a bad day

This is really a classic, so I had to put it here.

A Queen Street East mural

Bike Messenger: The Crust of the Shit.

DAMNIT.

A pall sits over this wet, freezing Hogtown: November has given way to December and with it every courier's nightmare, the hideous cold rains that last all day and make you hate everything. Normally its November when the really ugly weather kicks in, and of course it did, but it was mostly a decent fall what with global warming and the lake-effect and all.

Take yesterday. It was a dull rainy day, but a bit of transplanted Vancouver weather - a balmy 15 degrees till 12:30 - so I wasn't getting miserable as I rolled around the city picking and dropping other people's business. Frank (my dispatcher) let me break for lunch around noon and by the time I'd decided to move again everything was cold, with a harbinger that 15C was not to be seen again till April.

Today was of course cold, wet, and miserable from the gun, and Frank let me sit inside as long as possible. My radio, ringtone set to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, went off at 10am with a double at Queen's Quay. Off I went, feeling pretty fine about what I was getting into, the memory of yesterday's hours of wet, cold feet somewhat fading away under my wheels. I turned down towards the lakefront and nearly lost my sou'wester in the howling wind. There were ponds with little waves on bits of Lakeshore Blvd, and I was nearly windbound as I turned the bike eastward. A massive south wind. Whitecaps were rolling up to and over the quay; it was more wind and rain than I could ever remember riding in, and I've ridden in Holland. Epic! I thought. Its the kind of day when you don't even think about making money, just being out there is such an adventure.

It was so wet and the wind so fierce I found a bit of sidewalk to roll east on, so hideous looked the big metal beasts driving beside me. By 12:30 I was a soaking, freezing 'popsicle' and neither inner bootliner nor thickest wool sock nor neoprene overbooty was stopping both feet from the same process: first the damp, the wet, the cold, the numbness and the final stage, a hideous stabbing pain like being crucified with icepicks through the feet. I quit before that stage as it was only raining heavier as the morning became noon.

Frank was not happy, as I was the third bike to book off since the whole death march had begun that morning. On a Friday yet. But I wasn't making the sacrifice, and I dropped my bills and then tore home as fast as my soaking legs would carry me, the water leaking into and spreading around the hands, feet, arms, and even back, as it had been for three hours. If I'd made thirty bucks I'd be suprized but I didn't care.

At home I peeled it all off me and tried to forget it all.

Oaxaca news

The revolt of the Oaxacan people against their governor, Ulysis Ruiz Ortiz, has come to a critical stage in the last week. Oaxaca City is basically under siege by federal anti-riot police, and resistence is strong on the streets.

Last Friday an American Indymedia journalist was killed by police while standing with protesters and filming the assault. His name was Brad Will, an anarchist from NYC who'd been reporting on the whole insurrection for some time. Two other locals were also killed in the police assault. Their deaths are by no means the first.

Ruiz's state government has been paralyzed for quite some time due to the ever-widening solidarity in this struggle against his autocratic rule and current "dirty war", to the point where in the last couple of days the Mexican congress has actually voted that he should resign. This is a totally non-binding decision but it speaks loudly to the events of the last four or five months, especially the intimidation, killings, and disappearances of a number of the popular assembly's leading members, not to mention the fact of the police state Oaxacans have been generally confronted with since the teachers' union protest for better wages and educational standards began back in June.

Go to Oaxaca Indymedia to learn more, or google the Mexican newspaper La Jornada or the newsweekly El Proceso (if you've got the Spanish).

A road moment

Today was a good day on the road. Why? I didn't make any money, so the pace was relaxed. The air was brisk, the bike rolled around without any complications, minus the new front tire I threw on it the other day. Its a spongy piece of crap, the fourteen dollar result of riding the old one to the bitter end of its life in the middle of the day with calls on board.

Around 4:30, into the ninth inning as it were, the winds got especially gusty and white stuff was swirling around in the air - snow! I was hammering up Yonge street north of Bloor to pick at Price street when the stuff was all around me. It was one of those magic times as a messenger, when you can only really appreciate the raw force of nature in the middle of the city because you're doing a job on a bike.

Rush hour was well underway as I grabbed my piece and rushed out to get it down to a fancy cocktail bar on Bay street within thirty minutes, not a difficult thing to do in this case, but definitely a good excuse to be playing in traffic with snowflakes going sideways. I'd already had the good fortune to have been sent to drop a piece within a few blocks of my place the hour before, where I'd seized the opportunity to nip home and grab my other pair of gloves. For the first time ever I doubled up on cycling gloves, figuring it would be that much warmer. My old pair fit right over my newer pair so I went for it, and it worked as well as could be for half-fingered gloves in mid-October. That's bike courier thinking for you.

As I rolled south, this amazing thing was happening. The wind swirled madly, asphalt turning to wet and threatening slickness in the bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. In the western sky, the sun was shining a late afternoon golden glow that seemed to emerge out of nowhere, right in the middle of this crazy little snowsquall. It was like the city, split down the centre by Yonge street, was atmospherically split as well. It made sense if you were riding a bike down Yonge at the time, it was palpable for a few key minutes and made my little mission seem all that much more important and adventurous. Those moments are the kind that keep you getting back on your courier bike, the feeling of freedom that stays with you long after you hang it up and move on to other things in life.

Rush hour is an amazing manifestation of the feeling that right now is crucial. There is this real sense of drama, that people aren't just moving around as always, but are seized with an urgency in their movement, as though a kind of race were on. Well, a kind of race is on, the race to home, to beat the traffic on the expressways, to the next set of tasks and responsibilities at the end of the day, a release from the day's confinements at work.

Two office girls were waiting at a desk in the cocktail bar, which had no less than three wall- mounted large flat-screen televisions, all cheek by jowl. Even offices are starting to have these tv screens, with their perpetual supply of CNN rolling news keeping everyone preoccupied with nothing.

The one who was expecting a package signed with an excited smile, Desiree something, and took off towards the back. The other remained with nothing to do, so I asked her the time and wrote it on my waybill. Outside, it had cleared up and the sky was calm.

Back in the courier game.

29 September

A last Friday of the month completed. In the courier business, this day is always going to be a biggie, because a lot of bills are getting paid, and other business being concluded. In the mythology of the game, its a big payday with a good hammering pile of work to be done.

It was a classic fall day in Toronto with the sun shining and the air cool and gusty. What's considered great riding weather in these parts. For me, it was like one of those baseball games that goes to extra innings, becomes a kind of epic affair even though nothing spectacular is happening. In my case it was just that I had no money and no food or drink to push me onwards.

It's the classic bike courier scenario: so broke you need an advance to keep working, so i asked for one two days ago and got it yesterday, but it took all day to arrive so I couldn't bank it, then when I had the chance today I realized I had nothing to cover it, meaning it wouldn't clear till Tuesday and of course I'd run out of money last night. As I muddled through the situation while fully absorbed in the war of packages, pages, and waybills, I finally realized a plan: my old trick of taking the cheque to the very branch where it was drawn and cashing it there. In this case it was 20 King W., so I had the whole business coming together as I rolled into the core with a few Same Day calls in my bag.

Part of the fun of being a courier is trying to work your own errands in on company time, time that never belongs to you and is nearly always in short supply, so it takes all this logistical strategizing just to do something like go to the bank. In this case there was the added hurdle of getting the Royal Bank to hand over my miserable two hundred dollars; it was two o'clock and several trips to Eglinton and back later, quite badly needed. But desperation is rarely your friend in matters of banking or beaurocracy, and the tellers sent me away after I could only provide a driver's licence and health card as identification.

So having scrimped till the bitter end of the week (and for three weeks since returning from Mexico), I threw down my usual biking breakfast of hot muesli and a bowl of coffee, and tore off to my first call of the day. Eight or nine hours later I was walking to Money Mart to cash my advance, and saw nothing but veteran bike couriers, including the legendary Dogboy, or Stefano by his real name.

I've known him for years, as everyone does, an absolute hard man who rides with the most insane, kamikaze style ever seen - left turns into the oncoming lane at full speed - and never backs off for anything. Helmetless, headset blasting music, Stefano is a true soldier of the road wars since fifteen years, I think. He showed me a cheque for two hundred dollars or so, an advance off a two week commission of $689 he made at my old company, Turtle Express. He had already quit and joined the same outfit as me two or three days previously.

Stefano showed me his manifest of calls, pointing out the more valuable ones. I was stunned by the sheer tininess of his pay for such and absolute legend amongst couriers. In all my time back when I was first a courier, on and off for three years or so, I had never once seen him on standby. i had watched him make an brilliant comeback at the Courier Classic, an Alleycat race through Trinity-Bellwoods park, to win his leg of the team relay only to be hit full on by the second place finisher on a track bike, who couldn't avoid him as Stefano had stopped and dropped his bike immediately after crossing the line. Undaunted, Stefano picked himself up and raced the next round.

Legends of the man's behaviour have circulated for years. One time Stefano lost his temper and punched a guy in TD Centre, one of the bank skyscrapers. The police just monitered his wherabouts through his company radio and then sent about 8-10 cops to arrest him. The story perfectly captures all the elements of the man: the explosive temper at work, the fact that he's built thick as a brick shithouse so that you need eight times the manpower to bring him down.

One time Stefano was roaring down Yonge street at full clip and went into his lefthander on Wellesley in his usual mode, i.e., straight into oncoming westbound traffic, except that a car had stopped completely while turning and Stefano went through the windshield helmetless headfirst. He was working the next day.

What astounded me about seeing him today was his absolute lack of ego, no sense of his fame in the courier world. He jabbered on about busting through the next two weeks on $180, even showing me some of those peanut butter and jam packets you find at the Golden Griddle as a survival tip. He was all smiles about it, while saying things like, "At least I have a roof over my head", and "We're just like prostitutes, drug dealers, and those guys in Guantanemo Bay, we're nothing, nothing at all. Just call them something else and they don't have no fucking rights at all. Well, that's life man." He said it with a smile.

There it was, the awareness of the relentless exploitation of it all, driven home as a brutal truth, but Stefan didn't seem angry or even particularly disgusted by it. He was past all that. Now it was just an observation, a simple fact of life, unchangable. He stood there in the fading sunlight of a fall day, sunburnt in his crew cut, smiling away. He was the picture of blue collar addiction to work no matter how bad the deal, with his beat-up looking street-ified mountain bike seemingly all he had after years and years as a professional cyclist. It all shocked me a little, but only out of a naive assumption that things could somehow be better for a guy who rides so hard.

Oaxaca Update (Indymedia)

I wrote about the civil unrest and insurrectionary movement in Oaxaca City in August. This article supplies some very important context.


LOCAL ACTION ALERT

In 2004, Ruiz Ortiz came to power through an election viewed by many as illegitimate and corrupt. His policies and practices are widely unpopular. His support for neoliberal projects enrich a select few leaving the rest of the state in grinding poverty. His commodification of Oaxaca’s fiercely guarded cultural pride in the pursuit of tourism is disdained. The political and economic regimes of Oaxaca are a certain shade of barbarous. In a state still ruled by the PRI, election rigging ensures political control, lands conflicts are exacerbated by the government, and politically motivated killings and detentions are common. Ruiz Ortiz has been internationally condemned over and over again for such acts. The chief architect of the State's counter-insurgency program against the movement, Jorge Franco Vargas, is affectionately known as 'Chucky' of Hollywood killer doll fame.

But, after years of organizing, social movements are poised to take him out. Over the course of four months, a teachers’ strike has morphed into an all-out popular revolt. Protestors have reclaimed a state-owned television station and numerous state and corporate radio stations. All seats of government have been blockaded, forcing legislators to meet in secret and remote hotels outside the City of Oaxaca. A parallel and popular governance has formed and is gaining legitimacy as the true authority in the state. Ruiz Ortiz’s exit is whispered through the streets, painted on city walls, and demanded by daily direct actions.

In their desperation and depravation, Ruiz Ortiz and his cohorts are directing their violence underground in a systematic campaign of paramilitary and police violence and sabotage aimed at undermining the popular social movements.
Eviction Attempt
For close to two months, thousands of teachers, families, and students affiliated with the National Education Workers Union - Section 22 (SNTE in its Spanish initials) occupied the city center demanding economic relief for teachers and schools. Section 22 has made the journey to the capital city for a number of years with similar demands. For many teachers it was routine. Occupy the city center at the end of school and expect a small raise.

Around 50 city blocks had been transformed into a vast tarp city where striking teachers and supporters escaped the sun and daily rains. Barricades were set up to block cars and potential intruders. In a city choked with automobile traffic, the plantón (sit-in) also was a car-free refuge in the center city. Banners representing the plethora of social movements provided a visual confirmation of the breadth of the movement. Posters advertising marches plastered the city walls, scrawling Ricardo Flores Magón quotes adorned buildings, and full-length murals depicted Ruiz Ortiz as a raccoon and rat. With no beat-cops willing to dare the occupation, the city was a risk-free canvas. The atmosphere created was one of a vibrant community living in the streets and of constant political dialogue and action. Simultaneously, the plantón critically reclaimed a symbolic space dominated by capitalist economic and political interests.

Around four in the early morning of June 14, 2006, while teachers, families, and supporters slept then governor Ruiz Ortiz sent roughly 3,000 police elements to evict the protestors from the city center. Perhaps Ruiz Ortiz figured that one violent swoop would destroy the teachers’ movement and ‘clean’ the city center for the approaching height of the tourist season.

Riot-clad cops beat, burned, and gassed the teachers’ encampment. At 9AM, five hours after the police offensive, the smoldering remains of plastic tarps mixed with lingering tear gas still burned the eyes of passers-by. A low-flying helicopter hovered above the scene for hours launching tear gas on protestors below. Police elements smashed the transmitting equipment of independent Radio Plantón. Smashed-up buses littered the streets and everyone carried a stick in fear of another police attack. Hundreds, mostly police officers, sought medical treatment from area hospitals. After five hours of riotous confrontation in the streets, the plantón was reestablished. VIDEO

Ruiz Ortiz attempted to destroy the nascent revolution with this violent, public eviction of the teachers’ plantón. The ex-governor eventually recognized the error of this action in a televised apology. Not so much out of remorse, but out of a pleading self-interest for the social movement to relent. In his attempt to evict the teachers’ movement, he inadvertently provoked his own demise and the rise of the emerging movements in Oaxaca. The struggle is no longer just about the teachers. Rather, it is a collective demand for his exit from power and the collective desire for popular governance.

Already Fallen/Fallen Already
Post-eviction, the teachers’ movement and other movements joined in a campaign to demand the exit of Ruiz Ortiz and the desire for popular governance. In the face of such popular insurrection the legitimacy of state government crumbled and lost its ability to function.

Through an escalating series of actions the movement targeted pillars of the state government diminishing its ability to function thereby greatly pressuring URO to exit his seat of power. Oaxaca witnessed, and continues to witness: rolling highway blockades, occupations of municipal governments (in over 20 towns throughout the state), and the seats of government power blockaded.

The cancellation of the annual Guelaguetaza was perhaps most embarrassing to Ruiz Ortiz. The government/corporate-sponsored Guelaguetza is widely viewed as a tourist spectacle driven by profits rather than the celebration’s true communal roots. It is also the most important cultural celebration in Oaxaca, which brings thousands of foreigners and their money to Oaxaca. The social movements identified boycotting the Guelaguetza as a way of pressuring Ruiz Ortiz to leave power.

Ruiz Ortiz’s government was racing to complete unfinished ‘improvements’ to the Guelaguetza auditorium. Road blockades denied access to work crews and vehicles. The auditorium was burned three separate occasions and bathroom facilities destroyed. The morning of the Lunes de Cerro, Ruiz Ortiz canceled the Guelaguetza truncating 74 years of the celebration. A few weeks later, commercial vendors of mezcal, did not show up to the annual Mezcal Festival out of mere fear of a boycott.

Thousands attended a free, community-centered Guelaguetza hosted by the social movements. The spectacle of an event driven by profits was unmasked. And the coordination of a community-centered alternative proved that indeed people can organized themselves. In a state where the vast majority of townships use traditional forms of decision-making outside the state framework and Magón is everyone’s favorite anarchist hero, it really only makes sense.

On the streets the day of the eviction, the movements’ rallying ‘Ya Cayó,’ (He’s Already Fell or He's Fell Already) rang through the streets. The simple two-word slogan reflects the movements’ complicated successes and realities. Ruiz Ortiz may be trying to hang on to complete a full two years of his term. If he completes them the PRI-controlled legislative can appoint a new governor rather than hold a new general election. But, in many senses he has already fallen and it is almost beside the point. Already, Oaxaqueñ@ social movements are constructing different realities within the imposed one.

There is the social reality that people live regardless of the government (or conversely struggling to live because of the government). Further, the social movements created the People’s Popular Assembly of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials) to not only guide the movements’ campaigns, but also create a space of horizontal and popular decision-making. APPOs are operating in townships and neighborhoods all over the state. Mega-marches, the latest close to a million people, demonstrated the popular support of the movements. August 20, 80,000 civil workers held a strike in support of the social movement. August 1, a contingent of 3,000 women took the streets and ended their march by occupying the state-owned television station indicating a critical reflexivity of the social issues in Oaxaca and the within the movements. VIDEO

Dirty Repression
con-impunidad_6-28-06 copy.jpg

The movements’ successes are getting out of control for state and business leaders. City center business owners have solicited the federal government for disaster relief funds. Ruiz Ortiz has proved completely ineffective at resolving the conflict and the lame-duck president Vicente Fox has refused to use federal intervention (although reports state that Calderon, Fox's possible successor, and Ruiz Ortiz recently met at a Oaxacan beach resort in Huatulco). Public repression has not worked and the situation from the state’s point of view is only deteriorating. Ruiz Ortiz has gotten desperate and is resorting to clandestine violent actions aimed at destroying the movements and systematic violation of human rights.

Silence the Voices
July 21 two molotov bomb are lobbed at the house of Alejandro Cruz López. The next evening, Radio Universidad is subject to a drive-by. Nobody is hurt or killed, but the action sends a message. Three weeks later, unknown elements threw acid on the radio transmitter taking Radio Universidad off-air.

By the time Radio Universidad lost its signal, a group of women had occupied state-owned Channel 9 and two other state-owned radio stations. Channel 9 began live broadcasts and screening social documentaries about the Zapatistas or social movements in Guatemala. August 21, once again in the middle of the night, unknown agents fired upon the Channel 9. Unknown agents burned production equipment while another group destroyed the station’s antenna. Occupiers were evicted, but nobody was seriously injured.

The social movement reacted by occupying at least nine corporate-owned radio stations, one of which, La Ley, is strafed with gunfire. Lorenzo San Pablo is hurt and taken to a hospital. He dies a few hours later. La Ley is owned by Clear Channel and the signal has recently been cut-off. The same agents burn an automobile with its occupants inside, Filiberto López y Pedro Solís. López y Solís escape, but suffer first-degree burns. High-powered gunfire was reported at many installations of the social movements across the city.

Cut the Heads
The government also is engaging in a campaign of disappearing activists off the streets, who reappear tortured or in prison. The state government has issued arrest warrants for 50 leaders of APPO. Someone published a website encouraging vigilantly action against the movement. A website, called ‘Oaxaca en Paz,’ contains pictures and home addresses of social organization leaders exhorting readers to ‘find them and detain them.’ A protestor killed by police elements is crossed-out with a red ‘X’ across his face.

In five days, eight social leaders are nabbed off the streets. On August 7, Catarino Torres Pereda, spokesman for the Citizens Defense Committee, member of APPO, is one of the first to be detained. Germán Mendoza Nube and his accompaniers Leobaldo López Palacios y Eliel Vázquez Castro were beaten and sequestered by well-armed police dressed as civilians. Mendoza Nube is a representative of the Revolutionary Popular Front (FPR), integrant of APPO, and founder of Teachers Commission of Human Rights. López Palacios and Vázquez Castro reportedly do not have ‘militant politics’ and only were supporting Nube, who uses a wheelchair and has health issues needing medical attention. August 10, professors Juan Gabriel Ríos, Elonaí Santiago Sánchez and biologist Ramiro Aragón Pérez are disappeared off the streets by unknown agents, presumably police forces or paramilitaries. They were reportedly looking for Mendoza Nube, detained the day before.

Two days later, the former General Secretary of the SNTE Section 22, Erangelio Mendoza González is detained by State Police. The same day, two teachers give a press conference denouncing torture implemented by police during their detention and appear visibly beaten. The biologist Aragón Pérez remains detained, charged of ‘grave’ crimes, and a picture of a visibly beaten Aragón Pérez surfaces to the press.

Later that day another snatch is averted through security vigilance and radio alerts. An APPO mobile security brigade identified a Ford used in the arrest of former General Secretary of Section 22 Erangelio Mendoza González. It is spotted circling a house of a known movement leader. The mobile brigades detain the vehicle and find municipal mayor of Santa María Atzompa, Sergio Atalo Enríquez Aguilar, and an AR-15.

On August 15, José Luis Díaz Cruz and Joaquín Jiménez Ogarrio armed with a pistol enter the residence of the leader of the New Left and APPO leader, Flavio Sosa Villavicencio. They threaten to kill and put a gun to the chest of his wife, Beatriz Castañeda Pedro. Cries for help alerted neighbors, who mobilized, adverted the attack, and detained the aggressors.

Shoot to Kill
During a protest of a government-sponsored cultural event in a public park, a police element, dressed as a civilian, fires a weapon. No one is hurt, but the aggressor was detained by APPO. Isaías Pérez Hernández was marched through the streets carrying a homemade poster proclaiming, ‘I am an aggressor sent by Ulises Ruiz.’

August 7, Aristeo López Martínez, General Coordinator of Public Security, Vitality and Municipal Transit, and agents of said agency fire upon APPO adherents peacefully occupying the Secretary of Economy. People are hurt, but there are no deaths.

On August 10, during a march denouncing the detentions and disappearances of various social leaders, police forces shot and killed José Jiménez Colmenares, husband of a striking teacher. Protestors chased the suspects and burned a house where they suspect an aggressor to have taken refuge.

A day earlier, Andrés Santiago Cruz, Pedro Martínez Martínez, and Pablo Martìnez Martìnez are suspiciously shot and killed on a highway by unknown agents. Four others in the caravan are hurt. Andrés Santiago Cruz was a leader of the Independent Triqui Unification Movement, a member of APPO, and Pablo Martínez Martínez was of eleven years of age. APPO publicly denounces Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, Rufino Merino Zaragoza (Popular Unity Party Deputy), and Heriberto Pazos Ortiz (leader of MULT, PRI front group) as intellectual authors of the attack and point to political motivations.

Already Already
The stakes are high on both sides. Oaxaca is a crucial cross-roads for neoliberalism and authoritarian politics versus the visions of popular governance and community-guided economic development. The Oaxaqueñ@ movements have made political and economic machinations inoperable, or ungovernable. And in that vacuum they have lifted up visions and practices of popular governance and community-centered economics. Through a tactic of creating ungovernability, the state has nearly ceased to exist expect in its stripped-down inherent nature—violent repression. As the movements are more successful, the level of repression escalates. Invisible repression always complements the invisible hand.

The social movements have gone so far there is no turning back and they do expect more massive reprisals from the state government. In the heightened political atmosphere of a presidential election season, Oaxaca is a crucible of the acute political struggles currently waged. Oaxaca foreshadows what is to potentially pass in Mexico. Please pay attention.

International solidarity is urgently needed to support the work of the social movements of Oaxaca. Please take action.

Mexico City, D.F.

Distrito Federal

I've been to some large cities in my day, but nothing really compares (in my experience) to D.F. Never before have I had the pleasure of being trapped in a subway car with the doors open at my stop, unable to leave because fifteen guys had jammed themselves in to the already stuffed train before I could get off, pushing themselves forward like an American football defensive line.
My rescue was facilitated by two giggling Metro inspectors, after I'd shouted "!Quiero salir!" enough times. Each one took one of my hands and yanked me through the packed bodies, my daypack disappearing down my waist as I traveled outward. Sometimes its a good thing to be skinny.

Travel lesson: never take the Metro in D.F. between 5:00-7:30pm (at the least) on a weekday.

Other subway notes: The constant stream of beggers, musicians, and vendors hawking 15 peso cd's (via portable speaker, and playing the worst in soft rock), peanuts, chicklets, band-aids, suckers, etc. One lame woman drags herself across the floor of the entire Pantitlan-Taxquenia train all day every day, 'shining' peoples' shoes with a filthy rag while making the same pitch over and over in a mechanical voice.

I was stunned and embarrassed by the sheer misery of her dragging herself past people's feet, but couldn't give her money being too shocked to respond to such a powerful spectacle of poverty. No one else seemed interested. Odet assured me it was a daily occurrence, and I saw her again the next day and again after that. By the third time she struck not as pathetic at all, but as someone of incredible personal strength. Her voice was not pleading at but sharp and professional in its automatic repetition. Could you drag yourself along the floor of a subway train by other people's feet day after day without end, as a way of making a living?

It makes me think of a New York performance artist I once read about, a black guy who did this performance of dragging himself (while wearing a suit and tie) the length of Wall street. It was a statement of how capitalism makes people crawl, particularly his people, and it worked so well as an intervention that other black men would come up and start shouting at him to stop. The difference of course, is that this was no performance art but simply everyday life.

There were the two shirtless guys, one with a pile of broken glass in his t-shirt. The shirt was placed on the floor, while they took turns ramming their bare backs into it. Then the pitch for a donation for this exercise. It amazed me that they thought people would pay for such a hideous spectacle, but they were just using whatever they had. I was struck by the sheer oxygen-like necessity of money in human life in moments like these, the food chain of urban existence being totally determined by the pursuit of a few pesos, not just for these guys, but everyone a money addict whether they wanted to be or not. The shirtless pair had the vague, flushed faces of drug addicts, and it was clear that they felt no pain as a result of their efforts. All this occurs in the dense, crowded atmosphere of the rush hour subway, with its grim-faced commuters, the same grim, joyless feeling you find on crowded subway trains the world over, the weariness of a daily grind that never eases. Life in the megalopolis that can never stop growing.

It was exhausting enough that I took myself an hour out of town, to the pleasant state of Morelos, and to a very touristed pueblito called Tepoztlan, surrounded on three sides by green mountains, and one summit that is topped by an ancient pyramid. A truly enchanting place aside from the centro filled with touristic noise, and the travel time equivelent of one micro-bus trip from my friend's house to the terminus of the subway line in D.F. To make the side-trip is like leaving hell and entering paradise. I actually returned to Tepoztlan a day after leaving, so enchanting was its fresh air, stone walls, gardens, and forested hills. Massive trees stood up out of a mountain creek.

Its good to actually have fun being a tourist from time to time. That is the point after all, isn't it?

Some Aspects of Travel in Mesoamerica

1.The food.

I´ve never been so affected by the public and intestinal presence of fried meat. It is more common than bread in this country, impossible to get away from, so why resist? As a result, I have been on some accidental version of the Atkins diet for four months now, and the results have been as advetised. The idea of me eating to lose weight is thoroughly insane of course, but what can you do when you live in a shoe, hecho en Mexico?

That´s been my policy from the start, and 500 or so tacos de bistec later, I feel this strange absence of... fresh vegetables and fruit, most grains, anything steamed, etc. The cornucopia of bistec, chorizo, rais, pollo, carnitas, and so on is so omnipresent that it becomes difficult to disassociate food and eating from the inevitable heaps of fried meat piled in every corner.

In Mazunte, I discussed the dietary situation with a medical student from Conneticut, who corroberated the symtoms I was experiencing: a very slight light-headedness/other-worldliness combined with a distinctly hollow feeling around the solar plexus, as though having just been probed with a cow tongue. Unhealthy, but survivable was the conclusion.

The interesting thing is, of course, that Mexican food, as Mexicans themselves are always saying, is

muy sabroso, muy rica, que delicioso

. The quickest way to get a Mexican totally excited is to ask him/her what good foods are available for consumption. The eyes widen in excitement as the long list of chalupes, chiliquiles, enchiladas, ceviches, sopas, tlayudas, tamales, etc is revealed with great detail, hand-to-pursed lips gestures, and general fervour. Too much for an aphasic like myself to remember in proper detail of course, but the fine and rich mole, a semi-unsweetened chocolate sauce covering chicken, rice, tamal/anything edible, has not gone unnoticed I happy to say.

A typical example of all this being the other night when I wandered back to my friend Odet´s house to find the courtyard covered in streamers, and a surprize birthday party for her mother in full swing, including a band blasting out the best country music of the state of Tabasco.

I had some bread rolls in hand, my idea of a meat-free dinner, and Odet kept asking me if I wished to feed properly. Like a typically guilt-ridden norteño guest, I protested repeatedly throughout the evening until finally I wandered into the cocina at about 1am to find enough uneaten pollo de mole con arroz to feed an army. Having been primed by a few ´taqilas de refresco´, i.e., hard liquor hideously mixed with goldish yellow pop, I finally indulged a little while being interrogated about the translations of ´puta´,
´fuck you´, ´mierde´, ´cabron´, etc. by a gang of sweet-faced 12 year old schoolgirls and boys(some still in their uniforms), cousins of Odet, who I was meeting properly for the first time. In such moments of pure Mexican hospitality you quickly learn to forgive other moments of pure Mexican lieing, filth, and general city-of-20-million-people craziness.

2. Cycling.

Some people have asked if I, bicycle addict, have done any cycling in this country, with its incredible mountain vistas, etc. Cycling in Mexico has much potential, and I of course regret not bring my own bike along. While teaching in Chiapas I was lent a kids 24¨ mountain bike of the K-mart variety for a month or so. It had been in a crash and had the mild issue of a permanently loose steerer tube, one half-broken pedal, and bottom-of-the-line untightenable brakes didn´t stop me from ascending from the bottom of the Chiapas valley to the mountain pass and descending to the next valley (Suchiapas)whenever I had the chance. The one thing that worked on that bike were the gears, and despite its overall heaviness, I could climb reasonably well on it. Well, that is, for a bike with a maximum (knobby) tire pressure of 45 lbs., which is lower than what´s on my dad´s 1963 Raleigh cruiser. When you have nothing at all to ride you learn to appreciate a piece of crap that gets you out of a hot, polluted city and over a lush, cool green mountain or two, and back again in a couple of hours.

I rented a couple times and rode mountain bikes at altitude, in St Cristobal and Oaxaca City. The trouble is, the Mexican idea of mountain biking, at least to those renting bikes to touristas of unknown experience, is hilly roads, some possibly without pavement. Despite repeated pleas for ¨senderos de bici de montaña¨, I was always handed a roadmap with hills.

In Oaxaca, this amounted to a large circuit through a part of the Valle Central, which began with the ascent of Monte Alban, a proper 2000 metre ¨puerto¨ that nearly hospitalized my hapless Danish companion of the day, Martin, who was already having trouble just living and breathing in the general altitude of the state. Well, he looked young and strong enough. It turned out that Martin´s primary knowledge of mountain biking was being acquainted with his neighbour back in the very flat Danmark, who was on the Danish Olympic mountain bike team.

At more than one point, I was riding with one hand on Martin´s back (which was mostly covered by a horribly swaying Guatamalan dufflebag full of odds and ends), pushing him upwards. It was slow.

After we finally summitted at the semi-famous Zapotec pyrimid and registered the complete insult of a 45 peso entrance fee, we descended a ways to the dirt roads of the countryside, and I sent Martin packing after a short discussion weighing the mild shame of returning a full day´s rental after an hour-and-a-half versus that of abandoning and being stranded halfway through a 50km loop in the heat of the day.

The real lesson is that having your own bike is the answer, as you can ride it all you like, where you like, for as long as you like, without Martin coming along.

The Revolt of the Oaxacaqeñas

Oaxaca City


If you go far enough in Mexico you will eventually run smack into a political crisis, a scandal, or an open revolt, or possibly all three at once. Far enough being usually about 200 metres. In Oaxoaca City, the heart of a pleasant mountainous state known for its carpetweavers, Zapatec ruins, and heaps of expatriots living the easy life under sunny skies, there is definately an open revolt.

Since a march by the teachers´ union on 14 June was attacked brutally by 3000 state police, the city has seen the quick form alliance of different civil society groups: indigenous, socialist parties, and unions demanding the immediate resignation/impeachment/overthrow/fucking off of the state`s iron-fisted governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz who naturally is seen as being behind the whole no-negociation, shoot-first, arrest later policy. Ulises, as the protesters refer to him, is generally thought to have come to power through traditional means, that is, by vote-rigging and intimidation and has ruled in the traditional way.

For two months, a planton(a street takeover/protest camp) has made the struggle visible all over the normally tourist-filled zocalo. A small poster in English stands out amidst the Spanish political graffiti:

Please excuse the inconvenience while we
are making our history.
Once we have finished you will be able to
return to your regular tourist experience.

Streets have been barricaded, asphalt ripped up, trucks with ¨APPO¨ (Asemblea Popular del Pueblo Oaxoaqueña) spray-painted on them block off roadways. This is not a protest that goes home at three o´clock. The original issue the teachers were protesting against was the total lack of desks, textbooks, pencils, etc., in much of the state schools, plus the general lacking of the youngest students: without shoes, clothes or any food in their stomachs in many cases. The same level of public education for all Mexicans is guarenteed by the Constitution, and they wanted the governor to do something about it at last. This June march and planton was met with a 4 a.m. military-style assault (helicopters, tear gas, live ammunition) that left many wounded, half a dozen dead, and an explosion of political rage that has yet to subside.

Just yesterday another march of twenty thousand here in the city was attacked by police and a 50 year old mechanic who was marching with his wife (a biology teacher), was shot to death by riot police. If it wern´t for the planton of PRDistas five kilometres long in Mexico City (where thousands of supporters of Manuel Andres Lopez Obrador have successfully demanded a recount of the narrowly lost presidential election, by .6% of dubiously scrutinised 41 million votes), this regional struggle would be the top of the news. With this new killing yesterday (complete with photos of the dying man), in fact it IS in many front pages.

Mexican politics is a three-ringed circus of huge gestures and booming rhetorical sweep to match. Behind that there is a great frustration with the status quo in this economically expanding country of over 100 million. Legitimacy is badly wanted in a sea of corruption and incompetence. I saw a photo of the first ¨reconteo¨ in progess in the newspaper with a caption that read something like,

Counting is closely watched in the first of the votes to be re-examined.

In the photo an armed federale scrutinizes the IFE workers re-tabulating results at a table. One can imagine thirty more photographers in front of them. It is a ¨Ya basta¨ moment from a mainstream perspective, where the suggestions of a rigged election are being investigated ´voto por voto´ and damnit, this time it better be done properly. Its like every Mexican´s self-respect is on the line now - if this re-count can´t be done without interference then NOTHING can be done properly by Mexicans in the name of their own governance. It´ll be interesting to see the results, especially if Calderon wins a second time, but by an even smaller margin.

The contradictions of a modernizing society that is a constitutional democracy run by oligarchs are evermore rising to the surface. But contradictions of honesty are a part of the Mexican culture and character. While teaching English to teenagers, I was forced to confront the fact that half of my most advanced students plagiarized their final essays completely from the internet, even after I had caught nearly all of them doing it to some degree on the first draft of their initial essays and given them copies of the MLA guidelines for documenting sources plus the obvious lecture with embarassing examples.

The human urge to cheat in the face of difficulty is very great it seems, especially here.

Mayan if I smoke?

What is it about the indigenous of Chiapas?

The Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, took a tour through his new diocese in 1962 and came to a realization, the same one that Bartolome de las Casas understood when he arrived in 1523: these people are already the children of god. That is, the Indian is so modest and generous and good that he or she only needs to be steered towards the door of the church, not corrected by it, and having spent a very little bit of time in the Bishop´s diocese, I must say that I agree.

Take last night for example. I found myself in the very fine plaza of Comitan de Domingez, around eleven p.m., feeling a little peckish. The square was nearly deserted, just a handful of teenagers and some Mariachis drifting around in the semi-darkness, making a few strains on the old mandolin. An old woman stood by her buckets, and modestly inquired if I was interested in a tamalito de mole or two.

Well indeed I was, and I sat myself down and tucked into a couple that she served me, still hot from the banana leaf each was wrapped in. And damn me if they weren´t the finest tameles de mole I´ve ever had in my whole meandering life of sordid travels. Eight pesos worth of pure gastronomic goodness. You´ll rarely find a more inept and unethusiastic traveler than I, but at that moment I felt the sweet taste of victory right there in el centro de Comitan. But that´s not the point I was trying to make.

The point was that this woman embodied all that is so good about the Mayans, the calmness, the grace, the absolute grandmotherly sweetness of that lady. Its these very traits that the Spanish conqistadores must have come across, and promptly set about raping, enslaving, and killing in just the way a good European will when they´re far from home and feeling relaxed. More recently, we can say with perhaps greater authority (which one always wants), these are the traits that have kept Chiapanecan indigenous people totally ignored by the political process, and totally exploited by the economic one.

Is this an attempt to blame the Mayans for the exploited misery that they have lived in for for five centuries, a nasty, backhanded compliment that nice guys finish last? Well, not exactly. Its more a comment on the behaviour of the mestizo society here in Mexico, which is of course little different from that of you-know-who in you-know-where. And still the Mayans keep their dignity.

(It must be said that most of the Mayan communities high in the highlands of the Lacandon forest and elsewhere really are scared witless of outsiders and want nothing to do with them, for very good reasons that you may have heard about already. But the need to make a peso or three drives many of them into town to sell whatever they can cobble together. The truth is, I don´t know a goddamn thing about what the Mayans are like with each other, just through the inevitiably limited interaction I´ve had buying a bottle of water, etc. But from that and a bit of reading I´m happily making sweeping generalizations. If you don´t like it, denounce me in front of the Comintern and satisfy yourselves by reading blog entries about the long-drop toilets of darkest Siberia, a freezing hell I´ll never see the end of.)

Bits and bobs

1. So Israel is at it again, if one can say that they
ever cease. A policy of absolute aggression, it would
seem. Whenever the Gazans act up, Israel says,
¨Either you control the militants or we will have to
do it¨. Could it be anymore blatant? The only way to
stop us from assaulting you/continuing to assault you
further is if you declare war upon yourselves, hunt
down yourselves and slaughter yourselves so we do not
have to.

Same thing straightaway with the Hizballah in Lebanon.
No chance of a prisoner swap this time, we´re too
busy obliterating you bastards and thank you for the
opportunity.

But if you`d like this carnage to stop, if you´d like
this airforce/artillery/tank/naval blockade and
general shooting-fish-in-a-barrel invasion to stop,
Lebanon, you can do it very simply: Start a civil war
right now to ¨control¨ the Hizballah, never mind that
they are the strongest military force in the country.
Its a foreign policy of hyperaggression. Naturally
the West sits back and does nothing, as usual. Must
wait for Israel to finish its job first, of course.

Will Syria take this opportunity to re-occupy Lebanon
as Hizballah takes a huge shitkicking? Of course that
would be lining up to be the next fish in the barrel,
but if they could re-trench themselves, it would be
quite a political victory for them. Likely they´ll
not have the nerve, as Israel wouldn´t hesitate to
pound them into the stone age at the slightest
opportunity. But if Israel attacks Hiz. near the
Syrian border...

It made me think of all that Colin Powell b.s. about the military doctrine of
`overwhelming force`, ie, the American high-tech, low risk death-from-above approach
to warfare. Basically the doctrine says, never go to war, until you have a 9 to 1 advantage,
or is that 19 to 1? That way you can achieve your miltary objective easily and put the fear of
hellfire into the rest of world. Of course its attributed to the deep military thinking of Powell
and his Pentagon boys, but let`s give credit where credit is due: the Israelis, who`ve been pounding
the shit out of civilian populations since decades. And look at what it has gotten them:
occupation without end.

2.Congratulations Floyd $%&!ing Landis! (Yes, Floyd
reads my blog all the time.) That 17th stage victory
was worthy of the hallowed name of Eddy Merckx. What a
piece of riding, what a spectacular attack the like of
which you never see anymore. Well, I never do anyway.
Truth is, I was rooting for Landis to win the Tour
ever since that poor bastard Jan Ullrich got
blackballed the day before the Tour de France was due
to start. And now Ullrich has been fired from
T-Mobile Team, of which he has been the pillar since
1997. What a disaster.

In a sense I liked Landis for a similar reason to
liking Ullrich: attitude. Landis never shows that
Lance Armstrong, I-am-the-centre-of-the-Universe
attitude, just this laid-back but very determined
understated sort of thing. I like that. And Landis
did it without a powerhouse team like T-Mobile much less Armstrong`s New
York Yankees of cycling.

Still, the Phonak boys really busted their arses the
whole way for him, sacrificing everything for the
leader, as it should be.

Enough.

Tour de Fr., 9me etape

Hello to All Seven of You

One nice thing about my current job is the fact that I am done with work by nine a.m. and can scoot home in time to watch the Tour coverage on tv. I´m always in time to get the last 45 km of live racing from the highways and byways of good old France, with somewhat clueless Hispanic announcers yammering on.

Today was a sprinter´s stage, the last before the Pyranees (I think its the P´s), ending in the city of Dax, wherever that is. It was an awesome bunch sprint yet again with McKewen losing to the great Oscar Freire of Spain by less than half a wheel, with my man Zabel ripping up the inside line and past Tom Boonen no less to take third, his best finish yet this Tour. The way Zabel just keeps going at it, years after his peak, still giving everything against the world´s best never ceases to inspire me. I know he just wants one more stage win in the Tour so much. He´s got more victories than anyone else in the peloton, won the Tour´s Green Jersey six times over but he´s still totally hungry and won´t give up at thirty-five.

Zabel wasn´t even supposed to get much of a chance in the Tour with this new Milram team, as they had signed the superfast sprinter Alessandro Petacchi and the team would have been working for Ale-Jet had he not broken his kneecap in the Giro. So after the snub of not being picked for T-Mobile´s Tour squad last year after thirteen years with them, Zabel is back in action, always getting top ten finishes in the opening week´s sprinting stages.

I really needed to get that off my chest, I don´t care how irrelevant it is to any of you. I actually got to see my man Zabel in action at the World´s in Verona, Italy in 2004, if only briefly. It was the final, excruciating lap, and I had spent the previous forty-five minutes of the six-and-a-half hour race climbing the mountainous part of the course. Finally the front end of the race showed up and there was Zabel in first place, just giving it with full force in the heat of the 16th lap. To see a pure sprinter hammering up a mountain like that after 240+ km and in October no less (after eight months of racing), was really amazing. Of course, Freire beat him in the sprint and Zabel had to live with second, tears streaming down his face after a final furious effort over the cobblestones. It was particularly frustrating for Zabel because a) in the World´s your team is ill-practiced and the race is so long and difficult that making your move at the right time without something going wrong is hard enough, and b) Freire had beat him that spring right at the line in San Remo at the longest one-day race of the year.

It had been a spectacular fiasco for such a seasoned sprinting pro, that loss in Milano-San Remo, because Zabel (who´s won that race four times) went into the victory salute five metres from the line, not realizing that Freire was about to explode past him, which of course he did to Zabel´s eternal humiliation. Much later he said, ¨I didn´t see him there, I didn´t hear him, I didn´t feel him there¨.

Freire, who´s won three world championships, is a specialist at the long-range one day race with the possibly the best punchout speed in the final metres of a bunch sprint. It was his second stage win of this Tour, and it was typically amazing. Freire just exploding forwards and even the Aussie pocketrocket himself, Robbie McKuwen couldn´t reel him in despite his typical last-ditch move to leftwards off somebody else´s wheel. Robbie, who´d won three of the first eight stages (which is incredibly dominant), immediately gave Freire the congratulatory slap on the back after almost sideswiping him at 70km/hour. Ahh, biking racing...

A little good news

I feel bad. I have the weight of a certain guilt upon my shoulders. Thing is, I never say a nice thing about Mexico, Tuxtla, my school, or my job, and soon enough its all going to be history and I won´t be able to remember such details.

1. Mexicans are good.
That´s right, you read correctly a blatent gneralization that I may proceed to back up with evidence. If you find yourself standing in a 27 person long line on a Sunday afternoon in an utterly obscure part of an obscure city in a general store, people do not just step right in front of you, because you are just some stupid-looking tourista. Not at all, they treat you as politely as they do all the others. The Chiapanecas are some of the most decent and fair people you´re likely to meet in this world. And that includes most of my students, despite my oft-stated desire to bind, beat, banish, or fling them out of helicopter, the simple truth is that most of them have the grace of Jesus deeply set into them. Some do not and they should be held underwater for periods of time.

2. My bosses.
A case in point. I am continually in trouble, behind or too far ahead in the material, constantly allowing all the wrong things to happen, whole classes failing tests and such, and they just keep dealing with me respectfully, only with a hint of passive agressivity now and then. They would be somewhat justified in really cracking down, but that´s not their style. They do it with the softer touch, the chain of panoptic surveillence ends only in explanations and problem-solving. Many things have driven me and plenty of other mastros extraños batty at this little school (and country), but I have to say that they´ve had aplenty incompetence in return. And they pay on time in full.

3. Football.
I too have the World Cup fever, and this time of year its a good thing to have. Did you see that Thierry Henry goal when France played Brazil? That was... ¡STUPENDO! That guy is my new superhero - the speed, power, and ball-dribbling grace that man pravails with rocks my world. And against the greatest team in the world. All Brazil needed to do was neautralize Henry and they couldn´t, not with all the king´s men and horses. The %&/!!ing Tour of France is on and I´m mildly infuriated with missing it while they show pingpong matches from Ohio on %$"!ing ESPN. But only mildly.

4. The heat, mosquitos, cars, pollution etc.
Despite my rampant disgust, kvetching, and general hatred of everything, its not really so bad, except for the skeeters, which have turned me into a hotblooded killer. Nothing like a little hunting with yourself as bait. Rationality suffers in the tropical heat, as you can imagine. But its not always so hot.

5. The Mexican Elections. I haven´t seen La Jaffafa (the señora whose house i live in) since the final days, and now they´re deep into the recounts, supposedly with an announcement today of this closest-ever presential race. Lefty PRDista Obrador vs. centrist/righty PANista Caldaron (maybe? what do I know of it all?) Still, pretty fascinating to a political junkie like me. Everyone´s being so... Mexican about it. As in so calm you wouldn´t know its even happening. They´ve only had democracy for 15 years and already they´re bored with it. Surprize, surprize. 60% voter turnout, just like in Canada. (Yes, yes, I know, it was 62.5% last time so good for us.)

And off I go, full of joy and gratitude.

Hydrology Cycles.

Well, I feel its that time again. I know I´ll never make it in the Blogosphere with this complete lack of regular posting, never mind the lack of photos. Its scandalous. I can´t even get the address straight for people or its just not online half the time. Sounds like digital technology and me getting along nicely as usual.

One nice thing about being at this tropical latitude is the rain. When it rains it really bloody well pours to clean the world right down to its $%&ing rear molars. Just streaming down for hours in the evening or from 4am like this morning. If it is in the evening I´ve been known to get out the shampoo and go for it Irish Spring style up on my rooftop, and I assure your miserable office-bound self that nothing could be better. In fact, it makes me wish I had a bucket up there to save some of those ten inches of water when half the time the electric pump under the lawn hasn´t put anything into the tank on the roof in hours and I wake up to stinking dry taps.

A touch of good old water conserving rationality would really do the trick around here. Mexico is a ´developing country´, and you know what that means: miles of strip development on the edge of town full of car dealerships, outsized supermarkets, massive parking lots rammed full of cars every Saturday morning. You know, all the $%ing good things of life, that everyone in the world must have in order to be happy. Obviously you´ve got to wash your car, keep that pride and joy of a debt-and-pollution-inducing status machine looking fine. The secret is to get the kids out there on Saturday a.m., doing some work for the family, hosing dozens of litres of soapy water down the street the day after a good rain; it does my heart good to see the dream of a consumer society alive and well and growing like a cancer amongst 100 million Mexicans who work their tits off every day to make it happen.

I got a proper passive-agressive talking-to by my principal for mentioning that there was no way I´d be accepting a contract extension that meant signing myself up to working six days a week for a whole year. She rightly pointed out in subtle terms what a spoilt-rotten rich-world slacking piece of swine I am. Felt properly chastised and then rode off on her crappy two-wheeler that she´s too afraid to ride on these carstrewn streets of Latin insanity. The utter disgust and contempt for the bicycle in these parts was perfectly conveyed by my 7 o´clock class one day (half of whom should be tied up in sacks and thrown out of helicopters, but only once or twice because they´re good laddies after all, just slightly unmotivated), with this parcipial phrase:

Having too little money to buy a car, Lisa instead purchased a bicycle to ride to work.

On two occasions I was made to hear audible snorts of utter disgust from those forced to read out/listen to such a pathetic state of affairs. Why doesn´t Lisa just shoot herself instead of bearing this pathetic humiliation publicly? Hmm, Lisa, let`s just give you a bit of help with that mess you´re in, shall we now? Ah well, you can´t blame these ambitious youngsters. They´re steeped in the wonderful lore of the automobile at every possible moment, and what could possibly change their minds? Not me of course.

As a wise man once said, "Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Oh, I´m so terrible. Whatever am I going to do with me?

A quickie

I just wanted to say that I am going to get a couple of pics up on this blog, I just need to finish the roll. Yes, that´s right, I´m still pissing about in the film age of still photography. A took a series of pictures of stencils in San Cristobal de las Casas, where there are one or two very busy stencil artists.
The camera´s a piece of crap so no guarentees about how they´ll be. Maybe they won´t be.

Ever since writing that last bit about the grackles I´ve been meaning to correct what I said: grackles really are everywhere in Mexico, including meadows and forests as well as city streets. I was just trying to emphasize something about my grackles here in town.

Now that I´ve got that birder´s moral crisis off my mind I can move on to say that everything you´ve ever heard or thought about the mediocrity of teaching English far from home is true.

The hours, the endless marking of error-filled papers and tests (¨she want to be marry with the Arthur¨), the greasy indifferent teenagers acting like idiots at every possible moment, the crappy tape decks and vcr´s that should have been left in the 1980´s: its all a giant pain in the ass. You know you´ve become a teacher the first time you find yourself counting the number of desks in an empty classroom. It´s only mildly horrifying I admit, like sneezing chalk dust.

It could be worse though. The endless cries of ¨Teacher! Can I go to the bathroom? Can go to the bathroom Teacher? Can I Teacher? Can I? Can I?¨ always end when everyone leaves. The greasey, hyperactive sixteen year old boys with their backpacks carefully placed in their laps and smartass grins on their faces aren´t going to kill you. Of course its just a phase you´re going through Javier, you living piece of slime. You´re not bad guy, just a drooling piece of egomaniacal adolescent trash who needs to learn to shut his attention-crazed mouth.

We´re good pals, Javier and I. You should have seen Javier and his clown buddy Francisco in our multimedia session yesterday. It was the paralympics of hyperstupid sixteen year old dipshits, pretending the keyboard wouldn´t work, jacking up the computer speakers ¨by accident¨, highfiving the glazed window with fellow dipshits on the other side. It was a beautiful thing, gold medals of drool for them in the pairing category. I love these assholes. I makes you want to invest in a nine pound hammer and make society just a little bit better. Of course I allowed them to sit together, so I´m just an accessory. But they´re good kids, aren´t they now?

You can see that its bringing out the best in me, this teaching business. The wholesome hours I spend every single day with these fine upstanding youth of the Mexican United States of Mexico just keep bringing me closer to that fountain of youth I´ve always wanted to dip my toes into whenever the opportunity has arisen.

Grackle for you, grackle for me.

The grackle is a resourceful bird, a hustler, a busybody. Here in Mexico they are everywhere, the way crows are everywhere in points north.

The grackle is the most prehistoric bird my untrained eye has ever watched. That mechanical back-and-forth movement of the head when they walk comes straight from the dinosauric raptor of old. Its ´saurusness is acccentuated by a beak that is, in some individuals, continually open, even during flight. The grackle is a ground bird, constantly seeking its food, nest materials, etc. on the street or sidewalk or peering from a fence, ready for another sortie to the ground. Its song is a mix of short tsks and longer cries, all loud and distinct and loudest when in negotiation with others of its kind, just like all birds, but greedier.

What strikes me about the grackles of Tuxtla is the spastic intensity of their social behaviour, the sheer nervousness of them. Alone they are more composed, preoccupied with their next hustle, a groundscore or something in a fig tree that will be had for the searching. Their wings are lengthy enough to generate that beating sound one associates with pheasants in the bush or ducks taking off from water. But these grackles seem uninterested in such ´natural´ habitats. They´re for the streetcorner, the shade tree, a telephone wire. Its intense eye seems to be saying,´I´ve got business here, people to see, deals to finish, I don´t have time for pissing around in forests and meadows´.

Business indeed.

Better and better and better.

Hello. Are you familar with the film ¨The Passenger¨, starring Jack Nicholson as James Locke, a journalist of the American variety struggling to locate a rebel group in an unnamed Saharan country? It was made around 1973 by Michelangelo Antonioni and not released until recently.

The plot hinges on a moment of discovery in a fellow traveller´s hotel room: a dead Englishman in the adjacent room of an overheated hotel in the middle of nowhere. Locke looks at him, finds his passport, and has a realization: an identity is available for the taking, and he proceeds to switch passport photos, datebooks, and lives as he is entirely sick of his own. That´s all of the plot I am interested in retelling. The relevant bit in my mind is the mood Nicholson conveys, the irritated,
exhausted, spoiled white man moving through a foriegn landscape that neither interests nor inspires him. He roars off into the Sahara in his Landrover and gets stuck in a sand dune immediately, after abandoning his foot-guide (in search of his obscure rebel group) in disgust. One damned thing after another. He smashes helplessly at the ´rover with a shovel.

I have no such adventure before me, only the heat, the cockroaches, the lost passport. Yes, that's right, I managed to lose my passport w.in 48 hours of arrival, which included my visa for a mere 30 days in a country where I am under contract work for 90. Of course I missed my flight here anyway, was forced to wait it out in Mexico City for 24 extra hours and then take a 12 hour bus ride (which turned out to be an air-conditioned breeze, and not the 15 hour milk run I was promised. Now I work six days a week teaching English to sleep-deprived teenagers who drop their books on the floor every five minutes. I have indeed fallen into another life, one where the weather seems to get hotter each day, where the cockroaches have the size of some the larger beetles, where I drag my mattress out on the roof each night, where its cooler and quieter and where I have no Maria Schnieder as of yet.

Its the heaviness of solitude, of having no friend but a heap of problems each day, where procuring a postage stamp is a two hour exercise in sweat-soaked toil. This is the feeling that makes me think of Nicholson in the first twenty minutes of The Passenger (which is a pretty good movie, if only because it holds in high relief the emptiness of the Western material identity, the nihilism of a successful, priviliged man faking his own death out of irritation and boredom with his jetsetting, professional life).

A jackhammer is slicing its noise into my brain as I write this, distracting me from telling you about the exciting sites and sounds to be found here in Chiapas, i.e., the constant sight of old VW Bugs, the ripped apart sidewalks, the posol (a drink made of from the coconut).

I attempted to generate a discussion about overpopulation with my students this morning. They had no idea what the population of Mexico City was, and why should they as don´t live there. I insisted it was 30 million. No one argued. I announced that it was the same size as Canada´s population. No one contested that either. I went into an extended comparison of the relative sizes of the two landmasses in order to show that overpopulation was a kind of myth. No one argued, no one said much of anything. The Mexican teenager doesn´t want to argue it seems, especially not at 7:30 on a Friday morning, but not most other times either. And who can blame them? Isn´t it hot enough already? Why add a lot of thinking into the problem, and in English yet? Its the lassitude of the Tropics coming through again.

Why is Chiapas the poorest state in M.? I asked another group the other day. The corrupt politicians who are totally useless and sell off all our raw materials one girl offered. They´re all going to vote in the elections in July. But what to do about all this corruption? An unanswerable question. This is Mexico, they seemed to say. All people in charge are morons. So why worry?

Regards,

Sweating in the tropics

People,

Why leave the comfortable and familar for the discomfort of airports, bus stations, other people´s houses,
climates, microbes, exchange rates, etc?

Everytime I do it I am reminded of travels past. Large cities in particular remain a source of agony. As I scouted
the TAPO bus station for a place to sleep in Mexico City at 12 30am,I thought of past encounters w. giant cities. Days camping at a truckstop on the edge of Istanbul, sleeping rough in an alley near the Millenium Dome in London, climbing a wall to construction site in Paris in the middle of Saturday night. In this case it was a matter of a missed plane connection and no bus for another twelve hours. A case of waking up too late, wasting rediculous amounts of money rushing to the airport, only to mix up airlines, miss my flight to O´Hare and spend hours in a parking lot at in Washington D.C.reading a novel and taking the sun when I was supposed to be flying calmly into southern Mexico.

All the subsequent flights on the last leg were booked solid, and had horrible connections anyway. I dreaded the 15 hour bus ride more than anything, even more than the horrendously loud bus terminal with its floor polishers waxing away relentlessly in the middle of the night. Even more than sharing a little hut in the parking lot with a compañero in the dark, pesos and euros and pounds and quarters falling out of my pockets as always. But all was well in the end, none of the thieving nightmares every Western tourista dreams about befell me in that city of thirty million. My sweater came in handy for the first and last time this trip. I admit that I actually LIKE the guerilla camping, even w. a bad night´s sleep. Makes me feel a little bit George Orwell down and out wherever, wandering around in a daze the next day looking for un baño publico.

A million wasted pesos later I arrived after an easy, airconditioned bus ride that was only 12 hours (three bad Hollywood movies) long. Ah, the Latino tropics, where the only thing on the menu at 1am is mystery meat in a tortilla, and you´re happy to have it. Where it cools off to 25 degrees celcius. Where you can lose a foot in a crack in the sidewalk.
A place to be contento como los locales. A place to sweat and reflect.

Eating it from Paris to Ancaster

Thoreau said "We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us", and by the time we were back in the car heading home from the 13th annual Paris-Ancaster mtn bike race, I had had a sharp reminder of what that meant.

My last chance to do a bike race and I leapt at it before I even had one to race with. P-A is a mix of road and gravel and as it turned out, pure muck. And it was the pure muck that did me in around kilometre 54 of 60.

It was a bright Sunday, warming nicely for an Ontario day in early April, with little wind. I had borrowed my good buddy Dr No's new bike, a rigid flat black hybridy thing that I'd transformed into an off-roadish bike by throwing some knobby tires at it. It seemed to be just the thing for the job, once I'd warmed to the task (having elected to go without the tights when it was 7 celcius at 10am, plus some shinguards from my freestyle bike days. Maybe it was those Jinx pads combined with the 13th edition of the race... or maybe it was the shit-stupid organizers who let 1600+ bikes churn through kilos of six inch deep mud wrecking many a citizen racer's day (and the trail)in the process.

These massive for-profit races definitely have drawbacks. Paris-Ancaster drew more racers than ever before and the organizers didn't keep infrastructure up to capacity, so dozens of us started late in a 'third wave' of racers. (The race is big enough that you drive to finish, park, then wait for school buses that herd everyone to the start point, and inevitably there weren't enough of them.)

My raceday cohort J.L. and I finally got off the start gate in a small escape group, a cyclocrosser leading. It was way too high a pace for my cold muscles and I cracked inside the first km, then tried to find a pace of my own against the heartburn in my chest. As a mtn biker bridged up to me and we got into a rhythm I suddenly saw the long-gone J.L. headed in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION, sucking on his Camelbak stoically. Had he packed it in already? Dropped something crucial? Bad leg acting up? It was a mystery that bothered me as we sped away. Hours later I spotted J.L. in the parking lot changed back into street clothes. Turned out he'd grabbed his Camelbak for a drink and ripped the nozzlehead right off, the contents of its bladder emptying all over him as he rode. Eventually he gave up trying to find it on the trail and committed to a 59km excursion with nothing to drink. By the end both legs were cramping hideously. Such is bike racing.

I had a different yet worse fortune, after passing the hundreds of slow people who started god knows when before me, getting a decent rhythm going on my oh-so-effecient rigid frame with its much narrower 700c knobbies that even cut through the mud better than the fat tire gang could, mechanical disaster struck just five or six km from the finish: coming out of a few hundred metres of walking-only mud I jumped back on all ready to drop some more slowpokes, not even looking at the state of my drivetrain. If I had, I might have seen the deraillieur upside down and backwards, the chain mangled up along with it. I actually got on and pushed it skateboard style after walking it awhile, but ran out of pavement and opted for a ride to the parking lot from a local race marshall with a huge 4X4 truck. End of race, DNF.

Bike racing is a stark enterprise, where much pain and privation often meets with little or no reward and often punishment, and it left me wondering what exactly I was doing shelling out $48 for the privilege of such muck-strewn crap.

I took some consolation in the fate of George Hincapie on the same day at the inspiration for my race, the 104th Paris-Roubaix in north east France. The American pro star recovered from a scary fall on the cobbles mid-race and found himself in the lead group with 40-plus km to go in the 260km, seven hour marathon 'L'enfer du Nord" race with its fifty or so cobbled sections. Then his steerer tube cracked as he roared along at 50km/h, suddenly with neither steering nor brakes he crashed again brutally, at the side of the road. This time he broke his collarbone and had no support car to throw him another bike anyway. End of race. There's a picture of him sitting on the roadside next to his bike crying.

Fuck this.

Self De-fence.

I like removing fences. There are far too many around inhibiting the free movement of people in the world.

In Toronto I occasionally remove a chainlink fence by request of someone who owns it. Actually its the Downtown De-fence Project that does it, through its parent, the Public Space Committee. Seeing as I'm tearing off to Chiapas I asked if we could open the de-fencing season a bit early, and so we did at the weekend.

Burning through some metal pipe with a handheld grinder is a fine way to spend an afternoon when that pipe is holding up a chainlink fence. Its a wonderful thing to do with friends, and it makes people quite happy.

Bottombracket

So,

I have this bike race coming up on Sunday, Paris-Ancaster. I've been in a phase of excitement about bike racing for the last couple years, in fact I've allowed myself to become addicted to it as a spectator sport - European road racing that is.

Now this race on Sunday is special for a number of reasons, the biggest one being perhaps that its the last one I'll be doing for a good while, as I am off to Mexico for some some months very soon... so this one's gonna be it for now. Its a 60km point to point race, with over a 1000 bikes involved, even a special category for tandem bikes (!); its both road AND off-road with the ideal weapon being a cyclocross bike. Which I don't have. In fact, I don't have any bike for this race that I'm fifty non-refundable dollars registered for, at all. Tomorrow's Wednesday, so that gives me four days to play with.

But I've got a plan in the works: I looked at a bike a dude is selling out of his parents basement today, a full-suspension mtn bike that's pretty fancy for my taste, maybe too fancy, so I'm getting my mechanic buddy John to look it over tomorrow. It's certainly not preferable for the P-A race, that much I know. At least its only a couple blocks from my place, so we can take another look at it tomorrow, put peddles on it, and I can actually ride it which is crucialin a matter like this, I'm sure you would agree. Guy wants $800 for it, which is way more than I should be spending (should be spending $0). I'm getting nervous as hell just thinking about it all, but I could sell my road bike and get half the $$ back later...

And some people have sick children to worry about in the night.
Enough

Welcome.

Hello,

I've been meaning to get back to you about.... a number of things. I'm bored of sending emails and you're bored of reading them, perhaps. So let's jump past the sending of memos and let me establish my own little corner of the virtual universe, where all information appears recoverable.

Well, you have to start somewhere and why not here? Soon I will be going to Mexico and news from a foreign world will I have, though I'm really uninterested in relaying what its like to walk down the street in a foreign country, or any of the typical travel story bullshit. Travelling is mostly stupid and boring. I'm interested in other things, like bicycles and the English language and other languages and migratory birds. Got it?

So welcome to my little record of bottom bracket life. (A bottom bracket, for those who don't know, is the mechanism by which your bicycle crank makes your drivetrain work. As those who know me understand, I dislike numerous things, but I like cycling very much. I also tend to live at the bottom income bracket due to my lack of interest in trading my time for money, or in doing things that would make me a lot of money. An apparent lack of interest anyway.

In addition, this is a record of my last days in Hogtown, ie, Toronto, for a good while, so I'm trying to do a bunch of things I've never done before here before I disappear.