🇲🇽 Orizaba 210 to 🇺🇸 San Quintin, CA - 5.12.25
“Now I was training myself to take nothing seriously. A man's allowed to make lots of small mistakes, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if the mistakes are big ones and they weigh him down, his only solution is to stop taking himself seriously. It's the only way to avoid suffering—suffering, prolonged, can be fatal.”
- Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Dirty Havana Trilogy)
I’m comfortably relocated back in my Orizaba 210 apartment in Roma Norte, CDMX. It’s a modest 2 bedroom, in a modest complex with 2 dozen units, filled with the common peoples of the community… they’ve been quite nice and polite to me. I live on the top floor of the 6 floor walk-up. There are two security gates to enter the common courtyard from the street and I’m often stuck in between the two with groceries or my pack. It’s a rather ordinary place… with the exception that William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac lived at this address for some of their time in Mexico City. The location was an entry point for the beat writers of the time… Gary Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy, and others… I love the ghost energy of a place like this. And through its incantations the neighborhood remains a bohemian hotspot today.
Famous people, famous efforts, famous places… they are exciting and have a surface appeal… and then it wears off quickly. Some guy, that wrote some book… scratched his ass here in 1951… AND now I get to haul my groceries, laundry, and water, and my tired ass… up 6 flights of stairs… in a building that sways when a big truck drives by because sits on old lake Texcoco… and there are frequent earthquakes on top of that… and even more frequent… there are tenant meetings—to talk about paint, and new keys for the front gate, and trash day… and my Spanish sucks… and I also inherited a cleaning lady with my sublet and she lives 2 hours out of the city… and I am partially… or more accurately, fully confused and often… and no one that I’ve met knows who the fk’ Jack Kerouac is…
All is about this moment… this moment before us. And at this moment I have an affordable enough rent that I can get a cheap plane ticket (with miles), and wrangle a cat/house sitting gig… to make a little pilgramage back to San Francisco. For; peep visits, overflowing mailbox, to start up my car, eat heavy American food, speak my language… walks in nature and get lots of fresh Pacific air in the lungs.
I landed at SFO on an early Sunday morn… grabbed my car, emptied and closed out my storage unit, a stop at In&Out… and then drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to a little community called San Quintin. It’s next to the prison. It is the prison. That joint Johnny Cash liked to play.
I stayed at an artist’s compound… and it was a very peaceful place to be despite the dark history of the facility—now rehabilitation center. The owner of the place identifies as clairvoyant/psychic… she has a sign on the house and everything… and with that, I found it slightly ironic that she requested that I message her one hour before I planned to arrive so she would know when to expect me. I was hoping she would have the vision of letting me know when “I” was to arrive… because I’m not sure what I’m doing half the time.
I arrived in San Quintin on Mother’s Day… the previous day was Mother’s Day in Mexico… which means all of the restaurants, in all of the lands, are filled with moms and the peoples with moms…
I’m not a mom… but I do need to eat… so I plopped myself in a Chinese restaurant in the nearby San Rafael… it was packed with large groups of Spanish speaking folks celebrating family. I was in Mexico only 13 hours prior… and my mind was trained to order my fare, engage in small talk, and ask for the check in the Spanish language… and funny, is this life.
North America is such a diverse and lovely place… and I wish we all could see the brilliance of that. We tend to be a collection of sassy peoples, pointing fingers in all directions… but never into the mirror. And taking ourselves way too seriously… over foolish things. And suffering is what we demand… so prolonged suffering is what we shall have.
#soynorteamerican 🇲🇽🇺🇸🇨🇦
#ileavemyheartinSanFranciaco in a PO Box
#SanQuintinMitten
#followthebeatnikhighway
If your’re in the San Francisco area… ping me… we’ll get a Waymo driverless cab and go get sushi… cuz the sushi in Mexico City looks like sushi… but it ain’t sushi!
🍣🍱🌉😘💙🙏
