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!