Category: Banalities & Journaling

Locations:  Whitewater, WI; Chicago, IL; Minneapolis, MN; and roads in between

Soundtrack:  various, mostly NPR

I haven't written in a while.  Last Monday I got notification that my work visa number had come through from the Korean State Dept., so I drove to Chicago to shepherd my paperwork and passport through the consulate there, in order to ensure I had the actual paper visa in time for my departure for Seoul (now in 5 days!).

I spent 3 nights with Bob and Sarah in Whitewater, WI, and it was good to see them before my departure.  I enjoyed my time with Henry (their son of 9 months, now).   Bob is into this show he had DVDs of, called "Corner Gas" – a Saskatchewanian sit-com, basically.  Rather dry, but quite funny and entertaining.  My last night there, we watched a few episodes, and ate blueberries and drank beer (I know, I'm supposedly a teetotaler, but seems like I've been relaxing my dogma a bit, lately).

So then Thursday I drove back up to Minneapolis, but didn't get out of Chicago with my visa till nearly 5 pm, and between rush hour and the severe weather they were having (thunderstorms, high winds, power outages), I didn't get into Minneapolis until about 4 AM.  Oh well.   So Friday was a lost day, I was tired.  And so much to do!

Boxes, boxes, boxes, boxes.  I have packed 75 boxes with books (almost exclusively books!) over Saturday and today, and placed them into my storage unit.  Why couldn't I have opted to collecting something small and light, like stamps?  No… I collect books.  Oh well.  They're all packed away, now.  Must work on all my electronics stuff (5 computers, CDROMs, doohickeys galore), my paperwork (taxes for 2006 still due!), clothes, kitchen stuff.  But the worst is out of the way – all them dang books.

Meanwhile, I have a pleasing announcement to make:  I've got my new Sony Vaio running a "triple-boot":  Ubuntu-Linux, Windows Vista Business, and Windows Server 2003R2.  This is VERY cool.  And I've transfered my email to Mozilla Thunderbird (ending my last horrible Microsoft addiction), and I'm doing most of my work most of the time under the Linux platform.  I feel so… liberated!

I'll try to get my Win2K3R2 working well enough to run SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio, so I can continue to do my .NET development hacking and website stuff there – I'm not ready to take the huge step of migrating my DB work to Linux just yet.  But my desktop is FREE!

Ok… back to all that stuff to pack.

Location: Portland, OR and environs; then EAST on I-84 to US-395 to I-90 east east east, Spokane, Missoula, etc.

Soundtrack: NPR and then the MP3 player on shuffle: tracks of KoRn, Grateful Dead, Jobim, Suzanne Vega, Chemical Brothers… all strung together.

I had those famous waffles for breakfast yesterday morning at Juli and Keith’s, and Latif and Peggy were there. It was a short visit, though, but good to see them. Then I drove into Portland and had lunch with a friend, Arun, and his family – he’d prepared some very good Indian cuisine in the style of his home, Tamil Nadu, I think. I enjoyed it. Arun left HealthSmart not long after I did, he was one of the best programmer/developer types there, and now he’s moved on to bigger and better jobs – unlike what I’ve done, wandering off into yet another adventurous but not so remunerative career. But I want to try to stay in touch with him.

After a long afternoon taking a walk around his neighborhood with him and his older son Kiyosh (about 3 and intermittently charming and mischievous), I departed for the long drive east and back to Minneapolis. I drove until I got to Spokane, but was feeling quite exhausted and decided to splurge a bit and stay in a motel instead of my normal sleep-at-the-rest-area routine. So now I’m in Missoula, and the air is filled with smoke from forest fires, and it might as well be L.A. or Mexico City out there. Lovely.

Not sure if I’ll make it to Minneapolis now in one straight shot or not. But I’ll give it a try.

Location: I-5 Up the Central Valley

Soundtrack: NPR via various valley stations

I left L.A. early – 4:30 am., to beat the traffic out of the city. Dawn at the summit of the Tehachapis. Then tomatoes littering the sides of the highway all the way up the valley, falling off of trucks from the harvest, I guess. A sort of vaguely macabre asphalt marinara.

Quote: “No animals were humped during the making of that song.” Meredith Brooks, regarding her 97 hit “I’m a Bitch”, during a discussion of a recent New York City Council initiative to “censure” the use of the word “bitch” in public discourse, in which she suggested the label was as much empowering as derogatory.

Yesterday we returned from Xalapa.  A very clear day, but despite this the descent into the City from the east was still a sort of diving-into-smog. 

I've been struggling with a bit of bourgeois guilt (or first-world guilt if you prefer) – that feeling one gets when traveling in places like Mexico City (or south Chicago for that matter) when one resides comfortably.  The guy named Colin whom we met the other day here at the Casa accepted the label "freelance anthropologist" but my question is:  how is this different from being a sort of "cultural daredevil" – i.e. someone who goes out into the world from the safety of middle-class America, whether the urban nightmare labyrinths of Tepito or the destitution of rural Guatemala?

Not that I'm placing a value judgement on it – but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're somehow helping or even showing solidarity with the "masses" – all we're doing is "having fun" exploring alien cultural spaces, aren't we?  Is this wrong?

Phil and I went to the main modern art museum at Chapultepec this morning, but he wasn't feeling too hot (maybe a bit of elevation sickness finally hitting?  not sure…), so we returned to the Casa for a few hours of relaxation before we run off to the airport this afternoon for the flight back to L.A.

I took a long walk toward Metro Hidalgo, the little park there where Aura and I used to rendezvous and go on our "dates" all those years ago.  Such fond memories of such dysfunctional relathionships… but haven't all my relationships been dysfunctional?

I then zig-zagged my way toward Chopo, enjoying the feel of the little neighborhoods; the streets; the school kids loitering; the policemen (and a few policewoman, in fact) chatting, guarding inobvious things; the vendors selling aguas and jugos; the old women begging; the young men with punk haircuts and a lot of body jewelry cursing; the dogs sleeping; the smells.

I love Mexico City.

We are in the Mexican city of Xalapa (or Jalapa), Veracruz.  This is where jalapeños come from, of course.  But it is also one of my favorite Mexican places, right on the edge of the altiplano as it drops to the rainforests of the gulf coast, it is a bit steamier and much wetter than mexico city, but still not like being at sea level.

This morning we went to the state anthropology museum, which is one of the best outside of the main, national one in the DF.  Lots of giant heads and interesting masks and statues.  I found myself thinking of a story that could develop in relation to confusing the statues with reality, somehow.  A hallucinatory experience inside the museum.  It was sunny when we got there, and cloudy, sporadically thunderstorming, when we left.  We had some chicken at a chain restaurant, and walked toward the centro again.  Stopped in a spectacular park, all jungly and in a sort of arroyo, birds and koi swimming in ponds at the bottom and flowers and children running about playing.  Quite idyllic and earthy.

It began to rain quite hard, and we sat on some steps of a building under construction, and watched the sky wash some motorcycles on sale on the sidewalk.  I took a photo of the license plate of the car in front of me, with a flower fallen from some tree above it on the bumper like a dead creature.  Striking and strange picture, I was thinking.  I will post when I get a chance to upload pictures.

So now we are back downtown xalapa, and Phil is resting in the hotel while I strolled downhill to this internet cafe.  Got an email from my new employer in Korea, confirming receipt of a photograph I emailed him since I had failed to include one with the packet of other documents sent by courier last week with the signed contract.  An emergency ad hoc photo taken by someone at the Casa in mexico city, I find it striking/weird that my visa photo for my new Korean job was thus taken of me standing against the wall of the lounge of my first overseas job 21 years ago.  I love little synchronicities of that nature.

I ask myself, what is this process of going back to "old" places (where I once lived or traveled) that I've been doing so much of?  Being here in Mexico City causes me to examine my "agenda" in remembering things, reciting old narratives, visiting with old people or remembering people.  Many people (most) acquire a sort of rose-tinted vision of the past, and conversations about "old" things seem fraught with "it used to better" kinds of remarks.  I, too, practice this rose-tinting – I know I do.  But perhaps that's the difference – it's intentional on my part, and there are other times when I can revise my own historical narratives in profoundly negative directions, too.  I feel that, objectively, the past is merely different – neither better nor worse.

I went to see Guti Aviles this morning – she was a former member of the Casa staff, and was a sort of godmother to me during my year and a half here, feeding me garlic and papaya ("para tu salud m'hijo") and such.  A very caring, gregarious person, now over 70 and with an inoperable brain tumor, nevertheless she seemed cogent and after a bit of chatting seemed to remember me at least enough to repeat my name a few times as we talked.

Yesterday, an afternoon in the Casa like so many from so long ago – long, long hours of political and cultural debate or discussion with interesting, engaging people – a young man named Colin from Seattle, anarcho-socialist and with experience in developing-world communities from western China to Guatemala.   Another mellow world traveler Yaniv from Israel (though currently resident in Madrid) with fond recuerdos de la casa and a very generous, wide-open personality.  These sorts of people and the wonderful, brief relationships that can be build are part of what make this "casa de gringos" (entre otros) so unique in my traveling experience.

Today Phil and I are going to leave for Xalapa for a day or two, so as to experience something external to the gran ciudad podrida.

Luego, más.

This infinite city repossesses my soul.  Each street is a neighborhood, same-yet-different from any other:  poor or bourgeois; green with trees or grey with concrete; festive in colors of political advertisements or gang graffitti.  Last night Phil and I walked back to the 'casa' (the Casa de los Amigos, AC where I lived and worked for over a year in 1986-87) where we're staying as guests now, across the plaza that's in front of the Monumento de la Revolución, and at 8pm there were:  1) a marching band practicing (sound of cars crashing); 2) some boys playing football (americano! – not soccer – los chilangos love american football); 3) a permanent political protest encamped and playing traditional music through loudspeakers; 4) taxistas loitering; 5) men and women selling trinkets or candy or videos or music; 6) tourists strolling (that would have been us, I suppose).  It all felt vibrant, and so typical.  A city full of lives being lived.

This city.  And Manhattan, where I was a month ago, too.  These places always recall to me my untold tales of the truly infinite city.  A city in a Borgesian mode, genuinely devoid of limits or boundaries.  Some authors of science fiction have postulated cities that cover entire planets (Asimov or Walter Jon Williams), but I think there's a germ of something different, unique, evocative (and personally compelling?) in the notion of a city-universe. 

Yesterday, Phil and I took the bus from Autobuses del Norte (terminal) out to the pyramids at Teotihuacán.  We climbed the piramide del sol, saludabamos a los dioses moribundos y mirabamos a la muchedumbre de turistas que estaba ahí.  Sacabamos unas fotos.

We returned to the city, amid the haze of the north side of the valley and the grey suburbios climbing the hillsides, which were punctuated with occasional brightly colored declarations of incipient middle-class wealth in the form of well-built two story houses amid the slums.  Without map or guide I took us from Metro Indios Verdes to MA Quevedo at the south end of the city, and found unerringly but instinctually my favorite Mexican bookstore, la libería gandhi.  Once a sort of counter-cultural institution, this business has in recent decades grown to a sort of Border's-of-Mexico, with multiple locations and a very nifty website from which I've even ordered books from the states, although the cost of shipping is a tad exhorbitant – oddly, it's cheaper to order books shipped from Spain than Mexico.

I bought a spectacular book of short stories, very recent (2004?) entitled El materialismo histérico, by Xavier Velasco.  More on this gem, later?

This morning we went to the museo and casa de Leon Trotsky, who lived his final days here in exile before being murdered by a proto-KGB agent in 1940.  We walked around Coyoacán, had some lunch, and returned.  I met with Rosita, a woman who was one of the cleaning staff when I worked here 20 years ago, and now, despite her 70 years, is still spry and works occasionally to make ends meet.  We chatted and walked over to try to find Guti, another person who was like a godmother to me during my time here, who has been ill.  But she wasn't home or didn't hear us yelling up from the street ("mexican doorbell").  I know where she lives, though, and will try to come back to see her at some point again before we return to L.A.

Greetings from mexico city.  Walking around with my father, showing him my old haunts, moving efficiently through the subway system on kinesthetic autopilot.  We went to the torre latinoamericana this morning and up to the observation deck (floor 42), but the view was hazy and only a few kilometers visibility – couldn't make out chapultepec or popo, but could just see congreso to the east and torre pemex to the west.   

This afternoon spent a few hours at the museo nacional de antropologia.

Had dinner just now at a traditional style argentine parrilla – I had a pretty nice steak.   Anyway, I'll meditate on my experience and post more later.