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.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
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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