I’ve been meaning to write for a while. The sun seems to move a little quicker here. So much time is spent cooking in the kitchen, talking around the dinner table, eating ice cream and elotes (corn on the cob) in the parks and plazas, that I haven’t found the moment to sit down and put it all on paper. On the one hand, here in Mexico it seems like you’re expected to enjoy life rather than it being a rat race to consume and produce as much as you can. On the other hand, I often find myself frustrated by lagging and repetitive conversations that tend to gravitate towards gossip and trivialities. The chisme (gossip) here often becomes unbearable for me.

When I first came to Mexico in August I thought that either I had a penis growing from my forehead (testicles would be hanging over my eyes explained a friend of Laura’s when I tried to explain to her) or everyone was in love with me. Every time I would walk into a restaurant or café or bar it’s like time stopped - every pair of eyes would turn my way, start at my hair scan down to my shoes and back up to my head. Then time would start back up and everyone went back to their conversations like nothing happened. I would feel my forehead for the penis.

This still happens to me here in Torreon, but I’ve learned it happens to everyone. There is even a word for it - “recortar” - more or less, “to cut twice.” Which is kinda what it feels like. So, ten cuidado porque si vas a un caf� aqui, todos van a recortarte.

My trip from San Diego to Monterey, Mexico took four nights and five days. The first two night I spent in Tucson at the Congress Hotel and the second two nights I spent in my car, the trusty Saturn, once nicknamed “zoom zoom” and now only “zoom” (downhill). The first night - a Friday night - was spent in a rest stop, my car squeezed in between two giant semis. I fell asleep around 4 am under the yellow tinge of lamp light right after a giant yellow moon rose above the horizon.

Saturday night in Austin I should have called Elaine. I tried once, but there was a line for the payphone. And then I waited. And then it was too late. So I walked up and down 6th street by myself looking at all the happy stumbling drunks thinking about the fun nights I’ve had with my friends back home along Garnet.

Later that night I was driving around looking for a good place to sleep, thinking why the hell did I not call Elaine or at least the youth hostel. (hostelz.com said it’s one of the best in the country) I was looking for a church parking lot, an old trick I learned from my trip up to Alaska. (no one messes with you in god’s parking lot)

But then I realized the next morning would be Sunday and I could imagine all the churchgoers dressed in Sunday’s best with raised eyebrows about the ragged looking kid sleeping in the car. Surely some cowboy type would knock on my window to make me look stupid. So I resigned to sleeping in the parking lot of a giant hotel - a holiday inn or some nonsense.

The next morning, around eight o’ clock and with only four or five hours of sleep I woke up with a racing heart and droopy eyes. Next to me was an empty Nissan Sentra with Mexican plates. I imagined it being a Mexican maid coming to clean to rooms of a big empty hotel which charges more per night than they pay her per day. I imagined her having to wake up early in order to feed her children and then coming to the hotel at six in the morning and looking at me with sympathetic eyes before going in.

This is all probably very far from the truth.

Then I went to Guadalupe Street - Austin’s version of Berkeley’s Telegraph - and had a good cappuccino at Little City café. There is a free wireless internet connection there and I was wanting to put the new software on my ipod so I could record voice memos. But I fucked up. I pressed the wrong button and erased every one of the 5000 songs I put on there and organized.

I was in no mood to talk, much less about computers, but a guy in his late 50’s with youthful eyes had been eyeing me for a while and came over asking about my laptop. As my his questions started getting more specific, it became clear that he did something with computers at UT Austin.

I was still reluctant but after enough questions about RAM and driver support I invited him to have his coffee with me and we ended up talking for more than three hours. Allen Graham is his name and he’s one of those guys who seems to know everything about everything. Not in that coffeeshop kid who surfs the internet too much and gets excited about conspiracy theories, but a true renaissance man. Someone who has spent a lot of time to deeply understand a wide breadth of topics.

It was obvious his wife had long ago tired of his stories about how Bill Gates won the PC market and how Steve Jobs is a genius but bad at marketing and how, though the digital divide is narrowing, Saharan Africa still has fewest internet connections per capita on the planet. As he drank … (to be continued)

“why do you always spell success wrong?”