🇲🇽 Malafama • Temple Mejor • La Faena - 04.12.2025

“Reciting poems in the moonlight, riding a painted boat...

Every place the wind carries me is home.”

--Yu Xuanji (AD 843-868)

Rhythms

Riding a painted boat on new rhythms. The grooves of the old frequencies remain present as a residual echo. And hang your arm over the edge of the boat… and drag your fingertips through the conventional wake of past rhythms…

The wind has carried me to San Miguel Chapultepec, CDMX… where I’m in apartment limbo. Waiting for my Orizaba 210 sublet to open back up. And in the present… life… and everyday routine. And from that, a moment opened up that I… that we… could reconnect.

GildaMonster is my PunkRock intellectual companion from Toluca. She often seems bored in my company… and I’m quite sure she is bored of my frequent absence… but there she is… requesting I pick her up at the train station in Santa Fe on a hazy Friday afternoon.

I have to wade through a collection of public transportation from Escandón to get to the SF station at the edge of the city. It’s an hour and half of travel on foot and it likely takes me more time than it does her to travel down from Toluca. But she recently, and reluctantly, sold her car… and despite being a chingóna (bad-ass) from the barrio, she has anxieties about transportation, and stairs, and the CableBus, and crossing the street… and so on… And until she gets her new car, which she proclaims to be soon… I will gladly scoop her up wherever she likes.

I first met her several months ago in a coffee shop in Coyoacán. She was reading a book, had on a black leather jacket, ripped jeans, tattoos, a lip piercing, and one side of her head was shaved… tomboy-ish looks, tomboy-ish mannerisms, and a fistful of brash punk rock attitude.

I had arrived at the train station just as she was walking off the platform… her hair is now long, auburn colored, she’s wearing makeup… and has a hint of a smile when she sees me… and all adds to a growing list of curiosities I have about this person.

There were affectionate greetings and pleasantries, and I make some comment on how fast her hair grows. And she reminds me how long I’ve been away. And I suppose in some version of an abstract language it means, “I’m glad to see you…”

As we were looking for things to do in the evening… she asked me if I could play pool. It’s been a long time… and I don’t claim to know… but I can… There was a choice of two places… a local joint in Tacubaya (which is my gritty Metro stop) or the gentrified Malafama in La Condesa. I picked the first because she told me the people may see me as exotic and we could get away with hanging with the spicy locals. And she picked the later because… well, because everybody hates gentrification… but not enough to not hang out in a gentrified club. So… Malafama it will be.

Malafama is a popular place so there was a 2 hour wait for a pool table… so we sat… and sipped chelas, snacked, and played UNO.

Apparently Gilda had been keeping a tally of UNO wins in the back of her mind and said, “we are tied… this is for the winner!!!” She stumbles with English at times… but I get the gist.

And before we could finish our championship match… “Heel-da!!! Your pool is ready!”

She was at the table before I even stepped off my barstool. Brushing the felt, racking balls, picking out a stick. She was excited and I believe… excited to crush the only gringo in the place with her pool skills.

This was one of the few scenarios that I’ve seen her animated. She circled the table, confidently grasping the stick, taking absurd angled shots in which I didn’t even understand the physics. When she’d sink a ball, she’d grin towards me, pump her arms, and blast, “baaaamm!! I’m from the barrio!!!”

It made me happy to see her in this light. Boisterous, confident, in her element, having fun, and showing a side I don’t see much…

She would instruct me on where, and how to shoot. Showing me the angle. Licking her finger and putting a spot on the bumper… “here!! And bank there… and then there” I missed every shot. I know enough of the physics of the game that such shots weren’t even possible… or possible in my mind of conventional pool play.

Then came a moment… and probably for the sake of rational continuity… that I said, “I’m just going to do what I know and play my way.”

She nodded with light disappointment… and then she gleamed, “make this shot if you want to impress a woman!!!”

As I reflect… I’m still not sure if she said that because she desired to be impressed… or she was just politely cheering me on for a perceived lack of barrio pool room skills. But… her comment had triggered something primal… and I felt the weight of some version of seriousness rest on my shoulders.

The problem, or a resurfacing old rhythm, or background story… is this; In a past life… I had spent one thousand and one hours at the Skylark Lounge in Denver, the old location and new, in the back of the bar, with my eyes at half-mast, holding myself up with a pool stick… playing the game of pool.

I’ve never claimed to ‘know how,” or be good… but with the right amount of a beer buzz to block out the periphery, a little cosmic tailwind, and some bursts of luck… I’ve sank a few eight-balls in my day.

So… this day… this night… in a Mexico City club… I have some motivation to impress my opponent, the correct amount of chelas in me, underdog karma… and it’s not my first pool rodeo. And I begin.

I ran the table… in my way… how I know best… and gently sank the eight ball in the far corner pocket. I turn towards her, “are you impressed?!?”

She had a grumpy face, “no! I hate you now!!!”

And I thanked the Nordic gods for that… because… for the previous hour she’d been glaring at me with a dimpled smile and it was burning past my optic nerves and bouncing off the back of my skull, hitting all kinds of receptors in my brain—thus feeling a cocktail of suppressed emotional molecules bubbling up from the bottom of my feet and about to boil over the top of my boots. And who has time for that?

She then stomped her foot and in broken English, “you’re the only guy… that… (something)… my hechizo… my spell… my, my… it didn’t work.”

“Wha?!? You put a curse on me?!?”

“Yessss , un hechizo! it didn’t work!!!”

I do believe the hechizó worked… it just didn’t impact my pool game. I then wiped the stars, or hearts, or care-bears, or whatever from my eyes… and wrangled my bubbling emotional molecules… all the residual of her enchanting-magic spell… and we proceeded into the night with more games.

The next day we were downtown in the zocalo… they have ‘limpia’ (cleansing) ceremonies done by Mixica people in traditional dress. Gilda explained this and that about it… and asked if I want a ‘limpia.’

I mentioned, “you put a curse on me last night, didn’t you?”

And in a sad faced reply, “you want to remove my hechizó?!?”

There’s only one answer to that, “never!”

The reality is, in my current systems, new rhythms, against convention… I don’t want to remove, or cleanse my curses, or spells, or charms, or bad spirits, or demons… I want them to ride with me in the graffiti painted boat. Embrace them, get to know them, befriend them… and hold them with one hand while riding the waves of this new rhythm and with the other hand, resting my fingertips on the wake of the old.

We have this necessity to define, to have answers, to be healed. I want this relationship with life to be open-ended, unresolved, undefined, ever changing, and be forever curious… ask the questions… but live beyond the answers. And the wind will carry you home.

•

#CDMXlife 🇲🇽

#poolsharkpool

•

a night ends with a awkward meeting with people at La Faena. I have no problems walking out on rude people… and this instant I was way to polite at removing myself and with surprise my companion chose to leave with me… and I wished her to stay… and that be our last moment. A handful of known red flags showed up as reality… an intuitions realized. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of the end.