As the non-daylight-savings-assisted days get longer here in central Mexico, the late arrival of Easter this year means the many catholic-pagan rituals are happening under somewhat disorienting summer-like conditions. In other words for us Estatdounidense serial winter refugees, it’s just one more visceral reminder, this time delivered by the movement of the planets, that the world we’re now inhabiting isn’t normal.

Yes, it is Lent after all, where we’re supposed to stop our habitual inward-facing living and take stock of our resultant sins, contemplate the consequences of our self-centered lives, make some sacrifices that change our narcissistic habits to both improve the world we occupy and give us a better shot at redemption in the next life (or in the remaining alternative universes we haven’t yet destroyed, depending on your beliefs). It’s why our Mexican neighbors carry the enormous weight of religious statutes on their shoulders for miles in posadas. They’re sacrificing, atoning, yes, but also preparing, toughening-up for the real pain that that could (and probably will) descend at any moment on their lives but for the mercy of God (or the whims of the gods,) or of blind fate or (stay tuned below) The Observer Selection Bias.
In the last installment of this interminable diary of our late-life sojourn in Mexico, I teased that I might make an attempt at explaining the seemingly unexplainable politico-cultural (overused but for once apt adjective) existential chaos swirling around us. I’m not talking about getting all pundity on how or why what has happened, happened. Please, there’s way too much Monday-morning QBing already available on that subject from those much more (but mostly less ) qualified than I. No, thanks. I do, however, feel oddly obligated to try to tackle perhaps a bigger question really. Why, under the current U-turn whiplash of a 50 day old not unexpectedly extreme governmental regime in our native land, are so many of us frozen in a mixture of disbelief, anger, fear, awe, despair, hope, hopelessness, expectation, excitement, panic, vengeance, spite, impatience, and resignation?

Why? Blame it on The Observer Selection Bias!

OK, I came across this concept reading an article on the latest findings in cosmology (a hobbyhorse of mine) in The Atlantic. It’s sort of a duh explanation of why, among other wildly inconsistent findings modern applied and theoretical physics keep bumping into, we can’t find any other intelligent life out there. It’s because we’ve been so lucky to have existed for so long, it’s skewed our cosmic expectations or We’re way too optimistic!
What we expect to find out there is based on what we’ve observed and our observations are biased by the fact that we’ve miraculously survived, many times over, an extremely violent universe (or universes) that should not have allowed us to exist in the first place. Thus, our models are biased, incomplete if not wrong which is why sometimes the science doesn’t work. (Watch the “3 Body Problem” on Netflix to get the idea.) That’s why we can’t find more intelligent life out there and, I believe, why we are frozen with inaction in the present political sitch. We’ve dodged too many bullets to be able to even conceive of getting hit much less know how to remove the slug and carry-on.

We’ve known from 1776 onward that the political system the forefathers came up with was novel, ingenious but severely compromised, even for its time. But it somehow survived test after test, crisis after crisis, even a civil war, and two world wars. How many times have we heard how “delicate” our “democracy” was, but still it stands, it always comes through, proving it is better than any other form of government, the very meaning of “American Exceptionalism”. So our expectations for its present and its future has been so biased by our observation of its unlikely survival many times over the past 250 years that we can’t compute how quickly and easily it can (and could always) simply collapse given the right (or wrong) circumstances.

Now that those circumstances are here, we’re naturally stumped. We have no precedents. It’s not that the prevailing world culture of the past 80 years has suddenly devolved into a global herd of amoral sheep with tonic immobility. It’s just that given our liberal observer selection bias, the science doesn’t work any longer. Can we, will we snap out of it? I hope so. But we should understand we may well be living in a different universe then we’ve incompletely observed till now.
​ 
Next, I promise no more social studies and more about our beloved Mexico and perhaps the vagaries of to rent or not to rent as we prepare for Estados Unidos re-entry in a fortnight.
 

​How to explain being in the midst of the seemingly unexplainable? How, especially, when you’ve been a participant, even a passive one, in the current pervasive global disorientation? You can abhor, resist, rail against and distance yourself from the cynical chaos swirling around you, but you can’t deny responsibility for it comes from the very system under which you were born, thrived, now live, that you embrace and accept as its citizen. How then?

This question clouds our first waking moments everyday, even in the golden warmth and blue-skies of our ex-pat high-desert cocoon here in noble Mexico. This time of year, as the dry season settles into true summer, as Lent takes hold of the local calendar with a familiar but still exotic parade of Catholic-pagan rituals leading to Semana Santa, we again take stock of our fortunate lives of wintering here and start to prepare our return to the inkling of spring and reality of tax time in the still cold northeast corner of Connecticut next month. How can it be that our routine hasn’t changed along with the world this clement Mexican March?

 Señor de La Columna has completed its posada from Atotonilco to the Parroquia before Ash Wednesday. We’ve had our annual festive Mardi Gras dinner with our California expat besties, the Scarletts (although the one New Orleans eatery here that annually hosts our carnival revels, Hanks, turned us away despite a long-held reservation. An omen no doubt!) Our Grammy-nominated neighbor, Michael Hoppe’s annual concert at the Angela Peralta Teatro for the benefit of art education for the local children of the campo has concluded. Just yesterday, the surrounding indigenous community dedicated the day as they have for centuries to drumming and dancing around the main Jardin in celebration of Seńor de La Conquista*. And we’re busy adding more art, décor and cooling mechanisms to our casa ahead of our renters’ arrival for the intense summer just after April Fools.

But this disturbingly unchanged busy Lenten season is anything but routine for it’s overwhelmed by a kind of melancholy for us gringos here, a different kind, not one of pious religious introversion or penance but of a sad discordancy with all the hitherto comforting signs around us of continuity, communion and community. This lent we seem to be wandering alone in our desert paradise.

These days there is an almost exhaustive, long-suffering acceptance bordering on amusement cum pity for the gringo population here by the Sanmiguelenses. They’re used to the clueless self-referential attitudes of their over-privileged northern neighbors. Now they’re merely adjusting to absorbing the addition of fear, guilt and defensiveness amongst them. Like their savvy and pragmatic but unflinchingly proud president, they know how to handle us because they have little choice as we are a given.
*If the indigenous folks can celebrate being conquered by Spanish Catholicism while hanging onto their pagan rituals then the Mexican State can boast its economic savviness in navigating the manipulation of their giant Northen neighbors.:-)

Now the large Canadian contingent here is a somewhat different story. They too are melancholy but also angry, mostly at us Estadounidenses but also at themselves for being the biggest dupes of the continent for a couple of hundred years. They are, of course, among our most talented, kind and welcoming of ex-pat friends here. But I have to admit we’re steering clear a bit till our return north in a few weeks. By then perhaps the Tariffs of Damocles will have either fallen or been sheathed and Easter will be a true re-birth or a sign of the apocalypse. And perhaps I'll then try an explanation of the unexplained as tonic to these days of living precariously. 

In the meantime, we look forward to a SMA visit from an dear old friend, Mike Downing, gird our gringo loins for re-entry into Yankeeland (with a hope we don't share the same fate as the last SpaceX Booster.), prepare for week on the Upper West Side, followed by Pawleys, a birthday concert and a rare dip into the Western Europe!

 Stay-tuned, mi lectores preciosos!
 
 
 
 

Hola mis lectores preciosos!

February is waning which, for our nuclear familial quartet, means birthday celebrations: Ollie’s just shared with George Washington and AJ’s soon to be between the Ides and St. Patrick’s. For some of you it’s Carnival time, the approach of Lent, the dimly visible promise of Spring re-birth; but for most of the sentient world in this quarter century year, I imagine the shortest month seems simply never-ending as the relentless un-making of the American republic continues to rise in our consciousness like the threateningly filthy waters of Katrina after the storm had long passed. When will it start to recede, how daunting the clean-up, and what to re-build and what to abandon? In any case there has been, is now and will remain anxiety.

So before I surf into the actual theme of this post, a typically overwrought appreciation of our much anticipated automotive trek to the Pacific coast of Mexico this past week, I thought perhaps first a lame meditation on fear would be apt.

We, or should I say La Sombra (nee Jackie Jean Carroll), hatched the idea of a return trip to the fabulously chill Pacific beach spot of Troncones in the state of Guerrero soon after we flew there for a fab seashore getaway via Queretaro to Zihuatanejo last March. She solidified the plans last November by enlisting our intrepid travel, art, design and surf-loving besties from Sag Harbor to join us in a penthouse beach rental called Nerea on the north edge of Troncones for four days. This time, however, we’d drive the six to seven hours from San Miguel to the Pacific coast via Michoacan.
The idea of driving across central Mexico and back was both exciting and anxiety provoking. Exciting because we got to experience the quite frankly exhilarating topography of the beginnings of the southern Sierras up close, not to mention the freedom of not being a slave to the airlines.  Anxiety-making because the US State Dept probably has a warning about traveling to Michoacan and Guerrero at all, much less by car. Hell, there’s one for here in Guanajuato, I’m sure. And there’s always tales of road trips interrupted with shakedowns by local cops, deadly blunders onto a cartel’s mountain meth lab and, of course, the standard ole banditti kidnappings. Suffice it to say, then, we spent a great deal of time an energy making sure our drive route was meticulously planned. We even bought a dash-cam! In fact in the months and weeks prior to our pleasure jaunt to the beach, the anxiety almost overcame the joy of anticipating the exploration of more of this amazing place we’ve made our sometime homeland. Why was that?

It got me thinking about the power of fear in the human psyche. I read a piece not long ago about what I guess is paleontological anthropology. From the time of Darwin, evidently, the idea of natural selection when applied to humans suggested to our nineteenth century logic that we must be a species of predators and thus when psychology came around it merely picked-up that idea to explain our motivations for aggression and to excuse and eventually celebrate our thirst for superiority over nature and each other. But actually, if you study the components of the human body in terms of natural selection vs the rest of the animal world, it becomes painfully obvious that we are prey not predator. Our slight bodies, veggie chomping teeth, unclawed extremeties, long-distance running, home-building wariness. And as a species of prey, it is fear that motivates us not predation. It explains both what has happened in our present political sitch and why the most pleasurable experience of our amazing trek to the beach has been in recalling it! We managed to outsmart those predators always lurking!

OK, enough, enough epiphanizing on fear, how about that long beach run!?

Spoiler alert: The drive, while long and sometimes video-game like* when engaging in the Mexican highway protocol of passing any vehicle at any time no matter the number of lanes, existence of and/or width of shoulder, incline, acuteness of curve or number, size and/or visibility of what’s in the other lane, was breathtakingly beautiful and incident, difficulty, and kidnapping free! Both ways!
*Occasionally, you just have to pull out into that blind mountain curve and pass that struggling double length trailer hauling tariff-heavy steel trusting that the double length trailer hauling soon-to-be $50 avocados in the other direction will find enough of a shoulder to let you live to tackle level three!

I did unintentionally try to screw the pooch even before we began, however, by giving myself food poisoning the night before we hit the road. The lucky result was that Jackie did a bunch of the driving which probably saved both our lives. The plan was to drive about 2.5 hours on Sunday from San Miguel to Morelia, the vibrant colonial capitol of Michoacan which we had visited before, spend the night at an Airbnb in its Historico Centro, then head the 4.5 hours to Troncones on Monday, arriving at our beachfront penthouse in time to meet Doug and Victoria there. They were flying into Zihuatanejo from JFK and cabbing it north to our spot on La Majahua shoreline. Except for the fact that my previous poisoning precluded my exploring any of Morelia on Sunday*, the plan worked as hoped. *While I nursed several bottles of Electolytes and a platano tabasco in Morelia, Jackie visited the recently unveiled and renovated ant-fascist mural painted by two San Francisco WPA artists in 1934. See pix above.

Our third floor apt at Nerea had a huge thatched roofed living room with panoramic views of the ocean, stunning and affordable with a communal pool and service folk always on hand. Our companions were as agreeable as the weather on the mid-southern Pacific Coast of Mexico in February, very warm, ideal. The beaches are many, lovely and mostly empty, strewn with black volcanic basalt and sometimes hiding sea urchins. For any east coast beach goers, the surf on most is mild and delightful for active swimming cum body surfing. The big plus however is the real surfing spots from Troncones to La Saladita and our lifelong surfer, Doug took full advantage with the help of some local guides.
While the area is refreshingly and decidedly undisco, chill, minimal, and totally unpretentious, it has been discovered by gringos. They’re mostly low-key (Canadians) and superannuated surfers.

The food is seafood, fresh, simply prepared local seafood, Huachinango (red-snapper), Langosto (lobster), and plenty of Camarones (shrimp). Our fav eating establishments this week were Un Pedacito de Cielo, the restaurant at the very design-forward Lo Sereno Hotel (ate there twice) and Restaurante Brisas. Except for the hotel, they and others our measly four days didn’t allow us to sample are all right on the beach. Suffice it to say that we had such a nice time that we’re already planning next year’s visit, perhaps even bringing some family. Ping me if you’re interested .

For the final leg home to San Miguel, Jackie booked us into a little jewel of a hotel Casa Encantada in the stunning historico centro of the artsy lakeside Michoacan city of Pátzcuaro about 3.5 hours from Troncones. The town is worth a visit on its own as its chockablock with art and crafts and within striking distance of other maker-towns in the state such as Santa Clara de Cobre, the center for all things Copper which we visited last year.

Thus on Saturday late morning we pointed our Naranja Nissan Kicks outfitted with the unnecessary dash-cam back towards San Miguel de Allende  where we arrived virtually unscathed and a tiny bit tan 3.5 hours later. Lessons learned? Have plenty of effectivo (cash) for tolls as you definitely want to stick to the mostly impressive interstate-like toll roads as the tolls come often and heavy. Get gas when you can and always use effectivo if you can (sometimes tarjetas de credito can be grifted). Embrace the gorgeous mountain vistas, damned lakes, and amazing blue Mexican skies even when you’re passing that chicken truck on the shoulder or creeping over yet another tope (ubiquitous speed bump).
​
Most of all recognize we’re driven by fear, it’s biological, just stare it in its red-capped eyes and vow not to let it degenerate your morals or ruin your vacations.
 
 
 
 

​It’s Constitution Day here. Not exactly Carnival meets Supebowl but the streets, jardins, and restaurants of SMA are oddly full of competing touristas on a warm and sunny Monday with the fiesta civil. And because it’s now February, gringo deep winter tourists are starting to descend as well but are still outnumbered by Chilangos on their day off. No contest really. Of course, the irony of celebrating the Mexican constitution while ours is currently under stress on the day that Claudia Sheinbaum shall we say, tamed Señor Tariff for the time being isn’t lost on us. What’s really not lost is a yearning nostalgia for a sharp, serious, composed, confident and glib communicator at the nation’s helm as I watched the Mexican Presidente address her countrymen over the weekend, facing a looming economic catastrophe via their closest ally with calm and purpose. She’s a smart cookie…remember when we had those in office as opposed to forelock-tugging careerists?
 
It’s also Candelaria (yes, SMA has almost as many tourist-drawing festivals as my old parade-loving hometown along the low crescent of the Mississippi.) Like almost all fiestas here, it’s an imaginative appropriation by the Catholic of the pagan. It’s melding the feast of The Purification of the Virgin Mary which is a rare holdover from the Jewish ritual of purifying the obviously impure mother 40 days after giving birth with the Aztec begging the gods for rain and a bountiful maiz harvest. In the Anglo Christian world it’s mostly the celebration of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple for the first time a la Luke. But here it’s all about pagan tamales and atole because of the stirrings of spring. Most importantly to our viaje a la sombra de México, it signals the beginning of a two week gigantic “flower show” when scores of garden plant, shrub, tree and especially succulent growers from everywhere in central Mexico but mostly Puebla come to town and set up shop in the park here. Traditionally it’s been held in the lush European-style Parque Juarez in the southern, more gringo part of town but this year it’s taken over the newer Zeferino parque which is much nearer to our house here in the northern less gringo part of the city. I’m betting the banda, cumbia, ranchera music that breaks out at the end of each selling session was a bit too much for those snowflakes in Guadiana so now it echoes off our faux Barragán rectilinear architecture over these two weekends. I’m good with that! However, the bad news is there’s easier parking at Zeferino* and so we have already zipped over twice in our Naranja Nissan Kicks to scoop up lots of crazy succulents we don’t need. A small pay back to the local economy which may still get hit by deferred tarrifs.
*Zeferino is the self-taught engineer cum architect who constructed San Miguel's Disneyesque pink Paroquia!
 
Finally, since evidently the underlying theme of this post is guilt of economic hegemony, I suppose it’s time to confess our all-in participation in the thriving pull of dental tourism. We’ve had a local dentist here for several years for whom we save up our routine visits at approximately one tenth the cost of his estadounidense counterparts. Last spring however, I developed some more than routine issues that my guy here said would be better handled by endo-ortho-surgical specialists, so I decided to take my uninsured dental self to three different practitioners in CT. They pretty much all came to the same conclusion for hefty fees, one if not two of my aged teeth needed extraction for more hefty fees. Upon returning to SMA, I went to a new team of similar Mexican dental experts who had come highly recommended possessing some of the most space-age equipment I’d ever seen for the care of molars and incisors. Drs Hugo, Hector and Oscar not only came to the same conclusion as the CT drs but actually found the cause of the complication which the US practitioners hadn’t noticed but indeed harkened back to issues I had some 40 odd years ago. Suffice it to say two extractions, a related surgical procedure, a biopsy and bone grafts came to $720 USD. And what do we charge the cartels for all those illegal AR-15!? Now there’s a trade imbalance!
 
 

Buen día, mis lectores!
 
As the initial month of the first year of the of the second quarter of what was a bright new century, now acting like an old dark one, barrels towards its mercifully short calendar neighbor, the weather, now the supreme barometer of old-age contentment, here in the high-dessert of central Mexico responds dutifully by cutting the daily temperature gap from pre-dawn to mid-afternoon from 40 degrees to a mere 30 (47F at 5am and 77F at 3pm). Hard as it is for northeastern émigré gringos to fathom, even after some eight years of assumed acclimatization, in just over a week we’ll have the Candaleria flower market marking the start of spring here in SMA. In February!
 
Still, one must acknowledge the elephant in the habitación (or horse in the hospital) as all this cogitating on the perennially satisfying warm and sunny passage of time is not so subtly influenced this new year by the aggressively intrusive news around the recent regime change in our homeland. While we refuse to accept the envious congrats of our non-migrating compatriots for some sort of long-term clairvoyance in putting a border between ourselves and the info onslaught following the election, there is a definite psychological advantage we recognized many years ago in embracing the distance, both real and cultural, in getting outta dodge each January. It does lend perspective along with respite. I will admit, however, that the jarring political jump-the-shark re-run at home has set my inner where-are-we-in-history compass spinning. Now I promise not to attempt after-fact-glib-NY-Times-plaining, even if I could, but I do have thoughts and fears with which to bore you.
 
This week’s blitzkrieg at re-setting the nation’s governing and societal magnetic poles suggests being in Mexico right now is perhaps what it was like to be in the Baltics or Poland as Stalin’s rule took hold of next-door Soviet Russia. Consider how the long-assumed promise of the all-powerful neighbor state bringing a stable peace and universal prosperity as its noble goal was worldwide and everlasting cultural and economic revolution in favor of the forgotten classes is suddenly replaced by an unapologetic Russia-centric self-aggrandizing dictatorship where all surrounding acolyte countries are pressured to serve her interests and who now live in constant fear of angering the lurking Russian bear. In other words, at this slight remove, the US is looking like the new Soviet Union this week.
 
After all, I read that Steve Bannon is an ardent admirer of the Bolsheviks: tapping the simmering resentment of the working class, encouraging tactical political violence, re-writing history when necessary to advance party goals, leveraging propaganda, and using a small but disruptive political toehold to quickly create a one-party system. Think about it: wholesale political “Purges” via musk’s HR trick of making civil servants disposable “at-will” employees, “state-terror” threats via passive-aggressive executive orders, and even “executions” via removing security from perceived disloyal but vulnerable apparchiks. Most striking of all is breaking the existing system by overwhelming it with rapid change and the coinage of dog-whistle condemning phraseology in official memos: “sharks of imperialism”, “rootless cosmopolitans” and of course “enemies of the people” are now “Marxist equity”, “social engineering”, “gender ideology”, “green” and the biggest boogaboo, “wokeness”. What’s old is new again!
 
Ok, I admit that these presumptuously lofty and far-fetched historical comparisons were probably brought on brought on by a guiltily long and delightful weekend in CDMX where Trotsky also enjoyed long delightful weekends in banishment with Freda and Diego. But really, is anything based on observable events far-fetched any longer?
 
So, In the midst of this swirling political mishigas we somewhat surreally carry-on with the assumed subject of this blog, our improbable extended Viaje en Mexico and this year’s ritual sojourn to what has become perhaps our favorite and most comfortable locale after NYC, Mexico City. We decamped to the very upscale Polanco colonia, staying in an art-filled boutique hotel, The Pugseal vs. our usual Airbnb cum gringo fav, hipster Condesa.
 
(Venue Review: While lovely, quiet, safe and BeverlyHillsesque with Avenida Presidente Masaryk* making Rodeo Drive look like a strip mall, we prefer the treed and chill Condesa or vibrant and partying Roma Norte.
*Named after the Premiere of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935 known for bringing democracy to eastern Europe: see heady digression above for strained ironic connection.)
 
We traveled with our Rincón nabes and California besties, Ken and Mary Scarlett, pooling our extremely favorably exchanged pesos to take the ever-reliable BajioGo car service the 3.5 hours there and back from SMA (when solo, we take a bus). Jackie set the theme and purpose of our Thursday to Sunday jaunt to the 7500 ft high city of 22 million: Food y Barragán! The culinary destination that CDMX has become gave us an embarrassment of choices although our original plan to hit the famous Pujol and gorgeous Rosetta were foiled by waiting too late to make reservations. Still that blunder allowed us to discover two new venues and re-visit one old standby. Best of the trip was the stunning and gorgeously decayed décor, amazing service and wonderfully prepared family style Mediterranean fare at Taverna in colonia Juarez. Lardo in leafy Condesa never disappoints and Nueve Nueve in Roma Norte, the new favorite of our pal Rod who lives in the vibrant nabe is a monumental venue with first rate cuisine. The big duh is that evidently why we like going to CDMX so much is that architecture and design are as important to the Mexican restaurant aesthetic as is its cuisine. And we’re nothing if not superannuated groupies if of architecture and food.
 
Thus the other theme of our weekend was Barragán (Mexico's Frank Lloyd Wright)! Jackie booked us hard-to-get tours of both his longtime studio/home in the decidedly non-gentrified Miguel Hidalgo colonia followed by Casa Pedragal in the upscale Pedragal colonia built on a vast volcanic field in the southern part of the city developed mid-century not far from the Coyacan and San Angel homes and studios of Freda and Diego. The subtle but pronounced contrasts between where the famed architect spent his last decades and the work he created for his wealthy clients was a revelation. We, of course, took notes for our own Barragán wannabe casa. The biggest takeaway were  the “pulque pelotas” Jackie glommed from the museum shop. Those ubiquitous glass globes that popup all over Barragáns interiors are now filling our place in San Miguel. Surprise!
 
Our final Jackie induced wanderings had us discovering El Bazar Sábado in the comfy San Angel nabe where makers galore from all over the city offer pretty impressive crafts and, closer to our Palanco digs, Classicos Mexicanos, a museum-like showroom of updated classical Mexican furniture design from well-known contemporary designers.
​Food and design in other words, the staples of Mexico City consumed in three days.

All in all an undeserved and extremely civilized respite from the deliberate chaos of our northern home wherein several times I felt like I should go-off on a rant decrying the audacity of reveling in the luxury and comfort of entitled viejos gringos like Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain. But I didn't. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hola, mis lectores perdidos!
 
Sí, soy yo, Rip Van Werito!
 
Why, you ask, is this once semi-ubiquitous display of self-referential and needlessly digressive musings by a demi-expat alter-cocker, waking-up now? Surely the adventure of building a house in and navigating the commerce, culture, language, and politics of gringo-infested central Mexico is long completed by now. What’s left to convolutedly muse over?
(Well, you’re not really asking, are you? It’s me pretending you’re asking as an ashamedly clunky device for making excuses for this awkward, much delayed return to the overcrowded, evidently Chinese-controlled blogosphere. But it’s all I could come up with, so chill.)
 
Let’s see if I can manufacture a few rationales as I’m serenaded by Mexican marching bands in parade here at the edge of centro for Allende Day!  (Yes, we’re still here in San Miguel! And yes, I still get a kick out the civic desfiles with their numerous drum and bugle corps! I’ve concluded It calls up the southern marching band competition in the Carrollton Parade that passed near my grandmother’s house in mid-city New Orleans during Mardi Gras season of my childhood. It was, by far my favorite parade. Loved The Citadel’s storybook military uniforms!)
 
An obvious if presumptuously serious excuse for this unexpected (and, no doubt unneeded) web-intrusion is that today is the first full day of the re-boot of the political reality show that my native land has decided to put back into the schedule, presumably because it’s lost the ability to develop anything new in that realm. American, if not global, politics has become like Broadway, always defaulting to revivals. Unfortunately, this time it seems we’re retroactively FOMO for Stalinism and want to give it try! So, before they send me out to clean, I’ve decided to leave behind a journal of the upcoming plague years for future Silo rebels to dig-up and study for clues as to what the hell we were thinking!
Another, more truthful excuse is that Jackie keeps not so subtly hinting that she liked me better when I was engaged in this self-absorbed exercise while in self-imposed seasonal exile. So, here we go again.
 
Obviously, a lot has transpired within and without the family in and out of SMA, but I’ll (re)start with today here, Jan 21, 2025. The day after the Inauguration burlesque back home just happens to be Allende Day here in San Miguel. We celebrate one of the most important
“insurgentes” of the first Mexican revolution and our tourist-driven town’s namesake with parades, historical pageants, and of course fireworks. What’s different about the patriotic displays here than in the good old Estados Unidos, is the overt participation of the country’s military. There are more Guarda Nacional marching with lethal weapons than schools with snare drums. For my Nola friends, it’s like having the Nuclear Weapons Center from Kirkland Air Force base marching with samples of their arsenal in Endymion! (Come to think of it, I’m sure it’ll happen by next carnival, n’cest pas? They'll throw purple, green and gold geiger counters!) The effect of seeing a sudden phalanx of heavily armed mixed gender commandos and motorized artillery amidst high-stepping ER nurses, restaurant servers, ax-wielding bomberos, caballeros on beautiful palominos, and uniformed school children is now disturbingly reassuring. Is it assimilation or capitulation? 
 
Coming this unwarranted season: Succumbing to SMA ‘s dental tourism, Jackie vs the HOA’s new rule committee, a culinary and Baragán sojourn to CDMX, a road trip to Troncones on the Pacific, and more, yes, more house fixes! An essay on Fugas, Mini-splits, and ceiling fans.
 
Hasta maňana, weritos!

​As the earth incrementally tilts the northern hemisphere back towards the sun, we continue to hedge our meteorological bets by rushing down to meet it as soon as possible. In other words we fled to Mexico at the start of this year as we have now for at least five if not seven. Since we as a species have somehow completely accepted the illogical Einsteinesque fungibility of time, it really no longer matters. Of course, we have also accepted the fungibility of facts, literal experience, and truth which is why we’re in an election year that looks no different than the one four or eight years ago.
 
Suffice it to say we came down the first week of January 2024 as we do every year when the winter starts to raise its mean visage in yankeeland. We will continue to do so, I’ll warrant, until we don’t, of course. And then we may contend we never did, for who’s to say really.
 
So it’s either the shameful idleness of old age or the cursed apple of theoretical physics and brain-science come to roost, or the Plato-warned internet driven anarchy of unfettered democratization, but we’ve become completely untethered social or anti-social creatures. The only answer is to retreat to the family and the tribe of the like-minded. Thankfully I have both that offer ballast and balance. In fact, thanks to AJ, the family is expanding, to Oliver it’s creating amazing stuff, and to Jackie it’s mostly serene and always comely. As to the tribe, the weekly Zooms, daily puzzles, and regular physical rendezvous keep it all in focus till someone catches the rope and pulls us back into port.
 
Optimistic? Moi? We’ll see

Yawn, stretch, rub eyes, shiver out many many weeks of psycho-cobwebs*, blink hard and dare to take up the e-quill once more for the next Hellerish chapter of our illusionary quest for the illusive concept of home here in the dimming of our first-world heydays.
 
Or should it be the illusive quest for the illusionary concept? Shit. If there was any doubt about the power of entropy in the Newtonian universe we inhabit, just try refraining from any slightly strenuous reflective mental activity for three months or so and see how the little grey cells atrophy, time grinds and the keyboard turns to quicksand. I cannot tell you, those few left of my unexplainably patient reader friends and fam, how often I’ve pledged myself, lo, these past spring and summer months, to re-visit the previous baker’s dozen-plus-another-one blog posts from Mexico with a mind to “cleaning them up” for continuity and self-respect, forget about possible posthumous publication. Well, I guess I could tell you, but that would be a ludicrous digression, even for me. Suffice it say that each almost daily pledge of a pick-up the story back in Nuro re-start summoned the equally ubiquitous and almost instantaneous “nah”. Oddly enough, much the same self-rejoinder sprung to mind when pledging to use the rowing machine, open the Duolingo app, avoid carbs, and look for paid employment. Ah, it's a seductive apple of procrastination that the clement seasons and a second home cultivate for our temptation for we are, after all, slaves to our chemistry. And we landed just as spring/summer turned the corner of the hemisphere, when the path of least resistance is pretty much the immutable warm-weather law, right? Thus, I come to the almost legal conclusion that it’s better to just dive back into the silly blogpool, ignoring its shallow depth warning, thumbing a nose at past effort, scoffing at continuity, laughing at grammar to wallow effortlessly in its easy, run-on waters till the fall chill and proto-homelessness sober me up. Plus, the quantum end of physics says things can be in many places at the same time, and the same time can be in many places, so really I’m writing this almost four months ago and the past stuff is all cleaned-up somewhere/sometime, so stop judging!     
 
Right, so much for the strained re-entry, where were we? Ah, yes. Coming home to the disappointing northeastern spring and leaving behind a still not quite finished Casa 9! (Spoiler alert, it’s still not absolutely done, but more on that in later installments, I promise.) There’s that pesky concept, home, which I could pretend future scholars of this oeuvre (ha, ha, ha) would no doubt identify as its central organizing theme, if only it had one, which it doesn’t. Yes, I know it’s just a self-indulgent exercise in trying to ennoble the crass buying and selling of houses by blogging the experience as if it were a literary trope when we should be honing our do-not-resuscitate codicils. But, truth be told, we have indeed spent these spring and summer months back in the northeast US wrestling with the meta-idea of two homes, which would be “the” home and where will the second one be, if there really needs to, can be a second one. Yes, dear blogophile, displacement angst is in the house or houses! Agggghhh! 

How did this come to be, you stubborn chrono-addicts are no doubt asking. Ok, ok, you see, returning the ides of April, in time to file our taxes, also necessitated our meeting with that seminal figure in the waning lives of first world geezers, the money-management guy. In our case, the ever-genial and always re-assuring Tom Huvane. He’s the aging baby-boomer version of the oracle of delphi who, as the fiscal fumes of one's financial future begin to make heads swim, drops the not so subtle incantation of “the plan is in great shape as long as you sell the house in New Rochelle” with a further chant of “with a recession just around the corner” presumably of the start of the second of Trump’s FDR-besting 4 terms, “better sell sooner than later!” And, so, my dear whoever’s left, the real estate gauntlet was once again thrown at Jackie’s super-broker’s feet and the narrative die was cast for the epic poem that has been our spring/summer of ’19 back “home”.

​We were to spend every waking and sleepless hour, every bit of what’s left of our drowsy intellect, every plant an animal-based calorie of waning psychic energy to the selling of our beloved dream house in Nuro followed by the acquisition of a smaller, cheaper, less taxed, please-just-not-a-nightmare-of-a-mouseburger house as our northeast US somewhere within visiting distance of AJ & Oliver home. All before the tilt of October starts the leaves to question their dependency on chlorophyll and the Yankees on their starting pitching.  

Thus Easter, Pawley's, Mom’s 95th birthday, The lifting of  the Reserva de Dominio after we paid the final installment on Casa 9 even though the damn pergola wasn’t even started yet, Season 3 of Stranger Things, 50th Anniv of Moon Landing, the Democratic Debates, 3 feet of hail in SMA that leaked water into Casa 9 from badly caulked skylights, 9 inches of rain in the Marigny, Getting the solar pool heat finally installed at Casa 9, and Mueller’s Missed Opp all marched along these last 4 months, but all paled in comparison to the earth-shifting implications of JC & MK’s Suffocating Summer of Sucky Real Estate Options.

And you thought tales of the Rincon were scary. 

​Connecticut, you say? Oh, Stay-tuned!

 *(has the ring of some malevolent Marvel mega-weapon, no?)

Hola, ya’ll, one last time desde the sun y fun capital of Guanajuato. Well, not really for the “last time”, but since I made the bright self-in-corner-painting-move of calling the previous post “penultimate”, we’re sort of stuck with this being a “one last time” and so it will be. Let’s say the last one this time round from the brisk cool and sunny morning studio of our real despite-all-odds home, Casa 9 en El Rincon de Sta. Maria, Col. Obraje, San Miguel de Allende, Gte., Estados Unidos de Mexico. For, yes, we leave for the March-Madness-Mueller-Memo obsessed northeastern US too early Tuesday morning after nigh on to three months in this whiplash paradise.
 
I wish we could tie-up what we’ve come to calling the Alter Cocker Adventure: Phase One with a  neat litany of universal lessons learned con happy ever after all nuggets of cactus rainbows and unihorned burros astride our impeccably finished minor league-Barragàn modernist desert palace, but what we’re really taking back home for a while is much more complex and dare I say life-altering than that. “Yeah?”, I hear you thinking; “will we finally get some substance, some little profundity from all the sad-clown attempted comedy of these aren’t we brave scribblings?” “Sure, life’s wonderfully messy even after you’re eligible for the senior ticket discounts on Metro North, we knew that. And so…? Give us and a proper ending ending, for Crissake!”
 
Hold-on, you’re looking for the life-altering, surprising but uplifting take-away of this intense but, let’s face it, only one quarter of a year excursion a couple of degrees south and one language and time zone away? Don’t know yet, sorry. As Jackie says, we’ve got to let it percolate, but you will be the second to know when the moral brew is ready. We give you our Valente-like promise. Teehee. In the meantime, we’ll just wrap up the diarist chronology thang, post some nice pix and let you get back to your brackets as we drag out our three dusty suitcases and stare towards Tuesday March 26th, VM Day. (Well if Jan 8th was D-day, then March 26th should be Victory in Mexico Day, right? Ok, make it Victory OF Mexico, smart-asses!) Three suitcases, a camera bag and one cat carrier. Yup, I said ONE cat carrier.
Bummer alert!
 
As you may recall, we delayed our original return date for a few original reasons, the weather here was too mind-bendingly gorgeous to go back to always disappointing March in NY, didn’t want to interrupt AJ’s visit and there were more unfinished projects to oversee on the completion of THE HOUSE. Added to that was an unspoken lingering hope that Girlscout would finally descend from the rooftops or ascend from the arroyos of the Obraje in the nick o time, given a little more of it. But that didn’t happen. I think we’ve come to terms with her flight, however. She’s obviously found her place here, perhaps making a stand that until the present pro-canine/anti-cat US regime is overthrown, she will remain in AMLO’s feline friendly socialist paradise. Or more likely, she’s always been a hider, and just hid for too long this time. Don’t cry for Girlscout, Argentina, we think she’s just embarking on the third of her nine lives, but you may lend some sympathy to her former estadounidense humans. Especially the female human who remains fairly bereft at her loss. On the other hand, the prospect of seeing our short-legged, long haired orange tabby with a handlebar mustache, bandolero, dangling cigarillo and shaded almond eyes under a sombrero gives us something to look forward to upon our return to SMA for Phase Two in late summer!
 
And before we take down that Bummer alert, remember the “Halefrigginluia” raised in the last post over finally getting internet from the time-shifted Ma Bell of Mexico, Telmex? That lasted two and half days until the communication-monopolies-are-the-same-world-over technicians discovered that our line had been spliced onto an overloaded distribution node thanks, evidently, to the incentive of “lunch-money” to the installer buey last Saturday. And I thought I was getting the hang of working the sitch here!  After all, I grew in Louisiana and worked for NOPSI, but when that little peso-incentivized electrical improvisation slowed everyone else’s web access in the Rincon, our electron enabled lifeline to you, dear friends and fam, got pulled pronto by HQ. Now we’re talking easy three weeks and the prospect of having to stoop to going with the dreaded cable company, Megacable just to keep our webcam broadcasting and our solar panels registering while we’re gone! This is where I’d usually employ my patented lazy button on an unresolved plot point, “stay-tuned”, but if this is the last post, I got to find another device, hmm.
 
Ok, you want some takeaways? Here’s one, ConEd ShmonEd or we’re not in Orleans parish any more, Dorothy. Semi-seriously, though, new definitions of achievement rise in new cultural situations! The right view of this seeming slap-down here is that another major milestone that we thought we had reached we get to look forward to reaching again upon our return! Build, knock down, build again! The circle of Mexican life!
 
That wasn’t so hard, ok, here’s another: You, my bloggispherephiles, are all living examples of another lesson of our first round of the Michael & Jackie Mexican Adventure Bracket. That’s the simple and universal Duh that the most precious and cherished of all unexpected but fervently hoped-for discoveries when throwing yourself into the uncomfort zone are people. No matter how unbelievably and breathtakingly pleasing to the senses the strange new venue, it’s uncovering the shared and unique landscape of its inhabitants that makes you anxious for the next day to begin. I mean when was the last time you woke up at 5:30am and thought, damn, it’s not time to get up yet. I’m not talking about too much caffeine either. We’re reminded of our oh so distant youth when we left the humid monotony of the delta for the cold shock of Manhattan and the prospect of meeting all of you, as an example. So it is that his last lap of Phase One has delivered unto us the gift of even more amazing humans that instantaneously trigger and neutralize all of the two-steps-backism of this insanely beautiful, clement, seductive, hard-easy, familiar-strange, cat-dog new blessedly not-home home.
 
So we’re leaving this build, knock-down, build again place in the hands of a whole new cast of characters. You’ve met most of them, the villains and saints of our adventure and we encourage you to contact Meg Simon who will be casting the Netflix series from the podcast of this blog in the very near future if you’re interested in a role. Add to the existing dramatis personae the following:
Manolo, our infectiously can-do-but-at-my-own-pace accountant turned real estate broker turned property manager and his wife, daughter and son who are to be the guardian angels of Casa 9 till we return and after.
Sarai, the encyclopedic and overwhelmingly diligent landscape designer and experimental horticulturist and her crew of equally diligent plant bueys who are turning the several outdoor spaces of our could-be cold modernist home into an amazing botanic refuge.
Jesùs, our gimlet-eyed guardhouse guy who has become our trusted fix what Valente’s guys have gotten wrong guy who possesses the surest hands of any portrait painter and the calm demeanor of any astronaut.
 
See you all back north in a few long days, changed but the same, built, knocked-down, built again. Stay tuned…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Happy St Paddy's and no, we're not on our way home to the overserved and underwarmed northeast US. But good catch, oh steel-trap minded blogamaniacs! You are correct, we were slated to reverse our contra-caravan so, I guess just caravan, north, albeit with no apparent gang affiliation, this very day along with AJ, who, graciously, spent a hunk of his puny and precious vacay time with us this past week, but we're still here. Physically, anyway, for another nine, count 'em nine days. We made the decision some time back that, with a number of Casa 9 “deliverables” still teetering on the cusp along with the prospect of packing-up-the-house, such as it is, -mania impinging on AJ’s concise visit, we’d rebook to the 26th. I know, we didn’t tell you in the previous posting and for that we humbly ask your pardon.  And what, my deeply committed friends and fam as well the odd, how did you get in here, FB creeper, is our present mental disposition at this vague but pivotal juncture of our waning adventure, you may well be asking yourselves. Well, you may as well ask yourselves because we’re not answering that question. Not, that is, till we attend to that old taskmaster, chronology!
 
 
So, this last hurrah, final push, denouement , coda of phase one of “the Adventure” was preceded by a much anticipated and, we’ll admit, a tad worried-over visit from AJ. He was arriving in Mexico City on Tuesday and flying out Sunday. Now he doesn’t get a lot of time off and it was going to be his birthday while he was here so we were facing a long haul cum short skid scenario of which we wanted to make the most.  How would we accomplish that, you ask. Planning, my friends, precise planning. A quick hits of Mexico City followed by San Miguel food, golf, sun, pool, rooftops, did we mention food?
 
Our plan then was to start the week by taking the 3-4 hour, depending on time of day, day of week, week of month, month of year, Premira Plus 10:00am bus on Monday morning from San Miguel’s Estaciòn Central de Autobuses into Mexico City’s Terminal Norte, then grab a cab to a very handsome boutique hotel in the Juarez colonia, Stara Hamburgo, that was run by our neighbor and role model Lucia Liceaga’s friend Sandy. We’d stay there for two nights while AJ would stay for one. Jackie would don her Source-er’s disguise and scope muebles in the capital on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning before the hijo arrived Tuesday afternoon upon which time we’d spirit him off to Coyaocàn to experience Casa Azul and Trotsky’s House and Diego Rivera’s Studio before sampling the first of a host of fabulous CDMX restaurants like Pasillo de Humo (oaxacan) and Azul Condesa (oh, that Tortilla Soup!) and then we’d all head back to SMA on the comfortable Primera Plus 5:40pm bus on miercoles where he’d spend four chill days as the first non-me&Jackie to experience the new family set-up and we'd relax the hell out of him. Brilliant, yes?
 
Ok, I can tell what you’re thinking but Monday Morning Quarterbacking isn’t really constructive at this point so please put it away. One thing we had neglected to take into account was that Mexico City has 22 million inhabitants and 9 million vehicles on the streets at any one time. While we did make it to Coyoacàn for a quick sprint around Frida’s house with about three hundred of her biggest fans before it closed and managed a couple of wonderful meals and a greener than green park or two, about three quarters of our time there was spent in Ubers luxuriating in tear-out-your-hair-if-you-still possess-any Mexico City traffic. The relatively serene Terminal Norte of  early Monday afternoon was packed and tense on Weds evening and the four and half hour bus ride north was not the chill introduction to SMA we had envisioned for our harried NYC journalist.

Lesson to be learned when visiting amazingly handsome, dynamic, delicious and gorgeous park-infested CDMX: Pick a neighborhood and explore it on foot for several days, only taking to cabs and preferably ubers to other colonias early and late in the day.You’re welcome!
 
Despite the somewhat fraught and draining opening day and half in the capital city and a limited time away looming, our first-born first visitor to the SMA adventure project was able to partake of some of the charms of my namesake saint's town and, in the process, we rediscovered them too. Like El Charco Del Ingenio Botanic Gardens that sit in the hills just above our Rincon and offer a beautiful walk, some amazing views and bizarre cactus. Plus he worked on his tan and his handicap with what he says was the fastest 18 holes he'd ever played at the nearby impeccable Ventana club de golf. He even did us the honor of braving the, shall we say bracing and I do mean plunge Casa 9 pool before treking down to centro for a classic SMA meal. He, of course, brought us something too, not only a wonderful vibe of family and home we were sorely in need of, but didn't know it, but also a bit of break-through luck on the it-will-never-be-cleared-before-they-go back punchlist, dear schedenfreuders. Oh yes!

For we now, after five long weeks of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown Telmex promises of internet connection, a lone installer arrived yesterday while we were deep in AJ’s birthday celebrations over a lunch at the glamorous The Restaurant in Centro on Diez y Solano, about 1.2 miles from the Rincon. We had ignored last night’s 15th straight notice of their cross-their-corporate-hearts promised arrival within 72 hours to fo'sure install so for Chrissake don’t leave your home. We had settled into the reflex of knowing if by some wormhole an installer actually did appear, confused, questioning and disoriented at Casa 9 after all these weeks, there were always hordes of unregulated, non-unionized, and seriously un-OSHA-ed workers to let them in. Except on Saturdays, of course, when there are none of the ample build-it-tear-it-down-build-it-again craftsmen at hand. When I got the call from both the contractor, Valente and the Property Manager, Manolo that TELMEX WAS AT THE RINCON, I had just finished a lovely lunch that I had to put in immediate jeopardy as I left Jackie and AJ at the table to run the 1.2 miles and throw my body in front of this phantom Telmex installer’s little white van, if needs be, to get him to stay!  Did I make it? Was the broadband of Gunajuato curse broken? Testament to the success of my altercocker one sixteenth marathon is that this posting is the first in some 5 weeks delivered via home WIFI.  Halefrigginluia!
 
Another bright light in a week that started in a dark mood, was the lovely surprise of our let’s get to it landscaper, Sarai Guzman. When the three intrepid Mexico City traffic victims stumbled across the threshold of Casa 9 at 10:30 Weds night, we were confronted with an amazing array of fruit an olive trees, palms, more bizarre succulents than you could imagine, birds of paradise, bougainvillea, jasmine and more giant terra-cotta pots than a Beckett festival!  As we retired exhausted in our new starting to feel like home, a visit from family and the promise of an amazing garden allowed that perhaps as the horizon appears, things were looking up! We even had some rain for the first time this calendar year last night as we walked back from a lovely birthday dinner at the top of Trazo 1810.
 
Ok, OK! Totally out of character, sorry. I won’t get carried away here. We’re still nowhere with our water system or Pergola, still surrounded by 6 houses in varied states of Hiroshima level dust-cloud producing construction, still finding barely wound electrical tape as the finish of choice on light fixtures, still looking for Girlscout! 
 
So, after a whirlwind five and a fraction days en Los Estado Unidos de Mexico, AJ's winging, if you can apply that somewhat glamorous predicate to flying Jet Blue, his way back to Murray Hill, as we settle-down to another baker’s semana in the relentlessly lovely and clement Obraje colonia of SMA.  One more shot at trying to kill the punchlist and set our minds at ease before we leave our marvellously frustratingly remarkable home in Mexcio in the hands of others till we return for phase two. Stay-tuned, oh faithful followers of our extranjero follies, as the finale of our grand Mexican Adventure approaches.