We’ve stayed in these Ho-tels before, but never in the dedicated sex rooms.  In the past, they’ve taken one look at us, walkied back to command that we’re “norteamericanos” and diverted us to the nightly rooms.  But, tonight, we’re in the middle of nowhere and this is all there is.

If you’ve never driven Mexico’s highways, you should know that they are similar to America’s only in that they use asphalt as pavement.  Other than that, they’re a whole different beast.  There are no Motel 6s or Red Roof Inns dotting the highways.  (Not to mention that “freeways” don’t exist.  If you’re on a big, fast road, you’re paying for it, through the nose.)  The mom and pop motel that will eventually be bought out by those corporations aren’t even really here yet.  What does exist is a bounty of motels specifically created as a safe haven for prostitutes and johns — the Ho-tel.

Tonight we’ve driven farther than we should and, desperate for a place to rest, we end up at the Posada Treble Park.  There’s no office, just a list of rates, a microphone, and a slide-out money tray like the kind you find at gas stations in the ‘hood.  Isaac tells the microphone that we want a simple room for the night, but there is some confusion.  A man eventually walks out and sounds surprised that we want the room “until tomorrow?”.  He escorts us to our own private garage with a room attached.

I remember the first time I saw past the high front walls of these places.  I thought “How great — they all have their own individual garages.”  Later, I realized that this, after the high wall, was a primary indication that the place was a Ho-tel.

We enter through the garage.  There’s no key.  Our escort just walks away and we close ourselves in behind him.  The room looks similar to all the other dumpy Mexican motels we’ve stayed in except for the oversized revolving milk door that allows you to order specific items to be delivered in complete privacy without having to leave your room. 

I’m intrigued by the size of the milk door.  I wonder just what are these giant things that people are ordering?  Since there’s no menu here, my imagination is left to wander.

We didn’t splurge for the seemingly popular jacuzzi room.  Our room does, however, have the deluxe version of the Lorenzetti Maxi Ducha.  You may remember this from my prior post “Suicide shower”.  This one, though, has a side attachment that I can find no direct purpose for.  

Again, my mind goes to work, and the Maxi Ducha makes my milk door imaginings seem tame.

The crown mouldings, the hair dryer, and the plenitude of onyx tile are luxuries that we don’t often find in our Mexican motel sojourns.  That, and the free porn — all you can watch, imported from the U.S. of A., only interrupted by rare commercials for porn video games with characters’ named “Cockhammer” and “Clamtrap”.  The goal of the game is to have intercourse.  Sounds pretty straightforward — what’s the challenge?  Avoid getting venereal diseases — morphing your character into “Claptrap”?

The fact that the bed has bleacher seating as a headboard is only mildly disturbing, since I understand its function.  They’ve really tried to think of everything here, right down to the plastic coated pillows. The breath mints are a nice touch, too.  

And though the room does have the haunted air of past sexcapades, I feel strangely safe here, knowing that we’re locked in tight, and that everyone else around us is busy doing their own thing.

When you leave this much dirt on your car, you gotta figure the temptation is too much. We didn’t expect this little taste of racism, though:

Here’s a close-up:

Basically, the direct translation is “Fuck yourselves, you bad little gringos (North Americans)” followed by the old bird, aka the middle finger. I guess that translates the same in Mexico as in America.

The fact that we’ve been living out of a suitcase for the past year and a half only made the threat of losing everything that much easier to deal with. We didn’t have that much to lose.

This is not what you’re thinking as the flood water rises, of course. In our case, we were thinking something in the realm of Mmm. Cabbage really is a good subsitute for a hamburger bun as our dinner, late last night, was interrupted by a rude torrent of muddy water pounding on our front door.

Ever the hothead, I replied, ‘What the fuck is that!?!’

Muddy Water retorted, ‘Fuck you! I am a flood! You better run motherfuckers!!’, and he burst in.

M.W. aka ‘The Flood” came on like gangbusters. He had joined ranks with the River behind the house and they rushed the backyard. At the same time, he commandeered the little stream next to the house and used it to flood the street. He was blitzkrieging us in both directions. Under the front and back doors and into the house, all of the sudden, we were standing on a quickly disappearing island. The next moment, we were standing in the middle of a river 150 feet wide.

Isaac had the forethought to shut off the power so we wouldn’t be electrocuted. We sloshed through the the rooms of the house, holding keychain flashlights between our teeth, desperate to save everything that had a plug, not to mention all the brand new appliances that we had, waiting to be installed in the new casitas. Somehow, we managed to lift all of them and perch them on anything we could find that was above water, kind of like Jenga from hell.

Satisfied that we could do no more, and worried that we wouldn’t make it up our road onto the highway (Damn, Xterra!), we made like Noah, minus the animals plus the electronics, loaded up our ArkTerra, and got the hell out.

Muddy Waters came and went pretty quickly. The rains slowed and we were able to get back in the house by 3 o’clock in the morning. We threw ourselves down and never slept atop a mattress — its own little island in a shallow sea still left inside the house.

Today was spent cleaning up the layer of silt that remains from four inches of flooding. No sleep, cleaning ALL day, and still not done yet. Welcome to Paradise!

When I was little I put salt on a snail once. Once. I felt really bad about it.

Even after all these years, I reflect on that moment as one of my few acts of premeditated evil. Somewhere, in the back of my subconscious conscience (not to be confused with my unconscious conscience, which is another story — a novel perhaps…1000 pages…Volumes…But I digress, AGAIN.), I’ve felt shameful for what I did to that little guy.

(To that ant: the magnifying glass was not my idea. I have to admit that it was probably my lack of patience that made me give up my murderous actions, nonetheless, I am sorry.)

Today, in one of my daily bug checks I found these not-so-little guys:

‘What the hell are those?!’ I hear you demand.

Well, the slimier translucent guy is the snail (Nice shell, Dude. I can tell you’re from the beach.). And the slimy dark guy is what I’ve told myself is a jungle slug. At first I thought they were getting it on, gastropod-style, but then I watched them a little longer:

And I realized that the snail was actually eating the slug. Cannibalistic bastard!

Now I don’t feel so bad.

A break in the rain…

The circus was in town last night so, of course, we were there with a couple of our friends. This is only my second small-time Mexican circus, but I have already noticed a pattern.

They seem to be comprised of one family: a father (ringmaster), mother (ticket-taker/concessionaire), the assorted children (performers), and the single uncle who has a specific talent, be it tiger-tamer or aerial artist or otherwise main-event performer, but who also wears many hats, including clown hats.

There’s something so endearing about the size of these tiny circuses. The little girls out there in the ring, showing off their various aptitudes, remind me of a little show I put on with my best friend, many years ago, in the trailer park days.

For some reason, someone had converted an old barn at the entrance to the park into a theatre. It only strikes me as strange now, that a trailer park would have a real live ticket-taking Broadway musical performing venue attached to it. Perhaps the owner of the trailer park had Broadway dreams, who knows? But that is another story.

Anyway, my friend Sam (short for Samantha, to dispel any gender confusion) and I hatched a plan to put on our own Christmas Extravaganza replete with singing and dancing, and starring yours truly and Sam. Following a business model not unlike those of mega discount stores, we charged a low ticket price and expected to make money in volume alone. The trailer park had somewhere around 100 spaces, so we figured that, at a dollar a ticket, with each space having anywhere from one to four possible attendees, taking into account theatre-haters and uninterested parties, we could still be bringing in around A HUNDRED DOLLARS! Remember, this was the ’70s, Kids. And two sixth-graders with a hundred dollars would be considered downright rich.

So, we canvassed fiberglass-door-to-fiberglass-door, promising the show of a lifetime. Each resident got our spiels and we charmed the money right from their low income pockets. One crisp dollar for one handmade ticket, inscribed most probably by myself since I had the better handwriting, torn from a wad of tickets stapled together for just the very purpose of being able to rip them off one-by-one, thereby adding authenticity to the entire shindig.

Well, I don’t quite remember how much we did end up with, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a hundred dollars. But it was enough that when I told my mother, aghast for what reason I’m still unsure, she insisted that we return every penny.

So back we went, to each and every resident, and returned their money. But the show must go on, as they still say. So, we invited them all to come for the price of a donation if they so chose (the settlement my mother agreed to), and headed off for the bright lights.

Now this theatre did actually have a set up. I’m talking a lighting grid, sound system, the works. And it was just me and Sam, so we had to choreograph our skits carefully so that one could run the lights and sound while the other performed on stage. Back and forth, Sam closed on a tear-jerking “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while I faded to black. RUN!!! I position myself centerstage, Sam hits me with a spotlight and I gift the audience with the best “Jingle Bell Rock” one little heart can muster.

The audience, by the way, consisted of one elderly woman and my mother. All, in all, we raked in a dollar, which was enough to buy a hell of a lot of candy, so it was definitely worth it.

I know, I digress. But this is what came to mind as I watched the little girl “contortionist”, who was really more like a regular gymnast, give the show of her lifetime to a group of eager folks happy to pay the admission.

Twelve days in the city, eleven subway rides, ten wedding cake samples, nine exhibits, eight specialty markets, seven bakeries, six art stores, five cab rides, four hot dogs, three hamburgers, two barfing people, and a gang-shooting right in front of me.

Ahhh! The big apple — we came for the wedding, but we enjoyed a few other perks, in no particular order.

I’m not quite sure how this happens, but here’s proof that it’s not relegated to slapstick comedy. That’s right, the old tp hanging out the back door:

This one’s for my homies back in Mexico — the tinacos of NYC:

During a night-time trip to Coney Island, Ike snapped these pics:

While Ike and Pierre headed off for some Nathan’s, I grabbed these shots:

I just had to get a shot of this lamp inside a Brighton Beach restaurant — the decór was an interesting mix of Russian Rococo and Robert Palmer video:

¡Hasta Luego, Nueva York! Hope to be back REAL soon:

Today marks the one-year anniversary for the start of the International Live Your Dreams tour. So, I felt like it was time for a little reflection and Dar Gracias, or to give thanks.

The tour is what we make of it. At its best, it’s a perennial greatest-vacation-we-ever-had.

At the very least, the tour prospers in every day that I can say to myself I don’t have to go back to that job that I hate tomorrow, in every night when I go to bed with Isaac and wake up to find him still there in the morning, and in every moment when things go unpredictably wrong – I still think to myself how lucky I am.

Either way, today marks the exact moment when Isaac and I, together, decided to take a leap and live our dreams. So thanks to everything and everybody, good and bad, who helped make this possible – you are too many to name.

I’m happy to say that the tour will continue into its second year. I look forward to its evolution, from a vacation to a lifestyle perhaps. I wait for its lessons, even the hard ones.

I hope that the tour’s long-lived, too, of course. But we’ll have to wait and see.

If we fail, at least we can say that we did live our dreams, even for just a little while.

We started a new tradition today. After biking up to our land, we each sat down with a beer and enjoyed the view from the foundation underneath the pool. It forms a nice little bench that will grow ever higher, so our view will only continue to get better. As it is, it’s wonderful.

While we sat there, we watched the various birds visit the canopy surrounding our land. Some we knew, others we had never seen before. At one point, a couple of pheasants landed in the tree right next to us. But once they caught sight of us they flew away — directly overhead, actually. So close that I could see the features of the mouse that one of the pheasants held in its mouth. If he had dropped that mouse it would have fallen directly into my agape mouth.

Our anticipation is growing with every day and every brick. We really look forward to sharing this special place with you.

¡Salud!

Our little salchicha turns one today. Snausages for everybody!