Feeling Free As the Air

Our world is at once orderly and chaotic. Anarchist and fascist. Atheist and superstitious. Free and enslaved. Never forget that, especially if you travel to Mexico.

In Canada you can get away with living in what ever make believe world you want to live in. We all do it. In Mexico, if you do not live in the real world, the world in which nothing is real and everything is permitted, the world where everything is real and nothing is permitted, you might make it but you will not make it for long.

I fell in love with Mexico when I first learned why Pancho Villa became a revolutionary. Mexicans have got balls, motherfuckers. All we can do when presented with an asshole like the man Pancho Villa killed for trying to rape his sister (Rob Ford ring a bell?) is make jokes about him when other, much more appropriate action, is not only needed but sorely required.

Same goes for our scumbag Prime Minister. There is not a prison sour enough on Earth that would not be made more sour with his addition to the population.

I digress.

I fell in love with Mexico forever when I learned how William S. Burroughs bought his way out of captivity after running about as far afoul of the law as you can. There is something inescapably right, and, more importantly, fair, about being able to buy one's Freedom in our money worshiping world. All else is surely hypocrisy.

Once the appropriate palms were greased Mexico released me from captivity on the condition I not return until next winter. Motherfuckers love my money.

When I was down there, before the law stepped in, I was reading Charles Bukowski's "More Notes of a Dirty Old Man." Lots of very good, very short stories in the book and quite a long one about a gambler and his remarkable life. A man whose week, like any week of Lou Reed's, beat your year. Not many of my weeks do either. But all my weeks in Mexico do.