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.