fiesta 2007

sometimes when in the middle of something memorable, it's good to pay extra attention to each minute as each minute passes. that vacation, that ice cream, that city wide festival, that something will all be over soon enough so why not appreciate it as much as possible while you can. sometimes you know exactly when that thing is coming to an end you can only dedicate so much to it, or just as likely you dedicate that much more to make up for it approaching end. letting the fact that it's raining during fiesta shouldn't short change the thrill of throwing confetti eggs at your senator as she floats by on a regal barge. the zydeco band will actually make you want to tap your foot if you really want to listen. go ahead, follow the spontaneous motorcade down the street and through the big wooden doors to discover a theater full of little girls in pageantry and old women in funny hats. you're probably not going to get that chance again. the city is alive and so are we so let's live a little and worry about cleaning up cascarones later.

where does one begin? (and where does one end?)

I keep busy. In this "City That Never Sleeps...unless it's after 10pm," I've at least stayed out past 11 a handful of times lately. In fact I think we've all gotten past the point where we're reverse psychologically self reinforcing our own cynical lame existence to feel ok with ourselves in the mirror. I'm ok, you're ok, and all the royale Us are actually doing great. I'd like to avoid the need for insecure comparisons to cities just north who manufacture quirkiness at an impressive rate. I'd like to avoid them, but they're just making it too easy?

This previously mentioned Royalty is dissolving from the nebulous theory that kept us going, into a full fledged chunk of a town. They're coming out of the stone work. Per happenstance you meet one person who certainly knows another whom certainly is somehow related to that guy you once went to that thing with. By the end of the weekend, you've seen one person you don't actually know 10 times and can't imagine life without them. It's grassroots monarchy at its best and most incestuous. Weird social networks aside, the city of San Antonio most defendable when at its closest. The Bike Summit pulled in upwards of 150 people, many of whom actually hadn't met before. Now they have and We are better off. Don't even get me started on the power of a kickball.

Of note though is these youth of the republic having grown up, graduated, and are increasingly getting jobs, money, and their accustomed leisure time. We're well off, creative, and We don't want to get bored. That's the root of our beginning and inevitable end to it all. That's what's bringing down the hip giant up north. Too much, too soon. Too white.

And apparently such precedents have been set before. On the eve of the greatest ironic uniting force this city shuts down for, I find this article...of course Char makes an appearance. Fiesta brings us together, but it's not all we are. It's time to refocus on what really matters - eating pounds of oysters that have been sitting in the sun for hours with my fellow Antonian acolytes. I look forward to finally getting baptized into the family.

The Motorcade Diaries, pt. 2

Over 10 days in the middle of March, I traveled through coastal Mexico into the mountains of the central states visiting various cultural sites and the many bathrooms of government run gas stations. It was beautiful, surprising, tiring, and fulfilling. Led by an anthropologist Dr. B who is the definition of wise, twenty of us drove thousands of kilometres between five cars and five cb radios. Together we represented a cross section of America, or at least of South Texas. I tried journaling when possible and can't guarantee the names of towns or the accuracy of the Spanish I tended to slip into. I pick up the trip now in the last few days...

Dia Seis
We had one last huevos rancheros and left the Taselotzin co-op by 10am. I want to point out how luscious the landscape is up in the mountains. Everything has something else growing on it. Flower pots are moss-welded into the soil encrusted stairways. Trees are cut into posts, lined into barbed wire fences, and then these posts sprout into their own trees formally lining the perimeter of fields with succulent smelling pink flowers. Coming down we dropped off one of the local students back at his school in San Miguel. Further down the mountain a couple of our ladies dropped in on some 90 year old woman they'd made friends with a couple of years before. The series of towns and buildings through the hills seem very archipelago like, yet instead of water it's 150 tall pines sprouting autumn like shades of pollen on this last week before spring. The landscape changed quickly outside of the mountains though we remained above a mile mile elevation.

Our next stop were the expansive Aztec ruins of Cordona. Here the settlements were countless paths, walls, foundations, and pyramids all made of dry stacked volcanic rock tightly snaking up the topography. While there we witnessed the governor's helicopter take off with some Texas writer whose name I recognized at the time. Other than that we had the ancient city to ourselves.



Somewhere between our location of Tlaxcala and Cordona we stopped at a random puebla to hand out school supplies at una escuela. The elementary age students and their teachers were a tad shocked at the randomness of cinco coches full of 19 Americanos y un Australian taking over their playground with gifts and broken Spanish conversation. I met a little muchacho named Marco and others who I whipped out my Mexican child play time bag of tricks. These little uniformed ones also loved using my camera and could kick my butt in soccer. We left as quickly as we'd come and their clean pressed white collars and green sueteres pressed against the chain link fence dicen "Bye! Bye!"

By sundown we'd made it to this much dryer region of Tlaxcala and I had pescade con queso blanco y camerones. Our table capped it all off with the sharing of a deadly chile chased with tears and pats of butter.

Dia Siete, Ocho, y Nueve

As with anything, these past few days showed that even twenty person ten day road trips across the interior of Mexico have downsides. Right now I'm fending off a head congestion shared by most of our troupe. And during this final stretch back north, the arid plains of northern Mexico do little to cure a stuffy nose. Before I digress further into Mexican misery, I want to say that this trip has ended as well as it started...Since Wednesday I've laid awake all night with chills and a racing heart beat, been collectively involved in a wreck that coincided with a dead battery and broken alternator, gotten stuck in Friday afternoon traffic in Mexico City in which we were pulled over by two cops, been scammed out of thousands of pesos by that second cop who most likely was fake on account of his tow-truck-squad-car, and did I mention I nursed a horrible fever last night in a roach ridden hotel room with a fiesta jamming in the parking lot outside and standing water puddled around the bathroom's central drain?

However, the wreck happened in front of an insurance office, an alternator was quickly rebuilt by the town's Chicago trained mechanic, the roach puddle hotel had a couple of English channels to drown out the parking lot party, and anything else in between i can just chalk up to experience building. Furthermore, the food just keeps getting better, namely a hamburger I want to make mention of containing string cheese, pineapple, and chipotle sauce. The mayo slathered roasted corn and three scoop ice cream did little to help my allergies, but they tasted a lot better than the thick Mexican decongestant.


As for all the other travelers, just at the point where everyone seemed to tire of everyone else, Dr. B has remained cool and humorous enough to keep us on the same page and sharing great stories over our long awaited Frito pie dinner.

Tomorrow I'm home.