Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

Respect is one of life's greatest treasures I mean, what does it all add up to if you don't have that? - Marilyn Monroe + + + I cannot offer you self respect, but I can offer weird shit from Mexico. A few subscribers and a few friends who are also subscribers, or have assisted in this endevour in other ways, I feel are far too underappreciated. Seeing as Tess and I are living meager paycheck to meager paycheck down here while exploring, photographing, and writing about this marvelous country it dawned on me that those who have held out their hands, and wallets, to our Patreon and PayPal.Me accounts are not as appreciated as I would like them to be. So, with what little extra cash Tess and I have managed to scrape together over the last few weeks we have assembled the 'Mexican Box of Mystery'! [[Behold its mysterious mystery!]] What could be inside? Well, that is part of the mystery. There are many things for may different people. Some friends I...

"Home. . home is where you wear your hat... I feel so break-up, I wanna go home." - Lord John Whorfin, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension + + + Every time I cross the border from Mexico into Texas, in the US of A I get this weird feeling. This strange anxiety, in the pit of my stomach, that feeling you get when you know you've eaten some bad Chinese food but the effects haven't set in yet. [[When walking across the bridge I may have once or twice danced in front of this sign, just to say I did it Which I just did. So there you go.]] Its not dealing with the immigration officers on the Mexican side, unless I'm in my car. I'm always worried about getting Greta stuck in Texas after that one fiasco thanks to the state of Pennsylvania no longer issuing stickers. Its not dealing with the border patrol agents on the US side either. Though they have performed more than one "agricultural inspection" on Gr...

"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)...