El Mezcalero Gringo y su banda de borrachos felices.

Levanta la copa,
Inclina el codo,
Y a la salud de todos,
Me lo chingo todo.

-Attributed to some Mexican who almost certainly loved mezcal.

Mezcal, an artisanal distillation of the agave plant, the same plant from which tequila is produced, is a distinct culture, a way of life for many in the Mezcal-producing states of Mexico, a drink whose frat-boy fame for the dare-inspiring white worms drinkers occasionally encounter bottle-bottom belies it’s incredible richness and cultural significance. Leaving the confines of La Cuidad de Oaxaca, agave plants, colloquially referred to as maguey, spread toward the surrounding mountains in expansive roadside farms; typically, these spiny succulents are of the espadín variety, espadines being the most common maguey varietal, the basic agave you’re likely to have tried if you’ve ever sipped a smoky, chest-warming (or sometimes throat-torturing) mezcal.

There are an inexact number of different agaves (in the sense that everyone proclaims some different quantity, like Peruvians do when counting potato varieties grown throughout their history), and one of the treats of this trip has been exploring the diversity of distinct mezcales produced from the myriad plants. From the basic espadines, who are planted in bulk and mature “rapidly” over five to eight years  — we’ve heard various estimations in this range — to the many silvestres, the wild plants (arroqueño, tobalá, tepeztate, etc.), that grow without specific attention in the mountains and can take upwards of twenty-five years to reach maturity depending on the type, mezcal has infused my trip with smoky notes and hazy nights.

As we observed at the superlative palenque Don Agave, one of many mezcal distilleries in the state of Oaxaca, where approximately 80% of the country’s mezcal is produced, agave production is an involved process. Agave plants, once they reach maturity, are first cut back so that the piña, the meaty center shorn of the spiny leaves, can be collected. This piña is then halved or quartered, depending on its size, and once a mezcal producer has collected sufficient tonnage of the desired agave varietal — one gentleman informed us eight tons of maguey would typically produce around six hundred liters of mezcal — he can begin the process of producing the palate-seducing elixir.

A large pit is dug, filled with wood, and set ablaze, and then rocks are layered over the coals. Finally, once the coals are intensely hot and the rocks radiate extreme heat, the hacked up maguey piñas are layered over the rocks, covered in a tarp, and then everything is buried beneath dirt. (The process in many ways mirrors Pachamanca, the traditional Peruvian culinary practice.) After some number of days, the agave cooked and smokiness imparted, the earth is removed, the tarp lifted, and the piñas are ready to be further broken down. They are chopped more finely, the chunky fibers placed into an enclosed, circular area, over which runs an immense, horse-drawn stone wheel, the beast of burden churning out laps at its master’s behest.

What emerges is a deliciously fragrant sugary mash, which is then transferred to vats where it ferments.

Once sufficiently fermented, the liquid collected from the mash is transferred to the distillation chamber, where it is twice distilled to remove impurities and achieve the desired taste and level of alcohol.

At this point, you have a mezcal. And a high quality mezcal is, without question, liquid art.

Andy, one of the best backpacking companions I’ve met in my globetrotting years, a guy who simultaneously combines caring, charisma, and crudeness, and who’ll hereafter simply be known as el Mezcalero Gringo, lives to instill in anyone within earshot a passion for the spirit. On a daily basis we visit various mezcal-serving bars in the city of Oaxaca, and recently Andy invited a group of us to join him on a day trip to Santiago Matatlán, a town that is mezcal. Everyone in the pueblito works in mezcal, whether farming, harvesting, chopping, distilling, bottling, vending, manning the town’s AA outpost, or providing the basic services that hardworking humans require to survive in dignity. On a sleepy Sunday we strolled the lifeless corridor of palenques, the mezcalerías that sandwich the road leading into town, having to sometimes announce our presence with a shouted “buenas tardes” to rouse someone to tend to our thirsts for drink and knowledge, thirsts whose ratio began balanced and inclined toward the former as the tasting count climbed through the day.

By the end of the day, the four of us had collectively purchased eight or nine bottles of mezcal — savvy salesmen these mezcal-hawkers are, as free samples do, unsurprisingly, beget open wallets! — and the young man at the our final stop had taken us on a tour of the family’s facilities, walked us through the process, and more than tolerated our hijinks, laughing even as Ally inserted herself behind the bar and doled out heavy-handed pours of the sample bottles scattered across the long wooden countertop. As we departed for Oaxaca, our new best friend even gifted us a 200mL bottle of mezcal for the taxi ride home; we, the merry passengers, passed about and promptly emptied the bottle, our whole drunkperience reaching peak fun with Andy holding a sporadic conversation about sports bars in town out the window of our cab with the driver of an adjacent car, an interaction that resumed whenever we drew level over the course of miles.

We visited Don Agave mere days later (and, if I’m not mistaken, insatiable Andy is out again today, this time visiting El Rey de Matatlán!). Ricardo, our gregarious tour guide, gave us the thorough explanation of the process that informs much of what you’ve read and all of what you’ve seen in the preceding paragraphs, and he proceeded to treat us to an even more extensive mezcal tasting, a session that spanned nearly two hours and came replete with a dish of the customary mezcal accompaniment, fried chapulines, grasshoppers.

Introducing Team Oaxaca

I’m back down in Latin America, the deeper south, enjoying my annual, end-of-academic-year disengagement from responsibility, reminded the world is full of women I just might be able to marry if only we could ever find a way to staunch our transience. As is customary, the backpacker community embraces each new arrival, and makeshift crews of peregrinators are cobbled together over hostel breakfasts and terrace beers, the recently departed quickly replaced with the newly arrived.

Oaxaca, Mexico, is the first stop in the seventy-three days I’ll spend celebrating the educator’s schedule — barring, of course, any early termination via my bus plunging off a narrow mountain pass or my capture and subsequent beheading by Mexican cartels. I’ve been fortunate to earn admission to a club of particularly intelligent and attractive individuals, though lacking the basic qualifications I can’t figure out why I’ve been afforded entrance. I’ll assume it’s an oversight founded in my new friends’ predilection for mezcal and their mistaken assumption that, based upon my height, I might be an asset during a bar brawl.

I first met Alison, a hysterical, down-for-whatever Brit who can carry any large man down a cobblestone cuadra on her shoulders and who is such a compulsive consumer I’m relieved Europeans are credit card averse. Ally bunked beneath me in our three-person cell dorm, a dungeon-esque enclosure at the end of a corridor of poorly ventilated rooms, the corridor remarkable for confronting any visitor with a wave of mustiness not unlike a sweat-marinated hamper of soccer gear. Next was Rosalie, a typically tall dutch beauty with some atypical and seriously endearing silly habits: randomly cawing and bleeting, and dominating dance floors with her interpretations of how various fruits and vegetables might move. Soon thereafter I met Andy, a thoughtful, joke-cracking, secure-job-quitting New Yorker who teaches trapeze for fun and spends far more time deliberating over which mezcal to order than I do emptying mine. Ki Ki, a Dutch anthropologist, entered our lives in a blaze of glitter, trails of sparkly blue (or was it purple?) extending earward from her eyes, those brilliant, tapering comet-tails perfectly encapsulating her vivacious personality. Catrina, who is apparently as orally combative as I am, is a lithe devourer of hamburgers, someone of whom I’ve found myself paradoxically fonder after our first night clash over football/soccer allegiances devolved into venomous, alcohol-fueled threats to spit on and throw bags of urine at each other. Max is an elusive Argentinian who slips in well-timed wisecracks audible to those situated nearby. Finally there’s Phoebe, yesterday’s easy addition to the squad, a twenty-four year old travel blogger who for now intends to spend the next five years backpacking, purportedly generating revenue through her blog, though it appears possible her stronger tactic involves leaving dinners abruptly — “I need to go work on some stuff” — without having paid her bill 😜. (In fairness, a compelling argument could be made that the rainy afternoon spent guzzling mezcals around Oaxaca absolutely influenced her forgetfulness.)

These are the people with whom, for the last few days at least, I’ve shared laughs and late night street food, with whom I’ve traversed flooding, potholed streets in torrential downpours, and who are now a part of my indelible impression of Oaxaca.

A Gringo’s Guide: What I’ll Miss About Central America

“What do you mean, it isn’t air-conditioned?” demands the irate traveler, shouting English down at the bewildered-looking Guatemalan shuttlebus driver ready to whisk the backpacker to his next destination, the tourist’s product-heavy hairdo undermining the low-key sincerity purported by his billowing hippie-pants and unbathed stench. In moments like these, in an already overpopulated world, one can’t help but yearn for the golden-age of Mayan human sacrifice.

This, sadly, is a scene that repeats itself to infinity when amenity-obsessed travelers visit the developing world. Yes, certainly, at some point every traveler yearns for the comforts of home. But to let minor inconveniences interfere with unforgettable immersion experiences is, at the very least, disheartening, an unmistakable indictment of how we interpret and respect the world outside of our privileged confines.

If you strive to be a successful ambassador of your culture around the world, you must develop a sense of humor and seek the positives in every experience, every encounter. And the positives, no matter how terrifying or frustrating or sweaty the situation, oh, yes, they’re there. (Unless, of course, you’re being kidnapped or decapitated by a cartel or mara; that just sucks.)

Though I’m excited to be home in mere hours, the last six weeks have been every bit as remarkable as expected, and I’m hyper-aware of what I’ll soon be recalling with fondness.

I’ll miss the plate-sized spiders skittering across my hotel walls and menacing me from just unreachable ceiling corners, horrific but effective reminders to practice safe backpacking by keeping my bags zipped at all times.

I’ll miss the surprisingly frequent inquiries into my origins by native hispanohablantes, wondering whether I’m Spanish or Argentinean, a question so flattering I can almost ignore the implication that I either look like someone who’d be weaving and selling bracelets on the side of the street or speak with a lisp.

I’ll miss meeting intrepid, nonjudgemental peregrinators from around the world, thoughtful souls who are also down to unleash the ignorance at a moment’s notice.

I’ll miss being “exotic” — which mostly means I’ll miss the ego-massaging provided by Tindering in Latin America, where it’s not uncommon for a gringo to string together ten minutes or more minutes of uninterrupted right-swiped matches with latina diosas.

I’ll miss wondering why I’m walking past expressionless, double-barreled shotgun wielding private guards every time I join the hordes of children and diabetics crowding the ice cream and pastry counters, everyone presumably trying to spot the secret stash of twenty karat diamond sprinkles somewhere behind the counter.

I’ll miss the adrenaline boost I get when running anywhere in the region, understanding around any given bend I’m liable to encounter a pack of famished, feral canines that’ll eye my bulging, hill-climbing calves like succulent turkey legs.

I’ll miss the nostalgia of riding my old school buses, those miraculously immortal hunks of metal and vinyl who’ve found found new homes in Central America, the ubiquitous “chicken buses” threatening to hurtle every passenger in the region off any of the countless 180° mountain switchbacks. The buses have been repainted and outfitted with flashing lights inside and out, equipped with blaring sound and video projection systems in order to better revere the likes of (insert any reggaetón artist) and Nicolas Cage, but the tight seats that could barely contain my disproportionately long legs as a middle schooler have remained and, at least, my knees will carry the purple and blue bruises of nostalgia for some time yet. I’ll miss how nobody ever has to worry about over-hydrating and having to pee on a bus ride because, well, despite the soaring temperatures and unavailability of any other source of cooling, Zika is buzzing right outside and most passengers keep their windows closed. Really, Central American bus rides are the cheapest spa-time your money can buy. Most of all, I’ll miss the unexpected security of riding a chicken-bus so overstuffed that the only people at risk of being even slightly dislodged in an accident are those recent-arrivers hanging out the front or back doors, or perhaps the cobrador, the aisle-traversing money man who so enjoys jangling his coin purse in your face, when he’s scaling — in-transit! — toward the bus-top bags and baskets through one of the (handful of) open windows or the back-ladder.

I’ll miss Central America’s midday mystery, trying to ascertain which of life’s pleasures the perfectly wet slapping sound emanating from each and every open window and doorway signifies: vigorous sex or señoras smacking out tortillas (or, if we’re especially lucky, pupusas).

I’ll miss real sugar Coca-Cola and Mayan ruins and lava-gushing volcanoes that set the night sky aglow. I’ll miss the cornucopia of fruits and the overflowing markets and bustling bus stations. I’ll miss a mostly waiver-free society where you operate free of the threat of litigation, where you win jeers, not settlements, for being a dumbass. I’ll miss freshly prepared foods and salsas at each and every meal, the freezers in which we’d stash pizzas and lasagnas and whatever other pre-prepared aliments we’ve engineered back home an unnecessary afterthought for most of the population here.

I’ll miss strangers inviting me into their homes, offering me food and drinks and hospitality, and my feeling comfortable acceding without needing to first evaluate these kind individuals as potential perverts or serial killers. I’ll miss beautiful relationships where friends, no matter if their homes are dirt-floored and tin-roofed or three stories and protective-walled, proudly share their culture and experiences without reservation or even a fleeting thought of recouping any costs.

Vos me vas a hacer mucha falta, Centroamérica, pero nos veremos pronto, te lo prometo!

A Tinder Moment

For those few of you unfamiliar with the smartphone app Tinder – which means those of you who are married or, at least, loyal, and those of you who’ve yet to embrace modernity and purchase a smartphone – it’s an increasingly popular dating game that recreates the “romancing” experience familiar to anyone whose “relationships” tend to begin in a bar, after a few rounds of shots, and with people who only moments before were utter strangers. Essentially, it transports those moments of lustful judgment from poorly illuminated corner booths and sticky bartops to your touchscreen.

It’s a simple system. You log on, your screen populates with a pile of potential matches, and you go to work. Your fingers swipe furiously back-and-forth across the screen, pushing photos of prospects matching your predetermined criterion – gender(s), ages, max distance from your current location – left and right to indicate, respectively, I wouldn’t or I would, the photos of judged potential matches disappearing from the top of the interminable deck of prospects that the app keeps pushing forward, a digital draw pile that rewards with sex, not suits.

In other words, Tinder is an app designed to match you with people of your preferred age range and gender within a set driving radius – a distance based, presumably, upon a personal calculation of how much gas money you’re willing to spend to have sex.

Does it attract creeps? Mostly. Do people misrepresent themselves? Constantly. Is there a probability you’re being catfished in any given interaction? Certainly. Is it an addictive rush? Completely.

One particularly interesting date involved me driving to Pineville to pick up a Tinder match.  Because I’m not on Tinder to develop digital pen pals, I tend to push for a real-life introduction as soon as possible; this particular young lady agreed to meet after a few days of intermittent conversation. Still inexperienced in Tinder and not at all skeptical at the fact she needed me to pick her up, I was moderately excited. She was educated and, according to her picture, quite cute.

I pulled up to her Pineville residence, texted, and watched the front door. It opened. Out labored a creature who, it must be said, bore a certain resemblance to the attractive woman from the Tinder profile – a resemblance in the sense that I’d not be surprised to learn that the woman walking toward my car had cannibalized the original object of my interest and, in the consumption, assumed certain elements of her physical being, some sort of rare metamorphosis that occurs whenever one devours the body and soul of another.

This physical approximation of the Tinder date I had been expecting was wearing some variety of high-riding, ass-hugging shorts that could’ve easily doubled as bathing suit bottoms.  Her legs, however, were hardly the sort you’d want to broadcast to the world, shapeless, bruised pillars of cellulite jiggling, jiggling, jiggling toward my car.

Catfished!

In Pineville.

I scrunched my face, shook my head and muttered the obvious, “Should have seen this shit coming.”

Sighing audibly, I suppressed the urge to drive away, gesturing toward the unlocked door through the open window, extending a cordial introduction at the same time. I’m a nice guy, I repeated to myself like a Buddhist mantra, hoping positive thinking could sustain the forced smile adorning my face. My afternoon plans had shifted; suddenly, I was plotting my premature escape.

(Let’s pause here for a moment. You’re thinking I’m shallow. Guilty. Perhaps. But I’ll always retort that, in a system like Tinder, one obviously based upon physical attraction, misrepresenting your physical self is an unforgiveable deception. Be who you are, even if that’s a listless, many-times-bloated version of the ideal self you were three years ago.)

The driving commenced and all I could think was that I’d passed a slew of bars a mile or so from the young lady’s residence. I suggested we grab a drink or two at one of them, and her response was that, no, she had outstanding tabs at all those bars, that we’d need to venture into Charlotte.

Where I know people, I thought, shuddering. How could I explain that I have a reputation to uphold?

Driving through an intersection on the way toward Charlotte’s Elizabeth neighborhood I slowed at a yellow light. Immediately from the passenger seat emanated an unmistakable sneer, “Umm, do you stop when it turns yellow?” I tilted my head toward the floor and shook it back and forth, lamenting that I’d never gone to church to learn the quick prayers religious types mutter in trying times.

(It’s worth mentioning that this woman, this veritable authority on responsible driving, had been busy recounting the ways she’d recently totaled two different cars in separate incidents while drunk and had ended up with a suspended license, precisely the reason I’ve had to drive to Pineville to pick her up in the first place.)

While waiting at the red light I began contemplating the Blue Book value of my car and any drinks I might have to buy on the “date” relative to the enjoyment I might derive from edging into traffic and having the passenger side t-boned.  Thankfully, it was a quick light.

As we resumed driving, my positive nature insisted there was beauty yet to be uncovered, and I asked about her interests – to which I actually received the reply, I don’t have any. What do you do in your free time, professionally, whenever? Nothing. I might not even try to disguise this murder, I realized, strangling the steering wheel with both hands and focusing on my breathing, fighting the urge to scan ahead for oncoming eighteen-wheelers.

More endearing details emerged shortly thereafter, when I asked about her family, learning that her mom was an SEC-indicted penny stock pumper. There was a lesson in all of this, I was sure. The “date” ended a few drinks after arriving in Elizabeth and I immediately called the woman I really wanted to be spending my time with, a woman I’d met via Tinder months earlier. Date number two of the day went wonderfully, drinks and conversation at VBGB with a fascinating and captivating beauty about whom I’ve never felt compelled to even jokingly envision scenarios culminating in her demise.

An incomplete summary of life so far, 2014.

Some five months since I typed my previous substantial entry while riding passenger in a car driving toward Traverse City, MI, today is a fat slab of déjà vu – and the first time in as long that I’ve been unoccupied enough to encounter the peace necessary to sequence sentences.

Though I-75 is no longer the snow-buffered gauntlet it was those few months ago, when it funneled cars in opposite directions through the frozen corridor that is the entire Midwest, the wintry drear has yet to relinquish its grip on the state, and the fourish hours of overcast skies between New Hudson and Traverse City provoke either drowsiness or quiet reflection.  My mom – who, after the succession of coffee refills she downed this morning shortly before easing into sleep, I’m convinced could mainline an entire pot of coffee and remain delightfully unaffected – is unconscious in the backseat.  I, on the other hand, caffeine-free and sleep-deprived, possess an unfortunate imperviousness to vehicle fatigue.

And so I’ll bump out a few hundred words and greet you from your inbox.  These life updates are as much a chronicle for my personal (present and future) entertainment as anyone else, but hopefully they’re entertaining enough to coax you to read all the way through.  If not, mash that delete key and I’ll never know the difference.  Anyway, back to the task at hand – which, it seems to me, might simply be inflating my word count.

Much of my late winter was consumed by struggling to imitate being a barista.  (That, for the uninformed, is a coffee pouring and preparing professional.)  Lacking the sophisticated palette required to appreciate the subtleties of freshly ground and brewed coffee of impressive pedigree, I could answer customer inquiries into flavor profiles in only the most rudimentary manner – repeating, unconvincingly, that the blend tended to be darker and the varietal tended to be lighter, or reading some printed blurb with a twinge of embarrassment.  Overwhelmed by recipes for a million coffee-drink variations I was hitherto ignorant even existed, I was compelled to carry in my wallet a detailed list of drink names and their respective percentage compositions by ingredient.  As long as I was only working the register, smiling at coeds (and trying to disguise my annoyance at any non-friend male customer who dared insert himself into the line and interrupt my cheery flirtations), I was competent.  Hell, I might’ve even been average…in particular, unrushed moments.

But, in those instances I was forced to turn my back to the customer and enter the realm of coffee prep – especially when there was no coworker I could pester to confirm a latte or frappe was what I was thinking it was, in that case having to further degrade myself by as covertly as possible withdrawing from my wallet and then consulting the aforementioned recipe list – I was immediately overly sensitive to the fact that I was almost certainly butchering the preparation of the drink that the presumed coffee expert at the counter, who I naturally assumed was contemptuously judging my every unconfident movement, had just ordered.

I was quickly relegated to kitchen duty, hiding me away in the back, which was a sensible decision all around. All of a sudden my perfectionist tendencies were shielded from the customer’s hurried gaze.  I could calmly assemble pizzas and paninis and wash dishes and erupt into Chewbacca howling volleys with my wonderful coworkers (a group of hilarious, tolerant, warm individuals with whom I dearly miss working).  I could blast Starlito and Kevin Gates and Between the Buried and Me and, generally, music unpalatable to the ear more attuned to far less vulgar and decidedly more popular music, and I never again had to repress those barely suppressible, violent urges to douse with scalding coffee the faces of punk motherfucking customers audacious enough to request we turn down – or, more infuriating yet, change – the music playing in the shop’s main room.

With a meal-per-shift allowance and a variety of bagels and flatbreads and housemade sauces and fresh veggies and salads and meats and cheeses at my disposal, I experimented and ate well.  I won’t say I ate healthily, necessarily, but outwardly my body appears no worse for my five piled-high-pepperoni-and-prosciutto-and-whatever-other-variety-of-pig-I-could-get-my-hands-on-pizzas-per-week diet.  My future cardiologist, however, will likely reference this document when explaining my cause of early death.

Working in the kitchen, baking in the heat of a small room lined with running dishwashers and soup warmers, ovens and stoves and sandwich presses, I’d sometimes finish an entire shift before realizing I hadn’t peed.  Having purchased my work wardrobe at Goodwill and needing to cuff my jeans for their length, I’d return home on any given night with a foldful of the shift’s stowaways, bacons and cheeses and crumbs that’d jumped off the prep table, late-night cuff-snacks.  And for a brief period, after exposure to our wall of teas, I thought it’d be cute to adopt Orange Echinacea! as my euphemism for four-lettered expletives.

Alas, financial and free-time concerns convinced me to halve my coffee shop hours by March, and from there I slowly retired from barista-ing.  As I’m heading another study abroad group that departs for Peru in July, I began to concentrate on program preparations and, for supplemental income, tutoring and substitute teaching.  It’s been a good change overall, though I do miss the coffee shop atmosphere and the damn good chemistry we employees developed as a working family.

Yet, I’ve been fortunate to replace one group of beloved individuals with others.  The students I tutor are intelligent and inquisitive and eager to participate in their personal development.  And we’re all, tutor and pupils, weirdoes; as such, invariably, sessions run long because our focus regularly skips from conjugations and grammatical constructions to whatever random topic might flitter through our minds. And so we laugh, briefly recover, and then dash off on another tangent.

Subbing, similarly, is wonderful. It’s a regular reminder that teaching is what I want to be doing eventually, once I can afford to do it because it’s what I love to do, when I’m otherwise sufficiently financially secure that I can laugh off the fact that modern teacher salaries are stuck in some distant decade.

Halving my weekly working hours has also restored to my life the transience that became essential to my happiness the moment one of my best friends and I touched down in Mexico City, backpacks and no return tickets, on September 11, 2008.  Among various daytrips and weekends away I’ve enjoyed in the last months, I went to Carrboro for a Danny Brown concert and, more importantly, to reconnect with a close friend with whom I’d lost contact upon leaving Ann Arbor at the end of the 2008 summer.  We met up and, as the fun of the day extended into the evening and then the night, I missed the concert – which seems almost impossible considering that we never ventured farther than four hundred meters from the venue during those ten hours of conversation, beer and eats.  Still, I left Chapel Hill optimistic, sunburnt, and with exactly zero new hearing damage.

Another weekend, in Spartanburg, SC, I fulfilled the first of two best man obligations for the year, also being my first ever, managing to give a barely rehearsed toast – and having to glance at my notes only once! – without stammering too pronouncedly or visibly sweating through my clothes.  People even complimented the speech with what appeared to be sincerity, not friendly obligation.  And we, the groomsmen collectively, managed to not be a drunken, rowdy impediment to the smooth functioning of what turned out to be a marvelous wedding for a gorgeous, loving couple, though we made sure to infuse every bit of the weekend’s proceedings with a healthy dose of vulgar humor and rampant inappropriateness.

My brother and I spent a gloriously gluttonous weekend in New Orleans too, a city I’ve long wanted to evaluate as a potential future home.  It was dilapidated and invigorating, grimy and vibrant, a rugged landscape of contradictions.  New Orleans is vehicle disabling potholes and condemned buildings and majestic but uniformly monochrome graveyards, but also this brilliant kaleidoscope of colors and cultures and voodoo, block after block of oddly adorned homes, porches littered with peculiar, sometimes grotesque artifacts, fences and poles and anything that can be used to hang another object strung with the ubiquitous beads, and a diversity of people spouting a patois often so indecipherable that you, an outsider, are left staring, head askew, until a local with recognizable speech patterns realizes you’ve no idea what’s been communicated and repeats the message in intelligible English.

Oh, and it’s boozy.  Really goddamn boozy.  And, because of this booziness and it being legal to imbibe in public, in the street, wherever you may roam (and roam and gawk you will), you can pretty much rest assured you won’t be cited for public drunkenness, which is comforting for those of us who like to tipple until they tip over on a sweltering days, such days comprising the yearly majority in New Orleans.

And so you walk, beverage in hand, through the French Quarter, a mélange of the severely debauched and hedonistic, people in various states of intoxication and undress and deterioration of sanity, and then to Frenchmen Street to take in the omnipresent live music. And a cool drink never leaves your hand as you ramble between your first and second, and later between their second and third (and so on) James Beard nominated restaurants of the day.  And you’re reloaded again later, even though you’ve been slurring and stumbling now for some hours, as you zigzag toward a 3a.m. fried shrimp po’ boy which, given your current condition, will taste as good as anything that’s ever been James Beard acknowledged.

New Orleans most endears itself because it feels like a place where the proudly relentless American drive to work until you can’t work no more and then to invent some new problem for working even then, just to prove how damn hard you can work, for once doesn’t trump an appreciation for family, friends and fun. So, the next time I’m stateside, short the funds for airfare abroad and desperate to refresh, to be embraced by what I find most rejuvenating about Latin American culture, I know exactly where I’m headed.

…

Yeah, that’s enough.  Until the next disjointed chapter…

When stereotypes come true

At some point recently I met a man who was delivering Peruvian food to a college event, the driver of a particular Charlotte Peruvian restaurant’s catering van.  I exited the building in which the catered event was taking place to meet the caterer, emerging into the cold wearing khakis and a t-shirt.  The man, European-looking and speaking in thickly accented English, expressed concern at my lack of jacket, repeatedly asking if I wanted to return to the building to retrieve something warmer in which to dress myself.  I told him, seeing as how we’d be outside for intervals of no longer than thirty seconds during each individual trip we’d make to retrieve armfuls of aluminum food storage containers from his van if for fuck’s sake he’d just stop bugging me about my clothing selection, I was fine, to just grab a stack of still warm aluminum receptacles holding pollo a la brasa and plátanos fritos and whatever other miscellaneous food items I had greedily and hungrily ordered the night prior for tonight’s group dinner (a list so ambitious I could easily have completely mummy wrapped a medium-sized cat with the receipt he was soon to hand me) and hustle.

We chatted just inside the Student Union’s lower-level entrance as we waited for the elevator.  The man revealed to me he was Russian.  The conversation veered back toward the inadequacies and possible repercussions of my current state of dress.  Without even a whiff of discernible irony, with the earnest eye contact and gentle gesticulations of a man imbued with the compassion only known to those who’ve suffered the extremes of exposure, souls who almost certainly possess a life’s compendium of horrific Siberian stories of endless winters and starvation and the subsequent, unavoidable cannibalism of pets and less-important or less-abled family members, the Russian offered that should my nonchalance toward the evening’s cold lead to illness, I should promptly forego food for a day, maybe longer, during which period I should aliment with vodka.

I doubt I’ll ever again be so tickled.

Utter pointlessness as an outcome for a forced exercise in writing.

On Christmas Eve — or any night, really — when looking for a party that you know is taking place on a particular block but unable to pinpoint the exact house, it’s probably not a good idea to pace back and forth on the street, dressed in all black with your hoodie up, in front of a bunch of expansive suburban homes with perfectly manicured lawns and recent year model vehicles, SUVs with rear windows adorned with those stick-figure stickers detailing the family’s composition.  Even though you’re really just trying to stay warm while waiting for a text back from your drunk friends or, even better, some sort of activity that’ll signal which house you should approach — say, a familiar face entering or exiting a residence — you’re pretty damn certain to upset any citizen that spies your creepy figure pacing outside, eyeing their residence, whilst they’re planted in the comfy confines of their kitchen or living room, basking in holiday cheer with their Christmas-enamored children.  It’s one of those scenarios that could end badly.

So, how does it end?  Well, I know how it doesn’t end.  It doesn’t end with you being invited inside for cookies and hot chocolate.  It doesn’t end with a father saying to his family, “Shucks, honey, I sure am wiped! Think we should call it a night. Stop fretting about that bearded guy outside, dressed in all black, the guy who’s been slowly pacing back and forth on the sidewalk out front, eyeing the house for the last fifteen minutes.  Seems totally normal.  Ok, gang.  Wave g’night, kids.  Then let’s go sleep peacefully.  Think I’m gonna try out my new earplugs tonight.”

Hopefully it ends with you realizing, with a laugh, that what you’re doing would alarm any perceptive creature with a modicum of sense, and then you turn around and walk the half mile or so home.  If you don’t come to your senses, if you ended up with your face mashed against the hot hood of a Crown Vic, your wrists pinched in bracelets behind your back, that could still be a good ending, all things considered.  I’ve heard of far worse outcomes for innocents mistaken for criminals.

‘Tis the season of dentistry

It’s unrealistic.  Like, almost, still believing in Santa as an adult unrealistic.  Or standing amidst the wilted and disintegrating corpses of my mom’s plants and maintaining to her face that I watered them and expecting her to believe me unrealistic.

Desperately resuming flossing in the last few days before my impending appointment — the biyearly scramble, my last floss (hopefully) the last time my dentist’s fingers have been in my mouth — and somehow manufacturing this warped expectation that I’ll magically obscure twenty five or so weeks of absolute disregard to any and all advice my friendly and talkative dentist has imparted, yearly, desperately, for our entire lifelong relationship is the embodiment of unrealisticness.

And, damn, an insult to the intelligence and professionalism of the man who has this drill and that bone-saw hovering in the vicinity of my face.

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Footnotes, because we like footnotes:

1. Complaint about biyearly.  Terrible word.  Defined as “appearing or taking place every two years or twice a year.”  Waitasecond.  So it means this one thing…and something that’s entirely distinct?  We add words to the dictionary every year, right?  Hmm, I’ve got a suggestion…  (I can envision soon-to-be-devestated families excitedly packing their vans and buckling in their child car seats, prepping to show up the next day for reunions that aren’t scheduled for another year and a half.)

2. About the timing of a dentist’s talking: why are they always suddenly talkative, inconveniently and strangely to the point where it feels like a kinda sick and deliberate joke, always and only in moments when he or she’s splashing a stream of water off your recently polished whites or cramming digits into your oral cavity?

2013: a year in too many (barely edited and frequently tangential) paragraphs

[Originally published as an email to friends]

Some years ago, after spending the better part of a decade indulging my id, overloading the blogosphere with entertaining inanity – entertaining to me, I should specify – I suddenly ceased writing.  Two families, Braxtons and Andrews, celebrated silently, rejoicing that no further damage would be inflicted upon their still mostly intact reputations.  (My family overestimated my power to tarnish our names, what with my regular blog readership of five…including my parents.)

A few days ago I received one of my friend Ty’s life update emails, the semi-regular summary communications he so gracefully infuses with thoughtful reflection and wit.  I’ve always marveled at how he seizes my attention without a distinctly southern voice, excessive pornographic or sports references, or general obscenity.  In other words, he achieves the impossible.

While I’d love to accomplish what he’s able to accomplish through adult refinement, it remains impossible that I’ll write with anything less than brute force – smashing sentences together with excessive punctuation, jamming unnecessary profanity into any sentence I deem insufficiently entertaining, and paying no heed to rational transitions.  This one’s for the undisciplined, the savages.  And you can blame/thank Ty for what follows.

So, all you folks I hold in high esteem (even those I haven’t spoken to since the last time I used this email list some five years ago, sending stories so lewd as to be unbloggable back from Guatemala), here I find myself, recently thirty years old, in the backseat of my parents’ Prius somewhere near the NC/VA border, on the road to Michigan, where our familial masochism leads us every end-of-year.  We’re knowingly – this is sick, I know – heading toward cold so fierce we Southerners almost expect to encounter an entire midwest of corpses frozen until spring in the contortions of daily activity.

Anyway, to the summarizing and reflecting and poignancy blah blah blah…

I began 2013 in this very car, returning to Davidson, NC from New Hudson, MI.  January 2^nd I officially assumed duties as the 8^th grade Algebra 1 teacher at the exceptional Davidson area private school where I’d been teaching since October 22nd.  (Technically, the school resides just inside the Iredell county border, but it maintains a Davidson mailing address to avoid the backwoods stigma that accompanies any mention of Mooresville.  Or that’s the reason I imagine.)  Having studied English in college and then having extensively traveled Latin America, where I acquired an acceptable level of Spanish competency; having slept my way to extremely mediocre grades in 11^th and 12^th grade calculus in a typical act of giant public school rebellion; last having retaken Calculus as an uninterested Davidson sophomore; I might seem an unlikely selection for the math opening.  Luckily, I’m reasonably charismatic when I have a mind to be (read: during job interviews), I get along as well with middle schoolers as I do with any age group, and I’m the apparently nearly extinct male with an affinity for middle school education.  Also, despite the literary trajectory of my personal education, I’ve always been more inclined toward mathematics. (Writing and intoxication are, and this was especially important for me in the context of a college student, a far more cooperative couple than computation and intoxication.)

Teaching Algebra was not without its hiccups (having to relearn an entire, specific vocabulary wasn’t easy) and many of my beloved former students, who I still see and interact with frequently, remind me with a sibling’s honesty that I wasn’t a great math teacher, that I was far better equipped to teach them Spanish. (The wise, almost-verbatim assessment of one of my former students follows as such: “Sr. Pato, you’ve said Algebra was always incredibly easy for you.  That it simply makes sense.  Which is why you got so frustrated with us when it didn’t make immediate sense to us.  It was sometimes hard for you to articulate, step-by-step, processes by which we, those who struggle with algebraic concepts, could arrive at a solution.  You dick.”)  I certainly feel more comfortable teaching Spanish than any other academic subject, and teaching Spanish reminded me that I have a love for the constant and infinite elasticity of expression.  Also, that it’s never not hilarious when someone mistakenly asks someone else how many anuses they have: ¿cuantos anos tienes?

When I wasn’t spending fifteen minutes relearning algebra for the next day’s lesson or, ewwww, grading, I had a life.  And that life was pretty much exercise and, afterward, consumption.  During the school year I ran a handful of races — including an obstacle course that included beer pong/beirut and flip-cup stations and a mountain trail marathon in the snow that included creek crossings and 4200 feet of overall elevation change — and finished much better than expected, winning several pairs of free running shoes, a twenty dollar bill, and some massages in the process.  When I wasn’t running, I was liable to be found on Davidson’s campus, playing club and intramural sports with my good student friends, laughing every time I ran my reactivated CatCard, replete with a photo of fourteen year old pba, through the Baker Sports Complex card scanners.

During my school spring break and again over the July 4th weekend I took trips to visit my hermanito and his badass fiancé in Chicago, the city I swear I want to live in because I’ve only ever visited between late spring and late summer; I defy you to find a city more livable, during its nicest months, for twenty- and thirty-somethings.  At the end of May I attended my good friend Matt’s wedding on Bald Head Island, an event that reunited most of my best friends from Davidson (and allowed us to extend a long tradition of stealing and/or endangering pedestrians with golf carts) and an event that united a beautiful and beautifully suited bride and groom.  And besides maybe delaying the start of the wedding by a few minutes (I had to pee AND work on my first bow tie) and perhaps exclaiming a bit too drunkenly from the back pew of the church (where I was sweating through my clothing and fanning myself with a fat Bible), I think my presence was a positive one.

At the end of my teaching year, I hand-wrote all of my eighth graders personal letters, and immediately felt mildly self-conscious about it because some school parents were already disturbed that I would hug their children back whenever they’d kamikaze me with hugs, which was frequently.  Sometimes I sorely miss the cultural warmth of Latin America.  I would have returned to teaching, most likely as a middle school English teacher, had I not been presented, for a second consecutive year, the opportunity to travel to Peru with Davidson College’s Davidson in Peru study abroad program.  Earn a living while traveling abroad with a group of remarkable individuals that I have a direct hand in selecting? Could I block off a half year?  haHA! Deuces, Estados Unidos.

From mid-July through mid-December I was abroad, principally in Peru with quick excursions into Bolivia and to Ecuador’s expectation-decimating Galapagos Islands, doing the only (commendable) things at which I truly excel: being a friend and being organized.  As with my Davidson in Peru experience in 2012, the 2013 semester was and will remain, because of the unsurpassable quality of the people with whom I was privileged to share the adventure (expert/lucky selecting on my part, we could say), one of the finest experiences of my life.  I’d change not a minute, not a thing.  I take that back, I could do with less diarrhea…a helluva lot more hops in my beer…and less of the incessant commentary of tour guides on twelve hour bus rides.  (Tour guides, we’ve decided, at least those on buses, are sadistic quisi-educators so in love with their own practiced spiels they react to inattention by vengefully startling weary travelers from the cusp of sleep, blaring their distorted voice-blasts through the bus’ overdriven stereo system in expertly and inconsiderately timed bursts.  On several occasions I found myself shaken from the fuzzies of a dream where I was strangling a tour guide with his mic cord, the lump in his neck the mic I’d already jump-kicked down his throat.)  But, in the context of a half year in which disastrous things could transpire, really, I’ve nary a complaint.

In the two weeks since I’ve returned home I’ve spent most of my time between my parents’ house and the adult beverage aisle of Harris Teeter.  The three-week succession of IPAs has helped make more amusing the fact that my Craigslist-discovered housing options for the next six months – the period during which I’m working for and with some good friends in a newly opened on-campus coffee shop while awaiting my July return to Peru – currently consist of a middle-aged woman who casually mentioned swinging in our first meeting and a nineteen-year-old whose first response to my question about the boyfriend she’d mentioned is frequently present at her condo was that, “well, he’s on probation.”

2014, I’m excited to see what you have to offer (maybe you’ll teach me how to punctuate? or cry human tears?), and I know you’re gonna be great, but good luck topping your predecessor.

But I’m a poor traveller…

If a pharmaceutical company (Farma Dent, Perú) can’t be bothered to correctly punctuate the ingredients list (a horrifically apparent error of double commas to separate two ingredients?) on its mass-marketed product, I automatically have concerns about it’s ability to  properly, proportionately concoct a chemical cocktail that I’ll be putting in my mouth.

But it’s the cheapest on the rack.