"How can anyone be happy when it's sunny every day?"  Pablo Smog

The neighbor kid came over last night to say goodbye before leaving town.  I call him a "kid" because I'm old enough to be his dad, but in fact he's in his mid-20s.  We're not great friends (yet); I met him once while taking the garbage out, and we struck up a conversation that lasted 15 or 20 minutes.  He speaks pretty good English, and told me to check out Chicano Batman, which I did.

I didn't expect to ever see him again.  He's in town on a job of some kind, and was only staying for a week.  But yesterday, he comes up to me with a couple beers and a pack of cigarettes, and we proceed to hang out in front of my door, listening to songs on his phone and smoking too many cigarettes, while he drank tallboys.  I didn't touch the alcohol, of course.  I hate alcohol.

We ran out of cigarettes, and went to the Oxxo on the corner to buy some more, and proceeded to hang out by the pool in weather that people from L.A. and Monterrey consider cold, and so do I.  A bunch of people walked by, some of them came up and started talking to us, and before I knew it a few hours had gone by. 

The mid-20s Mexican people came and went, and while walking back to our domiciles my friend gave me one of those manly-type goodbye hugs that men sometimes will give to each other.  I didn't expect it.

At one point in the evening, my friend mentioned that he'd seen that my van was gone, and wondered if I'd gone into town.  I said no, I only went to the store.  I haven't been into the Centro to do anything cool in a couple years.  It sounds lame, like a bad thing, but it isn't.

It is the blessed gift of peace, masquerading as boredom.

I embrace it, and am grateful for it.

In 2004, when I recorded All The Diamonds You Can Eat, I apparently used to think that peace and contentment were things to get blue about.  It's the kind of thing the coked-up demon on the cover would think.  These last 4 lines from the song have an appearance of wisdom, but in fact they indicate a compromise with the spirit of heaviness that plagues many people unnecessarily.

This peace and this contentment
they are driving me insane
how can anyone be happy
when it's sunny every day?

If peace and contentment are driving you insane, Mr. Smog, allow me to suggest another decade or more in chaotic turmoil and circumstantial instability, to cure you of this idiotic, if wistful and not un-poignant sentiment.  Calling out the glib, willful egocentric-idiocy-masquerading-as-powerful-happiness practiced by many denizens of Southern California may not be the worst way to furnish your lyrical square footage, but the time to take your own advice has come. 

What advice is that?

Forget about it.

Why?

Because it's a sunny day.  Why else?

Why not?

The kid who came by to say goodbye last night reminded me why I came to Mexico.  Not to ingratiate myself to this place, or treat it like a golf course upon which I spill expensive drinks while working in my slippers, but to get away from the warzone.  Because if there's anything America has become, and will continue to devolve into, it's a warzone.  Even the cultural landscape is a violent exchange between the unlistenable, prefab rhymes of dead Soundcloud rappers and the unlistenable, prefab rhymes of mainstream country music artists.  I'm tired of the headline:

Houston Rapper "2 Stupid" Shot Dead At Postmodern Apartment Complex By Moronic, Thugged-Out Drug Elves

Over it, totally I am.  News headlines are like a cookbook for destruction and death.  Here are the ingredients; here are the instructions.  Mix a bunch of manufactured idiots with a bunch of terrible music, throw in some fake, patriotic sound product pretending to be a rallying cry for the silent masses, mix together, add alcohol, hair dye, and Marxism, and stand back as the entire concoction eats a hole in your table and drills straight down through the center of the earth, creating a tunnel through which Chinese troops can easily access your living room, for future conquest.

Exceedingly tiresome.

There are exceptions.  This new song by Horsegirl makes me relatively happy.  Of course, if you've been around the block a few times, you've heard it before.  But it's still nice to hear that a generation raised on a diet of self-hating gender dysphoria and manufactured rage over the race ratio of the actors in a commercial for something as unilaterally necessary as socks or globs of Chicken McSynthesized Gluten Paste hasn't lost their mind entirely.

*For the record, I don't know what gluten is, and I don't care.  I drank expired cans of beans from the food bank in the back of hot (or cold) vans in the desert too long to care about food.  I lived outdoors so long that in fact breakfast cereal still feels like a delicacy to me.  It's like a treat, pouring something you can keep in a refrigerator over a small pile of grain and dry fruit you don't have to pour directly into your mouth from the bag.  Breakfast cereal is like rich-people food, that nobody thinks is rich-people food.  Everybody thinks it's normal to take the milk out of the refrigerator, or get out of bed and walk upright into another room to take a piss, instead of kneeling on a pile of dirty laundry and pissing in an empty bottle of orange juice in the freezing, stupid dark.  And indeed, it might be normal.

But not for me it isn't.

It makes a cool scene in a movie, but it's a drag in real life:

Mojave Desert 2016

This song by Yard Act is also a would-be relief.  Meaning, it would be a relief, if it was true.  The line, "it's hippie BS but it's true" is a great line, but paradoxically, it isn't true.  It's hippie BS.  Still a great song though, which is a relief in itself, regardless of the dogmatic imperfection of it:

Remember that?  Dogmatic imperfection? 

I do. 

Which is why I came to Mexico.  To get away from the war.  The land of ever-increasing dogmatic perfection.

Even as a hopefully-born-again Christian, I have to say, the thought of yet another dogmatically-perfect regime is beyond horrific to me.  All fascist regimes are flawless in their doctrine.  If flawless doctrine exists, it doesn't exist every time and place it declares itself.  It probably doesn't even exist in the imaginations of those who believe they possess it.

But don't tell them that.  They will turn and rend you like the fodder for the pig mill their flawless doctrine has taught them to believe you are.  (If your doctrine is flawless, you will want to share it with people, and encourage them to adopt it as an act of free will, hoping that they will see the perfection of it for themselves (which is the only way to see it).  If it's full of holes and fraught with deadly mistakes, you will force people to adopt it at gunpoint.  Since there's no other way they ever would.  Just a thought).

Anyway, the kid reminded me why I came to Mexico.  People in America don't bring beer to neighbors twice their age, and they're not generally cool when you don't drink it.  Hanging out with him and his friends reminded me how many people I don't see, how much I don't do, how wonderfully bored I am, and how blessed and grateful I am for it.

Boredom is a gift.

If you're blessed with it, don't waste it.

Tomorrow To The Day

It was 10 years ago
tomorrow to the day
we left our little home
we flew away

we got some gas in Burns
we turned around in Bend
we missed our turn
we made it to the end

we floated through Nevada
to the western Utah line
we put a sticker on a billboard
we were looking for a sign

we lost our brakes in Denver
on the mountains in the rain
we coasted into the city
like a runaway train

     but we weren’t running from nothing
     it’s what we were running toward
     out of the arms of the devil
     into the arms of the Lord

Oklahoma City
a thousand degrees in the shade
there was no way to sleep
there was no way to stay

later back to Austin
locked behind the cemetery gate
don’t leave town
before it’s too late

     but we weren’t running from nothing
     it’s what we were running toward
     out of the arms of the devil
     into the arms of the Lord

now we’re sitting on the Jungle Farm
it’s quiet like never before
peace is like a foreign country
when you’re accustomed to war

I don’t know what to do with myself
I’m so tired, I don’t even care
thank you Jesus for holding us together
thank you Jesus for always being there

© Nathan Payne
July-August 2021