Mexican Jeopardy

On Mexican ‘Jeopardy’ the contestants always start at the bottom highest-priced end of a category and work their way upward toward the easy questions.  It’s as if the correct answer to a question ultimately comes from luck, not skill or knowledge, certainly not something that might be gained from thirty minutes of practice and familiarity with the subject.  People wonder why the Third World is the world of poverty and start pointing fingers of accusation at rich countries and rich corporations that ‘suck out’ the resources of the rest of the world while leaving nothing in return.  At the same time they ignore the reluctance of many of those same people to improve their individual and group situations by incremental steps and simple logic, the powers of two, double your money, then double it again, then so on to the limits of one’s ability.  This is the conservative approach to progress, conserving what already exists while moving forward one step at the time, best exemplified in reproduction.  Gene-splicing is a shortcut to nowhere.  The power of reproduction is the power of twos, in fractional terms, two unite and become one in the flesh, over and over to infinity.

Milagros

Twice I was in Mexico City on the most polluted day in the history of the world.  Yes, it got worse.  One day somebody found a yard-long mutated rat.  Yeow!  I hope that’s not the future path of evolution.  Nobody wants to brag about that, of course.  It seems like every time I go to Mexico somebody’s just seen an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe shedding her tears in some new location.  They take that catholic shit seriously, miracles and all.  A common greeting in Mexico is, “Que milagro!”  That’s what I want to know, “What miracle?”

Night Life

The girls of Ensenada will never make a Playboy shoot.  I know that there are a lot of lonely people in the world, but this is ridiculous!  Nightlife in Mexico is surreal.  With their bouffant hairdos and gaudily painted faces, it’s like something from a dream, or a circus, or maybe just the past.  Mexican women are to normal women as Mexican food and music are to their ‘normal’ counterparts, an acquired taste.  Ensenada comes awake all of a sudden when the love-boat lands.  It’s like night and day.  The only thing I’ve seen like it is in Songkhla, Thailand, where bar girls watch and wait behind counters deadly silent, counting I guess, as if something will surely happen if only they wait long enough.  It does.  The foreign off-shore oil-field support workers come in, somebody rings the bell hanging over the bar, and all of a sudden the place is an uproar, with dancing and drinking erupting as if from a long dormant volcano.  Of course, nothing beats the ‘wookie bar’ along Sukhumvit in Bangkok for surrealism.  If you turned Thailand up on edge to sort out the loose nuts, this is where you’d go to pick them up.  Is this where you end up after cruising the parking lot of Shoney’s Big Boy in Jackson, Mississippi, as a teenager?  It’s bumper-to-bumper on a Saturday night in Ensenada.

Remembering Mexico

I miss Latin America.  I still use Ensenada as a base when I’m in North America much of the time but, well, those girls could use some Slim Fast.  Not that I’m looking for girls mind you, I’m happily married, but I like visually pleasing experiences.  I miss the old days.  Back then I’d disdain to even consider hanging in a border town, but back then ‘the interior’ was dirt-cheap.  Now they’re about the same, and I can use American services and be back in Mexico at will along the border.  But that’s a compromised situation.  Back in the old days southern Mexico was pristine.  Old women went bare-breasted in Pinotepa.  Puerto Escondido was a fishing village, with campsites for the American hippie-types filtering in to winter over in the sunshine.  You could get a licuado smoothie for the equivalent of an American quarter.  Usually those are milk or water-based.  These were orange-juice-based!  If you camped on the beach, a Frito bandito would even come by your campsite after you’ve turned in and hold you up at gunpoint, taking your cameras and otherwise lightening your load.  Now that’s service!  But Oaxaca was always good at that.  I can’t remember ever parking my truck on the city streets and not getting robbed.  I even got robbed with a screwdriver once.  Mix me a Molotov.  My Oaxacan friends swore that the thieves weren’t Oaxacans, or at least not ‘real’ ones.  Yeah, we never really had slaves in Mississippi, either.  A British friend swears that the British were reluctant colonizers.  

Mexican Food

Of course Mexican food in US restaurants differs from Mexican restaurants ‘in country’ also.  There, it gets even more bizarre.  On the bright side, there’s mole, red or black or shades of brown intermediate, blood and chocolate made to order.  On the down side, there’s menudo, like the Puerto Rican pop group, literally bits and pieces of this and that, mostly tripe.  Remember Ricky Martin?  It’s an acquired taste I guess.  Once, in Mexico, I helped kill chickens for a party.  Actually I just watched, not horrified, because I’ve seen it before, but not inspired, either.  I think there were twenty to thirty of the little squawkers, throats carefully slit and blood collected in a large copper #3 washtub.  The pile of mole paste eventually covered an entire table before being put to the fire and made liquid to be ladled over boiled chicken.  Then we paraded around town with a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe.  Chili pastes in Thailand and Mexico look very similar, actually.  The women don’t.  Both take on a fat content in Mexico that would put Thailand out of business.  That’s what happens when lard is one of your main ingredients, I guess.  That’s what makes those tortillas so creamy smooth.  North Thailand uses too much grease also, more than the central region, but what really bothers me is that the coconut milk in those curries seems to congeal at well above freezing temperature.  I don’t mean thick; I mean breakable.  Not as high as nitroglycerin freezing at 50 degrees F, but high enough that I see pictures of it in my mind blocking arteries.  Nevertheless, I still haven’t gotten used to internal body parts in my food.  If God had wanted me to see this stuff, he’d have put it out there in the open.