Dispatches from The Mayan Empire

"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...

“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...

"Tourists came around and looked into our tipis. That those were the homes we choose to live in didn`t bother them at all. They untied the door, opened the flap, and barged right in, touching our things, poking through our bedrolls, inspecting everything. It boggles my mind that tourists feel they have the god-given right to intrude everywhere." - Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means + + + I saw an old stray dog today on the corner. He was the spitting image of 'Dogmeat' from 'The Road Warrior', an Australian cattle dog. He had mismatched eyes, one was almost pure white save for the iris, that gave him the look of an unwashed, coked-out, canine David Bowie. I called to him in both English and Spanish, but all he did was spare a bit of a sideways glance as he trotted off to wherever he was heading. That dog is still more polite than most of the tourists that visit this city. At least the on...