Stories From "The City of Eternal Spring"
Hoping We Type the Characters Correctly on This Spanish Keyboard
in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

¡Hola compañeros de web!

It's glorious to be back in the city where I spent two months studying Spanish in the summer of 2001.

The rose vendors are still plentiful.

The albino security guard with myopia to scare a mole still guards the same jewelry store.

Solovina, the 18 year old perra de la calle still lives with mi Mama Mexicana. Susan and I went to visit her yesterday and reconfirmed that she is the sweetest lady on Miguel Salinas Street.

The little old lady at the bottom of the street still runs a little lavandaria. My clothes haven't been this clean in weeks.

Perhaps because it's holiday season and all the ricos from el Distrito Federal are in town, but the the number of cars on the street is asphyxiating.


This morning

I wrote and updated the site while Susan was out sketching. She got a commission yesterday.


Last night

We went to see lucha libre, Mexico's version of professional wrestling. More on that later. I've used all my flickr upload capacity for the month. I took lot of pics.


In the afternoon

I met a Swiss man who goes by the name of Stone who has worked with locals on organic farming and beekeeping for ten years. He saw the "don't panic, buy organic" sticker on my laptop and we hit it off immediately.

After that, I went to the


Cathedral of Cuernavaca

I had some clothes to donate and didn't know where else to take them. Yesterday one of those nice old melt your heart church ladies said I would be more than welcome to donate the clothes there and they'd go to the poor.

Today, there was only Father Pepe waiting in the old church, which in Pre-Columbian times was a pyramid until the Spanish trashed it and built a church out of the rubble. That gout-ridden puss bag conquistador Cortez built his palace within view. The murals inside the cathedral are of smiling whities piercing the sides of crucified fools, also smiling.

Padre Pepe, the exceptionally caring proprietor of the place, was also smiling and I felt I could be honest with him. According to William S. Burroughs, you're not supposed to trust "a religious son of a bitch" with only matters of money, and since I had none, I just let the mouth rip through the erres.

He pulled out a little Virgin Mary amulet and gave it to me.

The priest wanted to know about my family, about what I had studied, about my wife. He was holding my hand the whole time.

"I don't have a wife."

"Why not?"

I swallowed. "Because I'm gay."

He kept smiling and simply said, "your sexual preference is simply that, and I can respect that. God only asks that you take responsibility for it. You should not have to have sex to be happy."

I agreed and let my hand drop, saying that the Buddha would say the same. Cut out desire and you cut out suffering.

"What religion are you?"

I answered that I was simply spiritual, but had studied the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha and found them quite compatible. And that the language of God was the only thing that really got people upset because there's no way people could be talking about different things when they imagine the Ultimate. People are always thinking and speaking different things--all wrong, of course--but they're good enough for me.

"But you do not have the god that we provide," he started to say, reaching for my hand again.

"I have the Ultimate in my heart," I answered.

"So do I."

"Yeah, the ultimate is all around us. In this desk--"

"--all over the earth."

"Jesus came to earth with the keys to heaven. And here we are. They fit in my heart."

"Mine too," he said, again taking my hand.

It was getting late. He wished me pleasant and safe travels. Then he offered to administer to me the final mass of the year, which is tomorrow. I declined. I'm really not into his product.

And yet I remain curious. Perhaps I'll wander over there tomorrow, if I don't have anything better to do than drink a pretty silly appoximation of the blood of Christ.