Final Days in Mexico

In Search of Lost Time:

Whoops!

The weeks rolled by so incessantly that it has now been about two months since my last update. At the time of my last post I was planning my time in Europe, and now, I am in Europe with a constantly crumbling plan. I blame the company of good friends for diverting my attention away from my hordes of loyal readers, clouding my eyes to how this would affect all 12 of you.

I stopped home for a short stint to watch my bestie and travel partner, Kory, marry my now-bestie-in-law, Maxi. A former Watson person mentioned to me that explaining their year to anyone else afterwards always reaffirmed how solitary of an experience it was. Upon returning, people would ask how it was and they'd need to find a way to summarize four countries, their countless trials and tribulations, and 12 months of new experiences. Paraphrasing, "people just want to hear that it was good, and they'll give you a few sentence to get there before you're on to something new."

I don't blame the asker, because who during a family barbecue would want to hear about the listless days I spent confused and lost. The same is largely true about mezcal. Some people want the whole story, and for them I am thankful, and some people just want a shot, which is just as fine. At the end of the day, these experiences are for me to grow, to better understand the world and my place in it, and I think very few people are interested in hearing about that when they ask, "how was Mexico?" No need to make small talk big talk. Which is all to say that I spent the week or so at home giving really bad summaries of my time, and that was a bit disorienting.

But here, dear reader, you get it all. The good, the bad, the ugly, the unnecessary, the overly personal.

"How's life been as a mezcalero farmhand, salesman, and go-to gringo?" - a friend via email

It was bad, then it was fine, then it was good. I'm glad I got to play all the various roles I did, as it gave me some confidence that I could actually do them all, which was fulfilling. I spent the first few weeks doing what felt like office-work, then I got to go play on the farm, which felt a little funny sometimes, because that's what it was, *playing, *while people were working. Towards the end I began to feel more like a member of a community - albeit one where I was the only gringo - which was more than I expected.

As a whole, to try and summarize my Mexico experience, I'd say I spent my months existing low on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: food, water, bathrooms. Most of my time I was obsessing over where I could eat, where I could get water, and where I could dispose of the byproduct of the first two actions. Still "It was a time of rootless enjoyment, and also luxurious melancholy which I took care to spin out and nourish." Laurie Lee wrote this about his time in Spain, but I think he was really just trying to describe my time in Mexico. 

The boys, drunk on mezcal, and me, the chauffeur

After I finished Demetrio and I's bargain of making him a website I went on a bunch of little adventures with my former SF roommates Alexis and Sage, and then with a friend from high school, Paige. We galavanted across Oaxaca and I got to play tour guide. Some parts were good, some parts were once-in-a-lifetime, some parts were miserable. Alexis and Sage are great people who I met on facebook and who helped me through a multi-variate life crisis and saw me off onto this adventure. They're smart, worldly, well rounded, complex, and cool and we each have different ways we see the world and we like to share them, making them great to talk to. Paige was part of my friend-quartet in high school where we would do debaucherous things, sneak alcohol, and talk a lot about nothing. Around her I'm reminded that we are blessed with a past and cursed with a future, or sometimes I'm reminded that we're blessed with a future and cursed with a past. The order switches a lot. Mostly we drink and shoot the shit, which is very easy to do in Mexico. 

**Time with San Franciscans: **

I'd love to walk you through all the funtivities we embarked on and the tremendous meals we ate but I don't think that would interest anyone too much. Instead, I'll share two thoughts that crossed my mind with the San Franciscans.

Different Mexicos:** **

I spent the majority of my time, around three months, in Oaxaca de Juarez, the largest city in the state of Oaxaca. Like most cities, wealth is stratified in a way that produces different versions of the same city. There's the Oaxaca de Juarez with world renowned chefs, European bakeries, and boutique cocktail bars, and there's also the Oaxaca de Juarez where you need to scoop water into the toilet to make it flush and where mezcal is poured from re-used coke bottles. One thing that surprised me about Oaxaca is the extent to which this continues for the state as a whole, with many different versions of Oaxaca existing in parallel.

This is not a new idea, as you've probably already been told "you haven't seen the real Mexico if you've only gone to Cabo." Still, humor me here. 

The city center of Oaxaca de Juarez is a land of rooftop terraces. On these roofs you can get a plate of octopus in green pumpkin seed mole, buckets of Mexican beers on happy hour specials, and eat guacamole with grasshoppers and cheese while the sun peacefully sets over the hills cradling the city. You can feast like a royal and reach a state akin to nirvana for a price of around $10-15 USD. You can then walk down the cobbled streets lined with colorful, fluttering paper banners to different print shops and ice cream stores before finding your way to another bar. People travel from all over to have weddings in the city and host calendas afterwards. These street parades include the wedding party, people in local dress, huge paper-mache mannequins, a lively band, dancing and mezcal flowing freely from hip holsters. If you walk the streets for long enough, you'll find a calenda. For the right price the quality of life is really, really nice and full of calendas, festivities, and happiness in the streets.

Fireworks in the streets

If you venture outside the city center into the surrounding neighborhoods, the rooftops and parades begin to dwindle in number. You'll find all-you-can-eat lunch buffets, shirtless men weaving tirelessly in the heat in workshops down back alleys, comedores where all the food is cooked over a small charcoal grill a few feet from your plastic table, and vendors on bikes slowly crossing up and down the tangle of streets selling elote over loudspeakers. 

Slightly further outside the city you reach roadside comedores where chickens peck under your feet until they're big enough to end up on your plate and where your drink order is shouted to the juice stall on the other side of the highway before it's ran across to you. Where you can buy and taste ancestral mezcal in someone's kitchen as their child gets a bath outside and their wife prepares you lunch. Where at the fork of a country road you can buy a plastic bag of alcoholic pineapple juice with a straw in it for $1 USD. Where you can buy hard boiled egg tacos on the highway out of the bed of a pickup truck. 

There's lots of parts of the city which feel very familiar, like any other city. The familiarity of a coffee shop or a large department store doesn't change much across countries. The further I moved out from the city center, the more my gringoness intensified, where the mundane feels surreal: a half naked kid peeing off the side of a mountain highway, going to a restaurant where there's no menu and the only table is the family's dinner table, or getting directions from a grandma in an apron while she's driving a quad.

The rules of the world I know don't exist in the same way. People do as they want, and asking for what you want usually gets it. You want avocado for your eggs? You get handed an avocado and a knife. You want a coconut with mezcal? You get handed a coconut with mezcal. You want salsa? You get salsas. You want a quesadilla? They don't have any, but they'll get you some. You want tortillas? The tortilla maker appears with warm, fresh ones in hand. Are you closed? Yes? Can I still get a coffee? Boom, you get a coffee. 

Reading this you may be thinking, "But Marshall, that's because you're a silly little tourist/gringo. That's just your experience based on your identity, not how the country works." To an extent you'd be right, but I learned about this magical ability from Demetrio. When he wanted something, he would pose a request to no-one-in-general, maybe the world, maybe the air, and then that thing would appear. I am a person who before stepping into a restaurant looks up and compares multiple menus. Demetrio would step in, sit down, and make his own menu. All of my examples are food related, but it extended to house maintenance, finding events, cars and parking, navigating the law, procuring and selling mezcal, and maybe even inner-peace and happiness.

There were parts of Oaxaca to me that were global and familiar, and others that felt like another planet. All of these places coexisted next to each other, worlds apart for me, but simply existing to others as the various versions of Oaxaca. I only saw a tiny sliver of the country and there are many parts which would be even more foreign to me. In comparison to the US, the only other country I know, I'd venture to say there are far more versions of Mexico than there are of the US. 

My experiences of Mexico were heavily painted by the version I was passing through, which was often a function of how I was passing through it and with who. There are versions you can only access by car, some only by foot, some only with locals, some only with foreigners, some you can only access after a certain amount of time, and others which are transient and fleeting, with each feeding and taxing you in different ways. 

Me (next to Demetrio), at the head of the table, happily out of place in more ways than one

Spiritual moments:

In last week's This American Life Episode, David Sedaris talks about Louvre visitors: 

"I'm guessing that a good number of these people are just standing here because somebody told them that they should do it. I don't think that they're all museum-goers at home. I don't know. Do people look back and remember the experience of standing in front of a painting?

I might remember eating something, or buying something, or seeing something, like an accident, or somebody who's really twisted up in some way, but not looking at a painting. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, for them, it doesn't get any better than this. But I don't know. Just from people that I know that have come here, they go to the Louvre because somebody told them that they have to."

In the show Normal People, Paul Mescal (ironic name) has a big moment of intellectualism as he stares at a painting by Vermeer all day, before Marianne brings him to another, different painting you can stare at all day. The scene reminded me of the one from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with Cameron staring deeply at the painting of the fancy Parisian picnickers. I think movies and the art world lead us to believe that museums are the place of intellectual transcendence, where we can, simply by staring, become fully realized humans. Maybe it works for some people, if not, why would we have all these museums? That said, I think I'm more with David Sedaris than Mr. Mescal on this one. 

Me and my crew, ~intellectualizing~

My high school Spanish teach would assign us photos of Mesoamerican artifacts to look at for homework. She would tell us to look through them and try and have an, "intellectual moment." To us, this always meant no homework. 

Now in the real world, where I have the desire to have these moments, I feel that they're fewer and further between. This year, I'd like to collect a good few of them to stash away for the years of toil to follow. While I was with Alexis and Sage, we went to a few museums and archeological sites, and I did my darnedest to have these moments. I had an idea that maybe the way to have an intellectual moment was to stare it in the face.  

In one museum, there was a collection of short clay humanlike figures. I sat down and stared at my little clay man, eye to eye, glazed over contact lens to glazed ceramic ball, attempting to have my moment. Trying to connect. Trying to connect. Buffering. Weak Connection. Connection Lost.

"And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them..."

- Frank O'Hara, Having A Coke With You

My little clay man

I know you can't force these things, and the reason Cameron connected with the fancy picnickers painting in Ferris Bueller is because it represented something in him, yadda yadda, but why doesn't any of the art represent anything in me? Am I not looking hard enough? Am I asking too much of my little clay man? I am a little man who has eaten his fair share of clay, why can't I see myself in him? I usually need a coffee or a little treat to restore energy levels after a long day of trying to connect with inanimate objects, which is my most recurring memory of museums.

Undeterred, I tried the next day in a second museum. Rather than a small clay man, this was a carved funerary urn of a rat-man from ~1000 years ago. I stared at the beady eyes of the stone carving trying to have my intellectual moment and to, for a moment, exist at some higher order than just the existing, to live for more than just the sake of breathing, to be more than just a sack of meat, to do more than just respond to stimuli and to instead stimulate, to do more than just look, do more than just glance, to have the road from my eyes go both ways and to converse with history, to take my place in it all, to ask for it, to take it, to work for it, to ask of it, to be in it. Instead, I fall short, I look flatly, I do not receive, I am told no, I walk away, I only glance, stuck with the unbearable lightness of being. 

Off to find my little treat. 

I ate some really good mole later for dinner and I think I was much closer to enlightenment than any moment I was in a museum, so maybe that says something. After dinner we followed a trail of ants to a mezcal bar called El Hijuelo, where regulars danced drunk and made conversation with us in broken English, and the owner told us the story of how he finds his mezcals. He communicated a lot better than rat-man. 

To pick and choose lines from Claes Oldenburg's "I am for an art": 

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“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum…
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top…
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself…
I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on…
I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. 
I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last wars raincoat. 
I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worms art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs…
I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-to-cook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, Pork art, chicken art, tomato art, bana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art…”

Funerary Urn which I am inappropriately calling rat-man

Reliving High School:

To bring up a second This American Life episode (ep. 351) on revisiting stories and things we believed as kids: "You can try to return to childhood by looking at photos or visiting the old neighborhood or listening to recordings. Or you can find someone who knew you back then, someone you haven't seen since. They still carry within themselves a picture of you that's unclouded by the years in between. They'll remember you better than you remember yourself. And you can do the same thing for them." 

As opposed to Alexis and Sage, who only know post-college me, Paige mostly knows pre-college me. Sometimes it's really nice to be around someone who reminds you of home, and reminds you of being a teenager and the lofty ideals you carried. Other times it's hard to be around someone who reminds you of the person you once were. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that we change, and sometimes it's hard to be reminded that time passes quickly. As such, it was a rocky two weeks with really high highs and really low lows. 

We started in Puerto Escondido before renting a car to stay in Barra de la Cruz, then to Mazunte, up to San Jose del Pacifico, down to Oaxaca de Juarez, a flight to CDMX, and then one more flight to Connecticut for the wedding. The time was filled with a lot of driving, talking, eating, and drinking, but it's a bit too personal to be relevant here. Still, here's the highlight reel:

• Paige lost here phone the day before I arrived, which meant I was awarded the fun job of asking every iPhone repair store in town if they had seen a yellow iPhone eleven pop up. After two sessions of trying, we found the phone at the aptly named, "Rob Cell", repair shop. After some shady calls and passed around pesos we got the phone back, without its sim.

• I tried scuba diving, which was on my bucket list. Not for me, I felt like the nirvana baby. Saw a sea turtle, which was neat. 

• We went to every bar and restaurant in Barra de la Cruz in a single night for a mezcal and a taco

• Drank a coconut on a hidden beach watching surfers in the sunset, which wasn't on my bucket list but is now crossed off

• Took a pottery workshop and a chocolate workshop with different artisans in Oaxaca

• Stayed in a town dedicated to foraging for wild mushrooms and met a very, very high grandma

Post-script:

Once again, this post is a good bit delayed and I'm going to call this 'caught up'. I'm now in the UK by way of Spain, working at a cider orchard for the next month before I head over to Belgium for bread making. Something to look forward to! 

Also, because there was no good way to include this earlier, I wanted to include a fun photo of Alexis, sage, and I with a man who we met on a rooftop during a mezcal event. He pulled bottles out of a bag he brought and started to give us samples before pulling out an unmarked bottle with gold flakes in it. He then asked us if we wanted to take a photo before taking a phone call and disappearing into the night with his partners because, "a little problem came up we needed to take care of." Like the coconuts on the beach, drinking mezcal with a mafioso also wasn't on my bucket list, but I'm glad I got to check it off. 

Alexis, Sage, and Demetrio looking photogenic

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