I have no clue how a bird made of concrete can fly.  But I have no doubt that it's flying.  Rows and rows of chairs are delicately arranged inside it's belly and every seat is full.  A Oaxacan Jazz band is playing modern jazz songs inspired by Mixtec traditional music.  I'm fascinated, the music emanates through the people, feeding them life.  They are the birds cells, they are particles of partially digested worms and bread crumbs.  Behind me the birds giant concrete stomach rotates, mixing wet cement and waiting for the jazz to push us back into it's swirling mass to be digested and converted into the spectacular energy that keeps this giant avian airborne.  The jazz jumps and sputters, tickling my brain.  Maybe I am a mitochondria.  A long table of meticulously arranged wineglasses awaits as people dressed in T shirt tuxedos pour bottle after bottle of pinot nois to entertain the guests/masses of food until they hit the stomach acid.    I sip delicately, not worried about being digested, it's all part of the cycle of life.  With each powerful flap of it's concrete wings we move forward in time, soon we arrive at yesterday, even though it's two and a half weeks forward on the timeline of this story.  The bird has a craving for the flavor of melancholy, and so thus it begins my retelling at an emotional low point, which is, not so surprisingly, an introspectional high.  

I was sadder than I've been since I've been down here, for no good reason, just on that side of the pendulum's oscillation.  It's amazing how moods change your perceptions of things.  The brightly painted building stood out almost offensively against the stormy sky and the constant motion of the passersby seemed obsessive.  I sat in various parks and smoked a few single cigarettes, which you can buy from indigenous women and children who walk around with little portable convenience stores strapped around their necks.   

In these types of moods, I become enthralled by small details.  Little things that pop out of the landscape and call to me.  I feel like they're also lonely and that I'm the only one who's paid attention to them, despite their hidden value.  One of these things was a wounded monarch that limped around my patio.  I photographed it and then it got killed by the cat.  

Another was a small section in an auto parts store that sells bonsai cactuses.  I walked by the place and stopped to take a picture of the huge sign that said "Autos America" on a sign in the shape of Mexico with a US flag painted across the country.  I realized a tiny little black sign with white letters beneath the huge monstrosity of advertising.  It said: "Bonsai cactus."  I walked in and it was just like a dirtier version of Les Shwab.  Hubcaps and engine parts and the types of guys who spend their whole lives working on cars and thinking about cars.  It's a huge store.  People filled it with chatter about cars.  It took me a while to find the Bonsai section.  It was through a little doorway with a curtain.  Another little sign hung over this entrance, which was even more subtle and unobtrusive than the first.  I waked through the curtain and almost ran into a little man who was taking care of his cactuses.  There were about ten of them, in a room smaller than my walk in closet at my apartment.  They were all rare cactuses, kinds I've never seen before.  I had been taking pictures everywhere I went, but I felt it'd be inappropriate in this little oasis, so I just looked and appreciated them in the moment.  The little man was old and retired, he'd worked as a bus driver for years and had been part of the workers union.  He retired and bought this closet from Autos America and now he stayed there all day taking care of his prickly friends.  I asked him if he got a lot of business and he said no, people usually just wander in here while waiting for their cars to be repaired.  They cast a disinterested eye around the small room and go back to "America" to argue over the price of their tune up.  I asked him about each cactus and he told me where it originated, it's name in latin, how he cared for it.  I told him about how for probably about 5 years now, I'd been buying my dad bonsai cactuses to keep in his office at work.  The same bizarre gift every year.  He's got a little collection, and its always meant a lot to me that he keeps them alive.  You only have to water them like once a week or so, but nonetheless, many people let them die.  His little collection has moved though three different offices in the five years.  If I could somehow send him one, I'd buy one right now, I said, but since I'm not going back for 40 days, and I don't want to carry a cactus through Central America, I don't think it'd make sense.   He said not to worry, unlike most Mexican vendors, he didn't pressure me to buy at all.  He said he didn't open this shop to make money, which was obviously true.  He didn't seemed bothered by the noise from the store next door.  He'd created a little corner of Zen.  I must've been in there for 20 minutes to a half an hour, looking at the little plants and chatting with that little man.  I left feeling the same, and went looking for another place that seemed out of place and matched my out of place mood. 

Unexpected Party

The decapitated cadaver shot fireworks out of the orifice in his neck.  

We hook El Poderoso up to Manuel the housekeeper's car with jumper cables.  He sat in his blue Honda and revved the engine while Memo held the cables to the screws on Camelo's wobbly battery.  As the sparks flew, this profound little story (above fireworks) flashed into my head.  El Poderoso sputtered and quit.  Memo disconnected the circuit and connected it again.  Sparks. Another piece of the future flashed into my mind: "Cornelius Dark is totally immersed into those fantastic voyages," and his pencil sketched body decomposes.  With this bit of electrically stimulated prophecy, El Camelo woke from dormancy.  Memo pulled the e-brake, put it in neutral and stepped out of the car, smiling and gesturing to the puttering piece of junk like a valet returning a checked Mercedes to it's owner at the Hilton.  Angelina returned his sarcastic smile lovingly.  I got in the passenger seat and we began our day of errands, triumphantly rolling down the tunnel towards the streets of Querétaro.  But, when Mamá stopped the car so that I could hop out and open the huge wooden doors that give passage to the street, I was distracted by more time travel.  This was the last destination El Poderoso would take me to.  Soon I'd be in Oaxaca and I'd have to find another vessel if I wanted to return metaphysically to mi querido Querétaro and my family here.  The last stop on the relative future of the driveway timeline (instead of toot tooting like a train to tell my memories that it's their stop, El Camelo putt putts): It's two memories, trapped in the same part of my memory, opaque and overlaid like underdeveloped photos with dual images.  

I'm in the kitchen with Mamá and Alejandro Jodorowsky and I'm in the living room with Diego and Cornelius Dark.  Alejandro draws a corpse with blood from his own veins and our laughter shoots fireworks from it's open wound of a neck.  As the laughter dies down, Alejandro brings up a more serious point.  This contemplation is blended with the look of disdain on Diego's face as he lays on the couch for three days eating ice cream to sooth the pain left in the place of his molar.  

"I know a trick to get your mind of that pain," I tell him.  I punch him in the shoulder and fill my right cheek with air to mock his puffed up face.  Rebe runs by me and I pick the little kitten up and throw him at Diego.  He chuckles a bit.  Cornelius Dark looms up through Diego's jaw and grimaces in a painful laugh.  He is Diego's dead body.  He is in the room with us.  I think about what else I can do to cheer Diego up.  Cornelius Dark scoffs at me.  Alejandro Jodorowsky says that God was replaced by his own creation: the first cause after creating nothing but effects for eternities.  I ask my mamá what that means.  Her eyes open so wide I wonder if they're going to pop out and expose her brain.  She starts to talk in a tone that puts me in a trance.  The words she says are instantly encoded in my amygdala and bypass the hippocampus altogether.   I'm unable to write them on my mental sketch pad.  I'm left with just an odd, (imaginary?) image.  Both haunting and mysterious.  She reaches across the table and flips open the top of my head exposing a ball of white wax with a new white wick sticking out of the top.  She lays a flat palm on the smooth shiny surface.  When she moves her skinny fingers past the wick, it ignites, like a gas burner.  I sit there with my head burning for an indeterminable amount of time.  Cornelius Dark's opaque image rises out of Diego as he falls asleep on the couch and the TV babbles on about Hollywood's richest wives.  He's wearing an enormous backpack and an open wound in his chest exposes his heart.  He's rapidly decomposing.  I'll meet him again, I know it.  I think of my own dead body and wish I could meet it like Felipe Delgado.  Even if I never see him face to face, I love this old man and I'll follow him forever.  

The Querétaro streets move past the window slowly and efficiently as El Camelo pulls us across the city.  He's been a good car, a good metaphorical time machine.  Mamá looks at me and asks where my mind is.  She rubs my fuzzy hair that will soon be an burning flame.  

"In Oaxaca."  I say.  And a giant concrete bird full of jazz swoops down from the sky, devours El Camelo, and begins it's migration south.

Mamá shook her head

and shrugged her shoulders.  

"A veces El Camelo no quiere salir.  Teine sueño, tendremos que despertarlo."  Her tone was that of a statement and a question at the same time.  She looked at me with her expression of permanent curiosity, her thin face raising with her eyebrows.  Jaime Saenz says to come to love a person, you have to imagine their body without flesh.  You have to see them as skeletons.  This concept has floated around in my mind since June and I sometimes make an effort while walking down a street which starts Eugene, becomes Guadalajara and then Queretaro and now stretches on toward Oaxaca, to envision the skeletons; to see the presence of death in peoples daily ambulations.  Mama's face is so thin, you don't have to guess what her skull would look like.  She has a beautiful skull, and because of this, her wisdom seems even more appropriate.  

We push El Camelo back to Saturday morning, feeling the lactic acid build up in our muscles and the shallow pool of tequila our brains are still floating around in.  It's a sore and groggy jog.  When we stop time traveling, I'm waking up on the couch.  My cousin Jorge, Diego and I are all passed out on the couches.  For some reason, Diego prefers sleeping on a couch the length of his torso with his legs hanging over the armrest to sleeping in his Diego-sized bed, which was left empty last night as Jorge supported his feet on the small living room table and sat with his head rocking from side to side in a cushioned  chair.  I laughed at this first scene.  It was 8:30.  I heard my mamá and Jordan (the student from a Baptist school in Texas occupying my past position as resident Gringo in the Montes/Espinoza household) making a very noble effort to communicate.  However it wasn't my urge to practice translation or a desire to contribute to intercultural understanding that made my whiskey stiff legs bend at the knee and pulled me off the sofa like a corpse under a spell... it was the smell of coffee.  I remembered how fortunate I felt last fall when I saw that my house had a genuine coffee maker and that Nescafe was not to be found in the cupboard.  I walked into the kitchen and Buenos Diased my mamá and offered Jordan a high five before pouring a cup of black gold.  I sat down with the two of them at the small kitchen table covered in a plastic sheet that has always made the kitchen smell laminated.  I can tell Jordan wants to get something across to mamá, and I struggle with my fellow  Gringo for a while as he gesticulates confusedly, reaching out into the air and trying to pick nonexistent vocabulary from invisible trees of words.  Immense pauses punctuated by tormented facial expressions serve as Jordan's comma's in his second language narration: "Mi novia..." he says, "tengo?" he asks, "un noche que es mal," he finishes and raises his eyebrow at me.  I nod encouragingly.  "Mmhmm."  He stars again.  "Ella..." the pause lasts even longer than usual.  I shrug at him as if to say "just tell me."  Relieved, he recounts the whole story to me.  After hearing it, I relay it to my mamá.  Only when I get to the end of my own narration does the gravity of the story hit me.  

Jordan's girlfriend, who's on the same abroad program and staying with another family, woke up at 5 Am to see the señor of her casa standing over her bed and staring at her.  El Camelo sputters unexpectedly and my memory is clarified as the engine turns over once, maybe considering waking up.  Kelly, Jordan's girlfriend, is now standing in the kitchen alongside her man, a stunned look on her face.  Actually, as I now remember, she had called Jordan as soon as the incident occurred and he'd loyally trotted over to her house and brought her back to safety here at our place.  She shook her head and said (in Ok Spanish and a unique raspy high pitched voice) "Me da miedo Señora."  El Poderoso sputtered again and she disappeared.  Rusty old Nissan was jumbling up my memories...that didn't happen till Monday.  The scene doesn't change much however, except for Kelly's absence, Jordan, Mamá and I all sat in the same seats, I still had a cup of coffee in my hand.  The food on our plates morphed from huevos rancheros to huevos a la mexicana and the kitchen still smelled laminated.  I'm describing a dream I had to my Mamá.  She's interpreting it.  She says that recurring snake bites probably mean that I'm soon to awaken in another plane, o sea, if I was to become conscious in my dream state, after the bite, I'd raise to a higher form of consciousness.  Mamá tells me all about the power of lucid dreaming and about different ways to interpret dreams.  I don't know if any of it is valid but, something about her presence and her tone of voice and the reality of her inspirational life story make everything she says true to me.  forgetting the barrier for a second, she turns to Jordan and asks if he knows any Biblical interpretations of dream images.  Admirably persevering through the point where most Gringo's I know give in to "culture shock" and stop trying, Jordan responds slowly in Spanish.  However he starts fragmentedly  retelling a dream he once had so I interrupt and repeat her question in English.  I'm probably interfering with his learning process, but I want to have a good conversation.  He switches to his more comfortable tongue as soon as the last syllable is out of my mouth and explains Joseph and his coat of dreams.  His talk of pharaohs and such reminds me of the "Cartoon History of the Universe" and I bring up some of the contradictions and omissions in the Old Testament noted by Larry Gonick.  I ask him how literally he takes his faith.  What percentage of the Bible does he think is actually true and should be taken completely seriously. 

"100%!," he answers solemnly.  

"It's the word of God."  To avoid exposing my lack of knowledge of the actual stories of the book itself, I go straight to my most important point. 

 "Don't you think it's a contradiction to believe that one must love their neighbor and simultaneously believe that if their neighbor doesn't believe in Jesus Christ he's condemned to eternal damnation?  Isn't that kind of conceited, and, well...not so loving?"  Unlike most people I've asked this question to, he actually considers it for a while.  

"Well, Jesus says that the only way to heaven is through him.  I guess God just chooses who receives Jesus and who doesn't."  

"So, if someone happens to live up in the hills of some really remote region and they never have even heard of Jesus or had the option to believe, they're going to hell?"  He thinks again. (Which makes me feel that overall I've accomplished what I set out to do with my questions)  

"I guess thats just Gods will," he says in a sad tone.  

"Well, just consider it," I say, "and maybe you'll eventually come around and let them into heaven."  

"It's not my choice," he says.  

"I think it is," I tell him.

Jordan pauses for a long time, like I'd asked him something in Spanish..."Well, that's very interesting," he says finally.  

I've got a lot of respect for people with faith, I decided, after learning quite a bit from my chat with Jordan, if, that is, they're willing to investigate it.

Later on, while we puttered around in El Camelo, I'd tell my Mamá about this conversation we'd had.  

"I know you're not religious," she'd say "but how would you describe your religion."  I look at her, a "Catohlic" who sings her charkas every morning, takes classes on gnostic teachings and symbology, believes in the Tarot, reads about the holy place of corn in Mexican indigenous cultures and incorporates these stories into the way she flips the tortillas and how she defines herself as Mexican, has more faith in her favorite authors than any icon and spreads her good will and love through the world by helping people grow productive crops...I think about it and answer:

"This moment right now, this old car and you and me talking about religion and scurrying around Queretaro... this is my religon."

She laughs..."And if we were sewer cleaners, and we spent all day digging around in shit, would that be your religion?" she asks me.

"I guess so."

El Camelo rolled forward,

slowly at first, but we gained inertia.  We got it moving down the long tunnel, past the houses of family members and the rental spaces, at what must've at least been 2nd gear.  As we pushed the 1983 antique past my aunt's courtyard, images flash in my memory of the 10$ eight hour bus ride(that could've been 30$ and four hours), as we speed up and pass Fabiola's office I remember finally arriving in Querétaro (perfect timing as usual, an all night party with friends and family), when we get to the stairs up to my grandma's house, I'm lounging in my house with Diego and Memo, we rush into the future on the timeline past the present, which will be my first day of errands in the Nissan and I envision El Poderoso coming to life and shuttling Mamá and I around town and that evening I see Jordan and his stunned friends all shaking their heads in disbelief as I laugh hysterically at my own vulgar joke, just as we're passing the stairs to our place, Mamá pushes in the clutch and steps on the gas...instead of rocketing forward just yet, el Camelo stops in it's tracks and I somehow sink into a memory of the future:

*Bad but Genuine Music: God is really good at most things.  Most of his hiccups are like symphonies.  But the greatest moments he creates are results of his inattention; they're products of serendipity.  Genuine music is made when God stops paying attention and consciously making it beautiful.  It can be lovely or terrible in terms of sound.  But it has a tangible quality of authenticity.  You can feel and see it as well as hear it. 

The other night, Diego, Arturo, Garibai, Vladimir and I wrote a bunch of rhymes in Spanish.  It was pretty funny.  We all sat around the big plastic table at Vladimir's family's restaurant with big glasses of Bacardi and Coke, a bottle of cheap white wine (which seemed comically out of place and tasted like piss and vinegar).  The night was very interesting and took a long time to evolve into music.  When it finally did, it was not good music, but it was genuine (see my definition above*) but in it's time and place, it was more entertaining than any concert could possibly have been. When we arrived Diego and I were tired and planning on staying for only an hour or two...the conversations began as trivial chit and monotone chat to fill the void.  Slowly, the rhythm would begin to pick up.  I feel often that the energy inside of certain spaces changes over short periods of time like a cheap mood ring on the finger of a man walking in and out of a sauna.  The gem began as greenish maroon.  Then Diego began to tell his buddies about the jokes we'd told a few nights before.  He asked me to tell one in Spanish.  It went over way better with Diego's friends than it did with the Baptists.  The laughter began to tint the evening's aura with a mustard like orange hue.  I told my dad's doctor jokes again, we all had a joke about quadriplegics and even the leprechaun made an appearance.  The evening continued to improve, to the point where the jokes didn't have to be funny.  Eventually, I attempted a version of "the aristocrats."  I took it as far as possible, and we were all dying, and the punch-line was satisfyingly anticlimactic.  In the calm after the torment of jokes, that moment when no-one knows exactly what to say and we all enunciate one syllable of a laugh like: whoooo or haaaa or we shake our heads while aftershocks of chuckles tremor our diaphragm, Arturo began singing.  At first I thought it was a song from the radio.  He paused at a clearly planned moment and Garibai took over the song.  They had mediocre voices.  I realized before they were done, by the way they smiled at the lyrics and looked at each other with boy-band-music-video-like expressions, that they'd written the song themselves.  An interesting choice to break the silence...after they finished I spontaneously started beat-boxing.  And Diego rapped a few lines in a Calle 13 voice.  This was funny too, just out of sheer ridiculousness.  Arturo rapped a line about how much of a bitch his ex-girlfriend is.  Vladimir put on an Orishas song on his cellphone and passed out napkins and we all started writing verses dissing Arturo's ex or just ho's in general.  After a few minutes we had a delightful, yet awful song.  With each recitation, the evening moved through shades on the mood ring until it settled on the neon yellow glow of genuine music.  This time the music tasted like a mix of the wrong liquors, it smelled like Pall Malls and it looked like a bunch of vulgar mexican teenagers and a scruffy gringo dancing in his chair, sitting around a white plastic table with two empty bottles lying drained on it's surface in a small dim comedor.  We ended up staying till around 3 AM.  And then I drifted back to the relative present.  

As a person of jumbled

 and unpredictable mental frequencies, I find it useful to choose metaphorical vessels to navigate through my narration.  Here with my family in Querétaro, I found the perfect vehicle to travel back through the past four days.  It is my mamá Angelina's incredibly tattered junker Nissan which has two names: El Canelo for it's color and El Poderoso for it's stamina.  Imagine the tunneled driveway of our downtown Querétaro loft.  It's a long concrete tube with five stairways leading up to the many houses and several ground level workshops and offices, some occupied and some with "se renta" signs.  On Saturday afternoon, I had the privilege of accompanying my mom on several errands in El Canelo.  Just like my mental mechanisms of recollection and narration, el Canelo had been dormant for quite some time, as Angelina usually travels by bus (to get to the sierra) or by foot (within town). If we're going to take this metaphor to the extreme, I guess she would represent my creative impulse, taking the drivers seat and steering my temporal lobe towards the amygdala (wasn't she the queen in star wars... could the part of my emotional and memory processing centers be played by Natalie Portman? Sure.)  So, el Canelo wasn't about to just wake up from his nap without some positive motivation.   Angelina had done this before, and she knew all the necessary steps in the procedure.  First, she asked me to get out and push the car around the planter in the middle of the parking lot and into place on the starting line of the driveway (aka the timeline of my story).  While I was doing this, she sat in the drivers seat, steering with one hand while the other held her cellphone, calling Diego and Memo downstairs and out of their hangovers to help push.  The three of us stood in a line behind el Poderoso and Angelina set it it second gear.  We began to push my literary time machine forward, sending us back to last Wednesday night in my story when a strange little man knocked on the door of my hotel room in Guadalajara.  After pretending not to notice for about a minute of knocks every ten seconds, I gave in and opened the door.  It was a strange little man.  He was probably about my age, had long curly hair and bug eyes.  

"Quieres ir por cervezas?" he asked.  I was a little taken aback, and didn't really want to drink, so I told him no, choosing not to mention that he'd skipped an introduction and any formalities that might follow knocking on someone's hotel room door at nearly midnight.  

"It's beers, but it doesn't have to be beers," he said. Was I misunderstanding his weird accent?  "We could get some beers but you know, it has to be done secretly.  No one can see us leave the hotel at the same time.  But I know where we can get some beer if we can get outside.  I could call my friend and maybe, you could lend me a hand and you know we could have a few beers.  Or if not beers than anything else.  What do you think?"  

"First of all," I responded after giving him an appropriately skeptical look, "I don't think you're talking about beer.  And secondly, I'm tired, I've been in an airplane all day and I just want to relax.  But thanks for the offer."

"No it's beer.  It's really just beer, but it has to be secret," said the gnome-like little white Mexican who's head twitch and the third repetition of the same sentence just indicated his true intentions, "we can get beer and bring it back here or we can call my friend and go drink some beers with him" said the sad little coke head who was clearly going to try to get me to buy him some coke.  I should've just closed the door, but I could tell he was harmless and thought it might be funny to take his silly little druggie code literally and accept his offer.  

"OK," I said, recognizing that this guy was really a character who might be sort of entertaining.  "Let's go get some beer."  

"All right.  I'll leave first and then you follow, OK?  I'll meet you out front."

"Sure." I said.

I waited ten seconds after he left then walked outside.  

"Let's just pick some up from the OXXO and drink it here OK?" I asked.

"From the OXXO?" he said confused, thinking I'd understood his code and was looking for some blow.  "Oh, I don't know if they've got..."

"beer?" I interrupted. "Of course they've got beer man, lets go." And I rushed out into a gap in the traffic towards the connivence store across the street.  I walked straight to the beer case while he followed, muttering inaudibly.  I looked back and laughed, having just identified the perfect product to "give him a hand with."  I grabbed a six pack of Sol and walked to the register.  

"You wanna go half and half on this?" I asked.

"I've only got a few pesos and I don't know if I really can..." He swallowed more words.

"Don't worry guy, I'll cover it." I said and I bought the $3 worth of beer.

We went back to my hotel room, me entering the building first to keep up his (now pointless) secrecy and confuse him a bit more.  We sat on the floor in the empty room and I opened two beers and handed him one.  

"You know, I'm glad you invited me to have a few beers, this is nice." I told him.  His lip twitched, setting off a chain reaction of twitches across his face and eventually he forced a smile.

I started talking to him, making up a story about being the son of a policeman who was down here in Mexico to do a report on the status of law enforcement down here before I joined the police academy myself.  I told him I'd heard there was lots of crime down here and asked if he'd seen any.  He sweated a bit and shook his head back and forth so fast it looked like he was about to pop like a kernel of corn.  He downed a big swig of his beer.  I took a small sip of mine. 

"Go ahead, I'm not really that thirsty," I said, realizing he'd almost finished his beer and wanted another.  He opened this one for himself and took another huge swig.  I continued to babble on and told him more about police academy, about how I come from a religious town in Nebraska and have always been appalled by the overindulgence and fast paced life in the city.  I told him I think that god wants us to be a more tranquil people and that we really shouldn't be rushing around wasting our lives like these inner city druggies and criminals.  

"Law enforcement," I said, "is just about the noblest thing you can dedicate yourself to, it's kind of like doing God's work."  I asked him some things about himself.  His answers didn't correspond to my questions.

"Where are you from anyway?"

"Sorry, I'm...I'm sorry about my hair, man.  It's really long and yours is so short, I mean, I would cut it but you know.  I really, I don't know how it got so long."

After several more absurd answers to simple questions I jumped to the one I'd been planning.

"So what do you like to do for fun?" I asked and I rubbed my nose in an ambiguous way that I knew he wouldn't know how to interpret.  Was it a symbol or just an itch?

He looked at me with a very twisted look.  He was scared and I realized, as funny as this was, I didn't want a scared coke head in my room.  I was about to say good night when his urge to get some coke, and the fact that I may be his only chance to score some tonight pushed his quivering vocal chords to speak. 

"I just like beers and sometimes I go to the bars with my friend and I know a girl who's a table dancer.  But you know I haven't got any money for food, do you think you could lend me some money, I'm really hungry."  I imagined a little light bulb appearing over his head.  It was a surprisingly appropriate answer in comparison to the others.  As a reward, I opened the last of the beers, opened it and handed it to him as I sipped my way through my one Sol to his five.  I also gave him a bag full of crackers I'd had left over from the plane.  He pretty much chugged the beer, and stuffed the crackers in the pocket of his hoodie, obviously feeling defeated and anxious to go.  Even his clever begging for food ploy hadn't worked, but I could tell he felt, as I had hoped, like he'd achieved a small victory by drinking more beer than me, and at least getting a little beer buzz out of the ordeal.  As we finished our bottles, I told him I was worn out and needed to sleep.  As I walked him to the door I said:

"I'm glad you liked the beers man, lot's of people don't like to drink with me cuz I get the clean stuff."

"What?" he asked, not understanding.  I held out the bottle to him: SOL CERO, sin alcohol.  He shook his head again, then nodded, then returned to shaking.  

"Well, buenas noches, it was nice to meet you."  I said and I shut the door, leaving him outside.  I was surprised by how well that whole joke played out.  Comfortably re-hydrated by my SOL cero, I turned out the light and went to sleep laughing to myself and thinking that was the best 3$ I'd spent in a long time.

Before my imagination and my recollection...

become a bannana milkshake of jumbled images, I oughtta recount the last few days.  Not so ironically, I am drinking a milkshake right now...so that not so creative metaphor is really not even "not so creative."   This being the first entry, y'all deserve better than silly brain milkshakes and rants that continue on for rediculous lengths of time before actually recounting anything... But given that it is the first real entry, I'd just like to say: This is a blog for y'all, and thank you so much for having interest in my life.  But, if it gets tedious and too absurd to  follow, I apologize in advance and I offer this disclaimer: this bolg is also for me, as  I attempt to define my relationship with my amygdala, my hippocampus, my mammilary bodies, or whatever mysterious pieces of meat actually send and receive electric shocks back and forth through my milkshake (which I now realize is beginning to melt).  In addition to that disclaimer, I also offer this system of color coding.  

Black (or standard text color in this format)- connective text(like ligaments that hold it all together((sort of))), 

A Green sentence signifies I'm telling actual memories, 

Red-memories tainted by imagination,

  Yellow-ranting (careful, may be abrupt and offensive), 

Orange- memories from before the begging of this timeline, 

Purple- brief arbitrary comments (and an excuse to include purple which is a great color), 

Blue-prophecies.  

The sections continue in their given category until the color changes.  So, before I find myself drinking banana flavored milk, here come the moderately modified but factually based stories.

I flew into Guadalajara with the intention of visiting the University.  We walked down the stairs and onto the tarmac to board a stupid little bus which, after waiting for each of the 40 or so passengers to stumble off the tiny jet we took down here from Houston, drove about 50 yards to drop us off at the terminal.  I could understand this service if we were all crippled in one way or another, but as an able bodied person, I found it absurd.  Just to satisfy I wandered around with my burden multiplying the force of gravity, pulling me closer to mexican soil as I scrambled words around in the comal of my hippocampus, trying to reorient myself, o sea reanimar the mexican part of my brain.  I'm thinking I'll need some tacos al pastor and a michelada to set this process in motion.  Unfortunately for my shoulders, I always consider it worth my while to find a cheap as dirt hotel, even if  I have to wander for hours to achieve this task.  Luckily I found an expensive hotel right away...and  the girl working at the desk happily gave me directions to the district of cheap hotels.  En routa, I saw the shadow of a cow walking up the side of a building.  The cow shadow must have been wearing specially designed bovine golf cleats or something, because it left a trail of dripping yellow footprints on the wall where it's feet had punctured the edifice, spilling neon mustard colored blood out over the building's concrete epidermis.  The blood of a standard office building probably carries hope, ambition and desperation, brought in from the outside in the minds of it's employees, into the heart (the CEO's office) where the hope and ambition (carbon dioxide) are filtered out, to later be redistributed in synthetic form (corporate advertising), and the desperation is pumped back into the employee red blood cells through protein chains of paychecks.  But that doesn't explain why the blood is yellow, or where the cow went that cast this shadow, or why, when I look at the picture I took, the cow is now white and three dimensional the mustard colored blotches now resemble giant cells and the the wall is dripping with shadow blood.   Photos don't lie I tell myself, it must have been the amygdala and it's troops of emotional cues marching posteriorly across the temporal lobe towards the barracks of learned and spatial memory in the hippocampus.  

I was on the train; I love trains.  I'm very disappointed that I haven't spent more time riding them.  Maybe someday I'll take a clue from my uncle and hop one hobo style and end up who knows where.  They seem an incredibly authentic way to travel.  Both inner city metros like this one and long distance spanning freights.  Especially the freights actually.  If legs were genuineness, the freight would be the millipede to the metro's common house spider.  Maybe that's just an outsiders romanticized impression, but one way or another, in a train I don't lose the feeling of an honest pedestrian even though I'm relying on a machine to transport me.  I thought about this until I got to San Juan de Dios, an inner city barrio with ample cheap hotels. I spent 10$ on my hotel room and the (at least) 10$ that I saved by finding such cheap lodging on a 10$ digital watch that makes me look like a power ranger!  Then I set out to remexicanize myself a bit with a bite of tacos and a gulp of michelada.  This was an easy task.  Then I went to a pool hall for a while and had a few more beers with some locals.  I try to interact with lots of people in Latin America, just to leave a positive impression, that of an atypical gringo who cares enough to learn the language and isn't a fat stupid tourist or a heartless businessman.  The stereotypes that the rest of the world uses to understand America are well deserved and well founded, but I do my best to chip away at them bit by bit.  Sometimes I throw starfish into the sea to save them...

That night I tried to retire early, but one quirky occupant, who'd been living in this filthy hotel like a roach for two months, knocked on my door at around 11:30......

let's continue the story in the next blog eh?  

Five hundred flowers from five hundred different types of potato

are my brain!