roof dog foto by smith
1st night in our new place. so tired we went to bed at 9. it’s 1:30 and i woke and can’t get back to sleep. don’t believe 4 hours sleep sufficient for keeping up with lady k.
listening to the new sounds here in the night in new house new neighborhood new city. analyzing. first thing in new place is to catalog normal sounds so i can tune them out, just listen for abnormal. been doing that a lot lately. this is our 50th place in 18 months. that’s nomad travel.
one sound is roof dogs. that’s where they live here in centro (the central part of town). no lawns, only enclosed courtyards where they don’t want the dogs defecating, so they put them on the roofs. i hear 6 having conversations right now over the rooftops (mostly 2 story, few 3). large big and small sharp ones quite near, an interesting aggressive couplet at the edge of my hearing.
we have internet. comes on when our landlord turns on his computer sometime in the afternoon after he gets home from work. tonight it went off at 8. so we get maybe 6 hours of connection a day. we find we feel incomplete without access, like a viable piece of us has been amputated. we be addicted, and that’s not good.
it’s hat hot here. either fry brain or wear straw. got me kinda cowboy kinda big game hunter hat. as we go out the door, lady says “Hat kiss” and we tilt our heads sideways to miss brims.
went to an xmas festival. largest collection i’ve seen of merry folk, food, trinkets, music, all spread out up and down the church steps and covered in tarps which held the fabulous food smells in. excellent street food – delicioso. so many voices, bells, carnival ride blips and bleeps, flashing lights, fireworks, cooking smells, children running laughing that i felt like i was in the midst of a firecracker explosion on lsd. i’ve never seen life lived so fully as here. even the poorest laugh. while watching an elderly lady cook empanadas and mamelas on large curved ceramic plates over charcoal pots the way they’ve cooked them for thousands of years, my time travel vision was shattered when she reached into her pocket to answer her cell fone.
after 14 months travel in eurpope and morocco, we told folk back home we’ve never anywhere seen anything the equal of the west side market. well, we gotta take that back. went to the smaller main market here and it wipes out the west side market by exponential factors.
most popular car here is the volkswagon bug – a lot of the old kind, a few of the new. and sitting in the square, vendors walk by with baskets of cooked grasshopper. car bugs and baskets of bugs beloved by all. i’m going to try the grasshoppers. be better than the psychologically disgusting blood sausage i ate in zagreb, croatia.
seen kumquat trees, poinsettia bushes, tangerine trees, patchouli trees. this is a rich land, but it’s been suffering a water shortage past 50 years. water’s delivered sporadically, and it depends on how many rich live in your neighborhood how often you get served. rich and poor live side by side in the inner town.
everywhere we go we hear happy bouncy upbeat mexican music. but if you translate the lyrics, the words tell the saddest stories you’ll ever hear. this happy-sad dichotomy fits the rich-poor lightskin-darkskin disparate reality here.
in our bathroom, i pointed to our toilet which has no toilet seat and in a deep sonorous voice said to lady “and here’s your toilet – welcome to oaxaca world.” she burst into hilarious laughter… more than the joke deserved, perhaps fueled by oaxacan weed. after meeting a few ex-pats down here, i find i do have “a people” after all – i’m part of the tribe of old smokers. not bad going from moroccan hash in morocco to oaxacan grass in oaxaca. back in the late 1960s there were 3 special marijuanas – panama red, acapulco gold, and oaxacan. of course the king weed of all time was thai stick, and it’s been 30 years since i’ve seen such.
asked lady what she was feeling, she said “It’s like we walked into a book.” been doing so much getting done to get here and now stuff, i haven’t had sunk in time to appreciate we’re way south of the border in mexican ways. i’m on a marvelous journey with magic lady.
rich creative soup here. be interesting times.
portrait of smith foto by smith