Compañeros,
It's been awhile since I've sat at this little glowing box and attempted to hammer out a 'status update' of sorts, just to keep you apprised of the goings-on here, in my new home to the south. It's 26 degrees here today, though our mornings are cool, and I'm sitting in the sun hammering out a scope document for some revisions that we've made to an app that may, or very well may not, make my superiors deliriously rich and, at the same time, allow me to finally buy the giant, jewel-encrusted sombrero that I've coveted since my arrival. The thing is huge, about two metres in diameter, and is covered in precious stones. If Mexico had princes and princesses, this thing would have been used as one of their cribs.
But the country lacks such distinction, and, as such, the thing is destined to hang on my dining room wall, above a massive circular dining room table, and a new wooden sign I will erect this weekend announcing: "The Nights of the Round Table".
That is, IF I can get this scope finished, which is looking decidedly unlikely for today.
I feel like writing something a little more fun at the moment, and I figured I'd benefit from a little recreational word-smithing.
Mexico, yet again, finds itself in international headlines, this time because some poor fool struck a match to light a gas stove, and, to his great surprise, also managed to ignite a massive volume of unseen methane or natural gases, which emanated from nearby swamps, sewers or a natural gas line leak, depending on which official theory you happen to subscribe to. The end result, however, cannot be disputed. The sheer force of the blast blew the floor of the lobby of the Riviera Princess Hotel through the goddamn ceiling, killing 7 people, including 5 Canadian tourists, and 2 hotel employees.
A friend of mine was already on the horn with me a day later, asking that I inquire into the official report of the blast, so that they might determine if their hotel, on the other side of the complex, was in jeopardy.
"Under what circumstances, exactly, do you think that the hotel's manager is going to respond to that question with 'yes'?" I asked, perplexed.
But he was desperate. They'd paid for the holiday, made all the required arrangements, and were now staring down the very real possibility that they'd either have to cancel, or change locations at the last minute, something travel agents aren't always so willing to have you do. However, when one's every waking moment while on vacation is consumed by the fear that your poolside, mid-afternoon margarita session might at any moment be interrupted by huge chunks of concrete raining down from the sky...well, to hell with someone else's inconvenience eh?
"You should get out of there Davey", he said. "Nothing good's happening in Mexico."
And when all you read is the international headlines, he's not far off the mark, but at least this latest saga didn't include people being hung from a tree and then dismembered, or 18 people being buried in a mass grave, or an Ottawa-based businessman being stuffed into the trunk of his car outside of Acapulco before the vehicle was torched on the side of the road, or 15 people being gunned down while washing their cars at a carwash on a Saturday afternoon as a retaliation for the government having arrested 134 cartel members the week before.
"Besides", I told him, "this is Mexico City. They don't fuck around here."
To be sure, this is at least partially true. The convoys of military soldiers and fully-equipped riot cops that are the rule rather than the exception on the streets here seem to keep whatever malignant influence the cartels enjoy in the Federal District firmly buried, in the underground, and decidedly quiet. Gang violence is rare, but when it does crop up, the orders from President Calderon are for the perpetrators to be dealt with swiftly, and harshly. The country cannot afford headlines pasted across the globe, pigeonholing its world-class, convention-heavy metropolis as a den of thieves, rapists, and cocaine-fueled massacre, where an unsuspecting tourist may be dragged off the street at midday to be held in a shanty on the outskirts of town until the required ransom is paid or your time runs out.
The implications of that brand of reporting would be dire for all sorts of industries based here, not to mention conventions and tourism, which has already taken massive hits due to the cartel-related violence on the Pacific Coast.
Instead, our capital city sits at an almost constant state of 'red alert', with its police force in full view of the general populace on an almost constant basis, traveling in pairs, on bikes, motorcycles, on foot and in patrol cars, whose lights are perpetually flashing.
I was hunkered down in a local pub several weeks ago, indulging in litre-mugs of beer, when I struck up a conversation with one of the bartenders, who seemed preoccupied by the large amount of police cruisers driving by the bar, lights flashing.
"In Canada", I said, "they only flash their lights when there's trouble."
"Here too.", he said. "Which is all the time."
This kind of over-dramatic response is typical of a great deal of the residents here, who mostly grew tired of the constant debate and rhetoric being put forth by national and international news organizations who consistently argued whether Mexico should be allowed to celebrate its bicentennial anniversary, or whether the festivities should have been canceled across the country, as they were in Ciudad Juarez, to avoid potential terrorist acts, and the price tag that came along with assuring that we didn't.
$100 million, after all, is a fair amount of money to spend on a party, and a lot of people thought that the funds would have been better spent on things like infrastructure, schools, water preservation, rural development or the country's promotion to the world, rather than blowing the whole wad in a 72 hour orgy of tequila, music, dancing, fireworks and 30 000 riot cops.
The other side stood firm, Calderon included, and stated emphatically that Mexico would host a party to end all celebrations, and would do so without a single drop of blood shed. For the most part, he was right. Many arrests were made that night, and I was very nearly one of them, when I was shaken down near Constitution Square for drinking from an open liquor container (it is, after all, rather difficult to drink from a closed one). After demanding 1200 pesos per violation or threatening 36 hours in prison, my girlfriend and I revealed that we had 50 pesos between the two of us, and if they'd like that, they were welcome to it. The cops, obviously furious at the 15 wasted minutes they'd spent trying to strike the fear of God into us with little result, sped away without a further word, but not before they poured our beer into the street, leaving us to a 10 km walk home without any sort of refreshment or mind-bending diversion.
Instead, we took turns taking pictures of each other modeling with the dozens of stone statues that mark Paseo de la Reforma.
That night is long gone now, a distant spec in the rear-view mirror, and while a great many of the locals here participated no more than watching the festivities unfold from the comfort of their living rooms, there is a general consensus that the ability for the country to hold simultaneous love-ins in all of its major cities and strategic focal points celebrating its independence without having to actually kill anyone this time in order to do it had to count as a win for the forces of Law and Order.
But the prevailing, intuitive sense of 'the long road ahead' that most self-aware citizens felt before we all shook our moneymakers in the streets on September 15th is something that no amount of booze or cliché-laden speeches could purge from the national conscience. No matter how many times someone yells 'Viva México' or dances to an indigenous rhythm, or shows up at a large public event, there will always be, for the time being, a sense that no matter the resolve of the general population, the well-armed cartels will eventually wear out the governing forces and plunge the country into a state of servitude not seen since the ghettos of eastern Europe.
And maybe they're right. There is, after all, the great possibility that our elected leaders lose their appetite for seeing their neighbours gunned down in the streets in order to stop the trafficking of illicit drugs to a very economically willing American populace. No one wants to send their children to school, only to have them return in body bags, all because some geek who lives in a fortified compound, paid for by the populace's income taxes has decided that even though his war on drugs has cost over 28 000 lives on his very own soil, he must trudge forward at all costs, and his loyal subjects must do the same.
But in a little over a year from now, Mexico will be forced to elect a new leader, as Calderon's 6 year term expires. Some will do so happily, anxious to reverse a course that many have viewed as flawed from the very beginning. But as Obama found out early on in his stint as US President, pulling out isn't as easy as it sounds. You cannot, after all, dive head-first into a wasp nest and then retreat, with bows and apologies, without some serious fucking consequences.
We are in this for the long haul, for better or for worse, until one side caves into the other's pressure, and I can't help but theorize that the lucrative nature of the cartels' business model will always attract a fair amount of pimps, hacks, punks and losers to their ranks, offering a constant replenishment of footsoldiers with which to combat the publicly sanctioned forces.
There are at least 28 000 people who've learned a very valuable lesson that public servants would do well to heed, and whose graduations are printed in bold font-type on newsprint that inevitably makes its way to the same final resting place as all of the unknown and undiscovered victims of this ill-advised conflict. The landfill site.
As Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush II and Obama have already determined, it is very difficult to win a war. What Calderon and the Mexican populace will likely need to come to terms with is that it is almost fucking impossible to win one that you're fighting in your backyard, against invisible forces.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Noise Inc.
It took me about 13 minutes after leaving Benito Juarez International Airport on my first trip to Mexico City to realize that the city's official song was something that essentially was conceived as a strange, everyday homage to the angel Gabriel, the horn-tooting biblical messenger who foretold the birth of both John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. In the arena of global prophecy, this is akin to the sportscaster who predicts that the next four Super Bowls will be won by four different teams who don't yet even exist. It is a veritable forecasting 'coup d'état', and one that, I suspect, isn't likely to be repeated anytime soon, unless the Louisville Mint Juleps, Arkansas Lewinskies, Baton Rouge Evacuators and Alabama Oil-Spills draft very well next April, make a deep splash in the free agent pool, and just about every other team in the league is paralyzed by tapeworms.
But that isn't likely to happen, and we're not here to deal in outright fantasy. We were dealing with music, or in this case, the unfortunate official sound of my new home at 7300 ft., which is the ubiquitous car-horn.
There is no way of properly conveying the over-use of this simplest vehicular device except to say that from the hours of 7am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, and occasionally into the weekend, one's morning maintenance, daily tasks, market visits, dining, nightcaps, romance and rest are likely to play themselves out to a cacophonous racket that permeates closed windows, earplugs, television noise, music systems and conversation, to provide a soundtrack that is only barely tolerable if you happen to be hearing it while someone is trying to extract perfectly good teeth out of your mouth without any courtesy of anesthetic.
That's right. Every single day, I rise, wash, eat, work, shop, dine, drink, fuck and sleep to the sound of hundreds of motorists who are either expressing irritation, grief, intention, menace, glee or greeting by ramming the palm of their hands forcefully against their steering wheels like the fucking things are bleeding to death, and the flow of blood must be stemmed.
We are not talking about a casual 'honk, honk' to let someone know that you're behind them, or to alert a friend or colleague that you've noticed them picking out cheap drapes from a secondhand store in a bad part of town. These are all-out, twenty to thirty second, ear-grating symphonies of piercing noises that invade the ears and don't dissipate for much longer periods. "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Oh. Hello Jose. How are the kids?"
To Mexico City residents, however, this kind of behaviour is merely a warmup for the morning commute, when the bastards may as well drive with one palm in the centre of the wheel at all times, while the other applies makeup, holds a taco, surfs Facebook or gestures wildly at the person on the other end of the telephone, which, incidentally, is held to the ear by the shoulder. Because the morning commute, dear friends, is when the orchestra comes out in full force, impaling the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to be within 400 metres of Paseo de la Reforma, or Constituyentes, or Virreyes, or Viaducto, or Circuito, or even my small, one-way side-street Pachuca with long, piercing, angry howls of assembly-line generated rage. It is like being locked in a room with 30 different speakers, each pumping 1000 watts, and then having 13 different bands play their own hit song at maximum volume. At the same time. Badly.
But then, as with many things, there's a bright side to the whole practice, which, in this case, is that I learned of someone, a long-time resident, who hates the sound of a car-horn more than I do. We were following the poor fool home last week, when I turned to Juan Carlos, a colleague who ferries me about, and instructed him to 'lay on the goddamn horn'. Our mark's eyes immediately shot to his rearview mirror, where he was greeted by two delirious laughing faces. He knew it was pointless. We weren't going to let up. So he hunched his shoulders, shook his head ceaselessly and kept driving.
We followed him for three kilometers, alternating between long blasting notes that seemed to actually crescendo and short, staccato bursts that seemed to be hitting him in the base of the spine.
"My God", I wondered. "What kind of effect must this be having on those sharing the road with us?"
I drew my eyes away from our victim in front of us, who had yet to evade us, and started to look around at the crowded road, into the cars and at those driving them.
Nothing. Not a measure of surprise. No disgust. No irritation. No eye-rolling by the pretty lady yammering on her cell phone directly beside us. Nothing.
This is, after all, completely normal behaviour.
But that isn't likely to happen, and we're not here to deal in outright fantasy. We were dealing with music, or in this case, the unfortunate official sound of my new home at 7300 ft., which is the ubiquitous car-horn.
There is no way of properly conveying the over-use of this simplest vehicular device except to say that from the hours of 7am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, and occasionally into the weekend, one's morning maintenance, daily tasks, market visits, dining, nightcaps, romance and rest are likely to play themselves out to a cacophonous racket that permeates closed windows, earplugs, television noise, music systems and conversation, to provide a soundtrack that is only barely tolerable if you happen to be hearing it while someone is trying to extract perfectly good teeth out of your mouth without any courtesy of anesthetic.
That's right. Every single day, I rise, wash, eat, work, shop, dine, drink, fuck and sleep to the sound of hundreds of motorists who are either expressing irritation, grief, intention, menace, glee or greeting by ramming the palm of their hands forcefully against their steering wheels like the fucking things are bleeding to death, and the flow of blood must be stemmed.
We are not talking about a casual 'honk, honk' to let someone know that you're behind them, or to alert a friend or colleague that you've noticed them picking out cheap drapes from a secondhand store in a bad part of town. These are all-out, twenty to thirty second, ear-grating symphonies of piercing noises that invade the ears and don't dissipate for much longer periods. "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Oh. Hello Jose. How are the kids?"
To Mexico City residents, however, this kind of behaviour is merely a warmup for the morning commute, when the bastards may as well drive with one palm in the centre of the wheel at all times, while the other applies makeup, holds a taco, surfs Facebook or gestures wildly at the person on the other end of the telephone, which, incidentally, is held to the ear by the shoulder. Because the morning commute, dear friends, is when the orchestra comes out in full force, impaling the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to be within 400 metres of Paseo de la Reforma, or Constituyentes, or Virreyes, or Viaducto, or Circuito, or even my small, one-way side-street Pachuca with long, piercing, angry howls of assembly-line generated rage. It is like being locked in a room with 30 different speakers, each pumping 1000 watts, and then having 13 different bands play their own hit song at maximum volume. At the same time. Badly.
But then, as with many things, there's a bright side to the whole practice, which, in this case, is that I learned of someone, a long-time resident, who hates the sound of a car-horn more than I do. We were following the poor fool home last week, when I turned to Juan Carlos, a colleague who ferries me about, and instructed him to 'lay on the goddamn horn'. Our mark's eyes immediately shot to his rearview mirror, where he was greeted by two delirious laughing faces. He knew it was pointless. We weren't going to let up. So he hunched his shoulders, shook his head ceaselessly and kept driving.
We followed him for three kilometers, alternating between long blasting notes that seemed to actually crescendo and short, staccato bursts that seemed to be hitting him in the base of the spine.
"My God", I wondered. "What kind of effect must this be having on those sharing the road with us?"
I drew my eyes away from our victim in front of us, who had yet to evade us, and started to look around at the crowded road, into the cars and at those driving them.
Nothing. Not a measure of surprise. No disgust. No irritation. No eye-rolling by the pretty lady yammering on her cell phone directly beside us. Nothing.
This is, after all, completely normal behaviour.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Welcome to the 2 minute warning...
The other day, my girlfriend asked me as I was leaving the room: "Hey...what ever happened to that blog you were going to write? What's it called?"
After a moment of guilt-riddled realization (damnit...I had meant to get that started last week) I replied: "Oh. Shit. You know...I never finished any of the entries. I guess I just ran out of time."
This is about as close to a categorical lie as you come without saying something inane like: "If the president does it, it can't be illegal.", or some other Nixon-rooted half-witted musing. No...it certainly wasn't that I hadn't had the time. Instead, it probably had a great deal to do with good ol' preoccupation and a healthy dose of proscrastination, which are still, after all these years, my favourite intoxicants.
But I'm behind all that now, and with any luck, I'll consult the bits of paper, napkins and scattered .pages documents, gather the observations together, and give this project the proverbial 'honest college try'. I'll attempt coherence, but given that I tend to look at the world through my own sometimes goofy, often skewed prism, there's a good chance that whatever I end up cranking out with just be hardcore gibberish. Then again, I didn't start this thing with any aspirations of being honoured for literary achievement, or revolutionary activism. It's an outlet. And it's my outlet. So if you disagree with the statements made here, you're welcome to leave comments, which can be as abusive as you care to be at the time. I won't delete any of them, and I'll use them as a kind of spiritual kindling on those cold Mexico City nights everybody around here keeps telling me are 'just around the corner".
The title of the Blog, and its underlying meaning will be more or less self evident to anyone with even an inkling of an interest in American football. It's fourth down, and you have inches to go to get to a new set of downs...the coveted 'first' that is so statistically important. You can roll the dice and 'go for it', handing the ball off to your bull-headed running back to grind through the line, attempt a short check-down pass, heave a hail-mary to the end zone in a poor-percentage last ditch effort, or you can check your balls at the door, throw in your cards and send out your punter. One decision requires a mixture of grit, dumb luck and blind faith...the other, nothing more than caution and a willingness to live for another play.
Anyone, however, who has ever watched the NFL for more than a handful of games will be able to tell you that both decisions can lead to horrific consequences in the blink of an eye, just as they can both convey upon head coach a god-like status if the call of the day works in his favour. Win, and you will drink chilled champagne from the perky nipples of nubile, creamy, tanned virgins. Lose, and angry, drunken mobs will chase your fear-crazed wife across the parking lot, to the traffic-snarled entry ramps and onto the highway, where they'll spend the next fifty miles screaming obscenities, hurling empty beer bottles, and occasionally breaking into honky-tonk song, all the while dutifully running her down going no more than 20 mph, until she hurls herself into the path of an oncoming vehicle in an ill-fated attempt at relief, or the concrete rubs her legs down to the stumps...whichever comes first.
These are ugly images, to be sure, and anytime I see the Saints facing 'fourth and inches' I can't help but wonder what must be going through Sean Payton's mind, but I think, over the course of the past little while, that I've managed to get a pretty good idea. It's a good deal of fun, after all, to stare a gang of faithless hacks in the face, take the catcalls and prophecies of doom in stride, and then walk away from the whole thing with a skip and a chuckle, having busted the line. It gives you a whole new perspective on risk-management, which is, generally, to just go ahead and spit at it. Warm up your hands and hurl it down the sideline for a 30 yard gain, then give a hard look at the opposing sideline, and beam a toothy grin at their cheerleaders.
I won't always win, which is why whatever this little endeavour of mine ends up being, it will have to contain what is likely to be a great deal of griping and conjecture. Musings...pontification...mental masturbation. You can't really have honest contribution without a whole range of emotions. It's what lends credence to the whole affair, and it's what ends up sketching the human element of any creation.
In the end, this is about the fun I'll have, the world that will confuse me, the issues that will set me off, and the short-yardage situations I'll face. I pray that I have the balls to 'go for it' more often than not, and my hope is that, should I flub it, lose yardage, and fall defeated, that the mobs forgot to gas up that morning.
After a moment of guilt-riddled realization (damnit...I had meant to get that started last week) I replied: "Oh. Shit. You know...I never finished any of the entries. I guess I just ran out of time."
This is about as close to a categorical lie as you come without saying something inane like: "If the president does it, it can't be illegal.", or some other Nixon-rooted half-witted musing. No...it certainly wasn't that I hadn't had the time. Instead, it probably had a great deal to do with good ol' preoccupation and a healthy dose of proscrastination, which are still, after all these years, my favourite intoxicants.
But I'm behind all that now, and with any luck, I'll consult the bits of paper, napkins and scattered .pages documents, gather the observations together, and give this project the proverbial 'honest college try'. I'll attempt coherence, but given that I tend to look at the world through my own sometimes goofy, often skewed prism, there's a good chance that whatever I end up cranking out with just be hardcore gibberish. Then again, I didn't start this thing with any aspirations of being honoured for literary achievement, or revolutionary activism. It's an outlet. And it's my outlet. So if you disagree with the statements made here, you're welcome to leave comments, which can be as abusive as you care to be at the time. I won't delete any of them, and I'll use them as a kind of spiritual kindling on those cold Mexico City nights everybody around here keeps telling me are 'just around the corner".
The title of the Blog, and its underlying meaning will be more or less self evident to anyone with even an inkling of an interest in American football. It's fourth down, and you have inches to go to get to a new set of downs...the coveted 'first' that is so statistically important. You can roll the dice and 'go for it', handing the ball off to your bull-headed running back to grind through the line, attempt a short check-down pass, heave a hail-mary to the end zone in a poor-percentage last ditch effort, or you can check your balls at the door, throw in your cards and send out your punter. One decision requires a mixture of grit, dumb luck and blind faith...the other, nothing more than caution and a willingness to live for another play.
Anyone, however, who has ever watched the NFL for more than a handful of games will be able to tell you that both decisions can lead to horrific consequences in the blink of an eye, just as they can both convey upon head coach a god-like status if the call of the day works in his favour. Win, and you will drink chilled champagne from the perky nipples of nubile, creamy, tanned virgins. Lose, and angry, drunken mobs will chase your fear-crazed wife across the parking lot, to the traffic-snarled entry ramps and onto the highway, where they'll spend the next fifty miles screaming obscenities, hurling empty beer bottles, and occasionally breaking into honky-tonk song, all the while dutifully running her down going no more than 20 mph, until she hurls herself into the path of an oncoming vehicle in an ill-fated attempt at relief, or the concrete rubs her legs down to the stumps...whichever comes first.
These are ugly images, to be sure, and anytime I see the Saints facing 'fourth and inches' I can't help but wonder what must be going through Sean Payton's mind, but I think, over the course of the past little while, that I've managed to get a pretty good idea. It's a good deal of fun, after all, to stare a gang of faithless hacks in the face, take the catcalls and prophecies of doom in stride, and then walk away from the whole thing with a skip and a chuckle, having busted the line. It gives you a whole new perspective on risk-management, which is, generally, to just go ahead and spit at it. Warm up your hands and hurl it down the sideline for a 30 yard gain, then give a hard look at the opposing sideline, and beam a toothy grin at their cheerleaders.
I won't always win, which is why whatever this little endeavour of mine ends up being, it will have to contain what is likely to be a great deal of griping and conjecture. Musings...pontification...mental masturbation. You can't really have honest contribution without a whole range of emotions. It's what lends credence to the whole affair, and it's what ends up sketching the human element of any creation.
In the end, this is about the fun I'll have, the world that will confuse me, the issues that will set me off, and the short-yardage situations I'll face. I pray that I have the balls to 'go for it' more often than not, and my hope is that, should I flub it, lose yardage, and fall defeated, that the mobs forgot to gas up that morning.
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