Hello again so soon, indeed. The purpose of this email is to direct you over to my SubscribeStar page, so if you want to avoid all the fun and get straight to the point, well, you probably should never have opened this email. But your hateful, contradictory habits of self-diversion are your problem. I'm here to exercise my writing kick and provide updates to you the chosen few as constantly as possible. I would write something else, like a song, or an anti-foodie bachelor cookbook about how to make something edible enough for a dude who hates food for reasons of drinking cans of expired beans from the food bank in the back of a dark, cold van for almost 20 years, in which I would devote an entire chapter to the cleanliness benefits of eating dry Ramen, instead of doing something that will force you get out and wash your hands in the snow, may God forbid we spill this tuna water on a pillow, or a sequel to The Divine Comedy, but I don't feel like it. Though I did start my first English-language song in over 3 1/2 years the other day. I wrote a couple verses, forced some chords out of hiding, lost interest halfway through the
Anyway, this week has been all about being a new recruit in Good Problems Boot Camp. I won't talk about it, because after 15 years of living in a van, or a car, being dragged into numerous relationships I don't really want to be in just so I can take a shower, among many other fun and terrible, time-wasting obstacles, it really isn't very interesting. Me and the landlord have become kinda friends. I say kinda, because the word "amigo" is used on everything down here, like a strange, meaningless salsa that tastes invisible, like your own saliva. Empty and ubiquitous.
But man, I'm serious, I don't think this apartment wants me to live here. I'm amazed that good problems can still put you through an obstacle camp of boots. Problems are problems, I suppose.
I'm thinking of checking out the Guadalajara area. I actually have a friend there, another gringo expat I met in L.A. almost 20 years ago. He was a guitar player on cruise ships, and has traveled and lived all over the world. Literally. Thailand, Colombia, Malaysia, other places, I don't know. Russia, Turkey, Baltimore, wherever.
SubscribeStar actually works, though. I don't know what it is, but it works. Meaning, I don't need to use a fast-food bank to get paid from it. Your real bank actually works. You have to sign up for it to look at it, I think. Is that normal? It sounds unrelated, and it is, but my friend's smartphone was hitting on my phone today, because it's dumb and probably looks easy. I was getting weird texts like zzzsssaasaaaaadddzzzz, some weird phone code for "whatcha doin' baby," I assume. I don't have one of those overwrought, morally-deviant machines. My phone is a phone. The cheapest thing on the shelf at the Mexican 7-11. It doesn't do anything. I spent $30 on it and had to think about it. $30? For a phone? The last time I bought one it was $20. The $10 mark-up, especially in Mexico numbers, sat on my heart like a leaden harbinger of 3G doom. But I do use it, from time to time.
I've never had enough money to actually need to hide it in my sock. The wallet itself was often worth more than the contents or lack thereof within. One time, when I was living in my car, I was driving around Los Feliz in L.A. with less than an 1/8 a tank of gas and no green money, and only a little bit of change, because screw you and your shiny golden world you finely-upholstered fools. What am I going to do, sit here parked between these soft indoor people's cars and die? So I turned the ignition and hit the road and what do you know, some guy was hitchhiking. In a residential neighborhood. Standing there with his thumb out. I asked him where he was going. He offered me $20 to give him a ride to work on 3rd & Fairfax. That's how it works. And it was the best Jumbo Jack with cheese and quarter tank of gas I've ever eaten, by a mile.
Anyway, you get the point. I'm at a rather soft and pleasurable loss for what to do, relative to usual, and am obviously opening the door for you to join me on SubscribeStar and become a patron. There's like, one cat-friendly hotel between Mexico City and Guadalajara. That can't possibly be true. Of course, there are a lot of hotels that are cat-friendly, if they're not aware of the fact that they are harboring cats. I stayed in a place in West Texas once with a strict anti-animal policy, and walked into the room and it smelled eye-wateringly horribly of cigarette smoke and whiskey. My cat hated it. What kind of animals had stayed there before, I wondered. In fact it was the hotel in that movie directed by Tommy Lee Jones, about the 3 graves of Julio Melchizidek, or whatever it was called. With Barry Pepper as the racist border cop. I ate in that blue restaurant Barry Pepper's wife is considering leaving him in, while talking to her friend, whoever it was. The restaurant was across the parking lot from the hotel, or adjoining to it like a skin tag, I can't remember. The food wasn't room temperature, and it was organized on a plate, as I paid for it to be. And I didn't have to sit on a pile of laundry while I ate it, or in the driver's seat.
It was a meal for the gods.
I normally use road atlases in lieu of plates. It reduces their lifespan from 20 years down to about 19, but they work well, especially if you make sandwiches on states you wouldn't visit if your life depended on it. I've never actually been to South Dakota. Probably because I never could see it through the mayonnaise. Unfortunate. I'd like to see the 3D-printed presidential mountain wall sometime.
Anyway, it was a good movie. I wrote about the hotel and the story around it in this song here, if you're interested:
Contemplatively pouring tuna water on the sequel to The Divine Comedy,
N
