Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote  + + + I have been absent from this blog for a good long time now. Other things have occupied my time. My novel, basic survival, crippling depression, agonizing pain and the desperate search for some relief from it, and surely more than that. Do not think I have forgotten you, my dozens of readers. Oh no. Not a day goes by that I don't think upon this little collection of personal history and attempts at witty observations. There just never seems anything to say. Not worth putting down anyway. But here I am. Once again attempting to give my audience something to chew on while I myself go over what I write again and again hoping I'm not embarrassing myself any further....

"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 ...