Down Mexico Way

 “Then sitting around campfires listening to men tell stories of women as they slide deeper & deeper into that all too familiar drunken slur of the profoundly disappointed.” Sam Shepard

My wife and I went to Mexico City and Oaxaca for six days, our first trip outside the US since 2019. Three nights in each location, enough to get a taste, a feel for the vibe and atmosphere. Everywhere we went face coverings were required, and people were very compliant. The traffic in Mexico City was astounding as was the pall of smog that smudged the sky. This was one of those trips where you see and experience more than you can assimilate. Too much Art, perhaps too much mezcal. I made the notes that follow on my phone, usually while riding in the backseat of an Uber. 

A mongrel hound brown and gray with an elongated nut sack; rebar extending from rooftops, an inhabited work in progress; dusty landscape, sere; thinking of a graveyard in a tiny town where the name on every stone represents someone you were related to; land of motorcycles and scooters; older sister carrying her younger brother down a narrow dirt lane, each step she takes kicks up a small cloud of dust; Sunday afternoon, dead part of the day, hot and drowsy; dog sleeping beneath a car; down the road the boy’s great grandfather built with his brother and a pair of mules; kids playing football on a bare dirt field; never seen so much corrugated tin, a basic material to keep in, out, or covered; unfinished houses with rectangular eyes; holding her history like something that might slip from her grasp; a place filled with ancestral spirits and omens; feral dogs roam in pairs; people who will never be relieved of tedium and boredom by money; the high priest was also the ruler; refuse caught on a barbed-wire fence; caramel-colored mutt asleep in the dust; stacks of bricks; children selling trinkets to tourists in the square; intestines hanging from a hook; the smell of leather; a blind girl singing on the sidewalk, her plastic cup empty.