Somewhere Over the Sun

I have the desire to tell you about my evening and you can do nothing to stop it. 

After adding 1,000 words to a short story, I took a walk around Polanco. It hasn’t rained in the last couple of days, but this was my first opportunity to enjoy the weather. Even after I had decided what to do, I took a couple of pointless laps around, looking at the scattering of people enjoying late lunches on the makeshift patios of restaurants in the area. 

I ordered a Belgian beer and took a seat a table away from a cute girl and her friend. My choice of seating was easily interpreted, I’m sure. I wonder how many coffee shops are actively cognizant of just how much attractive customers are good for business. From where I sat, I could hear the music of both the coffee shop I was at and the restaurant next door. At times the music overlapped, but the soft jazz covers of old pop songs playing overhead and the next door selection of rock hits mostly took turns grabbing onto my attention.

It was not as warm as I would have liked, but I ordered a dinner of cheese and bread and read my book. In some other place, the author I’m reading wrote, “I know what I love, still, now. That’s a confidence. If you don’t know what you love, you are lost.” Even if there are other things to want and love, I knew that I loved what I was doing, so I poured more olive oil and balsamic vinegar into my dish and read on. “When everything is lonely, I can be my own best friend,” a song emphasized on my walk back home.

A couple walks by looks at my dinner with what I assume is approval. Cute girl and her friend move indoors then back out for a cigarette. They leave while I’m mid-paragraph and I don’t notice. An ambulance is stuck in traffic, drowning out both sets of speakers for a couple of minutes, then Elvis takes over. 

I come across the following quotation in my book, “You know how they’ve got these cookie assortments, and you like some but you don’t like others? And you eat up all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don’t like so much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to polish these off and everything’ll be O.K. Life is a box of cookies.” Since the book was published in 1987 and Forrest Gump came out in 1994, I figure whoever wrote Forrest Gump is sneaky. But then I realized that the first English translation of Norwegian Wood by Murakami came out in 2000, so unless the writer was reading in French or Chinese or Norwegian, it might just be a matter of great minds thinking alike. Then while writing that last paragraph, I found out Forrest Gump was originally a novel written in 1986. So there you go.

The fifth floor of the UNLV Lied Library is pretty great. It’s where most of the fiction book stacks are, it has a great view of the Las Vegas Strip, and it’s one of the most popular places to take a nap on campus (read: popular, not necessarily best). What’s great though, is that there’s an open area overlooking the rest of the library and the many computer stations at the bottom level, where students can be witnessed doing plenty of Facebook stalking.

Let me take you away from the library for a moment. Remember when I told you about my idea for a quotebook, some portfolio of quotations you exchange with strangers to get to know each other. Well, I  have one. Except, rather than courteously trade portfolios with someone, I write mine on notecards and then leave them around on airplanes and at bookstores and, oh, I don’t know, fling them off of the fifth floor of the UNLV Lied Library and watch them saunter down to some unsuspecting Internet surfer who won’t notice it at all. Or onto the floor. Or directly into a trashcan. About 90% of them never get read, I’m sure.

Anyway, this one day, I got a girl and about fifty of these notecards and went to the fifth floor of the library. And we made it rain.

The lesson we learned? Library security guards have really boring jobs. They tend to be a little melodramatic about things happening on their turf. Anything happening on their turf. We got sent to the Department of Student Behavior for littering and, apparently, scaring the guard into thinking we might join the notecards and jump. We got away with a slap on the wrist and the very sensible advice to continue the act of spreading literature around in places where there aren’t any library security guards.

 

It was one of those plane rides that you can feel the faint urge to pee as you slide into the (ugh) middle seat and when the plane lands the ache still isn’t strong enough for you to bother to stop at the first bathroom you see. The cab ride back from the airport is almost as long as the flight.

Tepa, as it’s known, is about a thirty minute drive from the Guadalajara International Airport. Parts of that drive look like parts of Central California, when the hills have dried to yellow. The cows are skinnier here, although I guess it could be said that the happy cows which freckle the gorgeous pastures of Highway 1 are fat.

The town is small in that on-a-first-name-basis smallness that my hails-from-a-town-of-twenty-million will never get used to, although it always brings to mind the word ‘quaint’, which is such a lovable word. Its zocalo looks almost exactly like the town center of Valle de Bravo. There you go, dear reader. A place you’ve never been to and possibly never will looks almost exactly like another place you’ve never been to and possibly never will. There’s an insight to be had here.

I was brought along as baggage handler/trophy son/liaison of travel enjoyment. The business meeting gets momentarily philosophical when my book is mentioned (“You told me what it’s about, but what’s it about?” “Finding beauty in everything”) in between the latest behavior of (what I can’t help but feel is the fictional world of) the stock market and a delicious, authentic Italian lunch. What an authentic Italian lunch is doing in Tepatitlan, Mexico is a question made less and less valid by the growing smallness of our world.

The ice cream is great, there are large birds which are either hawks or eagles or some other creature that wouldn’t survive in the pollution of my hometown. There are beggars and school girls in uniform competing in the Mexican tradition of escoltas, which is pretty much about holding flags and marching and being in uniforms. I am not writing, but I am always writing.