La Vida Loca

I don’t write random musings very often anymore, which maybe makes it even more cliché than usual that I would choose to write on a dark beach on the coast of Mexico. I’m sitting about twenty feet from the water. It foams but doesn’t rise very high. The Beatles are singing “Let it Be” somewhere in the nearby hotel; they’re louder than the surf. I once karaoked that song in Boise; another time, in Shanghai. The song is bittersweet enough without the memories.

I walked nine kilometers today, maybe ten. From the center of Mazatlan to this “golden” periphery peppered with motels and mid-tier resorts. I limped the last few blocks, but I don’t think it’s my age catching up to me. It seems to be more a matter of bad shoes and thin socks. Conceivably I should also exercise more.

I’m not really sure why I’m in Mexico. At least in London, I had a secret mission and could enjoy the first class seat. Here, I think I came to prove that I could follow through on a travel whim. I had, after all, just cancelled a trip to East Timor in order to work with Bill Cathers at L.A. High this coming Saturday. More than once I had driven toward the airport, then not actually gotten on a plane. So this time, I did. It wasn’t unlike my motivations for doing Decathlon the second time. Regret minimization.

Also, I had told Chuan-Mei I would come—and this was my last chance to make good on that. Of course, I had abortively visited so often that she assumed I wasn’t actually flying here and made other plans. So I’ve been wandering Mazatlan on my own. Not a bad thing. I needed the peace and quiet. I do my best storytelling with an audience, but not my best planning.

I caught the tail end of Mazatlan’s Mardi Grass. Steaming crowds of—Mazatlani?—crowding the beachfront to watch a series of floats. The floats were crawling with dancers, some disinterested, others flaunting their curves. One float was for Alamo Rent a Car. I bought a coconut pastry of some kind, which left my fingers oily, then a cup of corn kernels mashed with cream and cheese. It was tasteless, maybe because I asked them to hold the chili; I tossed it out at a pharmacy where I bought water. I had expected it to taste of Chiapas and my journey with Sanjai.

I think this moment may have made the whole overnight venture worthwhile. Writing on the beach. I’ve always been a sucker for melodrama. Yet there’s something to it. Buried in me—perhaps entombed, at this point—is still that writer who loves words more than alpacas. It takes a lot to let him out. But when he comes out—or, as he is doing now, pokes a tremulous finger through a crack in the wall—he proves that he wants to come out.

I hear threads of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in my head. Memories of the summer after my sophomore year, driving to Venice Beach to meet Sasha and Jessica. Two years earlier I had tossed a Frisbee and run back and forth through Serrania Park. At night I would sprint through a different park with Ali and Jeff. Already I already felt like that had been the distant past. It’s startling how quickly Stanford installed a wall for me between high school and the thereafter.

A lighthouse blinks in the distance. A faro. Last year, I worked for a Grupo Faro, in Quito. That almost feels like Frisbee already. The walls come up more often now. I finished the “thesis” the first couple days of April, from a beautiful hotel in Taipei—after a week of good times and transient friendships.

Taipei. China. Singapore. When did Asia begin to feel more comfortable than Los Angeles? Maybe I am a natural expatriate—or someone who needs regular doses of alien-ness. One could argue that I always feel different from those around me, and that being in a foreign country allows me to manifest that difference, shamelessly.