Memogate

Documents were presented as authentic on 60 Minutes Wednesday on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the Presidential Election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate the documents, and that they were produced by modern wordprocessing software, which led to widespread mistrust of the Internet.

Sumidero Canyon

Winding Down (and Out)

I feel as if the world is winding down for me. Mentally, I am in a lost place. Some awful things have happened long before I expected the time of final things.
My health is not so good. Many little details bother me.
Financially, I am sitting on the fence of going forward and trying to go home. But to what home?
On October 26th, I finally suffered for not making clear to everyone that the scumbag who has been charging purchases all over the place is not me. A collection agency put a hold on $8,000 of my savings because they think they have the thief. Because I was not in New York to protest, they won a judgment against me. It is not my debt, but I have been told there is very little I can do about clearing this up short of taking the matter to civil court, which I would have to be there to do.
In addition, I have not taken care of my taxes, so the IRS is deducting from the interest. I keep meaning to sit down and right this situation, but I find hours slipping by while I surf the Internet. Withdrawing into the safe place inside my memories, sometimes even there I feel the intrusion of an unfair world. I’ve lost whatever little conviction I was building and no longer feel capable of responding to inequity.
At times, I have projected and thought I would enjoy living to ninety and watching this changing world, but lately, I feel as if I am ready to die soon. There is very little that brings me joy these days.
I don’t say this because of the robbing of my money alone—it is a combination of things that puts me in this mood.
I am a man out of place in his surroundings. When I went to New York in July, I quickly realized how different it had become from the time I felt it was my world. Having awakened too late for my flight to Mexico City, everything, for me, went a little wrong after that. I felt as if I had become a zombie by the time I was sitting in my brother’s car. And now, three months later, I have not returned to life.
I lost my guiding spirit in April of 2000, and so long as I didn’t change the set, I was able to drift through the days, but I came to a fork in the road that December, and I think I may have chosen a path not meant for me. I was distracted by my heart’s yearning, and I made irrevocable choices. Now, I am once again in a place where it looks as if I must make choices and I am reluctant to do anything.

Yellow Light

The yellow light comes at around four o’clock every day. In the narrow passageway between the livingroom and the diningroom at the foot of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, sunlight streaming through the windowed doors to the patio meets the light coming in from the kitchen window. The glorious color resulting from this concatenation lasts for about fifteen minutes. If I can arrange to be sitting in a chair having a cup of coffee and enjoying a cigarette, and observe this manifestation, all is right with the world for another day. I’m a simple man. It takes something as small as that to keep me happy.
However, if I’m busy or somewhere else at that time of the afternoon, and I miss my light fix, I feel lost and the day seems wrong, which implies that perhaps I am not such a simple man. If I put such store in this one poetic moment, maybe I need to get a life, as they say.
Day after tomorrow, I leave for New York, and although I can visualize the details of my apartment, I wonder what I will find there. My brother and Charlene have lived there now for more than two years, and they had made changes before I went home last time.
I have my present firmly fixed in my mind’s eye. Please let me recognize my past and keep it in perspective, and not let it interfere with my future.
Time plays a game with or without our sanction. We are the chess pieces. Whenever we stop to observe, we are on different squares from whence we began, never forgetting we are looking to mate to win.

Flying Home

It’s 10:00 pm Sunday, and I have lived alone here for a week. I have finished my summer course and this Thursday I will be flying to New York. I have spoken to A pretty much every day via Messenger (sometimes with webcam) and/or phone. He seems to have gotten through his first week of classes without too much ruckus and this weekend he went to visit his family in Ontario, near Los Angeles, I think. I haven’t had any difficulty being here by myself. During the week I had homework assignments to keep me busy, and I did a bit of house cleaning and washed some laundry.
I have done some work preparing for my upcoming classes, but no personal writing. I read Philip Larkin’s A Girl in Winter and think it will become one of my favorites. It was so appropriate for my time right now. I need to get some more of my books from New York because when I get in a melancholy mood some of them help me regain my perspective—my personal perspective, that is, which I know is kind of tepid and old-fashioned, but I don’t think that will change much at this point in my life.
Tomorrow night I’m supposed to meet Calvin for a drink and some conversation—looking forward to that.
I can’t believe I only have three more days here!

Alone

It is 6:30 on a Saturday. My first day completely alone here in Mexico. A has gone to San diego for a month-long course. I have Module 5 left next week of my Capacitación en Verano, and then on the 15th I am going to New York. Both of us should be returning to Tuxtla on August 4th. Without a friend here, I am bored already, and the 15th seems so far away.
I know I have complained quite a bit about the situation here, but this morning I was more upset to be facing this time alone. Of course, I can read or write without interruptions. I am sitting around too much lately. I have put on weight. My goal is to lose some of it during this novel adventure. I have vowed not to eat any red meat for a month, but now I’m longing for a burger. I have vowed many things over time and have found it difficult to follow through. This is something I kind of have to do, however, as very few articles of clothing fit properly. A month is not very much time to achieve a goal, but it could provide the spur I need to make some headway.
I need to keep busy to avoid feeling sorry for myself. I know many of my problems are of my own making. I just have to discover the way to unmake them. Easier said than done.

Cycles

It was Sunday night, actually Monday morning—nothing was open. I had one cigarette left in the last pack of a carton I’d picked up at City Club the previous Monday. I’d been at the computer all day, while A was at a soccer game, then watching Big Brother on his family’s big-screen TV.
When he came to the house, he told me to come with him in his car while he drove around looking for some smokes. The only option we discovered was one of the kangurus, who offered to sell us an overpriced pack in lieu of a couple of loosies. That’s when I decided to stop smoking.
My resolve lasted until the next morning when the tienda on the corner was open.
This is the kind of cycle we repeatedly go through, with A out of work and me on brief hiatus between semesters. He was going to use his treadmill to shake off some of the extra kilos. I was going to write more. We were going to gather a group of friends and travel to some of the less expensive sites I still haven’t visited after three years in Chiapas and he has not seen since he was a child.
Of course, he’ll get another job after he finishes his seminar in san Diego, and by then I’ll be teaching English again to teenagers who have little or no interest in learning it, but the coulda-woulda-shouldas will be didn’ts—likely or not.
The wading pool on the patio is murky. At least it’s not losing water anymore. I used it for an hour or so the other day. It wasn’t so much fun without the beers. Probably not too healthy either, as I could feel bits of grit under my feet. Still, it was refreshingly warm as I lay in it and watched the sky darken.
I think I wouldn’t smoke so much if I lived here alone without friends visiting, or if I had an interest in watching other people’s lives on a big-screen TV.
I really need to prepare my lessons for the electronic platform and stop futzing around with the paint program.
I should get dressed and go out to a bar and maybe hook up with a female companion.
I could clean out the pool and invite some people over—I would be a good host.
No, I wouldn’t—I never have been. I wasn’t at home, where I spoke the language, and here in Mexico, I sleep too much and smoke too many cigarettes.
Oh, god, it’s two-thirty! A won’t come by for at least another hour, and I just lit my last smoke.

Huatulco

Sappy New Year

I am sitting here alone, once again, through my own choice, but it is not a good way to begin a new year. I chose not to participate in the all-night drink fest yesterday, and today, when the prospect was to go and sit in the house at LaSalle for an hour or more feeling like a fifth wheel, I again said no. I am anti-social, and it is a problem in my current situation.
There are many things I don’t find amusing. I have been told I take things too seriously (by those who take almost nothing seriously, and often invade my private space), and this is unlikely to change. As the years go on, more and more situations seem pointless to me.
I do laugh occasionally, but at present those things that amuse me are not popular with the others around me. What can I make of that? I’m in need of a sea-change, I guess, if I am to remain here.
I have been looking forward to the changes in methodology to be used if I continue at the Tec for another semester, however, all else looks bleak. During this hiatus, I have been trying to decide if that implementation is enough to keep me here. There is little or nothing calling me back to New York, and thus, I feel like a man without a home. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to travel very widely for too long. I have already spent a great deal of money just to maintain this lately unsatisfying existence.
The only time I experience a modicum of happiness is when I am alone, and that too quickly fades. Am I in need of therapy, or am I simply fated to suffer ennui where others are satisfied?
Movies have provided escape. For two hours at a time, I have been drawn in and left my sullen, passionless life outside the theater. In the last three years, I have seen more films than I did in the previous ten, but now, even they are becoming predictable.
This place seems to have given me about all it has to give. I feel as if I want or need more, but am clueless as to what that might be. My friend went away for two days with his family. We both had a good time—he experiencing new social activities, and I, sitting here alone with no one intruding. I went to the cinema one evening by myself, and bought a book. At the end of that day, I experienced a feeling of satisfaction, but it was short-lived. The next day, the “vacation” ended, and all the familiar trappings fell back into place. I went with my friend to see the same film again, so even that experience was revised in my mind and placed in the category of familiar! I still have the book, of course, a collection of Jaime Sabines’s poetry, but I have not again delved into it as I did on the day of purchase. Many of the pieces I was already familiar with.
I have done quite a bit of work in preparation for the next semester, but there is so much more to do. As I sit pondering a decision in that regard, time is slipping away. Do I invest more effort in this, only to throw it up at the last minute? Or do I effectuate and prepare for something new?
Why, oh why, when busy and bored, do I see myself lounging in a hammock on a beach somewhere with even less to do?
I believe I was born too early for this life. If I were twenty years old now, I’d be in a perfect position to go through these head-trips, come to realizations, then go on with so much time ahead of me. Unfortunately, when I was twenty, I was too busy being distracted by the traumas of others to take care of my own.
Perhaps it is lost time for which I despair or perhaps it is the milieu in which I have settled. So many young people around me, too much of the time, reminding me of all my mistakes and lost opportunities. I need to reboot, but I’m working with old equipment.