so last night...

...I found myself walking the streets of San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico with my nuevo amigo Paul--a former elected official of the Irish Labour Party--and we're both looking for any excuse to practice our pitiful spanish, amongst other things. A rather attractive young woman in a fetching sombrero blanco sitting at an outdoor cafe waves at us so we decide to take advantage of the situation. We saunter over, I barely mutter "Hello, I like your hat" in the kind woman's native tongue, when ten of her best friends walk out of the cafe and they all start demanding to have their pictures taken with us. And the first woman made me wear her hat.


Many of them wanted individual photos with us. This went on for maybe ten minutes. Then they said good bye and left. Earlier that day we had visited Oventik, one of the Zapatista Autonomous villages. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the variety of human activity.

All Hail Mexico

We headed east out of Patzcauro a few days ago. Our destination was the tourist town Valle de Bravo, built near a lake, and once described to Justin as the Aspen of Mexico. We arrived in the afternoon, and the plan was to find a place to park, walk around the lake, then drive out of town to find a campsite. As soon as we pulled into town were we surrounded by Chilangos, rich kids from Mexico City, parading in their polo shirts. It was Sunday of three day weekend, and the place was just swamped. Without even bothering to look for parking, Justin drove back out of town and we decided a short car tour of Valle de Bravo was more than sufficient.

We drove about another hour or so up a mountain, and eventually came to some sort of state park. The park road was covered in red pine needles and the forest was as lush as Oregon's. We found the perfect campsite in a large clearing with ample wood to make a fire. We ate sausage tortas that—due to the heightened sensory susceptibility from camping—tasted as if they were manna from heaven, and made it through a liter and a half of tequila. We got into a long discussion on atheism verses agnosticism with Justin and I stubbornly in the first camp and Zeb in the later. Overall, it was one of the best nights camping so far: best location, best fire, best food, best conversation. And then God bore down his wrath upon us for our blasphemous chatter. It started to hail.

If the Eskimos have eighty words for snow, surely the English language can afford a new word for the torrential storm we found ourselves caught in. Marbles were falling from the sky; Justin dove into his tent and the rest of us jumped in the car. Within fifteen minutes the ground was covered in hail. We were laughing like school children. Once the storm passed we got out of the car and all kept falling over on the slippery hail covered ground. Dan incorrectly thought it would be fun to throw hail-balls at Zeb and myself, and his aim could of landed him a job at a vasectomy clinic. Our revenge is still being plotted. They other boys then cracked open two liter-boxes of wine, of which I was wise enough to not to partake, though it could not be judged uncalled for, due to the festive atmosphere.

The drive the next morning was a little rough around the edges. As we passed through the outskirts of Toluca, a seeming Mexico City satellite town, another hail storm came upon us. The storm fogged up the windows of the Party Car, whose poor defrost system just ain't what it used to be, all while a rather hungover Justin was trying to navigate the most complicated road signage we'd encountered thus far. Both Justin and I got splashed in the face with road water from passing vans driving through puddles, since we had to keep the windows down for visibility. We eventually found the correct libre road and started heading due south on our slow march towards the Pacific Ocean.

In Mexico, the federal government, or some other national body that promotes tourism, awards certain charming small towns the accolade of Pueblo Magico. It refers to them as such in the guide book pages of our atlas, and when in these magic towns you see the phrase written under the name of the town on various surfaces such as newsstands and ice cream vendor's carts. We've been to a number of these Pueblos Magicos, and I keep imagining that if we turn down the right street we'll run into a wizard in a sombrero or that we'll meet a talking donkey. So far no such luck. But we were approaching the Pueblo Magico of Taxco, and we thought we'd stop to experience the magic.

Taxco is an old silver mining town built up on a mountainside. According to our atlas' guide, it is also the birthplace of the margarita. We drove into town, and immediately the car was swamped with children and adults directing us to park at their hotel and to eat at their restaurant. The streets were full of German and Italian tourist. Again frustrated by the lack of parking and general chaotic nature of driving through tiny streets not designed for cars while trying not to run over tourists, Mexican children, and stay dogs, Justin ended up just driving straight through the town. We've driven through more destinations on this trip than places we've actually stopped. It's a pretty funny tourist style.

We ended up camping about an hour south of Taxco in a cow pasture under a radio tower. The owner of the land came by on his donkey, and while he didn't seem thrilled to have us there, he said we could camp for the night as long as we didn't catch his field on fire, which we all agreed a reasonable request. The ground was either rock or cow dung, and I was skeptical we'd find a place to set up the tents. In a field of tall grass next to the road we found two spots where the grass was flattened, making soft beds roughly the size of a tent.

We did not put two and two together at the time, but a tent is roughly the same size as a cow. We put this together in the middle of the night when the cows came to lie down on their beds of grass only to find their homes occupied by our invading army tent encampment. Justin was woken up by a bull chewing the tall grass from under his tent. He and Dan opened the flap to see the cinematic image of the bull silhouetted by the moonlight. A cow muzzled next to Zeb's and my tent, though after the first camping night in Mexico a few weeks ago when I was awoken and scared to death by a cow, I've gotten over my fear of bovines, and I fell right back to sleep. Eventually the cows accepted defeat and both sides made out with very few casualties.

I'm writing this entry from the porch of our hotel room in Acapulco, with a slight headache from the night before and a cup of nescafe almost working. We have a beautiful view of the two taller hotels in front of us. The sky has been covered in thick clouds since we rolled in to town yesterday afternoon, which despite the warmth and near ninety percent humidity of the place, has stopped any of us from actually getting in the bay/ocean past our knees. Acapulco is everything you'd expect for a three-quarters of a million peopled modern decadent never-never land built by a slightly sexually repressed slightly poor Catholic country.

Yesterday was Tuesday, and all the vacationers had gone back to work after the long weekend. We met a man who worked for the tourist bureau who directed us to a cheap hotel three blocks from “Disco Beach”. Of the six or so horrendous clubs that compromise “Disco Beach” only one of them had any clientele on this night after the big weekend. Zeb couldn't figure out how to appreciate this town, ironically or unironically, and opted to stay in for the night while Justin, Dan and I went out into the belly of the beast. By the end of the night we were at the terrible club “Paradiso”. At least it was outside, and an expensive beer in Mexico is still only three dollars.

The highlight of the evening, however, was surprisingly before we went to the club. We actually met and hung out with some actual Mexicans. As the three of us were walking along the beach we came upon a group of ten or so kids of varying ages from sixteen to thirty. Christian was the thirty year old. He had been married in the states to a woman from the U.S. and had lived in Austin for a while. He was a total club dude, but incredibly nice, and regaled us stories of being newly arrived in Austin, blasting Kia out of his car and singing along before he knew what the English meant. Then there was Luis, a nineteen year old queer kid with plugs in his ears, a birthday on Halloween, and a very charming disposition. He was really attracted to Justin, and he found Dan too hot to even consider. It was an interesting mix of kids, some macho and club style with pressed button-down shirts and gelled hair, some metal and stoner, some queer, and they all hung out together. They were into the fact that we were musicians and convinced Justin to sing them part of song. Another guy in the group, a young handsome kid in a pressed black button down shirt and pants, sang us a song in return.

Guanajuatoization

Mucho tiempo has pasted since I last posted an accounting of my southern adventures, but much of it has been worth recounting, so bare with me kind readers.

We spent two nights camping on different spots of the beautiful Rio Santa Maria. The river itself is almost a bright blue, possibly from heavy calcium deposits in the water. The first night we camped in a national park under a highway bridge, and there were still a few cows roaming around when we pulled into our site. We got there with just enough time to jump into the river before the sun went behind the mountains. In the morning we witnessed a miracle. A little shop was open just down the road that sold coffee.

After a hike up the river valley and a swim, we drove a few hours to a spot on the river Justin where had been during his first winter in Mexico nine years ago. The valley on the way down was straight out of Apocalypse Now, minus the war. Tall palm trees, cane fields as far as one could see with mountains on all sides, it was stunning. A number of locals had told us it was just a dirt road down to the river, and one not in particularly good shape, but turned out to be newly paved, which made the ride all that more enjoyable.

When we got to the campsite, however, we figured out why the road was newly paved. There was a construction site on the bank of the river, no structures yet, but bulldozers and piles of rock ten feet high all around. Someone was about to create a major tourist destination. To the right of the construction there was a still a large grass field with horses grazing and a few Mexican families enjoying the afternoon by the river. We set up our campsite and started to collect wood for a fire. Justin met a young local man named Delfino who offered to boat us up river to the Tamul waterfall for a very reasonable price. We made plans for him to meet us at the campsite at eleven am the next morning.

In the morning the campsite was blanketed in a fog, with mist rising off the river, which was now much warmer than the air. I could have been convinced I woke up in Ireland, rolling green hills with horses grazing, and it was all a ten minute drive from what looked like South East Asia. Microclimates present a challenge the foundations of my atheism. Justin, Dan and I ran into Delfino early in the morning and he recommended a place just up the road that sold coffee, another miracle. Our intention was to just get our morning fix and take it back to camp, waiting for the others to awake before breaking fast, but men are weak. We buckled under the temptation of huevos mexicanos—green chilies, tomatoes, onions: the colors of the Mexican flag. We watched the Mexican equivalent of The View under a circular thatched roof with open sides. Add to all these wonders the fact that the establishment had a toilet with a seat, and I might has well of died and been in heaven.

We figured that Delfino would have a motor boat, but he grabbed an oar for each of us from the back of his mini-van. We set out on a fifteen minute walk through the cane fields to where he and his partner Celestino docked their boat. Tamul is a major tourist destination, so there were many boats, all painted vibrant two color schemes. We even passed one team of guides retouching the paint on their vessel.

We paddled up stream for about half an hour through gorgeous canyons and surrealist rock formations. We docked on a big rock in the middle of the river about three hundred feet from the Tamul waterfall, one of the largest in Mexico. As we were rowing back we passed a few boats of Mexican tourists heading up to the falls, one boat ferrying the young couple we had seen doing the adult at the previous waterfall we visited (see the previous blog entry). We gave them a big smile and waved.

About halfway back down the river we stopped at a spring-water cave and all went swimming. Delfino said it was at least a hundred feet deep, and it seemed about thirty feet high at some points with giant stalactites hanging down. It was Samantha and Kyle's last day in Mexico, and there couldn't have been a better way to spend it.

That night we rented a hotel room on the north side of Cuidad Valles so that Sam and Kyle would be on the road to the border in the morning. The owner, or owner's husband—it was hard to tell, looked like an aging heavyset Mexican Sammy Davis Jr. with a terrible jet black toupee. He wore an unnecessarily heavy black leather jacket and carried around photo copied magazine articles that purportedly proved he had been one of the first people to discover the Grand Canyon, and that he personally knew Bill Clinton. He was very eager to explain this to anyone passing by, whether or not they understood a word of Spanish.

Cuidad Valles is the doppelganger for the part of Tel Aviv that reminds one of Queens, NY. According to the shy and awkward teenager who worked at the internet cafe where the internet didn't work, the city has no town square, though this may have been lost in translation. We ate terrible tortas at a fast food joint where I accidentally ordered “papas gordo”, or “fat fries” when I meant to say “grande” or “large”.

After saying our goodbyes to Sam, Kyle, and the Workhorse Van the next morning, the remaining four of us—Dan, Justin, Zeb and myself—walked across the street to the gorditas stand where all the cops in Valles hang out. We debated our route for a long time and decided to take the road less traveled, or at least the road less traveled by Justin and Zeb, since neither Dan nor I have traveled any roads in Mexico. We decided to head west and south to Guanajuato, then down through Michoacan, onto Acapulco, and finally over to the Oaxacan beaches following the southern coast. It seemed like a fine plan, but first we had to get through San Luis Potosi and the populated desert of northern central Mexico.

So far, we had mainly been in Hausteca, which is not a state but a cultural and geographic region, analogous to “New England,” “the Pacific Northwest,” or “Mid-Atlantic” in the states. Huasteca is lush and vibrant, completely divorced from what comes to the average yank's mind when they think of Mexico. The area around San Luis Potosi, however, is exactly the poverty, desolation, arid landscape and general fucked-up-ness that is the gringo's stereotype of Mexico. Dry, shrubby desert surrounded us in all directions. The building material changed from Hausteca's defiantly charming concrete cinder blocks to light red brick with heavy caulking in designs that somehow simply looked sad and tired against the barren landscape. Of the buildings we passed, most were only one story, half were abandoned, and half of the remaining ones were in an indefinite state of incompletion. We never made it to the center of San Luis Potosi, which perhaps does have some charming historical buildings, but the outskirts were stock industrial city, much like the strips of Queens, NY that are all chopshops and food stands plopped down in the middle of the desert.

Our first attempt to camp for the night was in an abandoned national park site just south of the city. It sure did look perfect on the map. We drove through a small town across from a highway and a thermo-electrical plant. The whole scene appeared to be out of a contemporary movie about the war in Iraq, if the studios thought the audience was gullible enough to believe small towns in Iraq were built out of light red brick. But the town sure did look like it had just been bombed. There was hardly one completed building amongst the lot, though we did pass an internet cafe on one corner. Many Mexicans appear to be content getting halfway through a building project, erecting two and three quarters of the walls, then sitting back, and sighing to themselves “eh, that's enough.” Everything from dad adding a second story to the family home to four story apartment buildings obviously built by a developer seem to follow this pattern. Creation and destruction achieve the same aesthetic.

When the government decides to close a national park in Mexico this must entail the removal of all signs, roads, and any evidence what so ever that the place ever existed. The sun was already setting behind the mountains when we decided to abandon our search for the park and just head down the way hoping to find a dirt road to camp on. We eventually found such a road, though by now it was dark, so we weren't quite sure how clean or unoccupied our campsite was. It was on a little creek next to some farm land. While Zeb and I were setting up our tent under some trees, we heard what we thought was a shotgun firing. I can't say I was the most relaxed I've ever been. It turned out to just be fireworks that someone thought were important to set off to celebrate Tuesday night. Once we had set everything up, a horse drawn cart with two or three farm hands passed us on it's way to the main road. They didn't stop or say anything to us. We awoke the next morning to discover that the place was covered in trash and that there was a little house just across the creek through some trees. A few more donkey pulled carts and one pick-up truck drove right passed us, however, and no one seemed to mind our camping there.

Guanajuato was our next destination and we all liked it so much that we ended up spending two days in the town. It is one of the most beautiful small cities I have ever seen. Built in a steep canyon in the 16^th century, it resembles the medieval cities of Europe but with the extreme landscape and vibrant colors of the buildings, it surpasses many of them with it's splendor. I also drank the first decent espresso I've had in all of Mexico. It is definitely a college/tourist town, which does make some of its vibrancy feel artificial, but still, there are enough people who live there milling around and going about their daily business that the place would feel vibrant non-the-less.

One thing I noticed that U.S. planners could glean from such a city was how incredibly small many of the store fronts were. Many shops were no more than ten feet deep and maybe ten or twenty feet wide. It might be a way to keep chain stores out of cities, and a way to integrate the food cart movement into the street scape. The small business food carts that are springing up all around Portland and Austin (probably other cities, and in Portland at least the city government is actively encouraging it) are a great recent U.S. city revitalization plan, and they certainly have their charms, but they can't compare to having shops of the same size (and same rent) built into the city facade. I'd love to do a study on Guanajuato, or any city really, that compared store size, rent, profit, distance from the employees homes and number of employees.

My friend Tommy Rouse once explained the chasm between people who like living in cities versus people who don't as the difference between people who like being around crazy people and people who don't want to engage with crazy people. While I think he meant it as a humorous slight against the fear associated with suburban flight, the truth is most often spoken in jest. People watching is certainly one of my main reasons for loving city life, and the more eccentric the people, the more entertaining it is to watch them. And I don't mean this in a condescending way. I strongly believe Ronald Reagan should go down in history as one of our worst presidents for cutting funding for programs assisting people with mental handicaps and creating the immoral homeless problem that the U.S. has. But I also think there is a difference between laughing at someone and appreciating their eccentricities. I've lived in some great cities for appreciating crazy people—Minneapolis, New York, Baltimore—but I have to admit, I saw a man in Guanajuato Mexico whom I believe has all the others beat. He was walking down the busiest tourist street with a toilet on his head. This man deserves all the government assistance available to help him get through this hard, hard life, but he also deserves an award for making me and most of the people on that street smile.

We found a great campsite just outside of town on the edge of a rock quarry that was also grazing land for cattle and sheep. When one shepherd passed by with his flock he waved and smiled, and gestured charades of us sleeping there for the night. It seemed like the perfect campsite. In the morning, however, we noticed two little dogs hanged together by a rope on a tree on our way out. I'm hoping there is some custom I don't know about that can explain this, but regardless it was a bit disturbing.

The next night we camped south of Guanajuato on some dirt farm road, and the next morning headed to Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan. Morelia is an old colonial city, famous for its ice cream, and I did have the best soft served ice cream of my life there, cappuccino flavored. Even though the town was old and incredibly beautiful, after being on the winding streets Guanajuato, Morelia's grid felt oppressive. We also were unfortunately right in the downtown district which was seventy five percent shoe stores. One thing of note about Morelia was it's bus system. They used small white vans and painted them with colored stripes to represent which line the drove. I've always thought that buses should copy the “colored line” system that most subways employ, and I've always thought that smaller buses that came more frequently made more sense. Morelia seems to prove that these are good ideas and that they can work.

Of the four of us, I seem to be the only fan of big cities, so rather than find the cool and hip part of town we hightailed it out of there. We ended up in Patzcuaro, a city founded in the 14^th century by the indigenous ruler Tzintzuntzan as a lake resort town for the nobility. In Patzcuaro all the buildings are painted white, with a three foot high burnt sienna stripe around the base and terra cotta roofs. The only signs for the stores are painted on the buildings above the door in a black elaborate font, with the first letter of the words painted in red. And, at least in one cafe, they pull espresso shots that rival Portland's. I've even seen a few women in their mid-twenties/early-thirties that appear to be single in this town, a rarity so far on this trip, though they all seem to be vacationing with their mothers. We found an extremely reasonable hotel for less than eight dollars each, which means I was able to enjoy another gourmet espresso cortado for breakfast today.

muerto de vaca

As I was saying earlier, and as I am sure you've all heard, Mexico is very dangerous. Last night I came within one hundred feet of being trampled to death by a cow. But more on that later.

We left Xilitla and headed south west to camp in the desert for a night. Wylie Coyote land, or so Justin promised us. Between the jungle climate that surrounded Xilitla and the desert was a stretch of apline forest full of pine trees that resembled Georgia. Maybe an hour out of town, we stopped at a gas station and ran into the gringo Stephen and his wife Cindy that we had met a few days prior at the sandwich shop. We were just down the road from their house and they invited us over. Even though Stephen has only been in Mexico for two years, he has assimilated enough to the culture to describe a forty five minute drive each way down a mountain road as a “twenty minute detour”. The road was gorgeous, though, a combination of pine trees and straight tall cactus.

They live in a beautiful little town, Tichihaun, dominated by a Baroque Franciscan Mission, the largest of five in the area. Stephen was extremely knowledgeable on the history of the place, and according to him it had been a small indigenous town first, then the church was built, a few of the saints' heads on the facade had been shot off during the revolution, then the population was almost completely wiped out by the flu, after which the government gave away the lots to people to try and repopulate the place while at the same time kicking out the few remaining indigenous residents.

Stephen and Cindy had just purchased a large plot of land just on the outskirts of town where they planned to build their dream home and garden, but for the time being they were living right in town at her brother's house. Her brother was still in North Carolina with no intention of coming back, and was happy to let them live there rent free if they fixed the place up. As I mentioned in the last blog, Stephen is a retired agriculture professor, and had spent time working on agricultural project in South East Asia. Their garden, though only one year in its existence, was incredible. So many types of lettuce, spinach, five different kinds of bananas, papaya, hamaika, okra, broccoli, small trees with edible leaves, sweet potatoes, and extremely fat chickens that they had to smuggle into the country because Monsanto(or some other large evil corporation) only sells chickens in Mexico that either produce eggs or meat, not both, and neither can reproduce without an incubator. Stephan and Cindy's goal was to be self-sufficient within one more year, and they were pretty close to that goal already.

Stephan was humble enough to admit that something unforeseen could wipe out their garden, and justify the doubts of their skeptical neighbors. But he seemed to be approaching the whole thing from the right perspective—no pesticides, collecting all the rainwater on the property due to the dry climate, only watering with buckets and drip lines, feeding the chickens lots of greens with their feed—not quite permaculture, but pretty radical compared with most contemporary farming practices. Their stated goal was to try to win over the locals (it helped that Cindy was already a local) and if they were interested, teach them how to farm in this more sustainable way. According to Stephan, eighty percent of the local economy was remittances, and that was already starting to dry up, with a few families even sending money to the U.S. to help their grandchildren get by while they looked for work. Most of the farming in the area today was corn (grown mainly to feed the emaciated cows) and beans. Stephan was trying to walk that fine between noticing critically how the current farming practices were hurting the land and the people, while respecting the fact that he was the newbie and that these people had been surviving on this land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It gets complicated when Stephan is growing plants that the locals' grandparents, or even too many greats grandparents, farmed but the current generation has completely lost knowledge of the plants due to the global economy.

A large track of land around the area had recently been turned into a nature reserve by the government, and a friend of Stephan and Cindy's was heading the operation. Her goal was to preserve what was there, though Stephan found this goal short sighted, even if the overall project was a giant step in the right direction. “There was an over-population problem here, before the Spanish,” he commented. “Have you read 1492?” followed, to which I had to admit I never made past the first chapter. He went on to describe how the native populations had been cutting down so many trees to build structures to keep up with the all the people. When the Spanish came in, they burned much of what remained of the old forest, which most likely had tall pines twenty feet high, in order to bring the natives out of hiding. Next the Spanish brought the cows which meant that basically only plants with thorns could survive, since the cows would eat everything else. It's crazy to look out at these beautiful mountains, that only have small towns scattered between them, and contemplate that the whole landscape has been completely altered by humans, more often to their own detriment.

I'm really curious if Stephan and Cindy's experiment will work. I hope for all our sakes it does. With global climate change and the precariousness of the global economy, we're going to need people who know how to grow a lot of food with little resources on small plots of land. They also bought us beer, which was very hospitable of them.

After the twenty minute detour that turned into a three hour highlight of the trip, learning about agriculture, Mexican history, and hanging out with the cutest baby and little girl, we figured we'd have just enough time to get over the mountains and into the desert to set up camp by sunset. Stephan and Cindy told us about a place about an hour and half away, which should have put us there around five thirty, if we didn't stop in the grocery store or get stuck behind slow moving trucks barely able to climb up the mountains, or if we didn't have some minor car troubles ourselves. The van, a.k.a. The Workhorse, was not working so well, and was having a hard time climbing the mountain. The ridge line that crossed from pine forest into desert also kept eluding us. We tried to pull into one official campsite, but the road was so steep that neither the station wagon nor the van could make it up.

We finally crossed over into the desert, with the sun just behind the mountains. At this point, however, the road started to head down, down, down, and the towns were smaller and fewer. I've heard from a number of friends who have traveled throughout Mexico that it is not considered rude to just camp on the side of the road on someone's property, and Justin is a firm believe in this statement, though I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. At this point, with the sun already behind the mountains, we didn't have much choice. The first town we passes didn't appear to have a road that went to it, which still seems a bit confusing. We pulled into the second town we came across, Cuesta Colorada, which maybe had 50 buildings at most, started to drive through. We passed basketball court with some graffiti, which I'd hardly seen any of so far in this whole country. There was one cartoon-ish drawing of a thugged out gangster type, which at the time freaked me out a bit, though upon reflection was probably just the musings of a bored fourteen year-old from a podunk town. It was Friday night and we did pass a bunch of dudes hanging out on the street. Justin asked them if we could camp up the road, which they said was fine. Of course I was fifty percent sure they were making plans to round up a posse and attack us in the middle of the night.

We found a corner of almost flat land with a relatively few number of rocks on the ground, next to a stone wall with crops on the other side and some goats off a bit in a pen. Upon unpacking my tent that Dan and I were supposed to share, I realized I brought the wrong tent, the extra one I own that doesn't have any poles. Whoops. Still, it seemed warm enough to sleep outside for a night. And the view was breathtaking, mountains all around, small cacti, tequila, as long as nobody gets bitten by a rattle snake in the middle of the night, I think we're going to be alright.

We got in our sleeping bags little after ten, and though the temperature had dropped a bit, it still seems alright for sleeping. And I did manage to doze off, under the big sky full of stars. Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awaken by footsteps. It could only be the gang of teenagers that run this tiny town come to give the gringos their comeuppance, I thought to myself. Then I hear the gang of teenagers let out a harrowing “moo”. I sat up in my sleeping bag and saw the silhouette of either a cow or a bull on the road about a hundred feet from my head. The beast must have seen me, for it lets out another bone-chilling “moo” and ran for the hills. I almost shit myself. Dan and I decided to sleep in the cars, which meant the rest of the night was extremely uncomfortable, yet safe from marauding hooves.

I thought I'd wake up in a terrible mood from the poor night rest, but luckily that appears not to be the case. Dan and I were both awoken early before the sun came over the mountains by a donkey making exactly the sounds that a donkeys make in kid's TV specials about farm life. We walked up a hill full of shrubs and cacti and watched the sun rise. Justin and Kyle arose shortly after that, and the goat herder came by to tend to his goats. He talked to Justin and seemed to have no problem with our having camped there. About half an hour later two men pulled up in a pickup truck and asked Justin what we were doing and if they could see his id. Justin asked the men if this was their land, to which they promptly answer “si”. He showed them an expired driver's license that he keeps in his glove compartment explicitly for situations such as these, and that seemed to satisfy the men, who then told us about all the great views you could see from different points on their property. As we drove out of town, about half the old women waved us goodbye.

We stopped to eat on the way out of town at an actual coffee shack, made out of wood with menudo, pork chops, and gorditas all cooked over an open fire. Dan, Justin and I braved the menudo, a soup filled with tripe, knuckle, and other mystery meats. Putting modesty aside, I was the only to clean the fat off my knuckles. The mother and daughter team served up delectable salsa verde in a giant stone mortar made fresh in the twenty pound vessel.

Down the hill we stopped in Pinal de Amoles, a poor man's Italian village where red painted corregated steel is a fine substitute for terra cotta roof shingles. It was only eleven thirty a.m. on a Saturday, which made it difficult to determine whether it was a sleepy tourist town, simply a sleepy town, or somewhere in between. Ninety percent of the buildings were painted ocre with a red stripe two feet high on the bottom. The small town had a roundabout with a sculpture of two miners three blocks from the zocolo, which added to the European feel. The busiest commercial district did seem to be along the highway, but by no means did the streets have an abandoned feeling.

We stopped at a beautiful national park with a giant waterfall, where somehow I missed the ridiculously hot young couple doing the adult that the rest of my party witnessed.

Just down the road was the larger town of Jalpan, an old colonial settlement with a giant zocolo surrounding three quarters of the baroque chapel. First we walked through the busy market on the other side of the highway from the church. They had just about everything you could ever need, including an aerosol spray can purportedly capable of silencing a loquacious spouse. After the market, we walked around the quiet residential streets surrounding the zocolo, which were as pretty as any I walked down in Spain. We spotted the first espresso machine we'd scene at an open cafe in all of Mexico, and Dan, Justin and I proceeded to buy the worst coffee ever made. I'm beginning to fall for Mexico.

(we're camping a lot now, and I've got less access to internet cafes, so I am unable to put up corresponding photos with this blog right now, but I wanted to post it, as I wrote it two days ago. I'll add pictures soon, and note that in a following entry. All apologies -mgnt)

A whole lot o' Mexico

Friends, I am attempting something very dangerous here. I am writing this before I have had my first cup of coffee. A full disclosure is in order however. I am sitting in an old iron rocking chair with chipping yellow paint on the roof of our hotel in Xilitla, Mexico. I made it up to the roof just as the sun was peaking up over the mountains, and was able to get in some poor man's sun salutations I've gleaned from Yoga classes over the years—I guess the west coast has rubbed off on me. There is also a strikingly warm southern wind blowing; it came in last night and raised the temperature at least 5 degrees or more. As I was saying, Mexico seems very dangerous.

We pulled into this great country five days ago. As you may have garnered from the last blog entry, that first day driving in was not such a good one for yours truly for reason that had absolutely nothing to do with Mexico. Crossing the border was much simpler than anyone said it would be, the only snafus being that we read the signs wrong for where you park your car in order to register it, and that Zeb's tiny Oregon bank thought someone must have stolen his card when he tried to take money out, so they locked his account over Martin Luther King Day weekend. But all those troubles were quickly sorted out.

The first night we spent on the outskirts on Cuidad Victoria. It was a small city at the base of where the flat plains meet the Sierra Madres Orientals, a four hour drive form the Texas border. The zocolo, or town square, was not quite as bumping as one would have imagined for a Saturday night, but there were still plenty of people of all ages hanging out about and plenty of street vendors around. Instead of a church being the main building on one side of the zocolo, there was a modernist government building. Another side of the square was flanked by a rather large Radisson hotel, though asides from a Church's Chicken, it was the only U.S. chain store we came across. The plain fact of having people just milling about immediately charmed me, and after some street tacos, tortas, and mexican hotdogs (wrapped in bacon with fresh tomatoes, mayo, and onion) I began to feel my spirits lift.

We stayed at a hotel designed for having an affair. The gave us the price in six hour increments, and they had private parking behind a gate to insure the discreetness of your indiscretions. But we were only stopping in this town because it had already gotten dark, and we were still four hours away from our first destination due to a late start leaving the U.S. But for $6 per person, the bed and shower were well worth it.

The next morning we entered the mountains and ate breakfast at a little roadside shack/restaurant appropriately named Trapico de Capricorn due to the fact that it was situated on the Tropic of Capricorn. They served up eggs, beans, and more tortillas then I knew existed, all for about $4. Most of the coffee in Mexico appears to be Nescafe, even though there are wild coffee plants and coffee crops all throughout the area. We also ate a local dish of eggs mixed with a native plant called chofa that seemed to be something in between an artichoke and honeysuckle.

The landscape made a quick shift to jungle; all along the roadside were banana trees, orange groves, and tall, vine filled forests. We picked up a three foot tall bag of oranges for less than $4. Many of the small (indigenous?) villages we drove through had concrete sidewalks that paralleled the highway and at times were elevated two or three feet above what must have been a basin for run off rainwater. We only passed one big industrial processing plant, which had about twenty trucks full of oranges parked outside of it along the road.

We arrived in our destination of Xilitla (pronounced hill-EET-la) in the afternoon. It's a beautiful town of about five thousand inhabitants that sits on top of a mountain. Being so high up it is usually cloudy, as it was upon our arrival. The streets are tiny, winding up the mountain. Even though one car can barely fit through the streets, with the other parked cars, the streets are two way for the most part, which involves much foresight in the drivers. We did manage, however, to go the wrong way up one of the few one way streets. There are also no streetlights in Xilitla, but a number of the more busy and complicated intersections do employ traffic cops during the day, who we also found out work to keep tourists in the commercial part of town when Dan and I tried to walk down one street into a more residential neighborhood.

Justin has stayed in the town twice before, and he found the hotel San Ignacio, where he had stayed two years prior. The owner of the place, Dona Elena, remembered him, and she cut us a deal on two rooms which worked out to about two fifty a night per person for five nights. Dona Elena is a tough ass; I saw her grab the broom out of the hands of her sullen fourteen-year-old helper in order to show her how to properly sweep water onto the concrete street. She is a bit of a matronly figure for all of us, doing our laundry, etc., and at same time making slightly flirtatious comments to Justin. She also owns the most obnoxious parrot known to man, a parrot that only knows how to squeal, as if it learned to speak from an overly excited toddler.

My room looks directly onto a staircase that every morning is full of school children and other townfolk coming to and fro. I think the people of Xilitla have figured out that if you build a town with lots of stairs, you don't need to spend money on gym memberships. Its interesting to watch the faces of the older folks before they tackle the stair case. They make it up a few stairs, stop, breathe, put their hands on their hips, then keep going. It's the same thing I do the few times I have gone to a gym, pumping myself up for the exercise. I saw one guy, maybe 40, walking up the stairs in a Montauk shirt. There's just as much of a chance that he's never been there and got the shirt through some charity as there is that he worked on Long Island and really likes Montauk. It's also true I haven't seen many handicapped people, but old people are everywhere, I've only seen one severely obese person in town, and there are roads for cars so theoretically someone could wheel themselves up.

Ninety percent of Xilitla is made of out concrete, the buildings and the streets, and it works beautifully. Many of the building have balconies, many of which have simple molded concrete railings. These little touches add so much. The town is human scale too; most buildings one to three stories. There are a few taller buildings, but they are placed well, are not more than six stories, and integrate into the streetscape. Less than half the buildings are painted vibrant San Francisco-esque colors, and they add a lot to the concrete without making the whole town seem too gaudy.

The streets are full of stores, which are all very small, and often have half their wares out on the streets. The streets themselves are permeable, and even where there are sidewalks, pedestrians walk in the streets until a car has to get through. Half the vehicles that try to get through are teenage girls on ATVs. In Xilitla, it appears everyone is married by seventeen. The square at night is full of young teens courting, and all the older teens seem to have children. The difference between courting and marriage in Xilitla versus courting and marriage in the U.S. seems like night and day. I've heard its different in the bigger Mexican cities, but if I grew up here I would have some teenage children by now.

Besides all its charms, the main attraction for tourist to Xilitla is Las Pozas, a surrealist concrete mini-city built by Sir Edward James, inheritor of a NYC trading fortune and possible illegitimate son and/or grandson of King James the VII of England. We went there on our second day, which was surprisingly sunny and clear. The work was actually made by a sculptor/craftsman from Mexico, Plutarco Gastelum, whose job it was to figure out how to make Edward James' ideas and drawings into a reality. There were so many spots where you could have easily fell to your death that such a place could never exist as a tourist sight in the states. But the magic of the place was undeniable. First off, its a half hour walk down into the valley from the town, which was a pleasant enough stroll on its own. Then you're in the thick of the jungle near a giant waterfall. We went off on a long hike to get to the top off the waterfall, and somehow got off the main trail and onto an animal trail. Justin was leading the pack and I think he was seriously concerned. We all became fairly certain it was a cougar trail and we were going to be eaten alive. But besides a few people slipping on some algae covered rocks and getting a little wet and dirty, it was one of the best hikes I've ever been on. The combination of the faked ruins and jungle scape pleased the senses.

Our third day in Xilitla, it was still sunny. And it was getting hotter. We drove to a nacimiento, or spring, and went swimming. Two little kids, maybe ten years old, possibly brothers, asked us if we wanted to pay them to watch our mini-van. They informed us that cars were known to get scratched in that parking lot. We declined the offer, which was wise since they still didn't scratch our car. The water was cool, but warmer than any water in Oregon during the high summer. There were a few other people there, a young couple walking around, some old women doing laundry down the way. Not too shabby for January. We then drove to a tiny tiny town Huehuetlan that had great gorditas, a beautiful church with giant sinuous trees and a mini Aztec staircase-esque zocolo, a charming little coffee-roaster with a coffee-bean based nativity scene that brewed our over-roasted coffee in Mr. Coffee machines (but hey, it was local), and no bathrooms. The coffee-roaster had a one, just no water in the john.

After Huehuetlan, we embarked on a wild parakeet chase. Justin found some info online about Xilitla that mentioned a giant cave on the edge of town where hundred of parakeets go to nest every night at sunset. We pulled off the road near what appeared to be a staircase down into the valley next to a few houses, but a gaggle of little children told us the parakeets were further on down the road. A guy who ran a muffler shop told us the trail was behind his shop through the cow pasture, though it was a bit over grown. At first we walked the wrong way, down the side of the mountain through a cow trail, and cows don't bother to leave the trail when the go to the bathroom. Eventually we figured out where the actual trail was and began to hear the parakeets. By the time we got there the sun was behinds the mountains, so most of the parakeets were already nested, but still were cawing up a storm. When we finally found the cave it was breath taking. It must have been seven stories tall, and there is purportedly a lake a bottom. It was getting dark so we had to head back, but a bunch of the guys planned on going back.

That night Dona Elena employed Justin to help translate for a newly arrived guest, Gary from Oklahoma City. Gary was retired and didn't speak Spanish very well, yet had been spending two months or so in Mexico a year for the past twenty years, mostly in San Miguel de Allende. He had taken a nine hour bus up to Xilitla in order to see Las Pazos. He joined us as we drank on the roof that night. Somehow we got on the subject of religion and Gary made the comment that with how crazy the evangelicals were and what a bad name they were giving the U.S. internationally that we didn't need Al Qeida. Upon learning that Samantha was from Shawnee, OK, Gary was excited to talk to her about their home state, but was surprised when she referred to it in a positive light, since he seemed to hold the state in very low esteem. The next night Gary was catching a bus back to San Miguel Allende.

Day four we woke up early and four of us went for a pleasant hike up a mountain. We picked up a guy hitchhiking back into town who tried to sell us his friends' ranch. Apparently land isn't that cheap around here. This is partly because for illegal immigrants who've made money in the U.S. its easier to invest it in land than to put it in a bank, which drives up the land prices. After the hike the four of us ate tortas (mexican sandwiches) at a lunch counter named “Las Tortugas de Huasteca”, tortuga being the word for turtle and a play on giant sandwich. We met another gringo at the sandwich shop named Stephan. He was a clean cut looking guy, a retired high school and college agriculture teacher. He was holding a baby, which we assumed was his grand child, but turned out to be his own brood. Sitting next to him was a beautiful Mexican woman at least 25 years his junior, Cindy, who turned out to be his wife, and another little girl of theirs, about two years old. Stephan and Cindy met when they were neighbors in North Carolina. Their first child was born in the states, and their second was born here in Mexico, near where Cindy grew up. They were trying to create a self-sustaining farm about half-an-hour from Xilitla. Stephan said he left the states for political reason, that he “didn't believe in Empire”. They looked more libertarian than hippy, but I didn't really have enough information to pigeon hole them. Its funny how the gringos we meet immediately make some comment in order to indicate some progressive, or at least not mainstream, leanings in their politics within the first few minutes of a conversation. I'd probably do same. Stephan and Cindy invited us down to their farm, which we may take them up on in a few days.

After the tortugas, we drove to a neighboring town in the valley that had a park by the river that was great for swimming. There was a rusted old ferry, large enough to fit two or three cars. It was pulled back and forth across the river on a thick wire. An old woman walked on the barge carrying an open black umbrella to block the sun, and it could have been a scene in a Fellini film. Swimming next to us in the river was an extremely obese woman, only the I've seen here in Mexico. I soon realized she was yelling at her children and mutt named Rambo in perfect English with a bit of southern accent. It turned out they lived in the small village we had hiked to that morning, where her husband was from, but they used to live in Florida.

Nearby we visited Ahuatitlan, another crazy concrete structure made by an eccentric rich person, though this time the man was a Mexican salesman who specialized in medicine fauna. People sure are into their pastel colors in this country. The good doctor Ramon had passed away a few years ago and it looked like the inheritors didn't quite know what to do with the place. We weren't charged admission, but the did give us mail order forms for the medicines.

Today is day five, it is still unseasonably sunny, and it keeps getting warmer. Last night the lights were out in about half of the town and Justin fell down a flight of stairs, possible spraining his ankle. Tonight is the last night we have booked at Hotel San Ignacio, and if Justin is up for it, the plan is to go camping in the desert tomorrow, or possible try to camp at Stephan and Cindy's farm. I'm fine if we have to stay here for a bit longer, it's a nice town, but I am itching to get movin' on. I'm beginning to realize I'm traveling with a bunch of small town folks who aren't so interested in big cities. That's fine, and I think with seeing new sights, and especially with once we get to the beach, I'll be entertained enough to be contented. I just wish I knew the language already. This trip is definitely giving me plenty of incentives to stick to my studies once I start language school in a month. If I knew the language already, I might already be on a bus to D.F.

super happy fun land, maybe...

Oh, touring. I knew I should have been skeptical when the first show drew a good crowd and paid well of a tour with two acts nobody has ever heard of. I'm experienced enough; I've been around the block once or twice. But like any good salesman, the first one's always free.

Tuesday the 12th was the low point(The band knows about this blog, they're reading it, and I feel safe saying this, and would willingly put a lot of money on everyone agreeing to this assessment). We played the Parlor, a punk-rock pizza joint on the north side of Austin that for some reason decided not to put tables in the front of the restaurant so that bands could play for their sparing clientele. And I think the employees get off on being jerks to the musicians. We did get two medium 14” pies with two toppings each and two Lone Stars each. The difficulty of six people trying to pick four pizza toppings tasks my belief in democracy. Lone Star has also performed the difficult task of making a beer that taste worse than PBR. The local opening band showed up late, and then left as soon as they were done. Before we went on, I was given a pep talk by an unnamed bandmate about how they were through playing music. After the show a different unnamed bandmate went and hung out by himself in an alley for maybe half an hour. Kyle's sister and brother-in-law were there and they left a few bucks in the tip jar.

Wednesday the 13^th was actually a pretty decent show at the Hole in the Wall, a fixture of the Austin music scene where Doug Sham used to play. My Austin friends showed up and we played well. We made a little bit in the tip jar and the next day Kyle was able to finagle $50 out of the percentage of the bar sales the club promised us, then said they couldn't give us that night.

We had four days in Austin in total, which we all had been looking forward to, but it turned out to be a hard time for everyone. I got to spend some quality time with two old friends of mine whom I hadn't seen in four years, not since their wedding. One of them is in grad school at UT and the other one just landed a great internship at a progressive magazine in Texas and has already had some of her writing published . They had just finished two years with the Peace-Core in Malawi and then biked through South America. While I wouldn't have given up seeing them for the world, being recently dumped (can I just say divorced? I need a word in between) and feeling completely lost with what I'm doing with my life—no job, no room, no nothin'—it definitely brought on the “life pangs”. It's a combination of inspiring and embittering to see couples who are making it work, and living life to the fullest. It's important to have role models, it can just be hard when you're feeling utterly alone.

Though I am known among many friends as a teller of jokes, I have thought up very few on my own. One of the few I've penned goes as follows, Q:What's the only good thing about L.A.? A: It's not Houston. Thursday the 14^th was the final stop on the tour. We played Super Happy Fun Land in Houston, though I'm not sure if the person who named the venue intended the deep sarcasm that I'm reading into it. Super Happy Fun Land is a gigantic D.I.Y. space the size of an industrial block in Houston, covered in graffiti of cartoon-ish indie-punk kids eating their own legs and the like. We walk in and the purveyor of the establishment, Louie, is getting his head buzzed. He must be in his late 40's or early 50's, a jolly avant-guarde type with a big beard wearing a white T-shirt of some noise band you've never heard of but has opened for Sonic Youth. If he wasn't wearing pink sweatpants he may have well of been, and seemed to be on a permanent acid trip, even if he somehow now achieves this mental state through a combination of Yoga and alcohol alone. Louie was extremely gregarious and scatterbrained. There were two other less eccentric dudes of the same ilk, and maybe three young gutter-ish punk kids, one of whom sat behind the concessions counter learning ukulele songs off her laptop while sniffing glue. We soon ended up trapped in a conversation with another one of youngins, who while sloshed to the point of being nearly incoherent, tried to convince us that if we went to Mexico gangs would cut our faces off and sew them onto soccer balls. Eventually the audience showed up, i.e. the other band, who were a poor man's Lucero, and they did the worst cover of “Folsom Prison” I've ever heard. They seemed like good people though, and I think a few of them felt even more out of place then we did.

I may have been exaggerating about the dismal turnout. A few of the local band's girlfriends did show up. There were also two middle aged stragglers, one who looked just like Raymond Caver, and another guy who looked just like Don Was. It turned out they were a noise band I had never heard of named Rusted Shut that had opened repeatedly for Sonic Youth. After everyone had left or was outside smoking, they decided to play at set. Don Was had some sort of sampler with two mics running into it set up behind a speaker on the side of the stage, while Raymond Carver stood on the empty stage in front of the empty room and asked repeatedly “are you my mommy?” in a baby voice while Don manipulated the mic signal. Raymond Carver made a joke to us about how we'd never come back to Houston, and I have to admit, I was a bit charmed.

We had the offer to sleep on the stage or the concrete floor of Super Happy Fun Land, but Kyle had been fighting a sickness and opted to get a hotel room to save himself from a sleepless night of listening to wasted punks waxing conspiracy theories. He offered to take another person or two to the room since he was going to pay for it anyway. Once I noticed the cat walking around and overheard the kids at the space talk about projecting a movie I decided to take Kyle up on his offer. It may have been one of the best decision I've ever made, but not because of missing out on a fun filled night at Super Happy Fun Land.

We had found a Motel 6 online six miles across town. Two blocks into our drive we passed the Scott Inn. It looked desolate enough to be cheap. I hid in the car while Kyle walked in and asked for a room for one. The first price offered was for ten dollars more then the Motel 6, so Kyle started to walk out. The man behind the counter stopped him and said “what's the problem?”. Kyle explained, and the man lowered the price so it was only three bucks more than the Motel 6, but added “this is a nice room, much nicer than Motel 6.” For this statement I hereby nominate this motel clerk the most modest man in Texas. Upon first glance, the room was nice, but nothing so special. The one bed could have comfortably slept four, there was a pull-out couch, a flat screen TV, mini-fridge, and wall size mirrors on two sides of the bed. But then we noticed a black light above the bed. We turned off all the other lights then flicked on the black light switch and hidden murals of the cosmos, of psychedelic hearts, and a mystical beach with palm trees and three moons appeared on our walls. We had discovered a magical portal to the real super happy fun land right around the corner hidden in the Scott Inn. At times I feel as if no new experience is going to expand my horizons. While I still very much enjoy life, it often seems as if my days of having my mind blown open by something new are over. Thank you Scott Inn for introducing me to the world of hidden black-light hotel room mural painting. My world will never be the same.

Friday the 15th kind of sucked. I had drunk texted my ex at the Whole in the Wall show in Austin two nights prior; the jukebox played “Mama Tried” which had been her ring tone and I just had to let her know she had forever ruined that song for me. The next morning I emailed her to apologize, and to make sure she didn't want to get back together before I went to Mexico with this bunch of yahoos. Mistake numero uno. Waking up in the Scott Inn, there was response in my inbox informing me that things were over for good, which was necessary and therefore good for me to hear, and a line about how she hoped we could be friends, even though she knows I'm terrible at that, which is true. There was also a line about how she had more to say, but couldn't say it now, which I chalked up to just more details about how she cared for me but thought that we weren't meant for each other.

While it was a hard email to read, I knew it was coming, and in a way it was a weight off my back. The day kind of sucked for sure, but we were driving from Houston back to Austin to store the musical equipment at Kyle's sister's house, and then onto Harlingen, Texas seven hours south on the border, all through torrential rain and terrible Texas rush hour traffic. As far as shitty days to think about starting a new life, being single, moving on, the future, etc. go, it was actually pretty good. The day was being wasted in a car; it was a perfect day for getting lost in my own mind and working through the clusterfuck that is my mind and life. Being raised in this consumerist culture, a part of me can't help but always think there's a better relationship out there waiting for me, the perfect fit, “the one”, all that b.s., and here was my golden ticket out of rainy, wussy, passive-aggressive suburban Portland, OR. Another chance to grab la vida by los huevos and give it another whirl. It's morning again, Lou Thomas, and manana you'll be en Mexico.

We had found a Priceline Super 8 in Harlingen. Word to the wise, for the first time in history, a band got caught sneaking six people into a room for two. Four went and got another hotel room just to not give the Super 8 jerk more of our money. Perhaps the only good thing about Houston is that it's not Harlingen.

If Friday the 15^th had kind of sucked, Saturday the 16^th, on the other hand, has really really sucked. It has sucked the biggest bag of dicks in the history of bags of dicks. Before I explain why Saturday the 16^th has blown so much so far, and it's only 5:30pm as I write this, I must first explain some things about the Brazilian people and their culture. This factoid I am about to present about cultural norms is most likely true for many cultures other than our own, but it was told to me by a Brazilian friend, so I can only safely attribute it to the entirety of his people. It is the principle of “don't ask, don't tell” applied to the bedroom, not the battlefield. Monogamy is still a worthy goal, but in any long relationship there are inevitably going to be indiscretions by both parties, and if you're both still committed to the relationship sometimes it's best not to mention anything. Sometime people just have to get things out of their system to remember how good they've got it. I've tried to convince the former women of my life that this is a good idea, though none have ever agreed, and because I try to be an honest and respectful man, the one and a half times I have been unfaithful, I have always ponied up immediately as was discussed and decided as the plan of action, with the inevitable disastrous results. I can not say the same for those who have demanded such honesty from me.

But this only tangentially relates to the utter shittiness that I found in my inbox this morning. One would think that a partner such as myself who didn't want to know about indiscretions during a relationship certainly wouldn't want to know about who you were sleeping with after wards. But some people feel like they got to tell people everything. So I woke up in Harlingen, TX with an email from my ex of only two months (together for a year and half and living together for the last three months) that she was sleeping with a friend of mine and they were talking about “taking it to the next level”. Thank you, but TMI. I'm sorry that they feel guilty, but how does putting me in a terrible head space, upsetting my stomach, making my brain run in circles with graphic images of them together, on the first day of my Mexican vacation none-the-less, how on god's green earth does that help the matter? Yes, I'd be upset when I found out later, but then I'd have had that much more time to be over the relationship. I might actually be, or at least had been, sleeping with someone else myself to make me feel better about the whole thing. But noooooo, we should tell Lou, he should know about this, it's the right thing to do—I can hear them tell each other over pillow talk. Funk dat. Ignorance is bliss. Before I went back to Portland, alright, let me know, but not at the beginning of my fucking vacation. Thank the lord above I decided to go to Mexico, and not stay in Portland for the winter.

Dallas, Austin, and Me

Oh Dallas, what is one to make of your charms? Your one-trick-pony skyscrapers that mimic fireworks frozen in mid explosion or are simply outlined in neon green, your downtown revival that consists mainly of gaudy nightclubs full of patrons chauffeured in stretched armored limousines, your three-hundred pound women in blue spandex dresses so short Ms. Spears herself would blush walking down the street in such an outfit when its only 30 degrees outside (I think Botero is becoming a theme here), your free shots of a mysterious glowing blue liqueur for the entire bar when the Cowboys won the play-offs, your hip underground-yet-fashionable lesbian art-shows of yarn sewn canvases depicting female porn-stars in mid-orgasm, oh Dallas, with your sprawl is so sprawling, how then is your drawl so drawing?

We played at the City Tavern, in the heart of Downtown Dallas. With the height of the buildings on the street, provided enough alcohol I could have been convinced I was in New York. The bar was two stories, the first floor was an up-scale sports bar, and the second floor was for live music. The Cowboys were in the playoffs and the place was packed. Fortunately for us, they won, leaving everyone at the bar in a good mood that evening. The highlight of the night happened after Zeb's set. As we were packing up the stage a man with a dark mustache and coke-bottle glasses walked up to Dan, the drummer, and asked if he could have his drumsticks. Dan, assuming it was the drummer of the following local band, obliged, figuring he would be able to get his only pair of drumsticks for the tour back after their set. Another man entirely started setting up drums and we learned from this drummer that the man who asks for the sticks collected sticks from every drummer that plays the club, that he would greatly appreciate it if Dan would sign the sticks, and that the "stick" man would soon show the sticks to his brothers, all of whom would be very excited by these drum sticks played by an unknown drummer from Portland, OR. Later in the evening, while at the urinal, I overheard the stick-man loudly explaining to another patron that he made his living on betting, and that he had bet on the Cowboys to win that night and done very well for himself.

That night I stayed with Kyle at his mom's house in a self-described white-flight suburb named Flowermound. We drove through another crazy town/suburb just north of Dallas that was the home to a number of multi-national headquarters. The tall, squat glass office buildings surrounded a lake had a tram that traveled between them, sometimes in tunnels through the buildings themselves. It was the closest thing to that modernist 1950s ideal of futuristic cities that I had ever seen, almost like Disney's Epcot Center. Terrifying yet fascinating. The highway we were driving on was as wide as it possibly could have been.

Kyle's suburb of Flowermound had a recently built retro-cum-simulacra new urbanist old town, the most complete I've ever seen. Again, provided with enough alcohol, I could have been convinced it was the real thing, an old Texas small town with four or five square blocks of two story brick storefronts. But I could begin to perceive, even as we quickly drove past on the 6 lane suburban road, that the three-windows-wide buildings of varying heights touching each other were really all one building, built at the same time. One of my pet peeves with all these new urbanist nostalgic street facades is their mawkish trompe l'oeil of multiple buildings where really there is just one. The public is not that dense, please stop lying to me, I am insulted Mr. Architect, if you want more than one building please build more than one building, or figure out how to make one attractive building, thank you very much.

Even though this recreated old downtown is arguably more aesthetically successful than many of its ilk, without sufficient dense housing attached to it to support the commercial spaces, and without a transit connection to downtown Dallas, it is no surprise that most of the little shops that first moved in have now closed and it is primarily offices now, and that it has the vibrant feel of any America downtown office district, by which I mean that of a corpse except for the hours of 9, noon, and 5. Oh, Mr. New Urbanist, when will you learn that without creating a development that is for the entire community, no space can sustain a vibrant community; that if you do not provide affordable housing for everyone who may work and shop in the development all within walking distance, than people will not be walking around; that even if you hide that parking lots behind the old town facade, the people are still going to drive there and drive home and not walk anywhere except from their cars to their cubicles.

After Dallas we had two days off in Austin, which have been just what the doctor ordered. I've been able to catch up with my old friends Pace and Laura, I went for a three and a half hour bike ride, I listened to NPR. On Sunday night we saw a young performer Danny Malone, who if a bit death obsessed, did perform with much gusto, and ended the set of songs for guitar, harmonica and voice, with an unexpected solo dance performance. He created a new genre that was a combination of pop-and-lock with ballet set to 4-track instrumental indie-post-rock, and the motherfucker pulled it off. Last night, Monday, we saw Dale Watson, a purveyor of Texas Swing, play at the Continental Club. The musicians were the cream of the crop, as were the Texas two-step dancers who came out in droves to see him play. It made me realize how much of a rich musical tradition there is in Texas. Tonight we play an all-ages punk pizza place with notoriously bad pizza, at least according to my east-coast friends. We may not have the rich musical tradition but we did grow up with our tradition of good pies.