Sunday, July 18, 2010

NOT WHEN, BUT WHY

Long over caffeinated nights again too tired to go and too awake for sleep. Just laying with the warm summer breeze falling on me on this hot summer night turning in and out of elegies and dreams riding shotgun with Kafka through my beloved desert with no headlights and awaiting the/my next turn; flying in limbo needing an inward “pirate vision quest with a fancy hat” and doing tedious things only unaccomplished can claim victory for yet still be on a rise for something better.

Looking too far off stars thinking it’s too high then without attention it is something past and there is more above. The questions are: Where will they take me? Are they what I want? What will I do instead? Is this the path that I have chosen/desired or simply fallen into? Are any of those stars worth it at all?

*Suppose you are at a bar, and you run into someone you have not seen in 7 or 8 years. You sit next to her and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend tells a tale only booze would free from his memory.


In a cab in Tijuana after buying drugs, the cab gets pulled over. To avoid the discovery of some narcotics, he kicks them under the seat in front of him, in case he is searched. When he pays the cab driver, and gets on his way, he realizes that the intoxicants are still under the seat of the cab. So begins a new quest for drugs.


Starting off in a “not too good” area of town, he encounters a man who is willing to sell what he claims are drugs. He holds out his hand, and resting in them is simple allergy medication. I’m not buying that, he tells them. Then the man opens his shirt to reveal a gun, and says:


“You will buy this, or I will shoot”.


Tough shit he tells him, and runs off, trying to find a place to hide. The closest and safest place to hide is a strip club, and he enters, slowly toward the back, looking over his shoulder. Reaching the kitchen, one of the strippers gets upset, raises her voice and all hell, and the police are called.


Outside the strip club where the police arrive, they begin to question him. In Spanish.


He does not speak Spanish.


Trying to find an interpreter, the police come across someone. Someone fluent in English. Someone able to translate. Someone who has a gun, threatened to shoot him and sell him fake drugs.


Unknowing of what the man with the fake drugs was telling the police, thinking he was going to spent the night in jail, and the police finally loaded him in the car.


When the car stopped, it was about 500 yards from the U.S. border. They were let out of the back of the car, and the police drove off, back to Tijuana.


When they reached the border, they explained to the agent what had happened, and his response: “Yeah, it happens all the time.”

There is one thing to be learned from that tale, and that is there are too many adventures lurking in the woodwork. Some big, some small, one needs to be open to all and embrace life for the experiences. Something one needs, and can only realize the ones wanted after a “pirate vision quest with a fancy hat”. Not necessarily needing something exactly of the like, but you that you are living.