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Baby #2 ! Thank you Lord!

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:59:10 -0700

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The funny/scary/amazing thing is that Lee had been saying over and over all week that she felt pregnant, even thoug a test taken just two days prior was negative. A mother's intuition is phenomenal.

The funnier/scarier/amazinger thing is that she told me the morning we found out that she had a dream that we were going to have triplets.

What a great day! Prayers are (desperately) welcome. :)

love: a user's manual

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:29:52 -0700

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I think we all have a grasp on how to give love, but we're not so clear on how to be loved.

What a complex subject, no? How to complete the circuitry of love? It is not enough to give love; you need to learn how to receive it.

I love you. These scant words are some of the most powerful ever crafted. Just three words, three simple monosyllables carry enough force in their utterance to change your life, fire your passion, calm your fears, and strengthen your heart. It only takes one word, sometimes none at all, to inflict pain, to destroy. But to enliven, to fulfill – these are the words you need.

It’s easy to give love in any of its flavors – strength, submission, sharing, support – but to accept it, to believe in it, to be in it, there’s the witches’ brew. Two people can be in love and yet be painfully torn apart by the dark matter of relationships which seems to amplify the contrasts between them. In time, those contrasts calcify and henceforth every conflict is another hard-toothed grinding on the relationship, slowly wearing down the partners, indifferently cutting away at the bonds of their affection. Like a cancer, it metastasizes as it grows and poisons the healthy connections between you, so that soon there is no sane, safe refuge in your love. Eventually, but not fatalistically, the lovers fall away or flee from each other.

I love you.

It builds and affirms. It gives comfort in uncomfortable silences. It’s a knowing hand that says ‘I am here. I am with you.’

Giving love – the will to intimately connect – the I love you part – is powerful medicine, and is innocently assumed to be soul of a strong relationship, but giving love must be married to accepting love. If everyone speaks and no one listens, there is no conversation, only cacophony. Accepting love is harder for many of us. Since childhood, we’ve known that attention is a precusor to affection, which we crave. We are programmed by feedback that certain behaviors return certain results. If the affection is not forth coming, we revert to the first need: attention. We lash out, we manipulate, and we hurt because it works. Eventually someone will stop you, no? Benign at first, it too grows as we do. It becomes more sophisticated, less blunt, and more surgical. We learn to incorporate distrust into our decisions.

As a young mind begins to peer in on itself, it questions the lack of affection and usually arrives at the naive conclusion that it is lacking, unworthy of affection.

We’ve all walked with strident optimism into those early relationships, nervous and excited at the possibilities, untouched by hurt, only to return shortly later bruised and bewildered. Your hide thickens though, and in many cases becomes a wall of stone.

To some, myself certainly included, a relationship in love can devolve into a game theory; how to maximize affection with the least vulnerability. Boundaries and barriers are established and manned, tests of initiation and validity are undertaken. Scales and scanners are brought out to gauge the other, to evaluate how much vulnerability should be risked in this venture.

But this is the path of diminishing returns and broken hearts. Avoid it, friend. Pull up your sleeves and dive into the tall grass. You will not know the fulfilling, regenerative strength of love until you can accept it as well as give it.

But to accept and embrace the love of another, you must first accept and embrace yourself, complete with flaws and failures.

Only you can open this door, so your lover may join you.

dedicated to my wife, Lee. Semper.

sleepless in condesa

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:14:03 -0700

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Its about 1 in the morning here in our hotel room in Condesa, a Soho-like neighborhood in the Cuauhtémoc burough of México City. I cannot sleep. I should be able to sleep. I should be comatose, in fact. Its been a wild 24 hours here.

México City, or just México, or sometimes D.F. (pronounced Day-Efay) is a world city, truly one of the greats. The history, the people, the energy, the architecture, the food, everything reminds me of New York (but definitely not Los Angeles). We are staying at the Red Tree House Hotel in Condesa. I highly recommend it for style, location, and the staff, who, for lack of a better word, are just cool. You've got to love a boutique hotel that has a golden lab named Abril that greets you at the door and walks you to your room. You just have to.

We got in late yesterday evening and ran out for a quick Malay dinner suggested by Adrian, one of the staff at the Red Tree. Every street in the Condesa area seems to teem with the hip set and bistros of every culinary flavor.

After six months in the Bajío we feel pretty comfortable with Spanish. I get a little weary of speaking in the present tense most of the time, to be honest, but its coming along. But chilangos (once a derogatory term used by the rest of Mexico to refer to those from the capital, but the people of DF took over the slang and own it now with the same arrogant pride for which they were originally derided), especially the young, blasé, tortoise-shell glasses and prada set, speak a very fast, heavily slanged Spanish that leaves us doing that classical quizzical look over at your partner to see if they picked up that hablablabla that just raced over your head. Everyone who has traveled outside of their language knows exactly the look, that communal squint of incomprehension.

Early the next morning we woke, and then we went back to sleep. The bed here is just that damn good. (I wish I could sleep right now.)

Later, near early afternoon, we rolled out of bed, down the stairs, out the door, down the tree lined streets full of oppressively handsome people walking their dogs and progeny through the verdant Parque México, and right into two chairs and a table street side at Cafe Toscana for an espresso doble (ah, that's what started my overstimulation! the writer writes) and a panini that we had we decided we did not want to order originally and then convinced ourselves was in our better interests. A dark, rich, bitter doubled up espresso, to me, is a far more eloquent and accessible demonstration of the Divine than Kant's Critique. I'm just saying.

A dreaded Argentine boheme brought by a board of earrings and necklaces for sale; which I dreaded. Lee, my wife and unindicted co-conspirator, has shed her tomboy ways and unleashed her inner jewelry fetish. She loves earrings and necklaces. No, she is mesmerized by them. Her look reminds me of a gold prospector who just found the payoff nugget and greedily with wide eyes imagines a leisurely life of ladies and liquor in a San Fran whore house. Its quite scary, except that its also disarmingly adorable. I transmit the universal guy signal of Go away' to the Argentine, but Lee is already picking earrings off the board and at this point it would take a rifle butt to stop her. So I go back to the blessed genius of espresso while she ooohs and ahhhs and bargains. I like her choices, she knows how to make a deal, and she looks great to me, so I don't mind terribly, but we husbands need to make at least a feigning of disinterest or we will be looking at and asked for opinions on every ring, bauble, boot, or dress our wives pass in a day. Using a tired and probably inaccurate metaphor, men were hunters, women gatherers. The genders shop in the same way today. A man finds the prey, goes at it, kills it, and brings it home. Very linear. Women gathered, which requires finesse and judgment to discern between friendly plants and their unfriendly cousins, the relative ripeness of different foods, and how much and when to take things so there will be more later. Very multi-dimensional. In the end, she 'gathered' an interesting pair of serpentine-curled silver earrings that were quite lovely and exceedingly well priced for the neighborhood.

We grabbed a cab from a stand and took off to the Zocalo. Now we knew we had a very short time in town, and we were going to make no pretense of trying to uncover 'the real Mexico'. We came to enjoy ourselves after weeks of living frugally, often not leaving the house for days except to photograph or go to the lavanderia (laundry). We just wanted to turn off our culture filters and dive in face first. We got out of the cab about 8 blocks from the Zocalo, the central plaza of the city, indeed the entire Mexican nation. In fact, it was the center of all things even before the Spanish insisted themselves into Mesoamerica. It is the site of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan times, where sacrifices were made for good fortune to the gods of war and rain.( It did rain yesterday, which I thought to myself was a welcoming sign.) The Zocalo really is the geophysical axis of this place. Unfortunately for me, it has been co-opted as a massive photography exhibition hall. About 2/3 of the Zocalo are taken up with the Ashes and Snow touring exhibition. I understand its a good show and thought provoking, but this is my narrative right here, and this exhibit was in the way of me doing some serious history grokking in a place I have wanted to see since I was an 8 year old with a bowl cut and buck teeth. La vida... sometimes throws underhand, sometimes overhand.

We watched a breakdance troupe for 30 minutes with some vacationing Québécoises, who were staring with complete lasciviousness at the muscled up dancers popping and jumping around. It made me think of a story idea where a young guapo goes fishing everyday in the Zocalo for the hungry touristas who want to cross off 'do a hot latin lover' off their to-do-before-you-die list. He laughs to himself that he has no need to travel around the world because the most beautiful parts of the world travel to him until he falls in love with a young woman who completely captures his heart and mind and leaves without telling him her name or where she is from, only that she will return to DF sometime soon. The want for what we cannot possess being stronger than common sense, he spends every day in the Zocalo looking for her, almost frantically searching every face that passes, afraid that she might be passing behind him at any second.

After the hat was passed for the breakdancers, we rolled around the back of the plaza and looked for a taxi stand. A line of Aztec-dressed vendors selling jewelry and curios appeared. Lee cracked her knuckles and dove in, getting prices, getting them dropped a few pesos here and there, finessing the sellers, who though they are immune to the poorly phrased and barely comprehensible attempts at bargaining by hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists over time seem to be cool with dropping their prices with Lee. Its some cool Jedi mind trick. For instance, one man wanted 150 pesos for a small stone copy of the Aztec calendar and Lee gets him down to 130 in half a moment, and drops him yet another 30 pesos when she mentions her tattoo of the calendar on her back. Chido. (That means 'cool....')

We left the Zocalo and headed out for some lunch. A few blocks here, a few blocks there, several dozen shoe stores where she popped her head in to see if they had the Holy Grail of her shopping odyssey: a pair of black leather, thigh high, stiletto-heeled boots. She calls them 'f me boots'. Since I'm the ultimate recipient of all this searching for hot, sexy boots, I fully endorse it, except for actually walking into every shoe store to look at every shoe. Lee has got it down to a quick 3 second recon scan these days. I fully expect that facility to develop and one day we will arrive at a new city and she will sense up some odd fluctuation in the spacetime field like horses before hurricans and she will walk with maniacal precision directly to a vendor stall buried deep inside some rinky mercado off the main strip, request that the vendor stand so she can get a box from under their chair that contains the most perfect 'fuck me boots' ever made. I do.

We grabbed lunch in a cantina off Calle Mesones, which was completely ripped up for construction. Lee and I funneled down a couple rounds of chelas (beers), rice and chicken soup, and caciatore style steaks in about an hour, watching a group of friends play dominoes and chat over drinks. We decided afterwards that we wanted to get some pulque, a fermented alcohol distilled from the hearts of maguey agave and consumed in Mexico for over 2000 years. Pulquerias used to be ubiquitous but now there are only a few scattered around the city. We had a ten block walk ahead of us, but we needed to fend off the food comas we had started with the big lunch. Along the route north, Lee found a punk goth store and bought a nose ring. She dived into a hotel bathroom to see if it would fit, but the post was painfully thick. 'Yeah. No..', she said coming out of the bathroom.

20 minutes later and the threat of carbolepsy passed, we made it Plaza Garibaldi, where the pulqueria is located. Crossing the plaza, I snapped a few shots of a small, narrow cantina with a huge sign that read: 'No minors and no one in uniform.'

The proprietor of the pulqueria was genial. The pulque was delicious. I've read since that the style he serves, flavored with lime or tamarind, is not traditional, but it made no matter. It was good. Think of a very viscous orange juice. Not slimy viscous, but more thick like pulp. A few cheers and chinking glasses and round one was down. Round two came right up. I'm going to pause here. I wonder how many people are actually reading this far down into this story. If you are at this point, be a friend and leave a comment saying some quote from any tv show you can think of - like 'Whatchu talking about Willis', or 'Mel !!!' Anyway, back to the story as it were. We sat outside on the plaza. excited, shrieking children were taxiing each other around with a dolly and small crate, like they invented fun itself. Teens off to the side played football (their football, not ours). An old man sat quietly behind us weaving leather belts next to a small elderly couple with their daughter and small boy, chatting and drinking. Inside the bar, a group of young bucks were deep in the throes of the great Mexican pasttime: singing. I am firmly convinced that every Mexican knows by heart the lyrics and emotions of every song every written by a Mexican. Seriously. You can play any song from any point and any Mexican will pick it up immediately and belt out the rest of the song. One Saturday night our friend Gray offered to buy our friend Libi's drink check if she could name and sing any song that was playing in any of the clubs they were going to. He paid. These young men were completely in the moment, just singing their hearts out with their friends - shaking to the fast songs, wailing like mourners to the sad songs, swelling with pride to the old ballads. They paused when an old man came in and asked to join them. 'Of course! Come, sit, drink!' And they all started singing their hearts out again.

Well, I started this at 1am and its almost 4am and I think I am finally ready to sleep. There is more to tell. Eating five different meals from five different food stands. The art and gamble of taking a taxi in Mexico. And finding some of the finest and freshest sushi just a block from our hotel.

We are getting up in two hours to go to the bus terminal to catch the 7am back to San Miguel. We'll pack a few more things and head back to DF tonight. We have an early flight back to the States, so we'll get a room here and taxi out to the airport for our flight. My best friend Baron is getting married in a week and I have the honor to be his best man. We'll visit family and friends for a week or two and then head on back down south.

Thank you for letting me ramble away my insomnia.

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:21:12 -0700

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25 Montes de Oca

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:14:37 -0700

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:17:37 -0700

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:55:44 -0700

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The Procession

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:24:51 -0700

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:48:43 -0800

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:58:48 -0800

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:51:08 -0800

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The Persecution

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:29:45 -0700

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I'm also posting miscellanies on tumblr and twitter

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:33:30 -0700

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A personal homage and dedication to Hans Proppe. Thank you. Sincerely.

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:27:21 -0700

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 11:26:55 -0700

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The Passion

nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:46:37 -0700

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:38:15 -0800

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:20:32 -0800

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:22:15 -0800

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nobody@flickr.com (fubuki) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:23:49 -0800

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