BORDER LOG

Monday, August 18th

Obama's Plane Raises Ire


Hysteria Hits the Roof Before Reason Can Compose Itself by Brian McNeece

Anyone over the age of seven is familiar with a court of law. When I was a kid, we watched Perry Mason deliver clean justice out of a mess of knotty claims against his clients. Numerous courtroom films and now Court TV have made us a sophisticated culture when it comes to the concepts of innocent until proven guilty through admissible evidence and the mounting of a convincing case.

Despite being a culture built on due process, those foundations are being flooded with the corrosive acid of hysterical emails boiling with hate. People I know, people who I otherwise consider to be rational--kind people--send me these emails. It worries me that so many people seem to be jumping to conclusions on the flimsiest of logical connections.

By now the majority of people who read this and who use email have received the message about how Obama is DISGRACEFUL because of what he did to his airplane. If you have received this email, you will remember that Obama had the gall to paint over the American flag that was on the tail of his plane. According to the email Obama is a clown who is ashamed of his country. If he gets elected, the message implies, our government will turn into a hideous bloated monster, followed by communism or worse!

Remember that this is because he painted over the American flag on the tail of an airplane that his campaign leased. The plane was leased from a company called North American airlines. (A more sympathetic viewer might call this choice of a lease a very patriotic decision.) Throughout the primaries, Obama’s campaign left North American’s paint job intact, including the trademarked flag logo on the tail. When Obama locked up the nomination, his team had the plane re-painted and the interior remodeled for the fall campaign. In fact, once the candidate put his name and symbols on the plane, he couldn't keep the flag--unless he painted a different version. So the new paint job used Obama’s red, white, blue campaign logo in place of North American’s.

The email also mentions that Obama, instead of the American flag, has his own image on the plane. It’s all about me, claims the email, implying that Obama is tainted by an oversupply of egocentrism. How dare he? Let’s see, he’s running for president of the United States. Yes, that’s pretty egocentric. He’s spending millions of dollars to put his name and face everywhere he thinks you and I might see it. Isn’t that what people do when they run for office?

To be fair, we ought to look at McCain and his plane too, shouldn’t we? That’s what it means to make a case and analyze an issue. What do you know, McCain doesn’t have a giant American flag on his campaign jet either. And how about that, he’s got his name writ large all over the thing.

After I read this angry and indignant email about Obama, I went to his website for the first time. You know what I saw there: Not one image of an American flag on his website. And McCain’s website? Guess what: not one American flag either.

Perhaps by now, American flags are waving on both websites. But think about it, does the lack or presence of an American flag on the candidates’ planes, websites, cards, or promotional materials have anything to do with their patriotism? I don’t think so. How can you judge a person by what they don’t have on their materials?

Neither of the candidates has a picture of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Thomas Jefferson on their airplanes. They don’t have an image of the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, or even a map of the United States! Just think of all the images of our great country that they don’t have on their airplanes—Betsy Ross sewing the flag, the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake flag, Paul Revere on his famous ride, George W. crossing the Delaware, the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

At least Obama is leasing a jet made by Boeing, an American manufacturer; McCain flies a French-built Airbus A320. I don’t make much of this, or else I’ll be considered a communist soon for driving a Toyota.

Other Obama incidents spawned equally condemning emails. When photos caught Obama onstage as the only candidate without his hand over his heart, folks were quick to conclude that he was un-American. They didn’t mention that it was during the National Anthem and not the Pledge of Allegiance, nor that it is customary just to sing the anthem without the hand over the heart.

When Obama said he was going to stop wearing his American flag lapel pin, the internet crackled with screaming of un-American! Shoot first, check the body later to see if it was the right target. Obama wanted to make the point that the symbol and the sentiment are two different things. He once again wears the flag lapel pin.

Since the indignant, anti-Obama email did get me to go to both candidates’ websites, I saw that both of them have provided curious minds with summaries and oftentimes detailed treatments of their positions on a whole array of issues. The media often overwhelms us with hyper-kinetic, fragmentary and often highly biased, exaggerated, or mocking snippets about each candidate and their views.

Go to their websites from time to time between now and November. Actually read and consider what they have to say. Certainly take into account their votes or prior occasions (although neither of them has been doing their job as U.S. senators since the campaign started two years ago.)

In a democracy, the people are the judges and the juries, so if you plan to vote, do your duty and take a look at the evidence instead of accepting unsubstantiated claims.


bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 08.18.08 @ 09:11 PM PST [link]


Monday, August 11th

Summer Bike Racing in Baja California


Night Warriors on the Ciclopista by Brian McNeece


Even though it’s 100 degrees at trackside, nobody complains about the heat. After all, it’s nightime. It’s Friday night in Baja California’s capital city of Mexicali in the heart of the usual scorching desert summer. Calentísimio! We’re racing road bikes on a 500 meter asphalt ciclopista or velodrome. Thousands of bugs seem happy enough buzzing madly around the lights above the track. A stiff humid breeze from the Sea of Cortez will make the race more interesting, and maybe it helps, just a little with the heavy heat. Maybe it helps.

Families with babies in strollers and youngsters in mini-kits of the local cycling clubs lounge on the side of the track. Races for the “infantiles,” including everything from tricycles to juniors are over, and the young ones are plying their parents for ice cream or dulces (candy), churritos, or hot dogs being sold from tables.

My race is coming up next. The novatos, or novices, have just finished, and the women are starting up. This is Mexico, so nobody minds if I warm up on the outside of the track. If it were a race in the US, an official would be on the megaphone immediately, screaming at me to get off the race, you idiot, no one on the track who’s not in the race. But this is Mexico.

As I cruise on the outside of the track, Tino comes up alongside me. He’s a veterano too, in my race, a guy I’ve raced ten maybe fifteen times before. “Why do we do this?” he asks me. “Nothing obligates us to suffer as we do.” A few years ago, when Tino was new to Mexicali, he showed up at a crit on a fixed wheel bike. He got plenty of sidelong glances, but stayed with the bunch to the finish and took the win in the sprint.

Tino and I have trained together too, for he lives in my town of El Centro. But once the race starts, no talking and no friendship. “I guess it’s an addiction,” he says and smiles. Tino is on the Exinsa team. They have three riders in my race: Tino, Elias, and Ricardo. Modesto is usually the team leader, but I don’t see him tonight. Still, it will be three against one. My teammates, the Cimarrones (Rams), are all in other race categories, so I’m on my own unless I can strike a deal with someone.

We veteranos line up. There are twelve of us. Two years ago the veterano class was anybody over 40. But Benjamin, 58, complained. How can we be expected to compete with somebody 18 years younger? So last year they upped the vet class to 50+. This summer, Benjamin is not around. I notice that Zambada is racing. He’s 48. Ah, that’s okay. Jorge Arredondo used to be a tough vet competitor, but he’s 44, so they make him race with the elite racers. I’m 56; Tino might be 50, maybe not.

Twelve of us are at the starting line. Waldo is back there. Waldo always races, although he’s probably 64 and gets dropped after about four laps. His grandkids are racing in the novice and the elite groups. Waldo is always smiling, happy to be riding. Hey, there’s a new face. It’s a guy named Miguel. Wait a minute, he’s in his 30’s. But this is Mexico. He hasn’t been training, (sez he) so what the heck.

I remember Miguel: he punched a guy in the face in Ensenada because the guy supposedly elbowed Miguel’s son during the sprint finish. Blood spattered all over the pavement. Miguel spent three days in the Ensenada jail. Now he’s in my race. Swell.

Race director Francisco “Pollo (Chicken)” Santacruz reads off our names and then says, “We have some new rules.” He looks at me. “Brian, you translate, okay?" We survey the field. Everybody but me is Mexican. “Oh, never mind,” says Pollo. “If you get lapped, you must ride outside the white line. You cannot draft on the lead group and the lead group cannot draft you.”

“The people behind should get the inside lane,” I suggest. “Otherwise, the race is over.”

Pollo scowls in derision and waves aside my suggestion. “Okay, 25 minutes plus two laps. Go.”

Since we’re old, we usually start up reasonably, with nobody jamming at top speed. That is, unless my teammate Tony Darr from Imperial is in the race. Tony often does a track stand at the starting line and then hauls ass while the rest of us are clipping in. So if he races in the vets, he just might try to lead the race from start to finish. The rest of us hate that. Tony is not here tonight.

The wind is in our face as we take the first turn in a counterclockwise direction. I lead through the first lap at a moderate pace, looking warily over my shoulder for the first attack. Here it comes, good old Tino blasting up the track around 26 miles per hour. I stand up to chase him down, for if he gets a gap, he might stay away indefinitely. His teammates won’t chase; they will sit on a wheel until it’s their turn to burn out somebody else’s solid fuel.

I pull the group up to Tino, who has backed down to about 21 miles per hour. We cruise around a couple of laps with the lead changing a few times. There’s Miguel next to me. I give him plenty of room.

The line of racers weaves across the track. The leader, now Francisco, pedals slowly, resting, ready for a new attack. Now it’s Elias, a big quiet man with a thick torso. Elias is dead meat on hills because of his size, but around a track, he’s a force to be reckoned with, for he can maintain a torrid pace. Once again I chase. Where’s everyone else? Suddenly I have my answer. As I approach Elias’s wheel, the third member of their team, Ricardo, comes screaming by on the downwind straightaway. Behind him is Rogelio Zambada. I crank it up and somehow get onto Zambada’s wheel. We’re six minutes into the race, and I’ve already had to sprint twice. I can do that about four more times before I’ll have burned all high octane fuel.

As we hit turn three I wave to the other Rogelio, and Blackie, and Tino’s son Daniel sitting with his friends. The curve is banked up about 8 feet from the field to the perimeter, topped by a small wall. A running track skirts the entire Ciudad Deportiva (Sports City), and there are usually moms and dads and kids jogging or walking.

Because of the wind, we’re always looking for the sheltered side of the rider in front of us, who in turn is always trying to prevent our finding it. So consequently, the lead rider will first hug the inside and then the outside of the track, depending on the wind. During the Elite race, forty to fifty riders will pass by the spectators on the outside edge of the track going 30+ mph, creating a lovely sizzle of precision bearings and the pulling power of a diesel semi, the force of their displaced air buffeting anyone standing too close.

Tino takes a turn, then Elias. Then surprise, suprise, Zambada is at the front. Everyone has their head down, going all out. I pass Elias, who sounds like he’s about to hoark his lungs onto the pavement. That’s racing; on the edge of the abyss, the pressure building up in our eyes and forehead, the road ahead starting to blur as our hearts hit the danger zone. That’s racing. Once again, I chase down the attack group, and I’m burning up precious fuel.

Ricardo whizzes past me. We’ve already lapped Waldo, Francisco, and a couple other racers unknown to me. Miguel has dropped out. I sprint for Ricardo’s wheel and hold on for a lap. Just when Ricardo slows, Tino and Elias go turbo and pass both of us. All this while on my wheel, Zambada comes by me. Tino and Elias have a four bike gap. I’m gasping for air, and so I yell, “Calmado!” to Zambada as he comes by.

He ought to be my ally. I’ve been doing most of the chasing on the Exinsa boys. If a fresh Zambada will just keep a fast pace, I can grab his wheel and we’ll steadily close that gap. But no, Zambada cranks it up, bridges the gap and leaves me and Ricardo behind. All I can do is hold my maximum pace and hope that the three leaders will get disorganized or inattentive and allow me to catch. Strategy now calls for Ricardo to sit on my wheel for the rest of the race.

I seem to get closer to the leaders, but then the gap widens and soon they have half a lap on me. It’s no use. Lap after lap, Ricardo sits on my wheel. Suddenly I pass through a small flurry of yellow butterflies, blown in I suppose from the farm land to the southeast of the city.

I gaze at the ambulance in the corner of the field, wondering who will crash tonight. During one road race a few seasons ago, a car clipped one of my teammates. He finished the race, but when we approached the ambulance driver for first aid, he said the ambulance was empty. We asked, “What do you expect to do, just pick up corpses?”

The battle for the finish goes on across the infield: Zambada outsprints Tino, with Elias third. I beat Ricardo for fourth.

After one cool down lap, I roll up to Zambada at the high end of the track, where he is whooping it up with his cheering section. An animated winner, he giddily thanks me for helping him during the race and promises to return the favor next week. I seem to remember this speech before, but no payoff yet.

At trackside, I congratulate Tino, who says, scowling, “Zambada should have worked with you.”

I rinse the dried sweat off my face and change out of my cycling gear. It’s still 98 degrees on my car thermometer at 10:00 p.m. Warm, but there’s a breeze. A pleasant night for a race in Mexico.

bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 08.11.08 @ 12:22 AM PST [link]


Friday, May 2nd

Mexicali can't win when it comes to its water pollution problem


Between Two Rivers: The e-coli stop here

A new chapter is being written in the 100-year saga of our notorious New River . Last year, a new treatment plant became operational, and finally most of Mexicali ’s raw sewage was being treated. Fecal coliform levels in the New River at the international boundary dropped several magnitudes, and regional officials were rejoicing that decades of effort were paying off in a big way. The River was not clean, but it could no longer claim its place as one of the dirtiest rivers in the world.

This was the good news. Now for the bad. At a meeting of the International Boundary and Water Commission’s Colorado River Citizens’ Forum on March 3, Jose Angel from the California Regional Water Board reported that recent testing showed river contamination levels back up to levels approaching raw sewage.

The news was especially disturbing to US officials because our tax money had in large part paid for a state-of-the-art pumping station, 27 kilometers of pipe, and a $12 million bank of treatment lagoons to send the water south toward the Colorado River delta. What had gone wrong?

Francisco Bernal, an engineer with the Mexican section of the Boundary and Water Commission was asked if the recent earthquakes might have damaged the pumps. After his very lengthy answer, I wrote in my notes “earthquakes not responsible for sewage bypass into New River.”

In fact, the CESPM ( Mexicali ’s public works) had purposefully bypassed raw sewage into the New River instead of pumping it south as agreed. The bypass began on February 19 and ended March 12. You see, a second irate party has objected to Mexicali pollution.

South of the treatment plant is another “river” formed by agricultural run-off: the Hardy River. Upwards of 1000 vacation homes have been built along the Rio Hardy, most of them occupied by Americans who enjoy fishing, skiing, and the generally laid back atmosphere.

Back in December of 2007, residents noticed that Rio Hardy smelled a little funny. River users had the water tested, and discovered it was no longer safe for human contact. This coincided with treated sewage from Las Arenitas lagoons flowing into an agricultural drain and then into the Rio Hardy. Though the river camps are more than 20 river miles south of the sewage lagoons, there seemed to be no other explanation for the contamination.

Meetings with CESPM officials ensued, and apparently residents had enough clout to persuade them to bypass about 320 liters per second of raw sewage directly into the New River--and into the United States.

Diplomatic heat brought the situation to a full boil, with California Senator Diane Feinstein intervening via our EPA and State department. That’s why the waste water was once again fully pumped south. But the story gets worse.

On a tour of Las Arenitas on March 27, we were taken a couple of miles south of the treatment lagoons along the pipeline sending treated water toward Rio Hardy. There in the middle of open desert, CESPM had sledge-hammered open the pipe and was allowing the water to gush out into the sand.

We were told that the water had been properly treated via a 19 day trip through the lagoons. But this water still exuded a foul stench and ran gray-green and very turbid.

Three days after our tour, on March 30, a friend and I returned to trace the flow of water in the desert. The CESPM officials had told us they had diverted it to a “farmer’s land.” US government officials were satisfied that the water was at least going south and not into our country. But I needed to know if the water was actually ending up on farmland.

From the break in the pipe we had to make several giant loops to keep tabs on the water flowing through a low area going south. We noticed a CESPM truck paralleling our course some distance away. We reached the fields of wheat alongside the highway at the village of La Puerta and headed back north. There we saw a stream of water inching southward like the flickering tongue of a snake.

The CESPM official arrived at the same spot a few minutes after we did, accompanied by a single worker wielding a shovel. “Where’s the water coming from?” I asked him. “A well in the desert,” he said. Then he raised his worried eyes to the fields about 300 yards distance, and said ruefully, “It’s getting awfully close to that wheat.”

That was last Sunday. I’d bet plenty of money that today, that treated but foul-smelling smelling sewage water is still being dumped into the desert.

Jesus Mosqueda, owner of Campo Mosqueda along the Rio Hardy told me, “This is the only river Mexicali has. They have to keep it clean.” He was hopeful for a solution by April 15.

The Mexicali water officials now know what Octavio Paz meant when he said, “Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States .” Now Mexicali is an even worse position. They can’t send water north to the United States , and they can’t send it south to Rio Hardy. Where will they send it?


bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:26 PM PST [link]


When Learning is Really Tested


The Overhead Projector College Readiness Test

I’ve discovered a quick and easy way to test my students for college readiness. It costs very little and requires no pen, no pencil, no computer, and no calculator. All it takes is an overhead projector.

For those who haven’t been around a school room for some years, an overhead projector is a metal box with an arm above it like a periscope. You set it on a desk to project images on a screen from a sheet of transparent plastic.

This is how my test works: In my reading classes, we start every session with two students using the overhead projector to present a brief analysis of a news article. You would think that the hardest part of this exercise would be to read the article, understand it, and report on it. Not true. It was a surprise to me that the toughest part of the assignment is to operate the overhead projector itself.

The first day of class I announce that every student will have to give a presentation. I stand at the overhead projector, folded up like a great blue heron’s neck, and tell them, “Watch this. You need to do this. When it’s your turn, you need to prepare the projector and the screen. It will be your day.”

Here’s the lesson:

1. “Release the arm with your thumb right here and rotate the arm up until it clicks into place.” Click!

2. “Unwind the extension cord from the front here and plug it in the wall at the front of the room.

3. “Push the orange button on top the projector, HARD, so that the light comes on and stays on.

4. “Now put your plastic sheet down on the glass--just like any piece of paper that you’re going to read. Look at the screen.

5. “Adjust the image by moving this mirror with your hands. See the mirror and how it moves everything on the screen?”

You the reader of this newspaper are reading these directions, but my students can see what I’m doing. You’d think that would make it rather clear. I do it slowly, pointing and repeating. I continue,

6. “See this round knob on the arm? Turn it to raise the head of the projector to focus the letters.” They come into focus.

Then I walk a few steps away from the projector and come back with the plastic and introduce myself as if I were a student and do a sample presentation. I then ask for volunteers.

At the next class session, the volunteers–confident people–work the machine. They may fumble with a little, so I help them. At the same time, I give all the students another lesson. “Here’s the mirror to move the image; here’s the knob to focus it.” And off we go.

I remind the students that when it’s their turn they need to come a little early to pull down the screen and ready the machine. From then on the students see others use the overheard projector at the beginning of every class.

In a class of 30, how many college-age students can accomplish the whole show–coming early, pulling down the screen, setting up the projector, and giving the presentation? In a typical class—5 or 6.

Those are grade A choice college students. They might not be particularly academically prepared or even score very high on an intelligence test. Doesn’t matter. Those students I am delighted to have in my class because they can accept the responsibility of doing such a simple task.

What about the rest? Probably another 16-18 can use the machine all right, but they don’t dare touch it by themselves. They’ll sit in their desks until I’ve arrived and called them to the front of the room. Why? Because they are afraid they might do something wrong.

The last 6-8 students form a varied pack. Some just show up on their day with an empty sheet of plastic. A few arrive late, which naturally ruins the timing of the assignment. Or they don’t show up at all. The real prizes are those who walk to the front 12 weeks into the semester like they’ve never seen the overhead projector before.

I’m a teacher by choice, and I’m ready to teach all comers. That’s what a community college is about. Operating an overhead projector is not complicated. If a student can’t muster enough interest as he sits in the classroom to learn how to use it, he’s not ready for college, or a job, or any activity with the minimum of responsibility. He needs to master something even simpler, like a shovel or a broom, before he’s ready to enjoy taxpayers’ donations toward his education in a college classroom.



bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:21 PM PST [link]


Looking for the Soul


Where to Point the Finger

I was at a restaurant recently where two groups of cyclists were getting to know each other. The usual confusion about names ensued. One person called out, “Now who is Cliff?” and the fellow sitting across from her pointed to his own head.

The one who wanted to know Cliff looked up to the guy standing behind him. “You’re Cliff?” she asked.

Then the real Cliff once again pointed to himself, this time to his heart.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought you meant that guy behind you.”

As a student of culture I’d learned about this variation of body language. We in the West generally point to our chests to locate ourselves while other cultures—Chinese, so I’ve been told—point to their heads.

Cliff was a guy from Georgia now living in Yuma who first pointed to his head then made the adjustment to repair the communication. That in itself interested me. But it also got me thinking again about a recurring question that has confounded all thinking people, and that is the question about our identity. How do you locate personality? How do you locate the soul?

If you can point to your head or your chest to locate yourself, does that mean our personality, our soul, has parts to it?

You would think that the soul is just one thing–a single unit–for we want to believe that our soul is immortal. After we die our soul goes to heaven, hopefully–or the other place. And to be immortal, and therefore immaterial, it just can’t be the sort of thing that can be broken down into parts—part of it in our head, part of it in our chest.

But the idea that our soul has parts seems to be really the common cloth of our daily existence because our personalities can visit so many different moods. If we are happy and joyful, our soul carries that aspect. If we are depressed and low, such is the quality of our soul. Caught up in the passion of rage when we are slighted or wronged, our souls seethe with that special power that springs from anger.
And when we are sexually excited, we have surrendered ourselves to the erotic nature that comes with being a human animal.

So even if we accept that the soul somehow inheres in the mood of our attention—be we happy, sad, angry, or sexually excited—we’ve accepted that the soul has parts that can be active or quiet.

Oh, but maybe I’ve just identified emotions, and maybe I haven’t looked deep enough into the human spirit. Many thinkers simply dismiss all of that as something lower in human nature. They would say that the soul is beyond that. The soul is something finer and more elegant, and passions pull us away from our true nature. The Buddhists would agree with some of that, for their program of meditation and purification is to help a person realize that the passions of emotions and sexual attraction should be overcome in order for a person to understand his own soul and those of others.

The Hindus have taken a different approach. They developed a language for identifying the parts of the human personality. They call these parts chakras or energy centers which are associated with parts of the body. There are seven of them. Moving upward from the base of the spine, sexual organs, solar plexus, heart, throat, brow, and crown, the Hindus explain that our temperament has seven qualities, beginning with a drive to survive, then procreate, then seek power, then feel compassion, then communicate with others, then to see the connections with all things, and finally to be wise and calm in complete identity with all of creation.

In this way, Eastern thinking has a way of talking about personality that many in the West have adapted to show the soul as it inheres in a physical body.

With this kind of framework, the question about where should we point to when someone calls our name gets a little more complicated, for it could be interpreted as asking which sort of energy dominates in each person. A person who is always angry should point to his abdomen. A person who can’t get sex out of his mind should point to his genitals. A person who is caring and full of compassion should point to his heart.

A person who is analytical and thoughtful in communicating with others should point to his head. And I suppose that the person who the Eastern mystics would call “self-realized” would point to a place above his own head—to the sky, to the heavens, to the divine. As a check on our own orientation throughout our days, we should reflect, when someone calls our name, where to point our finger?

bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:19 PM PST [link]


Saturday, September 8th

Searching for Permanant Vacation


Four cyclists talking after the ride

Do you remember Jack Troup? I read in the paper that he got picked up for threatening some 12-year old girl. You remember that he was a wacko.

Yeah, he was strange. The last time I saw him, he came in the bike shop with a thick rope around his waist dragging a wooden box stuffed with all his belongings.

And what about that tall guy with the frizzy hair? What did we call him?

Permanent Vacation.

Yeah, that’s the guy. Remember how he used to stand in the intersection down the street from the bike shop directing traffic? He had a most serious, dignified expression as if he was a London bobby or something.

Yeah, I remember him. Permanent Vacation.

Bike shops attract some weird guys. I guess it’s because guys like that can’t get a drivers’ license.

Jack Troup came into the bike shop one day and Bob immediately started yelling at him, “You get out of here, now.” And the guy said, “But I want to buy a bike.”

Bob said, “I don’t care, your money’s no good here. Get lost!” Apparently the guy had fired off on some of the customers. He sort of worked there, you know.

What about that gal? Pat called her Oil Can Annie. She used to lick the oil off the concrete. I’m serious. She wanted the fresh stuff.

You’re kidding.

Not kidding. I saw her do it.

Is this something that happens just in dumpy little hick towns like ours?

All bike shops have them. They just congregate.

Even the Trek Store in La Mesa?

You bet, they’re everywhere. Maybe just fewer of them.

Yeah, when I worked at the bike shop, there was that guy, Lalo or something. After awhile, he got himself a little lawn-mowing business. He built himself the rickety-est trailer you ever saw. It was about 8 feet high—two tiers. So he had a mower, a trash can in there, a couple of rakes, a broom. I think he found some old re-bar and scraps of steel around town and somehow he threw it together into a trailer and pulled it with his bike. The thing would sway and squeal when he went around the corners.

What happened to him?

I dunno.

The Wal-Mart Man, now he needs some help himself.

Who’s that?

It’s this guy. You know we leave at 6 a.m. on the weekdays. It’s dark. We all have lights, well except for Lorenzo; he comes with no lights at all and dark glasses. But anyway, we’re heading south on LaBrucherie at about 6:10 and there’s this guy coming back into town finishing his ride. He’s on some bent up Wal-Mart mountain bike with the seat about 4” too low. His knees are coming up to his ears and he’s wearing dark clothes.

That guy’s going to get killed.

Greg said the Velo Club should buy him a bike.

We ought to buy him a grave site.

The guy’s a friggin’ lawyer I think.

Send him to Trek. They’ll know how to sweet talk him. We just yell at him to get a friggin’ light and join our parade. He weaves down the road, still alive.

Up in Brawley, I’ve seen plenty of dirtbags on bikes with stuff piled into them every which way. I’ve taken photos.

Every town has them. They can’t drive, they get homeless, all they have left is a bike. And where do you go with your bike? A bike shop. Those poor Brawley guys, what are they gonna do? There’s not even a bike shop.

Do you remember Ben Hur, from Mexicali?

That sonofabitch. He would show up on a ride with nothing, no water, nothing to eat, no pump no tube. Then he’d get a flat and try to get what he needed from everybody else. What a leech. And he wasn’t even aware that he was doing in. He thought it was the way to ride.

You know what we call guys like that in Spanish? A choncho. A guy, not exactly a leech, but a wormy, sneaky guy who never does his part, never carries his own weight.

Ben Hur’s still around.

No kidding. That was years ago when he used to ride with us.

Yeah, I saw him at the track in Mexicali last summer. He introduced himself to me. “I’m Ben Hur.” I thought he was kidding. What kind of a name is Ben Hur? That’s not a Mexican name.

I don’t know. Mexicans name their kids everything. It could be Nelson, Danny, Toribio, Florentino, or Ben Hur. Maybe his mom and dad liked the movie 35 years ago.

I think it’s more like 50 years ago, dude.

Well that’s his name.

Is Hur his last name?

Hell if I know.

You know, I bet you every bike store has at least one guy with a motor on his bike. Maybe he’s an engineer, or wanted to be one. He’s got it welded on there and sits on the top scooting around so proud. Comes in the store, muy superior.

I could dig a motor- a real small one disguised as a tool bag.

Then there’s the guy with about 6 mirrors attached everywhere possible. Mirror man.

Sure, yeah, you’re right. They come in types. What about the single guy in his fifties or sixties who buys a new bike every year? He’s got a two or three style recumbents, a top- of-the-line carbon fiber, full Campy 10-speed. He loves bikes, and cruises on them at about 14 miles per hour, one after the other.

I know that guy. Why doesn’t he ride with us sometimes?

He doesn’t like you, Corey, that’s why. You scare the shit out of him. All you guys scare the shit out of those guys. You’re too lean and mean and focused. They go the other way. Lean, maybe, and mean, but way out of focus.

That was Jack Troup’s problem. I think he was a schizo.

Well, I’d bet you two to one that the Trek store don’t have the cholo bikers comin’ round with their chrome on chrome bikes with the steering wheel, chopped down low as they could go.

Garcia’s another bicycle type, aren’t you, dude?

What do you mean?

Well, you’re the guy who needs a new bike every year.

Is that right, Garcia?

Tell ‘em.

You tell him.

You see, getting a new bike is like getting a new wife. Except you can’t get a new wife.

Shut up Corey.

You said it.

You might be surprised about the Trek bikes store. They might have some different souls up there too. They have a bigger store with a bigger back shop. Maybe they stuff the people that don’t look like Lance in the back. We should call them.

Yeah, ask them what their wacko population is.

Hell, I was riding up Highway S2 and came up on two guys heading south. I waved at them; they didn’t even acknowledge me. So I figured they must be from San Diego.

Yeah, if you see a cyclist on the road around here, you stop, hug, pull out pictures of your children and invite them to your wedding. Do you think those SD cyclists allow the cholo bikes in a Performance Bike Shop?

Tienes razon, cabron. They don’t like us Mexicans.

Shut up, Garcia, you’re more American that most of us.

I’m just playin’.

Go to Adams Avenue bikes. 3 to 1 says they’ve got more spaced out cycle shop-loiterers than we have here in El Centro.

Okay, but Adams Avenue bikes is in Normal Heights.

Nah, I think that’s North Park.

Either way, they’ve got more of their share of marginal characters. I was talking about Trek Bikes. In La Mesa. That’s a clean neighborhood. I was in there one time and I picked up a saddle and was carrying it around the store to compare it to the ones on the other bikes. A guy followed on my heels and grabbed it away from me and put it back on the shelf. Do I look twisted? Shit, I’m a pillar of the fucking community. How do you think they treat a guy with a far off look in his eyes and no shoes on his feet?

That was Permanent Vacation. Did you know him?


bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 09.08.07 @ 08:51 PM PST [link]


Surviving Summer


Can’t Stop Pedaling to Save My Life.

Red shoes forced the girl in the fairy tale to dance until she died. The lesson of the story was not to want something too much. She longed for those red shoes; and in her mad passion overlooked the evil spell that accompanied them. Something akin happened to us the other day, this time with our bicycles. The madness for turning pedals nearly led to our demise, for we misjudged the gods and the portents, and thought too lightly of the consequences of our errors.

September 3, 2007 was Labor Day Monday this year, a day for rest, repose, reflection from the labors of our lots. Most people head for the beach, the bay, the chaise lounge by the pool, or the barbecue. A certain tribe of Imperial Valleyites think the day best used by riding many miles on their two wheels—without motors. Such a one am I, among others, who decided that such a day was ripe for a 70 mile trek across the noble, empty desert.

It was the usual morning weather, sweltering. Carson Kalin reported that as he drove from Brawley, the 5:30 a.m. temperature steadily dropped from 88 to 84. “With that kind of cool, I’m considering moving to the Southend.” I reported that the forecast called for lows dipping into the 70’s, but my remarks were quickly dismissed as idle fantasy. Despite the catcalls and rebuffs, I was not so easy to abandon that prognosis, as if the aura of tomorrow’s cool might spread somehow backward across time to today.

To thwart the beast of heat, I had soaked myself thoroughly prior to leaving my house. Though the humidity was high for hereabouts—probably in the 60 percent–I was dried out in about fifteen minutes by the breezes of our pedaling.

After a relaxed 17-18 mph stretch to the south, we headed west into a slight headwind along highway 98, the wide, smooth, undulating stretch of pavement that we in the Valley rate the Shangri-la of bike riding country. Keeping a sober, moderate pace, we had to slow a few times when some accelerations broke up a party of six. We arrived at The Oasis, a hillock surrounded by a scroungy arrangement of palm, mesquite, and other anonymous foliage. Not much of an oasis, it’s a place where coyotes convene and aliens cry out for mercy. Yet it’s the only green patch within miles, fed stingily from a drip irrigation system occasionally activated. There we reconnoitered, grabbed a snack and split up into two groups: the sensible and the senseless. The sensible three of us headed back home on the wings of a sympathetic westerly tailwind.

We other three, Fred, Benny, and myself, succumbed to the enchantment in our bicycles and pedaled west toward Ocotillo, another mere 12 miles. Only twelve trifling miles. At 20 miles per hour we would be there in a jiffy. But that wasn’t to be. Our legs were tired: Fred and Benny had ridden to the Oasis the day before. I had done 38 miles with sporadic bursts of speed. Just five minutes of rest had stiffened us all up pretty well.

We were making but 16 miles per hour in the face of a hot breeze. When the road turned to the north and dropped off of the Yuha Mesa, we managed 21 miles per hour briefly. But then as we approached No Mirage and the road tilted up, we could barely reach 14 mile an hour. Benny suffered a classic bonk; Fred went back to retrieve him, and we dragged ourselves the last few miles just above 12 miles per hour. “I think I bit off more than I could chew,” confessed Benny. He didn’t look too well. Not well at all.

At the gas station, the weight of the thick atmosphere crowded with angry molecules banging and smashing into one another fell heavy on our backs. My squinting eyes felt as if a circle of hot stone was being pressed into the orbits. We made light banter and exchanged encouraging words, mentioning at the same time the various parties we could call on to collect our carcasses from the pavement before the vultures arrived to a lengthy repast. In truth, we were well aware that we were in the danger zone.

Fortified with copious draughts of water, Gatorade, maltodextrin, electrolyte capsules, beef jerky, and energy bars, we remounted the devilish machines that had lured us thus far and set off into the inferno for more of the same, looking forward to a west wind at our back and a few hundred feet of total elevation loss to speed us homeward.

Shortly we noticed the nervousness of the wind, as if it were afraid to bring us bad news. It gusted hither and thither, then from the north, prompting us to settle into echelon with Fred and me taking turns and Benny just riding to stay alive. By and by we realized the west wind, that harbinger of dry, cool days ahead, had quietly surrendered to the suffocating, hot humid powers of the eastern sky. In other words, we were fucked.

We had been duped by the gentleness of the signs of dawn. When we had headed west from the fields into the desert, the humidity had dropped—and the dryness drove the cooling evaporation of our sweat on skin. A collection of clouds diffused the early sun’s rays, and the reddish tint of dawn over the mountains tranquilized us into trusting the turning earth to be benevolent today.

Halfway back those 12 miles to the Oasis, we felt the sucker punch, the change-up, the feint and charge from a sun that had spent three hours winding up with calm deliberation, slowly building to a crescendo of full blown, full body heat pack. Passing the Oasis, we gave a weak nod to a place where we should have turned back. But now we had twenty-two more miles against a stiff east wind, into the fierce gaze of the sun, with no shade, our arms, legs, and face exposed. There was no shade. Temperatures are measured in the shade because a normal thermometer placed a few feet above the asphalt, will soon quit its top limits of 140-150 degrees and burst its container. There’s no measuring the intensity of the direct sun. It’s too tough to handle.

We pedaled above the black asphalt, our helmets atop our skull, our sunglasses protecting our eyes, our legs going round and round—nothing but searing, penetrating, merciless hot.

Our water bottles yielded a thick, fiery liquid better used for making tea than refreshment. Splashing ourselves to help cool us, the water landed hot and burning until giving up a few degrees of cooling some minutes later. Without apparently offering much relief, still it seemed to disappear in a few minutes.

We strategically began discussing the best place to hide from our present circumstances. At the palm tree line off Mt. Signal Road, Fred and Benny sought the shelter of shade while I stumbled across the sand to raid the water set out for illegal immigrants. I had already drunk or poured two bottles of water over me. I drank the third one down standing over the cache of gallons, and then filled them all again. I poured one all over me and refilled it, replaced the cover on the half barrel and tramped across the expanse to the road and fired up again.

The single track of footprints that was visible before I made mine reminded me that there were real people without bicycles recently passed through, and I shuddered. Just the week before a lone woman had died within a mile or two of here, died of exposure before reaching this tiny oasis of life and the shade only sixty yards away. I blessed my circumstances and joined Fred and Benny, whom I encouraged to pour one of my water bottles over themselves. They obliged my mild persuasions half-heartedly. “Soak yourself,” I said. But they sprinkled but a little here and there on their jerseys. My jersey, meanwhile, clung to my body, totally wet. Fred said that it was nice to have a breeze. “What breeze?” I wanted to know. “You have to imagine it,” he replied, again exhorting the magical power of desert living. “You’re a creative writer. Now’s the time to be creative.” In a minute or two, there was that breeze, hot and angry from the north, but as we were in the shade, we extracted all the relief that we might, and left it to the beetles and the lizards panting in their deep holes.

Back on the road, Fred pointed out a mesquite tree alongside the south side. “That’s a good one to use in the afternoon,” he commented. Or anytime it’s like this, I thought. We soldiered on, on and on, still pedaling desultorily at about 18-19 miles per hour.

At our usual turning to the north on Brockman, we took stock of our situation. Benny had kept an even pace the whole distance, and seemed in better shape than before. He remarked the same, and admitted to being in a sorry state of mind at the Texaco station in Ocotillo.

Now we spoke a little here and there, a change from the one hour of silence we had observed while meditating on our fragility as we crossed the burning asphalt in the desert proper.

The wind came from the northwest; we soldiered into it. Turning west onto Kubler road, we pedaled three abreast for a time, and then resumed our pattern of Fred and I taking turns with Benny in the rear. Heading north finally on LaBrucherie, we traversed the New River, heard no cry from Red Ruth 77’s tent along the Central Main Canal. “Got any extra water?” asked Benny. He took a long drink of that burning hot stuff.

After a steady gait up to McCabe Road, Fred picked up the pace, simulating an interest in the traditional high speed lead out to a strong sprint finish at the freeway bridge. I went to the front and took my turn. Suddenly I realized something—the headwind was gone; we had actually been up to 19-20 miles an hour again on our journey north from Kubler.

Our delusions of sprinting home soon evaporated, but we compulsively turned those cranks the last mile and over the freeway overpass. Coasting downhill, Benny asked Fred for more water. They turned toward Fred’s house to where Benny could get revitalized enough for the last two miles across El Centro to the relief of an air conditioned home.

Hard core, was the conclusion of the day. An epic seventy miles of riding when we should have sensibly been sipping soda water at some pool’s edge in the shade. But we instead were clipped into our pedals, just like the girl in the red dancing shoes. We might have pedaled until we expired if our homes hadn’t loomed on our horizons just in time.












bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 09.08.07 @ 08:26 PM PST [link]


Wednesday, September 5th

Victory in the Baja Foreign Legion


A Picaresque Cycling Tale

A race in Baja California called to me, and I answered, for racing in Mexico is guaranteed to be entertaining.

We registered north of Ensenada where the old, free road diverges from the coastal toll road for a climb up to El Tigre, a plateau at about 1200 feet. That was to be the rolling terrain for our race.
The promoter, Chepe Garcia, was there as promised at 9:00 a.m. for registration or inscripciones. Fog brought cool, 64 degree air from the ocean. My desert colleagues shivered in their t-shirts and shorts. Some people actually wore undershirts against the cold. Come on, dudes, don’t you know that this will burn away shortly, and even quicker higher up and inland?

My category, 50+, would race only one way, from “out” to “back,” so I needed a way to get to the starting line. I spied a likely-looking veterano standing next to a car with an empty slot in a rooftop rack. “Can you give me a ride?” I called out to him without introduction. He nodded his head. I exchanged pleasantries with his other car mates, then went over to him.

“Nacho, Ignacio, Macho, Nacho Camacho, Nacho Libre—whatever you like,” he said. A thin guy with a gap-toothed smile, he was a lean cyclist and a happy fellow.

“Seriously, can you give me a ride?” I asked. “I don’t have any way to get to the starting line."

“Sure,” he said. “We can put your bike on the back.” The car, a well used, black Japanese compact had a trunk rack as well.

Chepe was cajoling everyone to get moving, so I quickly changed and rolled my bike over. Five of us crammed into the small car. I was introduced to Juan, Paulo, and Enrique. Nacho drove.

Immediately began a banter, headed up by Paulo, that kept the laughs steady. Though my Spanish is good, I can’t follow the double entendres and allusions that make up the heart of jokes. But I got into the spirit of the claims about how much booze Paulo had drunk the night before, Nacho’s recent sexual exploits, and the eye color of a certain mamasita. Paulo felt it proper to challenge everybody’s sexual orientation on the route to the starting line.

The repartee wasn’t interrupted when Paulo requested a bathroom stop. Nacho flipped down his visor and handed over a good supply of toilet paper. Enrique, Paulo’s yerno or son-in-law helped himself to more tissue in the glove box. I picked my spot at a large bush of unknown name whose upper leaves were blackened by the summer heat.

As I felt one leaf’s rough, dry surface, I wondered how much of my hosts’ behavior was for my benefit, remembering the axiom that every observer changes the event being observed.

The ground of this convenient pullout spot was densely strewn with plastic bottles, bags, cups, and other debris of a thousand road trips. A crude sort of harmony was created by five simultaneous streams of urine from five different bushes. When Paulo walked back, Nacho called out, “He couldn’t go because he needs a bidet to wash his ass."

We headed further north and descended the plateau into the canyon toward the sea. Nacho started to pull off the road in a small community where he spied a cyclist parked at an abbarrotes or grocery store. “Not here,” called Paulo. “Keep going.”

“It’s at the bridge, or under the bridge,” I offered, remembering Chepe’s remarks.

Just before the bridge sat a van full of conocidos (acquaintances). We pulled off there, but they shouted, “It’s back at the top, not here. We’re just waiting for others to tell them.”

We headed back uphill. So much for a 60 km race. The stretch of old highway from coast uphill and back down to coast couldn’t have been more than 25 miles, I figured. So my race would end up being 20 miles, not 38. And much of the climbing would be eliminated.

Our new starting line began at the base of a gentle uphill stretch. We five were the first to arrive, but little by little the younger kids, rookies, and women riders congregated. Some warmed up on trainers; others rolled along the road. The fog had lifted; the sun shone through a pale sky, blowing an ocean breeze from the northwest. The primera fuerza or elite riders passed us heading north, followed by segunda fuerza. I cheered Edgar Alarcon in 3rd place in the elite, and then Benjamin in segunda. We had to wait until they made their turnaround at the bottom and passed us once again before we could start.

Time to race. Only six veterano racers nervously approached the line. The four of us from the car plus Juan and Waldo from Mexicali.

We clipped in and rolled calmly for the first couple hundred meters. Then one of the Valle Congelado boys (all three of my companions were on the same team) hit the gas. In a few pedal strokes, I was anaerobic and laboring, but not falling behind. We crested the rise and accelerated, the four of us taking turns. In just a few minutes, we overtook a few of the tercera or rookie riders and then a couple of the women. Two young guys hung on for a while then dropped back.

A couple more hills later, I took a turn climbing, turned around and saw only Juan behind me. Nacho and Paulo had dropped back. I was redlining, but flying on adrenaline and caffeine.

Would Juan now take turns with me to leave his compañeros behind? No. He stayed on my wheel and wouldn’t come around. I sat up and let Paulo and Nacho back, as I didn’t think I could tow Juan all the way to the end without Paulo and Nacho attacking and passing me on the downhill.

Back in formation, I launched another attack, but there was Juan again. I looked at my heart rate monitor: 180. My God! I haven’t seen 180 for a year or two. Luckily the pace dropped, and then came the downhill. I was worried that my Mexican trio would blast by me, as I’m not a daring descender. By now, a girl and boy had attached themselves to us. Lucky for me, we mostly coasted downhill. I tried another attack. No luck. Nacho attacked. I was on his wheel. Why didn’t they gang up on me? I wondered. If one of them were willing to sacrifice himself, he could attack me and force me to chase. The other two could easily latch onto my wheel, and as I fatigued, come around me together. I would be dead meat, and the other two would be gone. That is a textbook tactic—one they hadn’t considered, obviously.

For once in a Mexican road race, I knew where the finish line was and had scouted where I would be able to sprint full bore. It was just after a bridge where the road veered right. I had noticed a pullout on the uphill side and another road sign marking the upcoming curve to the left. We were now flying downhill past the bridge in echelon to protect ourselves from the crosswind coming from the sea. Nacho was to my right. I rode about five feet to the right of the center line. Juan and Paulo were to my left behind.

Suddenly an oncoming sedan swept toward us. Trouble was, it was over the center line. We all cried out. I swerved sharply to the right. I just knew I was going to hear the awful sound of a head-on collision. It was impossible that my new friends and competitors could avoid the front bumper of that car. But somehow our group split, and Juan and Pablo avoided certain death by passing the oncoming car on the left. All this happened in milliseconds. No time for fear; it was already over, and the sprint was looming. No time to reflect on the miracle of our salvation.

Together again, we passed the sprint marker. All of us were standing up. I was boxed in. “Shit,” I yelled, as I stopped pedaling to prevent myself from ramming into Paulo. Then Juan accelerated to Paulo’s left, and I followed Juan’s wheel. Now was the time. I gripped the drop bars, stood up, lowered my head and cranked for all I was worth.

My legs felt like they were moving in slow motion, but I had no doubt that I was at my limit. I had nothing left. As I passed the finish line, I noticed Chepe glancing up disinterestedly. Beyond a couple of cars, my teammate Edgar Alarcon was talking to someone next to his pickup. A few other cyclists and their friends milled about a haphazard collection of cars on both sides of the road. Someone had a checkered flag in hand, but it drooped and dragged on the dirt alongside the pavement.

No hurrahs, no bell, no clapping. But I won, and by a fine margin. I looked down at my heart monitor. 186. That scared the crap out of me. I coasted for some meters with Juan just behind. Without any gesture, he made his U-turn back toward our follow car. Nacho and Paulo had already turned. Trying to catch my breath, I coasted for another 100 meters, slowed and turned back.

Where was the manly sportsmanship from the races I’d won before on the track in Mexicali? Nobody paused to call out, bien hecho, well-done. None of my fearsome threesome opposition made any effort to acknowledge my hard-won victory. I coasted back to the car. They were all putting their bikes and gear away in silence at the back of the car. Heads were turned away. Some muffled conversation among themselves ensued. I leaned my bike against the front fender of Nacho’s car. No need to remove any of my equipment, for I was going to ride back to my car—just three hundred meters more down hill where the old road merged into the coastal freeway. I was getting the major freeze from my formerly warm and jovial car-mates.

Edgar came over. “How did you do?” he asked.

“I won.”

“I got third,” he said, and went into a long outline of his race, most of which I couldn’t understand because he spoke so fast and softly.

Waldo, from our group, finished the race. How did it go? I asked. Well into his sixties, Waldo is known for his love of cycling, not his speed on a bike. “Ah, well I arrived, but I ran out of road. I was just about warmed up by the end.” He smiled.

I went round to the back of the car to collect my sandals out of the trunk. Silence from the three Valle Congelado riders. Still unhappy. It was as if the sun had been eclipsed and the daylight replaced with a deathly darkness. Despair oozed out of them like decay run rampant. Flesh eating bacteria ate instead at their spirit.

Finally, Paulo said, “Ah, well, congratulations. You have a strong sprint.”

“You’re a pretty good climber,” said Juan.

“I’m out of shape,” said Nacho. “I couldn’t stay up with you guys.”

“I was at my limit,” I replied truthfully. In fact, I was surprised by my own performance. I hadn’t seen a heart rate above 172 for a year or two. I was a little stunned by the intensity of my own effort.

The conversation trailed off. Meanwhile, I watched Benjamin come across the line just in front a of a tall, young rider who didn’t seem to have the heart for a full-tilt sprint to the finish. “Did you win?” I asked Ben.

“No, second. There were a lot of attacks.”

Ben, though 58 years old, had raced in segunda fuerza, a category like our Cat 4, reserved for younger guys working their way up to the elite level. He shook his head in disgust. Benjamin takes his cycling very seriously and is a much stronger rider than me.

I waved my goodbyes and headed to my car. We were all supposed to rendezvous at the Parque Revolución at the north end of Ensenada, where a circuit race for the little kids and our awards ceremony would take place.

I must have been the first of the adult racers to arrive at the park, a one block square plaza like those found in every city in Mexico. An elaborate raised band stand stood in the center, topped by a dome supported by columns. The park was a very well kept space, with fine landscaping including topiary bushes, grass, and flowers. An arching wooden bridge crossed a sand playground full of new equipment. It was a wholesome, fair-like urban park scene, filled with several hundred revelers: moms and dads with kids hand in hand. Vendors hawked cotton candy, churros, balloons. Music played from mini-parties in the corners of the parks. Kiosks sold tortas, peanuts, raspados, and other refreshments.

It was a teeming Sunday scene, a far cry from the last time I had been in this same park a decade or two ago when it was a quiet, semi-barren, unloved place.

The kids’ cycling club from Mexicali had set up their instant canopy on the south end of the square. Kids in their club jerseys and bib shorts scampered around their bikes, excitedly anticipating their turn to race. It was about 1:00 in the afternoon. I greeted the kids and complimented them on their dashing uniforms. I recognized many faces, but could remember no names of the parents from Mexicali. One of them set several bags of food on the table, opened it up and offered me a fish taco. I was famished, so I accepted. After his wife addressed him, I was reminded of his name. It was Pedro, a gracious and handsome, dark-complected man that had often raced with me in Mexicali. “Have another one,” he said.

“No, thank you,” I said, waving him off. I knew that he had bought the food for his family and friends. Instead, I bought a bag of peanuts. As I munched, Paulo, Juan, and Nacho approached. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey there, maestro,” said Paulo.

I was struggling to get my peanuts out of the bag and drink a soda that Pedro had given me. Paulo helped by liberating the bag of peanuts and helping himself. I supposed that we were friends again.

“I need a beer,” he said. “Where’s the liquor store?”

I offered peanuts to the others, including a new member of their group, a younger, bigger, more archetypally athletic sort named Omar. We were all cracking shells and downing the peanuts like a village of hungry monkeys. I noticed that nobody threw their shells on the ground. A new sort of Mexico.

“Where was the liquor store?” asked Paulo again.

“Let’s walk this way,” I suggested, and Paulo stepped in next to me. He was back to his jaunty self and began to tell me about the race in August. Turned out the Paulo was the first lieutenant of Mark Helvie, a very strong rider from Ramona. Mark has a reputation from way back as an excellent climber and a perennial contender for the top of the podium in our age bracket. Paulo had worked for him for many years as a carpenter and general craftsman for Mark’s remodeling business. Omar joined us. I found out that Omar was the one who had beat Ben.

“I was really surprised,” Ben had said. “I was taking turns with this other guy. Omar was behind us, like about 75 yards. I thought we had dropped him, but he stayed there for most of the way back south. Then about 6 miles from the line, he came by us. We tried, but even working together well, we couldn’t catch him."

Omar, Paulo, and I found an Oxxo a block away. I bought a 12–pack of Tecate Lager. “Can we drink I public?” I asked Paulo.

“No, we’ll have to sit in the car,” he said.

“We don’t want to have to get you out of jail,” said Juan.

We started our drinking in the car, but quickly found some plastic cups. Juan shook his head when I gestured toward the box of beer.

“He’s a Baptist brother in Christ,” said Paulo. “Doesn’t drink.”

Nacho also waved away my offer. “I’m driving,” he said seriously, his humor having disappeared somewhere about the finish line.

“I needed this,” said Paulo, gesturing into his elbow as if giving himself an injection. “It’s good medicine.”

Benjamin had joined us by this time. “What’s happening, brothers?” he began. “There were three of you and only one of him. Why couldn’t you take him?”

With no reply from the Valle Congelado team, Ben said. “He was stronger last year. You should have seen him on the Rumororsa.”

Paulo said, “Ah, well you guys need to come back on August 25th. There’ll be a lot more riders then, guys from L.A. and San Diego. Maybe Mark Helvie will come.”

“Well I hope he doesn’t come,” said Ben. “He’s too strong. But we have more guys we can bring. Brian, we’ll bring Fred in August. The three of us will show them.”

Right, Ben. Last time I raced Mark Helvie, he and his buddies lapped me. They lapped Fred twice. (To be fair, it was Fred’s first criterium.)

I finished my one beer. No sign of Chepe, and it was approaching two o’clock. No Chepe, no trophies. I had a 3½ hour drive ahead of me. By now Paulo was feeling a lot better. “All right,” he said. “You’re the champion, maestro.” He turned to his two teammates, “What do you think, boys? Did he anesthetize you at the finish line? Had enough?”

I smiled. Friends for life.

“Next time, you’re on our team,” he said.

I put Benjamin in charge of retrieving my trophy and took my leave from Paulo, Omar, Juan, Nacho Camacho, Pedro, and the others waiting on the mysteriously absent Chepe. Turned out that after pushing us to get to the park, he had himself elected to find a place to eat lunch—probably with his take from the entrance fees.

Well, Chepe senior did all right by me. Ben collected my trophy, and it was an impressive one, a large golden cup topped by a plastic bike. The plaque claimed that I had won both a 60km road race and a circuit race—a embellishment befitting the veterano class. I could legitimately claim that as time passed, my achievements had risen. The older I get, the better I was. A trophy is a trophy, and this one is a beautiful keepsake from a happily brief, intense, victorious day. At my age, it doesn’t get any better than this.



bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 09.05.07 @ 11:06 AM PST [link]


Friday, August 31st

Vietnam and Iraq: Two Kinds of Quagmires


Another Bright Shining Lie

Up until recently President Bush has always rejected any comparisons between the war in Iraq and Vietnam. Vietnam was a quicksand that swallowed 58,000 of our soldiers and along with them our willingness to fight. Up until recently Bush wanted to distance himself from that sad period in our history.

But on August 22, Bush did an about face in a speech in which he implied that we should never have left Vietnam: “Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields’."

Bush’s remarks have a noble ring to them. The aftermath of Vietnam wasn’t pretty. Without our protective presence, fear of the new communist regime sent hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese refugees into exile. The “boat people” who abandoned everything fled across the South China into overcrowded refugee camps for months, sometimes years, before starting new lives across the world.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began one of the most horrifically effective genocidal campaigns in the history of the world. They evacuated the entire capital city of Phnom Penh and moved people into the re-education camps that Bush referred to or slave labor in the killing fields. Twenty-five percent of the population died.

If we leave Iraq, says Bush, similar devastation will result.

It’s a noble position, but it doesn’t face reality, and Bush will now run into a buzz saw of disagreeable facts coming from historians.

After the French lost to the Vietnamese in 1954, we gradually became entwined in the civil question of who would govern that far off nation—the Chinese-sponsored communists in the north or the West-inspired democrats in the south. Republican presidents Truman and Eisenhower followed by Democrats Kennedy and Johnson and then finally Nixon kept upping their bet that we could win that war. We couldn’t.

Bush wants to redeem the U.S. for that tragedy. But the truth is–we couldn’t win.

In 1969, U.S. troop levels in Vietnam peaked at 543,000. Compare that to today’s surge-fed troop count of 160,000 in Iraq. Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a war fought mostly in the villages and countryside. We carpet-bombed much of the country; we led massive sweep and destroy missions. We defoliated thousands of acres of jungle. To disrupt supply lines from North Vietnam, we also invaded and heavily bombed neighboring Cambodia. Napalm became a weapon of terror to burn villages. Thousands of Vietnamese citizens were re-located off their lands far from their family homes.

Over 2 million Americans served in that war. Fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives and 304,000 more were injured. We fought for nearly 15 years, and still we lost. Our enemies the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army lost over 2 million men as we fought a war of attrition to kill as many of them as we could. Still, we couldn’t win.

Now President Bush implies that we could have won, we should have won, if we had just stayed the course. To copy the title of Neil Sheehan’s book about the tragedy of Vietnam, that’s another Bright Shining Lie.

Yes, Cambodia became hell on earth, but historians make the argument that it was our bombing of Cambodia that helped drive people to support the Khmer Rouge. It was the Vietnamese who toppled the brutal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in 1979.

Vietnam and Iraq do have one thing in common. Often we don’t know who the enemy is. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson was prompted to say that we had to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people because our forces were constantly walking into ambushes that could only have been possible with the help of the villagers we were trying to protect.

President Bush is finally right to state the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. As in Vietnam, our soldiers are constantly driving into ambushes of roadside bombs. Responding to this psychological terror, their combat techniques in an urban zone only add to the hostility of the population. We need to win hearts and minds in Iraq too, where most people must surely want peace and stability. But we’re not winning.

In calling for a gradual pullout of our troops starting next spring, this administration has already tacitly begun another parallel with Vietnam, where we needed three years to bring those 543,000 U.S. troops home.

Bush can also follow Nixon’s example by beginning serious negotiations with the powers of the region to prevent Iraq from its careening course back to the Dark Ages. With the Sunnis and the Shias and Al Queda all hating each other—and the Kurds in the north–it looks like a much tougher task than Vietnam. I pray that the effort be successful.


bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 08.31.07 @ 01:16 PM PST [link]


Different Ways for the Dying


Please Cry for Me, Cachanilla*

Death comes to us all, rich and poor, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Psychologists say that it’s part of the human condition to react to the deaths of our loved ones through a similar cycle of emotions. We deny, we get angry, we grieve, and finally we accept that our own lives must go on without the ones we have lost.

This cycle of emotions must play out as the psychologists say, but still, over the centuries distinct cultures have marked death in unique and different ways. For us here along the border, the line on the map and the fence on the ground also mark a huge cultural difference and a pattern of behaviors to help us know how to deal with the events after a person dies.

Like any other cultural practice, all this is in flux; change comes to everything. When I was young, funerals were dark, forbidding scenes, with lugubrious words etched into the silence of a reserved congregation. The obscure, abstract melodies of medieval hymns set the mood of ponderous sorrow. No one breached the control of the priest or the minister in delivering his eulogy--in praise of the deceased, of course--but also as a warning to the living to follow the word of God or suffer forever thereafter.

As I grew into adulthood and middle age, the innovation that is endemic to our times also entered the funereal arts. Just as sweethearts began to design their own weddings, so also did those left behind take liberties with the traditions of funerals. The beloved’s favorite music might be played—even if it was happy, cheerful music. The congregation might be invited to share anecdotes about the departed. Most appreciated of their words were those that made the rest of us laugh. We could laugh at a funeral!

This new development came with the logic that after his long disease, the departed’s suffering was at long last over. Or if the recently passed had died unexpectedly in the full bloom of youth, we could still celebrate his or her new life with God in an eternal heaven. A funeral could be a happy occasion. Hallelujah, he is born once more in everlasting glory! Let us sing for joy and laugh at the good times we shared together!

A good friend’s wife hails from Mexicali . Upon experiencing this cultural variety of the marking of death, she was in turn shocked, bewildered, and horrified. “I couldn’t believe it,” she told me, her eyes wide. “People were laughing, laughing. That’s not right."

Several years ago, our neighbor’s housekeeper suffered a sudden tragedy when her son was killed in an auto accident in Mexicali . He had just graduated from medical school and was about to begin his practice. His young wife was pregnant with their first child. At the vigil, the disfigured son lay in an open casket as mourners milled about to be near him.

Having never met him, we and our neighbors paid our respects awkwardly, bowing before the flower-bedecked bier and touching his coffin like the others had done. It was a solemn occasion, of course, but one thing we had never experienced was the eerily ever-present strains of weeping. Sobs, cries, wails—they came in soft and shrill tones from all around the funeral parlor. Women old and young, all clutched in the arms of supportive friends, cried long and hard until I thought, tears surely must fail them and they would stop.

Above all the other assembled voices, one pierced the air—Mario’s wife. After my wife and I had retired to the side of the room, we saw Griselda throw herself upon her husband’s coffin weeping in full voice. Her face contorted in the agony of her grief.

Aside from the sad, many-voiced harmony of weeping, conversations continued at a low murmur. No one spoke above a bare whisper, and no one smiled. We were told that the vigil, and Griselda’s repeated flights into tearful sorrow, would last for many hours.

“You see,” said my friend’s Mexican wife, “in the U.S., it takes days, even weeks sometimes to plan the funeral so that everybody can arrive. In my country, if someone dies, we have the service the next day. There’s no time to control your emotions. At the funeral, everybody cries.”

The owner of a hospice in central California related that in her experience, Mexicans pass through the stages of the grieving process much faster than Americans. “Because we think we should hold things in,” she said, “it takes us longer to really process those deep emotions. Yes, we laugh at the funeral and party at the reception afterward, but in a way, we’re just putting off the sadness.”

After attending several U.S. funerals, my friend’s Mexican wife made a pact with her American husband. “When I die, bury me in Mexico . People are supposed to cry at my funeral.”

*The name given to people from Mexicali . Refers to the arrow weed that grows along the sides of fields and canals.
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 08.31.07 @ 12:59 PM PST [link]


Tuesday, December 19th

Don't Take Away Our Polluted New River!


Not Enough New River?

Events befitting the turmoil of local water controversy have folks in California actually worried that we’re getting less and less of the most polluted river in North America.

Since the New River was formed in 1905 by the accidental breach of the irrigation delivery system from the Colorado River, Imperial County has annually received thousands of acre-feet of Mexican water free of charge. As Mexicali grew, however, so did the load of human feces, fertilizer, detergent, and the effluent from slaughterhouses and industrial plants. Just about every disease can be found in the New River. Fecal coliform counts remain thousands of times higher than allowed for human contact.

So why would anyone want this water? Since the historic Quantification Settlement Agreement was signed in 2003, California must find ways to live within its 4.4 million acre-feet allotment of water (something it has never done). And, despite its need to REDUCE its use of Colorado River water, southern California won’t be denied growth. Over the last fifty years, the New River has annually delivered about 150,000 acre-feet of water at the boundary, enough for about 300,000 homes. Filthy or not, that’s real water. So LA’s Metropolitan Water District has filed a claim on New River water.

If you doubt that New River water could be fit for any use, you’re wrong. The two U.S.-built power plants near Mt. Signal in Mexico have already tapped into New River water to cool their turbines. Recent looks at a US Geological Survey website show that annual flows of the New River at the international boundary are now 25% below 26 year average rates to about 112,500 acre-feet. Proposals for new transmission facilities near Mt. Signal indicate that SDG&E would like to build another power plant across the border to take advantage of a more streamlined permitting process, cheaper labor, and lax pollution enforcement. This means more Mexicali water diverted for cooling—and less water crossing the border.

All these developments have left the Calexico New River Committee puzzled. For five years, executive director Pablo Orozco and his committee have advanced a proposal to encase the New River from the border to beyond the Calexico city limits. They also want to put a trash screen at the border to stop the floating parade of debris and illegal immigrants who use the River. But how can they engineer an encasement project if the flow rate is a mysteriously shrinking target?

Meanwhile Mexicali is about to reduce the flow of the New River even further. A new pumping station and treatment plant known as Mexicali II will be operational this September. Funded by the U.S. EPA, Mexico, and Japan, this happy project is the culmination of steady progress to upgrade the Mexicali wastewater collection and treatment system. Much to the surprise of skeptical New River watchers, Mexicali will soon treat all its wastewater. Unfortunately, the US will no longer receive the treated water.

Mexicali II was set to be completed several years ago, but it was blocked by residents who didn’t want the waste-water treatment plant in their neighborhood of El Choropo, south of Mexicali. Consequently, an additional 18 kilometers of pipe had to be laid. Starting in September, 20 million gallons of water per day will be pumped “over the hump” of the ancient Colorado River delta. After treatment, that water will flow south, not north. Some treated New River water will irrigate a golf course and ecological park. Farmers may buy treated water for irrigation, and the remaining flow will drain into the Rio Hardy and the Sea of Cortez.

Suddenly the problem of the most polluted river in North America will have been transformed. Instead of the historical average of 150,000 acre-feet of water per year, the U.S. will receive only 90,000 acre-feet. The MWD wants the water, and so do we. Although a small part of the Salton Sea equation, a lessened New River flow at the border worsens an already intransigent problem about how to keep the Salton Sea wet.

Just when the New River will be substantially cleaner, just when the U.S. actually wants the New River water, the flow will drop by 40% of historical rates.

And soon it may be even less. Francisco Bernal, Mexicali representative of the International Boundary and Water Commission, has poured verbal acid into the turgid waters. “We plan to re-use all the New River water in Mexicali,” he said at a recent IBWC Citizens’ Forum meeting.

Bernal’s remarks were played down by Al Goff, Bernal’s counterpart in Yuma. “They’ll never eliminate the flow of water at the boundary,” said Goff. “At least not in our lifetimes.”

For water watchers in Southern California, there’s drama on every horizon.



bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:44 PM PST [link]


Sage Advice at the Carnicería


Get It While You Can

As I walked up to the meat counter, one person was ahead of me. He had a cell phone to his ear and a pained look on his face. He glanced at me, as if seeking sympathy, and without saying a word, reached across the counter and handed the phone to the butcher.

He gave me a mournful look. “I’ll just screw it up,” he said, as if I was a buddy that had arranged a meeting with him there. “I’ll let her tell him herself what she wants.”

He sighed. “My wife, she makes a great caldo. You know what a caldo is?”

I nodded.

“I’ve got diabetes, so caldo is good for me. But I let her choose the vegetables.”

He began to examine imaginary potatoes. “If I do it she says, ‘This one is too ripe. This one has a bruise. This is one–’ there’s always something wrong with what I try to do for her.”

I agreed with him.

“Yeah,” he continued, “the women, they’re in charge. I told my son, ‘You better let them do what they want or you’ll be miserable.’”

The butcher listened intently with the tiny cell phone jammed against his heavy head. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

My new friend gestured in exasperation. “Look how long it’s taking her to tell him what she wants. I can’t believe it.”

He gave me a long hard look. His eyes bore into me with anxiety and determination. “That’s why Mexican men run around on their wives.”

I must’ve had a surprised look on my face. Well I was surprised. Do people tell you things like this in the grocery store?

He pressed on. “Yeah, their wives, they’re driving them crazy.”

Then he had a thought, like maybe he had incriminated himself before me. I mean, we hadn’t really done any male bonding at all. No drinking, no feats of courage, no bawdy jokes.

“I’m older now,” he said, a little apologetically. “I’ve mellowed.”

So did he or didn’t he do what Mexican men have to do?

He turned to face me. “This is how they are,” he began. “My wife and I, we went to Paris. We did the whole thing, the Louvre, what you call it, the Champs d’Elysse, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, all that crap. She got tired of museums and sight seeing pretty fast, but she always found energy and time for shopping. She had to get something for everybody. And you know what, on the last day, she dragged me out again. I told her, ‘Now what? You’ve got a gift for every cousin you’ve ever met.’ And you know what she told me, ‘I’ve got to get some things for people that I’ve forgotten about.’”

I started looking at the meats to make my choices, figuring that my lack of attention might slow my new brother’s confession.

“That’s the best cut right there,” he told me. “Get the chicken too. That’s better for you. Humans aren’t really meat eaters, you see. Lions and tigers, they have a really rough stomach. But humans don’t.”

The butcher carefully handed the phone across the counter. “Did she tell you?” my pal asked.

The butcher nodded.

“You know what she wants now?”

The butcher patiently said yes, yes, and wandered off to get whatever it was.

For some reason, I imagined that my new friend was retired U.S. Navy. Maybe it was the authority with which he told me things, or the way he seemed so firmly planted on the ground, or the tight little mustache that graced his upper lip.

“My wife told me, ‘You can go out with the boys on Wednesday night,’ but the trouble was that I didn’t want to go out with the boys. I wanted to go out with the girls. I wanted to smell perfume, touch some skin. And you can’t play that game, going out with the girls, or just ‘the girl’ because, you know, that’s another woman. The second woman is not a third species. They want the same things. They want you to pay attention to them, they want you to make little gestures, so they know they’re wanted. Either that, or it’s just ‘show me the money.’ Yeah, get down to brass tacks.”

He backhanded me on the shoulder. “Except for these young ones,” he said, with a knowing, gnome-like sneer. “The ones who want to deny all that—that old-fashioned stuff about women being from Venus. Yeah, they use bad words and think nothing of mentioning farting. They sit and dress any way they want. They even talk about the ondas, sex, fucking, just like men—with men around. TO MEN! What happened to courting for God’s sake?–la movida-eh? How do any of them fall in love?” He was shouting now.

In a softer voice, he went on. “There’s trouble there.” He nodded and pointed his finger for emphasis.

He shook his head. “I’m out of my league there, anyway.” Smiling as if it took some effort, he continued. “All I want,” he paused. “All I want from her now is my own space, that’s it.” He drew his hand down and across the air.

“And in that space, what does she care if I go down to Mex from time to time and rent a little.” He held his hand up, his eyes wide and innocent. “I’m no don Juan, no. And I’m not putting on airs with another woman. Just want a little affection on my own terms. What’s wrong with that? They’re clean.”

The butcher handed two bundles across the counter. As my buddy reached to get them the butcher said, “She told me to give her two, but for six people, I thought that wasn’t enough, so I cut her three.”

“Too bad you aren’t the one paying for that,” my friend growled, but not in an unfriendly way. “Is that it?”

“No there’s another one,” said the butcher. “Just a minute.”

My friend rolled his eyes. “It was going to be one piece of meat. I’m glad it was him and not me.” He turned to set the packages in his basket. Passing a shelf of hot salsa, he gestured to the hottest one. “Get one of these,” he said, smiling. “Chile is good for you.” He made a tight fist and pushed his forearm taut. “Get it while you can.”





bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:40 PM PST [link]


On the Border of the Metaphysic


To Infinity and Beyond

This morning I was attacked by infinity. Normally, the view from my bed is comforting because there are four walls, one ceiling and a limited number of books, drawers, and precious knick-knacks.

Suddenly it struck me that as I took one step away from my bed toward the bathroom, the earth was rotating me at 1000 miles per hour, the sun was flying away from its beginning, and our galaxy was heading off to the never-ending oblivion of infinity. Aaaagh!

And then I realized that if I looked at all the numbers from one going up, I would never stop. Even worse, I realized that if I removed all the odd numbers, I would still have an infinite number of numbers. Did that mean that the odd infinity was only half as many as the total infinity? Attacked by infinity, I felt tiny and weak and vulnerable and wanted to hide under the bed.

I was so troubled that I asked a mathematician. “Is two times infinity twice as many?”

He replied, “No, you can’t multiply infinity because infinity is not a number. If you could multiply or add infinities, then you could prove zero equals one, and if you could do that, you could prove anything, which would mean you would have nothing.”

Oh. Hmmm. Okay.

Well, I got the mathematical part of infinity out of the way. I realized that infinity in mathematics was just a construct, just something we could imagine. But what about the infinity out there, outside my bedroom door, outside my planet—in the stars and the UNIVERSE?

Are there an infinite number of stars? Can we always find one more, just like we find one more number after the last number? An interesting observation is that if there were an infinite number of stars, wherever we looked we would see one, and the sky would be lit at every point in every direction. But it isn’t, so there are not an infinite number of stars.

And what about time? Could the universe have always been here and always be here from now until–keep counting–infinite and forever?

I looked into Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time.” He says that before the universe began with the big explosion out of nothing, there was no time. So there was no "before." Actually, I like that, for even the scientists studying the facts of stars millions of light years away confirm that the universe appears to have a beginning–just like it says in the Bible. Those who take the Bible literally think the earth was created a few thousand years ago while the astronomers and cosmogonists believe it was a few billion. If this universe had a beginning, the astrophysicists and creationists disagree only on the element of scale.

By all evidence this universe had a finite, limited start date. How about the ending? Cosmologists formulate this question like this: Will the universe continue to expand forever or will it one day begin to shrink and then collapse on itself? Right now, all the facts say that it’s expanding and in fact expanding faster all the time.

However, it turns out that even an ever-expanding universe isn’t necessarily an infinite one, for even as it’s moving out, it’s moving in. That’s a hard one to get our thoughts around. But it’s true that astronomers say that the universe is curved, coming back around like a circle on the equator. Perhaps the very essence of space is being limited.

I spent the day wrestling with infinity, and I think I’ve got it in a full nelson, subdued, under control. Even all the grains of sand on the earth (though many) are finite. They are just as described by some number (though only God knows it) like 37 or 53–just a lot bigger. One estimate I found for all the grains of sand on earth is 6.63 × 10 to the 22nd. And the number of stars, though as Carl Sagan told us, included billions and billions, is another straight up number–somewhere between 10 to the 22nd and 10 to the 24th or so. Realize that the high end numbers (ten followed by 24 zeroes) is just fifteen times the number of grains of sand. The lower estimate is fewer than the number of atoms or molecules to make a mole. You remember what a mole is from high school chemistry, I trust. That would be Avogadro’s number. That’s 6.02214199 × 10 to the 23rd. It’s an awful lot of atoms, but it doesn’t scare chemists, who use this number like you and I make change for a dollar.

With the entire universe tidily finite, I felt snug and potent inside a firmament that goes on and on but still has a limit. This universe is certainly bigger than a breadbox, but a whole lot smaller than infinity. Kind of like from my bed to the bathroom. I find that rather comforting.


bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:34 PM PST [link]


How I Became a Mexican


You Can Too

The first Mexican (who wasn’t really a Mexican) that I became friends with was my junior high classmate Lou G. He dressed and talked just like I did, so the only reason I learned he was Mexican was via his haircut. One Monday he came to school with what in those days was quite the radical cut, with the front of his hair combed over and the top and back sheared off in a crew cut. It was the damnedest thing.

“Where’d you get that haircut?”

“Mexicali,” he told me.

Mexicali, wow. He said it like it was no big thing, just normal life to get a strange haircut in a strange place. I got all my haircuts at the Schultz barber shop on Main Street. Mexicali, that was kind of like going to Bulgaria for a haircut.

I realized then that Lou had another life, a Mexican life separate from our American life together as students and as adolescents. That intrigued me.

It was much later that I learned that on top of being American and Mexican, Lou was also a pocho. This was explained to me by Mexican-Mexicans (who are not pochos). We had gone camping at Guadalupe Canyon with Fred P. (a Mexican-American). Arturo, the Mexican who owned the camp, immediately bristled when Fred entered our conversation. I was puzzled by his reaction because to me Fred was about as American as I was. (In those days, I had no notion that I was really a Czech-Polish-Irish American.) When I asked Arturo the problem, he just spat out, “He’s a pocho!” which meant to Arturo that Fred, as a Mexican from “el otro lado,” felt himself superior and treated Arturo disrespectfully.

That was another dimension to being Mexican and American that I didn’t know about.

Around the same time, I began to date Julie from Mexicali. Julie’s mother was from Kansas and her father was from Veracruz, which is kind of like a librarian marrying a rock guitarist. Julie was an American-Mexican. From her I got to meet a whole pack of middle class folks in Mexicali, people who valued the good life of music, art, travel, and an important ingredient for Mexicans everywhere: a good party. Unlike most of the Mexican-Americans I had gone to school with (most of whom were blue collar) and the Mexican-Mexicans that I met in the rough bars I frequented (drunk), my new friends were just like me—only a lot more relaxed about enjoying life–and Mexican.

That’s when I decided that I wanted to become Mexican too. It apparently was so easy—since Mexicans came in just about any color or lifestyle you might want. The language wasn’t a barrier. Some of the Mexican-Americans I knew didn’t speak Spanish as well as I did, so I figured I had a leg up already. And though my vocabulary was a little bookish and I missed some of the slang, I made up for that defect with a good accent.

What did I have to change to become more Mexican?

I stopped wearing short pants and t-shirts and took to upgrading my wardrobe to meet the Mexican requirement for a more careful regard to appearance. I learned to kiss my female acquaintances casually on the cheek and to greet my compañeros with a manly handshake, embrace, two slaps on the back, and another handshake. I cultivated a higher awareness of introductions and acknowledgements of guests and made an effort at a prouder posture instead of slouching in a corner like the malcriado surfer dude that I had been before.

At the time, I had a low-slung 1967 Ford Ranchero painted blue with turquoise upholstery (Mexicali workmanship). In the rear window I placed a small Mexican flag decal. One day I had it parked at Mission Beach when a Chicano vato saw it. “This isn’t your car,” he told me as I climbed aboard. “This car belongs to a Mexican!”

Exactly.

I became more Mexican but not Mexican-American like Lou or Fred, not a pocho, not an American-Mexican like Julie. In the end, I suppose I’m one of a growing number of border anglos who have adopted some of the stylish cariño (caring) that is Mexican. I don’t say that this was all done with cold calculation; it was more of a tectonic drift.

I was made aware of this drift this past summer when I joined a group of rather intense cyclists for a 35 mile ride through San Diego. As I rolled up to the crowd of intimidating athletes, I had to quickly decide who I would approach to meet to get the lay of the land. I surveyed the group and spied a Latino astride his bike under a tree at the edge of the milling crowd. Ah, that’s who I’ll meet. He’s Mexican–like me.

bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 12.19.06 @ 02:29 PM PST [link]




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