VIva Santa Cruz de los Senderos

Arrived this afternoon via Autobuses del Norte. I write as sunset slants through a guava tree across this stony little courtyard.

I had a couple hours waiting in the big terminal, pushing through the crowds of Mexicans to buy tickets. They don't form lines; they just stand around the counter and hold up a hand, or money, like they were bidding. Still, someone does attend me in time, by whatever mysterious charity, and there's a couple of hours to wait for the bus anyway. No one seems upset or even bored; I entertained myself imagining they could wait as well at the station as elsewhere. The kids stop at me to stare absorptively, and as I type I realize it's not like cattle exactly, but as though I were cattle, or an orang, or something too altogether foreign to respond.

The bus rocks through fairly eternal suburbs, with tall Barrier-Block-style rectangular housing perched on improbable slopes. It's a darwinian theory of construction, I suppose: those buildings that survive the rains and quakes will tend to remain, and what remains will eventually house the greatest number of people in the smallest space.

The hills outside Santa Cruz feel like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, at Disneyland. The road careens so narrowly all I see outside the window are the rocks. A goathead pokes around the seat from beneath the clothes of the senora in front.

For a second I imagine it has just done nursing. "O walleyed, unrepentant goat" -- insouciant, with his legs, I have to imagine, tied -- "tranquility to accept the things I cannot change" or "so placid and self-contain'd." But then, he's probably birria by now. /I'm stewing. But then, he's probably stew./

With the rocks parted, Santa Cruz opens below like sunrise, roads flickering in and out of red and goldish rocks, sparse nopales and mesquite, darker green gathering towards the copper lake below, and pink narrow spires rising above the town.

From closer, dust dominates. I can't say I mind, now that it's no longer midday and I'm no longer stomping from hotel to hotel with that GI dufflebag across my neck, but I wonder how the farmers manage. Maybe it reaches a point where as much topsoil lands as leaves, but I'm suspicious.

DF

I cannot rent this room, the concierge tells me. When I ask Whyever not he says they rob the güeros frequently, that I look too obvious: he points to his eye and to me, then to the bag with this computer.

I'm fairly happy, though, and happier to sleep. I walk stairs to the ninth floor, where a naked bulb hangs some eighteen inches by a wire.

I hit the light, tie the computerstrap to a wrist and run the strap under my back. A moth lights on the window way up here above traffic, and refracted headlights cast across the ceiling from below.



Morning,

I leave the bag of clothes and grab a train to Librería Gandhi. It's closed, but the sun's still low, and I eat tamales beside some stand with some chocolate corn drink so thick it barely pours, almost a pudding or a porridge, and walk the damp streets. We must have had a light rain last night.

A woman sits crosslegged on the sidewalk, weatherburnt face, rotting teeth, legs doubled, a scanty rebozo beneath and around her.

I want to avert my eyes, but as she reaches towards me, lifting her hand, her arm, her mouth, her eyes, I see the baby nursing, wrapped in a woolen blanket. A large smooth, full perfectly formed breast pulls from its lips so softly my tongue presses against the roof of my mouth.

I'm back -- or forth

I'll explain.

I'm in a hotel on Benito Juárez off the Zócalo in Mexico City. I took a gamble, figured my money would last longer. I paid the ISP up front, hung the bike from a rafter in my dad's garage, and hiked up to catch a train to LAX. I'll wind up on my his door again; he'll wind up supporting this project another way, but six months later, so I won't worry when I write.

The trip -- everything officious at LAX, this plane a snug living room with almonds in the sky, the California grid computer chip grids in someone's rumpled motherboard below; then Tijuana streets some cattywampus termite-lust linguine, here sofas on the boulevard, there a bridge to zilch.

At Mexico City a thousand cabbies flood the airport. Nobody asks; the quickest grabs my bag. I grab it back. I do not own enough to pay someone to carry belongings, and no one carries my computer. The cabbie hollers something through the crowd, some explanation, I suspect, though it sounds like a complaint. He has waited because I'm a tourist, and now I won't produce him any money.

"Perdón."

Lo siento, I have been told, is sorry. But it translates as "I feel it," something I'm trying to not say in this crowd. The next cabbie grabs at my bags; I hoist one on my shoulder, hang the computerbag by a strap from my neck and plunge off towards the metro, at the end of the airport.

The second I hit the platform at the bottom, I find a slim young man beside me. He looks slightly shy behind thick, Ginsberg glasses. I notice he's in uniform.

"This is hard," he said. "You travel very far from home."

"I love to see all this." I adjust the army duffle square between my shoulders, cock my head to nod around its bulk. The boy's too young to be a cop. His friend, another cop, stands at the entrance looking with what seems distaste.

"I think I find it very strange to be far from my father. Somewhere I can't read the signs I don't know what to do."

"One makes mistakes. People usually forgive."

"Sometimes. But I would want someone to help. It must be very hard."

The train came. I waved and smiled patiently, perplexed at his attentions and only as the train pulled out noticed the sign behind him:

BULTAS GRANDES PROHIBIDAS
VIOLADORES SERAN MULTADOS

Sensible | Sensate

A belated happy 267th to the Marquis de Sade; let's everyone go make sense:

IF the plant leaks once in a while,
THEN almost no one dies of it,
SO it happens once in a while,
SO it is news,
BUT it is not important.

IF the plant leaks every day,
THEN many die of it,
SO that is important,
BUT it is continuous and we cannot sort out which individuals die because of the plant,
SO that is not news
AND no one wants to know.

C'est logique, non? -- what we use whenever a thing does not make sense at all. And what's a few roentgens between consenting amis?

The majority of the scientists at Los Alamos signed a petition that bomb that landed on Hiroshima be detonated at an unpopulated site in Japan, to demonstrate it. With all the times I've heard people discuss Truman's decision to drop the bomb, the option has never been mentioned.

Rudy's planning his class action suit. He called to say first that he spoke to some lawyers, then that he's planning to. I sent him the email addresses, let him go. If he thrashes enough, maybe he'll kick up someone I can hand this stack of papers off to. But I'm not running interference -- have to work, I say.

"How are you going to take care of yourself while you're doing all this?"

"Oh, my old man's got a house he needs painted. I'll just live in it while I paint it and fix it up. I'll have to bring some birds across, too."

Birds?

"Tropical birds. They don't cost anything down there cause they flit through the trees. People pay big money. Pet stores and them."

I mention the little legal issue; he's not dissuaded.

"They're easier than people. A little tequila, they keep their mouths shut all the way across."

"The birds are mum."

"Yeah. I'ts great; you can't let them get too much, though. Then pull them out of the socks soon as you get good across."

"Socks?"

"I visit my cousins, then stop off in Rosarita on the way back. I sit on the beach with the birds and the laundry and give the birds a little tequila. When they fall over, I pop them in a sock, one by one."

"Yeah. That's a few thousand dollars in that basket if they're all still good. "

When I was a kid, our parakeet always looked a little glassy-eyed.