"we were born to fuck each other one way or another."

The semester's almost over and part of me wishes I had more time here to cultivate some budding relationships. I've missed one opportunity here in particular that I think really had some potential. But now I'm set and speaking in a defeatist tone that's premature considering I have two more weeks in the City before I head out on the road for the remainder of my time in Mexico. Two more weeks to establish something tangible that could reach far beyond the four months I've spent hiding out here.

This is me letting possibility slip away well before she's out of sight and out of reach...

My Lady's House

Yesterday I discovered a documentary photographer through an exhibition at a museum near my place here in La Ciudad.

The majority of the work by Pedro Meyer is classic b/w documentary shots from his work around the Americas in earlier decades but his recent material is digital, some modified and some straight-forward photography.

There was one photo (relatos y retratos 5/6) at the gallery without a title from the mid-70s of a young woman sitting naked on a front porch in a fetal position, her head is turned with her mouth covered by her arm and her eyes are set on the photographer behind the camera. When you're actually standing in front of the print, her eyes follow you as if she's the one observing you and not the other way around.

For me this girl represents what I want in a partner. Someone with sharp intelligence not only evident in what she says but in what she doesn't say. What she lets settle in order to observe. She accepts and exposes herself to the scrutiny of others but she's looking right back at you doing the same.

***

As always I'm distracted from my responsibilities. I'm ruling out all my options for life back in New York and life after school. The collapsing economy helps me to remain realistic about my plans for the next couple of years. One plan I cannot be swayed into abandoning is to adopt a dog once I have the income and the housing suitable for the care of one.

I'm scouting out possible living arrangements on the interweb every few days. It kills a lot of hours and I feel productive even when I'm avoiding schoolwork. Hartford's looking kinda nice right now...

***

I hope I don't find myself living alone for very long. I really don't. This is kind of an extreme example but I watched "Grizzly Man" the other day and it got me thinking how an unrealistic sense of idealism, morality, and perfection, especially if constantly applied as a litmus test to people around you, can lead to this anti-social behavior and profound resentment of humanity and human interaction.

I don't want to become so rigid in my search for a girl, or even just friends to surround myself with, that I consider certain differences insurmountable obstacles.

I think I'm better than I was a couple years ago but sometimes I see too much of an indifferent loner in myself to be very confident in my social skills or prospects of finding someone to love and love me back.

I can easily shrug off going home alone one night but when those days accumulate without much notice, when I finally count them all up, I might be doing so in an air-tight hermetic seal I long ago secured for myself.

***

Iron & Wine


There is light in my lady's house
And there's none but some falling rain
This like a spoken word
She is more than her thousand names

No hands are half as gentle
Or firm as they like to be
Thank God you see me the way you do
Strange as you are to me

It is good in my lady's house
And the shape that her body makes
Love is a fragile word
In the air on the length we lay

No hands are half as gentle
Or firm as they like to be
Thank God you see me the way you do
Strange as you are to me

Waiting for my recession garden.

"And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war." Isaiah 2:4

I don't really have much to say as of late. I think a lot a shut myself up in my head and in my room. I talk, I just never actually say anything.

I photographed the 40th anniversary of 2 de Octubre. There was a march/protest which resulted in clashes between the cops and the protesters. My shots might be incorporated into a documentary by this director from Tijuana.

Recently Liberation Theology has been peaking my interest.

I'm in a constant state of waiting around for some shit to go down. Something that will define my future direction in life.

"When anything can happen, nothing tends to. It's only when you realize the places your story can't go do you discover all the places it can." (some quote I paraphrased from an article I lost in the shuffle of time.)

I like this article.

I can envision my own little recession garden on my plot of land outside Hartford, CT.

"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." -A.E.

There's a twenty-day void on this blog of mine that I can't really explain. The void, though in a sense, accurately reflects this past month for me here in the D.F. I've been distracted by memories from back at home, by people, by the news... of a collapsing economy and a country seemingly unraveling before everyone's eyes.

***

I'm physically here but my mind is thousands of miles away and years ahead of the present. At any given morning or any given evening, when I'm skipping class to sleep in or avoiding my homework, I'm pissing away my last semester at Purchase with my friends, I'm working at a Hispanic support org. in Westchester, I'm in the middle of my Master's in Social Work in Puerto Rico, or I'm married with a cute little wife and two children with traditional Spanish names.

I can feel my life being re-routed in a direction I know will make me happy but I'm so impatient that I'm not paying attention to the road or the directions or signs or anything. I just daydream about my final destination.

***

A couple weeks ago I was at a beautiful little hacienda in Morelos for the weekend attending job training and orientation for my camp gig in October and last weekend I was in Gaunajuato for the Independencia break with friends. Both trips were oppurtunities to wake up without the blarring car horns honking their way through D.F. traffic. Both trips were oppurtunities from me to make something happen.

I feel like 'mI squandering my chance to do something drastic while I'm here; I feel like I'm playing it too safe and lack ambition or the ability to abandon my caution. I don't know what I want to happen though. I feel like I'm loosing creativity in my life.

***

I haven't yet opened up the window in my room today. It's been gray and overcast all morning and into the afternoon but the bloated clouds haven't given way yet, they haven't let loose all that tension which makes them swell and hang heavy in the sky. That's how I've been feeling, swelled and heavy with so much pent up tension I'm not able to release. Sexual tension, creative tension, etc. To steal a line from the movie "9 Songs," the D.F. is a city where "claustrophobia and agoraphobia are in the same place, like two people in a bed."

***

Last night I had a dream I won't describe here about a friend that died a couple months ago. I'm still somewhat in denial about the seriousness of our friendship but I haven't forgiven myself for loosing touch with her during those two years before the accident. I told myself that I won't loose touch with friends like that again but it seems kind of unavoidable. Chance can fuck your life up so quickly and I guess all you can is prepare for the worst.

***

I've been retreating into my own mind lately when I should be doing everything but. I have a little over two more months left here and I should work toward what I want rather than just waiting for it to happen.

I'll work mornings and you can work through the night...

Against Me!

It was a birthday gift
of a Mexican Telecaster
And from this day on I will play along
to all my young pioneers records
And there will be a poetry
spoken silently between me and the stereo
I'll work mornings
and you can work through the night

Mary, there is no hope for us
If this GM van don't make it
across the state line
we might as well lay down and die
Because if Florida takes us
we're taking everyone down with us
Where we're coming from (yeah)
will be the death of us

And I cannot help but hold on
to a handful of times
when what was spoken
was a revolution in itself,
and what we were doing
was the only thing that mattered
And how good it felt
to kill the memory of nights spent
holding your shirt for the smell
I heard you used to cry
when you made love to him
but this band will play on
Because all we can do is what we've always done.
And on and on and on...

Mary, there is no hope for us
If this GM van don't make it
across the state line
we might as well lay down and die
Because if Florida takes us
we're taking everyone down with us
Where we're coming from (yeah)
will be the death of us

***

I've been giving very little attention to my school work down here. I skip whole days of class and give it little thought. I used to be a good student with a GPA bordering a 4.0 but my average starting slipping during Cape Town. I lost confidence in higher education and lost interest in becoming an academic or an intellectual. The lessons of reality aren't learned inside a classroom but outside and around the world.

None of my credits matter here so I've decided to do things at my own pace and live rather than keep myself cooped up reading academic essays all semester.

Fuck that. I want to see the Americas through my own eyes, not through the "supported standards" of scientists.

***

The political environment back in the States is getting pretty tense and I've been obsessed with the news coverage on it.

Some times, when I hear about the people resisting in that hostile environment, I wonder why I'm here, why I'm running away to where its easier. I'm on vacation exploiting the position of a developing country while many of my countrymen and contemporaries are trying to prevent their home from collapsing in on itself.

I want to be able to reject the specialization of knowledge but I always find myself retreating back to it like a safety net when I'm too scared to just pick up a leave.

I came to Mexico but I rationalized it with academics. That's always the excuse when there shouldn't be a need for one.

I should really be stepping out of this box that's looking more and more like a cage.
I shouldn't be running away from responsibilities at home and I shouldn't simply be relocating my cage to somewhere with a nicer view and cheaper drinks.

***

When I got back from Africa I had already made up my mind to leave the U.S. and live my life in a location with stronger ties to the international community and the people of the world who don't seem to exist to most of North America. I was going to do a 180 with my perspective and turn my attention to the greater world and leave the U.S. to rot. I was under no delusion that I would totally block out any influence, relationship, or news from home but I thought I could at least begin a new life as a sort of voluntary exile.

But while I still plan to leave the U.S., I feel like my initial instinct to get the hell out as fast as possible is misguided, irresponsible, and even selfish. Because as a citizen of an empire, an exploiter, and an insider, I should be reeling in the overextended power of my country from where it is most effective, from its heart.

I want to know the the U.S., cuerpo y alma, before I leave it.


Walking is still honest.
So I will walk the world.

***

Against Me!

Dear mother,
This is just survival.
Cannot promise your children everything,
But you would lie so they can sleep tonight.
Defeat tasted nothing like you said.
Still 22 days left till the end of the world.
My legacy was making you a man
For a justice I could not change.
This is one voice not to forget;
"Fight every fight like you can win;
An iron fisted champion,
An iron willed fuck up."

Can anybody tell me why God won't speak to me?
Why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas?
Why death is easier than living?
You can be almost anything
When you're on your fucking knees.
Not today,
Not my son,
Not my family,
Not while walking is still honest,
And you haven't given up on me.

Dear shithead,
This isn't happening;
The sky is really falling,
The paint's all made of lead,
There's asbestos in the walls,
Hell's coming to rip off the doors
To your priveleged heaven.
Do you want to love and feel it?
You can look but you can't taste it.
You can reach but you'll never have it.
We are untouchable;
Untouchable is something to be.

Can anybody tell me why God won't speak to me?
Why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas?
Why death is easier than living?
You can be almost anything
When you're on your fucking knees.
Not today,
Not my son,
Not my family,
Not while walking is still honest,
And you haven't given up on me,
And you haven't given up on me,
And you haven't forgotten me...

Yo sigo aqui...

I woke up on Friday with a swollen cheek and a pain pin-pointed at three places along my jaw. A nagging feeling had begun the day before while wandering around La Condesa with friends so I gargled some hydroxide and drank two-for-one beers at a near-by bar and quickly forgot about it.

My first instinct is always to self-medicate, provide instant relief, and take care of the problem later. I was nearly thrown into the hospital when I came back from South Africa because I had been traveling for weeks with two torn-up and infected feet. Hah. During that appointment my doctor claimed that all young adults think they're invincible and I guess sometimes I'm no exception.

Anyway, once again I basically ignored the pain because I figured it was my wisdom tooth and the area just needed to be flushed out. I went out that night, slept out, and arrived back at my place the next afternoon after falling asleep on the bus and missing my stop by probably 20 minutes.

Fortunately my roommate is friends with a dentist and set me up with an appointment later on in the day. Needless to say that the root of my problems, as the dentist explained at his office, were essentially my own fault for not properly taking care of my teeth. The area around my wisdom tooth had become infected again and I had massive plaque build-up and so on and so on. I was there for a few hours and he cleaned up my teeth and pulled the wisdom tooth. It turned out that the tooth actually had three roots and one was scrapping again my jaw.

I've always had teeth issues since before I even had any. Around the time a baby would be growing in a first set of teeth I was not cooperating. So they pumped me up with calcium injections and I grew so many so fast that I have a double-tooth on the top and some crowding on the bottom. I never got braces and never felt the need to. I already needed modern science to over-come my heart condition and metal bars in my mouth seemed unnecessary. It seemed superficial to me.

Anyway, the whole thing came out to be a fraction of the price of what it would have been at home. The guy was cool too and we actually went to lunch before he took my tooth out.

I kept the thing and I want to bury it somewhere in Mexico, somewhere I fall in love with.

***

I've been having a good time with the people around me which is calming my anxiety about the expectations put on me by my department back at school and my professors. I am expected to do a project while I'm down here but I'm not so confident in my abilities to follow through. My professor and thesis adviser is down here for a week. He's assuaged some of my concerns but I'm still nervous. I'm not the type to worry about academics or grades but I am being expected to do something I was never too sure about from the beginning...

***

Since Friday I've been recovering, eating mostly fruit in the form of baby mush and ice cream. I took some pictures of my quirky little apartment today instead of going to school and I've been keeping up on the political bullshit back home.

***

The NYTimes has a great photo essay on Namibia in the travel section of their website. It captures the country pretty well from a tourist's point of view.

Here it is.

I remember sitting in the middle of the shallowest part of the Orange River which separates Namibia and South Africa one night when the overland tour I was part of set up camp. The sun setting behind the mountains was stunning and I felt little fish biting my feet and fingers. There I thought that one riverside looked exactly like the other and that the river was only a border assigned on a map and that it couldn't prevent me from swimming across. So I did and then we all did.

All of us on the tour, we stripped naked and swam across.

***

For the free-flow of ideas and the free-flow of people, I want to walk past the make-believe lines of the Americas, the fortified borders, and barbed-wire fences because I know that a red line on a map is bullshit and all the terrain is the same.

El extranjero

According to my roommate, Acapulco used to be a happening place in the 70s and 80s, a rare resort town that retained at least some of its Mexican identity.

My parents went there for their honeymoon over 26 years ago and I have a vague memory of chasing a peacock in a plaza when my family vacationed there when I was very little.

Most tourists fly into Acapulco, bypassing the north of Mexico. The same goes for Cancun. Now, these places have become a haven for well-off northerners looking for a good time and cheap drinks. Acapulco, in that sense, doesn't disappoint.

This past weekend I ventured down to the famous hot spot with some friends for a much needed break from the D.F. The water was warm and the drinks were cold and we had ourselves a great time lounging on the beach and sipping tequila and spritz. The whole town would be absolutely breath-taking if all the sand weren't stolen and sold to hotel chains and foreigners. Styrafoam and shit is swept away into the sea every evening at high tide.

We took an organized tour around the bay and onto an island on the second day and as the commercial boat sped along through the turquoise water contaminated with trash, I hung off the edge, thinking back to a few remote days on Zanzibar in the middle of my African explorations.

***

One day Cholo, a local ship builder, invited me along with his crew to run some errands around the island. I'm not a strong swimmer and I know nothing about shipbuilding but for that day, and the following when Cholo explained and showcased all the styles of ships that were used on the island, I wanted to drop out of school and join his crew. I wanted to trade with the local Muslim tribes and strap giant logs to the side of a trim ship and live and work according to the tides and the rains.

But there I, as I am here and everywhere else in the world, am a foreigner.
I am restless and rootless. The latter feeds the former and the former feeds the latter.

***

Due to the negligence of my University here, there's a chance my student visa may get denied and I won't be able to finish out the semester. A part of me wishes that would happen so I have an excuse to skip town and head south...