As I sit drinking coffee, ingesting footage, occasionally cackling in a public place, I think about my return to the functioning chaos of D.F. and my life eating lunch at predictable hours.
I try
to synthesize and mentally apply metadata to all that has passed in the last 9
days.
I realized:
1.Be/Play nice. Everything else falls into place.
2.Genuine enthusiasm is contagious, beautiful and palpable. This has something to do with Limbic Systems.
3.Everyone, deep down, wants to be a movie star. Especially in remote villages.
4.Conservation agriculture is more of a philosophy than an agronomic practice.
5.The guys here, the dream-team of 5, work. They are patient, sympathetic, hilarious
people both amongst themselves and with the farmers.
I have made mistakes. Flat-out, without excuse and (now) harboring little to no regret. Why? Because I am a sociopath. (I am totally kidding). Let's try that again. Because I, like the rest of you, am currently and will continue to be a work in progress. And that is not a bad thing. It is a distinctly good thing. At least once you realize it and use it like upgrades to your mac. So, yeah, periodically you will be like that spinning colorful wheel as you change from lion to snow leopard and you really wish your computer would stop freezing and get on with it; that this is taking way longer than you had expected and you want to rush it to the end but the only way is to force quit and that just takes you back to the start when you really know that without this upgrade things will not necessarily get worse but they definitely will not get better, so you go make a cup of coffee and crack open some non-required reading and as soon as you stop waiting and wishing and thinking about this upgrade, how long it is bloody taking, then it just happens. Always. Like water. Except if you watch water it will boil. Trust me.
At exactly 12 p.m. we will know who will be the
next president of Mexico. I am curious as to what is going to
happen if, indeed, Peña Nieto is announced the triumphant victor. What are
the implications of the PRI, a party that ran a "perfect dictatorship"* in Mexico for 71 years, returning?
What I really want to know: is there
enough fuel for a genuine revolution?
In 2006, the loss of Obrador† to President
Felipe Calderón by half a percentage point set off mass protests. And that was
before the country had been torn apart by years of narco violence, before the global economic crisis, before a noticeable change in weather patterns
that continues to cut into harvests that is slowly but surely raising
prices on basics like tortillas, before Peña Nieto said that those Ibero
students who jeered at him where not actually matriculated but
paid impostors, before those students made 131 Youtube videos holding their
Ibero credentials next to their (mostly) bespeckled faces, before everyone else who opposed Peña Nieto and supported meaningful democratization starting identifying themselves as the
132nd.
I am 132 or Yo Soy 132 has blossomed into a mature movement that goes beyond Peña Nieto or Obrador. It is about fostering a real (keyword being real) democracy with transparent elections, freedom of expression and unbiased/accurate media sources. And no, Televisa in its current state does not count. It is the people of Mexico saying they are tired of constructed lies. And they are listening to each other and participating. If you want to be convinced just look at the last election. Totally protest free. Okay. Not exactly‡. But there were definitely not pre-election protests aimed against Calderón or any other candidate for that matter. Actually, I cannot think of a parallel example, in or outside of this country, of such disquiet surrounding a political candidate before he has even been elected or not. Maybe Bush but that was again after, not before, electoral fraud.
As I was typing these words my friend called. "Do you want to join
the revolution? We are going to the polling stations to take pictures of
the results." Taken back by the coincidence I could hardly answer. "Look, just call me
if you do." I could hear her movement and excitement and I get
it. I watched Obama win. It was my first year here. I
still lived in Texcoco. I ran through the cornfields alone and cried and
laughed and hoped as I tried to keep my balance in between the dried out stalks that crinkled to my touch.
YoSoy132 protest filling Reforma
YoSoy132 protest in the Zocalo
The movement has already
flooded the streets of Mexico City three times. And it unabashedly says it will do it again
if there is any sign of electoral fraud. Hence my buddy. The phone call. They
are already mobilizing. She just called again. But this time she was shaken up.
"The PRI was breaking rules and I took photos and then they tried to take my camera
and my bike and me but my friend saved me and we ran and
they chased. I need a favor." She was talking so fast and I could not
understand the names of the streets and the organizations so I had
her say it again and again. "I got it." No one has picked up the
phone. I have filled out two different forms. I asked for help from Yo Soy 132 using social media.
Well. Profound disappointment might be lurking just around the corner. Then again, profound political change might be there too. We all want to change the world. /////f o o t n o t e s//////
* Said in 1990 by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa with regards to government under the PRI.
† Obrador is the main contendor in this fight, though he is a softer version of himself, extending a hand to those he shunned the first go round. And he is advocating for a nation of love. AMLO. His initials literally translate to "love it." ‡ The last election was anything but protest free. Obrador held a rally in the Zócalo that has crowd estimates ranging from 500,000 to 3,000,000 supporters. He also set up plantones inside the Zócalo and Reforma, the Champs-Élysées of Mexico City, for 47 days.
When I was growing up we use to take these family trips exclusively to Florida. We would pack up our 1980 something Plymouth Voyager or maybe it was a Dodge Caravan. Either way, it had fakewood paneling pealing off from the edges and this kind of like roasted maroon interior with the tactile sensation of worn down velvet. No doubt towards the end of its life the ceiling had collapsed. An Attaway trademark. But not for these journeys. These trips happened its prime. We would stuff the back of the car full of each individual family member's bags with various umbrellas, folded towels and loose sunscreen bottles stuffed in between the cracks so as to achieve the highest atomic packing possible. For easy access of walkmans/tapes or books or Gameboys, depending on which kiddo, our L.L. Bean® (forest green, in my case) backpacks were kept under the seats. And, of course, a cooler up front containing various sandwiches, cheese blocks, whole fruits, breakfast meats (country ham, bacon and ground sausage, all cooked together in an iron skillet, giving all three this kind of magical flavor, one not that does not normally exist on breakfast plates, but left textures as the only real way to distinguish one from the other) and ice cold Fresca.
We would leave at ongodly hours. 4 a.m. At least we would plan on it. The rush of the final round before departures would be stressful and never made it easy, better said damn near impossible, for me to sleep once the tires left their pea gravel parking spot. It always seemed my siblings conked out as I squirmed or watched the trees in the dark as we crossed from Georgia into Alabama without even leaving the Mountain. Or maybe we took a right at what looked like a hand-painted billboard from the 50's for The Mountain Star*. Personally, that road never seemed safe. Probably had something to do with the hard right turns, one after the other, with like a 40 degree slope that only mellowed out to the flat valley at the end. Once you are already in Wildwood. (What a name). I would lay down on the ground thinking it might help for me to spread out, relax, but the rough fibers of the floor would irritate my delicate† face. That and the proximity to the tires was disconcerting.
Sometime just before sunrise up I'd come clean: I had been awake the whole time. I would move to the passenger seat at a quick stop and start interacting with the driver, always at this stage my father. He was listening to country music, not because he was a fan of the style, but because it always told a story. And so I'd listen and sure enough some man would be upset about his woman's lying cheating ways so he'd a'been a drinking and fighting and driving around in a truck yelling at people to be more kindly around the holidays and to not X the Christ out of Christmas‡. But country music, we all knew, was not what we would listen to for the majority of the trip. A couple hours in, we would stop at a Cracker Barrel (Restaurant and Old Country Store), only out populated on our journey by Waffle Houses, to buy diabetic-friendly multicolored candy buttons and, the dreaded - maybe not dreaded but unavoidable, inescapable - book on tape. Always b-rate, semi-professionally recorded scandal/mystery types written by the actual John Grisham or some John Grisham knock-off. The stories were not so bad if you could force yourself to pay it mind, but let me tell you something about narrators for books on tape: they are male. Always. And their interpretations of the female characters, especially during anything that related to sexuality. I am not sure if it was offensive or just disturbing.
Eventually the other cubs would wake up somewhere near the Florida line and we would pile out to look at miniature flipflop keychains that somehow included a bottle opener, inappropriate tea shirts (I'm too sexy for my diaper) and a combination of shark and gator teeth as we savored our miniature paper cup samples of fresh squeezed orange juice.
But now the gang was awake. Six living, breathing creatures growing anxious from the mixture of sugar and aspertine in the blood and trying to gain control in a space a little larger than the size of (one of) Donald Trump's beds. The volume would rapidly increase and then decrease. A distraction. Culprit: father. Reason: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder§.
Tensions rose a degree more. Others tried to come in for the radio. One of the boys suggested some Snoop. It worked at first but I think the parental unit, while they enjoyed "getting funky on the mic like an old batch of collard greens" was not outwardly pleased by "with my nuts on your tonsils."
A power struggle ensued. Insults about ones respective musical taste began to surface. "If David Bowie is gay then why is he married to such a hot model, huh? Explain me that one."
Just when it seemed all hope was lost, that the radio was bound to get turned off as an act of defiance against demon spawn, someone, the younger older brother (because that makes sense) passed a plastic, white object with black type he rescued from the marsupial pouch on the back on the passenger seat.
Tensions dropped 3 degrees with tape insertion, an almost Pavlovian response. The tape rewinds and there is static silence before:
/////f o o t n o t e s////// * A small cafe on the back of the Lookout Mountain. Definitely the Georgia side. Just had to keep on Lula Lake Road. The kind of place that you always plan on going to though you never get the chance because it has funny hours that do not coincide with your passing. It is probably the kind of place that is only open for lunch. I bet they have great pie.
† Seriously. My sister and I both use to suffer in the summertime. We would hang country-club poolside all day and you could literally watch the white blotches emerge on our foreheads, and in one extreme case strips of bacon-like flesh under the eyes.
‡ Accompanied by other classic country songs like "Looking out the window through the pain" and "I got tears in my ears from lying on my back and crying about you girl." § More commonly known as ADHD, identified twice as much in men than women, though probably better to say boys than girls because it is the kind of thing they start medicating you for when you are like 7. In my father's case, his diagnosis came from an elementary school teacher: "Your son suffers from having ants in his pants."
A l y s o n :
The sea was angry that day; we did not know what lewn beneath. I will preface this by saying I could not read in high-school. Even with high adrenaline producing drugs. After three 20 mg pills I felt electric. I must have been about 16. I got my driver's license on them, and I was wearing a turtleneck so it could not have been May. The play was, what, Fall 2003? Yeah. '03 for sure. I had my father's car and I was trying to ash my cigarette out of the window and ended up swerving big time and almost drove off the side of the mountain. The passenger never trusted me again.
E m o r y :
The sea was angry that day, my friends. I was in my friend's backyard and we found a tall boy 24 oz Bud Light®. We split it in the woods and hated it or at least I hated it, so I gave my half to Amanda, who got pregnant pretty young and now, you know, I feel kind of bad. Like maybe me encouraging her to drink that other half of the tall boy, my half, that was what pushed her over the edge at too young of an age. How old were we? 14. 15 perhaps. No, wait that was for cigarettes. We were 12.
S c o t t :
No, that is boring. The "was angry that day" shit. The first day of my homeschooling I was angry. I must have been 11. We had all the books picked out for the year, a video for math class, that kind of stuff. But on Tuesdays I would go to the church and it was like a real class with other kids. At least one other day of the week we went to the library to hangout with the other homeschoolers. I was always so sure that I was way cooler, what, with my friends in public school. They didn't abandon me just because I stopped going to school with them. I would ride my bike at 3 pm to go wait for them to get out of class.
I mean, what do you want me to say? I finished my history class in like 2 weeks. Just had to read the book. And I tested off the charts for everything except math. I always cheated in math. Remember that part of the book that had the answers given? I just copied them and showed no work. God, I was so far behind in math when I went back to school in the 8th grade. So far behind. What do I do for a living? I am an accountant.
M a r y :
The sea was angry that day. We each had different color socks and hats. I was purple, Andrea hot pink and Woogie was yellow. The rest of the costume was standardized: white shirts and cutoff-acid-washed-jean-shorts. It was to be the performance of our lives. We had practiced for weeks at Woogie's. She lived just by the school. All you had to do was walk from the back of the playground, near where that old metal slide used to be. Maybe you were to young to remember. It seemed to climb past the tree line so you could see straight clear to Covenant from its peak. I loved that slide even though over its lifetime it must have broken many bones and warranted thousands of tetnus shots, which is probably why they replaced it with a one-story plastic hut pretending to be a log cabin. Anyway, near that was, maybe still is, a dirt path in the woods, though now that I think of it, it was not as much woods as shrubbery. Details. So you exited this path that seemed super hidden to my little girl mind and, boom, you were in front of her mother's house. I didn't know where her father lived. We never met him. Heather watched us practice and complimented our dance moves. We trusted Heather. She was redneck pretty, which meant slutty. Even at the age of 10 she oozed sex. I still know all of the dance moves.
January. February. March. April. Wait a minute, May? Really? Where? Could this all be because of Infinite Jest or is something else going on here? It was not for lack of material. I mean, did you see the Televisa-esk production, the one starring the ex-Playmate, and which pretended to be this country's Presidential debates? Bof. I won't even start. My blood pressure.
But I still have nothing to say. Or maybe I have the strength yet.
This is the longest period between entries since I began this experiment in August of 2008. At least I think so. So what happened? One might guess that I fell out of love with the city, that I am no longer curious and or inthralled by its idiosyncrasies, that I am bored, that I was killed by a narco shootout, which came to a tragic end in front of that bougie organic store in Condesa, the all-natural-living-lactobacteria-guaranteed-yogurt-tub splattering on the sidewalk as I freed my hand to grab what felt like a bee string but, you know, expecting to see nothing more than my hand upon further inspection, wait, blood? so I looked twice out of disbelief because I only checked in the first place as a formality, like when one stands up too quickly and bumps one's head on something sharp having miscalculated one's force + the objects distance but one's hand always comes back from the point of impact clean so I was probably pretty surprised by the color and the blossom on my shirt, that the story is already being adapted for the screen with (true) rumors that Michael Bay is bidding for the production and hopes for it to be out before Christmas 2013, that at Jose's suggestion I became an international prostitute and my pimp allows me a weekly 10 minutes (maximum) of interweb access, which I use to tell my parents that I joined a traveling circus as a trapeze artist, a long-held but dormant passion unmasked by a fascination with the pointed, pink and white striped tents that lay backdrop for the sequined elephants reflecting the morning light that I had passed on my way to work until the sparkles induced an insanity that beckoned me into the show.
But all of those theories are lamentably wrong. I guess I became too comfortable here. Too confident that I had it all figured out. Opted to do little else with my little free time other than be with what seemed like perfect-fit-friends in this adult playground. Kind of lost myself in between the glamor and the ugliness of social scenes in a sprawling metropolis. Equal and opposite reactions in the world.
Time for Round 2 (more like Round 20). But who is really counting.
