Somewhere Over the Sun

On most days, my duties are light: sit at a typewriter and bleed, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep, find a spot at the coffee shop near an electrical outlet. I sit there and I write. I look at pretty people come in and leave. I wait for my coffee to reach sipping temperature. I sit there and do nothing. I describe a fictional scene, or transfer a memory into a made-up person’s life. 

My friend Cassie sent me a text the other day saying how she believes I have the hardest job of any of her friends. “I look to books to show me the big picture,” I’m paraphrasing here, since my phone’s memory is weak and I was forced to delete the message, “to make sense of the world, to entertain me. That’s a heavy burden.” 

Some days, yes. Some days it’s tough to just sit there and try to make art that feels worthwhile. Some days it’s easy, and everything feels golden. Then the next day I edit the golden stuff to try to make it a little more golden. Even some of those days are easy. 

Some days, I finish a chapter and immediately start another one. Some days I write a paragraph and decide it is not a day for writing, and I try to go find some other way to spend my day thinking about life. Some days, I write for hours and hours and it is as easy as breathing.

But today? Today, I make salsa.

 

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.