catholics who keep it in the closet as a sort of embarrassment. It has worked, in fact, although not for the reason they think, of course. It was purely the force of sugge...

While you, my faithful readers, await some actual content please feel free to enjoy this list of my favorite quotations. Some from the famous, the infamous, the intellectual, some from ancient history, some from my favorite films. The only real commonalities between them are that in one way or another they have meant something to me. Enjoy! + + +  "I am in the prime of my senility." - Brother Theodore . . . "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean THEY aren't paranoid, too." - Faculty X slogan, Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (Grant Morrison & Frank Quietly) . . . "One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real." - Klaus Kinski, Actor . . . "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." - Napoleon Bonaparte . . . "To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?"...