"You don't always get what you go after.  But you do get
what you wouldn't have got if you hadn't gone
after what you didn't get."
Blaze Foley

I have reached another level of expat dissociation.  When you live so long with the locals that they talk to you like a local, it can make you feel even farther away than you already are.  Weird.  A new one on me.  It makes me miss Texas (and Minnesota and Illinois for that matter) very much.

I have reached another level of expat dissociation, one that may be fatal to my desire to stay in Mexico.  Unlike the U.S. citizens who believe it is virtuous to feel guilty and ungrateful while simultaneously, ridiculously believing themselves to be too smart for religion, I have no shame or guilt about being an American whatsoever.  But because I'm not the typical gringo expat, my Mexican friends sometimes let slip ideas that make me want to die at the Alamo.

Mineral de Pozos, Guanajuato

I'm seriously thinking about coming back to the U.S. for reasons that have never existed in my heart and mind before.  The Blaze Foley quote is true, and it's true because in order to meet the bassist in San José Iturbide, you have to leave the Amistad house to look for movie people in Mexico City.  When the English teaching job in Mexico City doesn't work out, the cost of living will drive you north and you will seriously consider starting the Mexico chapter of your own band in an artless, hostile town while simultaneously putting a sketch of an idea together for a 45-minute border run film that WILL ACTUALLY GET MADE, instead of sitting on the mind-shelf of theoretical dreaming until you forget it's even there.  Move forward.  Get something done.  Let the Mexican chapter of the band keep you, or fail to.  Whatever happens, happens.  But do it.

Mexico Chapter of NP & The Wild Bores, San José Iturbide

The paradoxically POST-POLITICAL SENSE OF BEING AN AMERICAN hit me like a ton of feathers last week.  It made me wonder about the weight of fire, how much a fire weighs when you put it on the scale.  Accounting for the weight of the wood, it seems to me the fire would register in the negative numbers. 

Fire is lighter than outer space.  

The thing that's burning is what's heavy.

So, what's up?  Should I stay or should I go?  Leaving Mexico City before the earthly, strategic plan of finding a million dollars of funding for American Migrant doesn't make any sense.  But it was obviously right.

Is the strategy inspired, or is it the kind of thing you don't dare risk too much hope on?  If you don't dare risk too much hope on it, the strategy is flawed, to the point that the people working it don't even believe in its potential.  The movie was the opposite of that, for me.  Still is, which is why I'm leaving the solution behind.  I met who I had to meet. 

I still am, and will continue to. 

The strategy is perpetual motion.

Excerpt from the song "Diamonds in the Dust" on original ACR letterhead, w/ expired contact info

Perpetual motion is the goal.  Life's a TRIP, man.

A trip to where?

The destination, presumably.

What destination?

What if it isn't the destination that's important? 

What do we do if the tempo of the cooking implements

Banging away behind the singer

Are out of mind and also

Time?

Are they playing footsie with the mic stand?

Getting stoned with the guitar?

What if... it doesn't matter?

What if it's the trip that is important,

And there's no destination on this spinning graveyard

Anywhere at all?

My heart is far away.  In fact it is in Heaven.  Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  It isn't in the Bible, but I read somewhere that where God's finger points, His hand provides the way.  I have lived on that for decades.  It's true.  The question is, is His hand pointing up, or pointing down?  Into Heaven, or the flames?  What is the weight of fire?  How heavy is the thing you're carrying?  The thing that's obviously burning?

Are you breaking bad, or breaking good?

I am seriously thinking about breaking character, returning to the floating "no" of destination, and leaving the Mosquito Coast behind.  At the beginning of this message, I figured Texas.  Now, maybe Chile.  Or maybe I'll stay here another month.  Does it depend on God?  Clearly, it had better.  God willing, the Rapture will happen before any of it, and the point will be made moot by circumstance, and fire.  It amazes me that people insist on disbelieving in hell, when proof of it is billowing toxic smoke to the heavens every day.  "After everything you've been through, how can you NOT believe in hell," asks the drunken singer in "Diamonds in the Dust."  "Virtue" is just the other side of the sin coin.  Animals don't have those problems.  But this article is long enough.