Hero

Of Heroic proportions.
Music blasting.
I had the idea of writing a whole story through dialogue alone but I'm sure someone has done that before. Then i thought of doing vignettes or something equally spastic but I've also done that before. i once suggested POV pieces to a friend who should now know that I wish I could call her from this god forsaken cornucopia of a country I've inherited.

So instead I'll adopt my stream of consciousness staple but avoid the half obscure, half inane references to things only my mind (and maybe just another one) might get in full and proceed.

There's a story in which I wish I were the protagonist but end up winning the oscar for supporting actor at this rate. Maybe I'd settle for the photography oscar if I could muster a meaning in a photograph that goes beyond "it's not only what's in the frame, but also, outside of it".

That's how I walk around home now. Affairs settled I leave my SLR at home and imprint the images in my mind instead. Take Tepic, Nayarit.

A town that hopes to be city with battles and bombs raging through it. It cover the face of a hill and nothing more and the circular road that is the height of city planning in mexico is really just a straight line to the side of the city. The transit police ride 4 cylinder cars that a moped could easily outpace and the water floods the bottom third of the city when it rains. Some streets are cobbled, some streets are paved and others look like the perfect set for a jarhead styled movie. Craters, not potholes, are filled with mud, and disease and bacteria.

Streets are known not by name but by shape and somewhere in the labyrinthine hedge of an urban spit that the city is, there is a restaurant called New Port...sometimes Armando's. Of modest origins the place serves shrimp about 400 different ways without falling into the commercial vomitous that some other "Mexican" chains within Mexico meant to offer a tourist experience. The jokes are insider Mexican but easily explained to outsiders. The waiters are two brothers and the cooks, the chefs really, are a mother and daughter team sometimes joined by the sister in law. Of course the streets outside are sometimes lined with soldiers bearing AKs protecting the commander in turn who loves the restaurant as well - all in an honest day's work.

Then there's the drive which should have been described before the meal but I suppose the drive back is equally significant. You pass valleys and ridges and a fragmented landscape capable of hiding a lost cow in the corner or a plantation of agave or something. Something. Get it? But there's a 5 minute period across a plain of sorts where there is green jutting out of sharp, black, jagged rocks. Volcanic rock to be precise and as you look around you realize that you've carelessly been driving through the wide open mouth of a volcano that's deep in its REM cycle. Such pretty contrast - bright living green and black dead rock.

Drive home and realize that it's the bicentennial of your independence and there's nothing to be proud of. That you wrote a thesis 6 years ago where you discovered that independence was an ill-fitting word for a movement better described as a failed insurgence. 200 years and nothing to be proud of. 200 years to crawl ahead as countries with far less independence or history have outstripped us in intellect and power. And the war rages on and 72 were murdered last night in a northern city. A grenade was thrown in a bar injuring 20 - at least I'm glad the grenades they are using, the military or otherwise are old enough to injure and not kill. Yet.

Just fyi.

Rock beats both paper and scissors.