September 29th, 2017, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico:
This morning, just before dusk, dawn, whatever, I opened my eyes onto the thick navy blue and white stripes of the curtain that serves as my bathroom door. The floor, ceiling, walls and everything else in my room fell away in one silent swoop. I hung suspended in empty space, holding onto that curtain with my eyes, trying to figure out where I was. I felt that if I failed to recognize the curtain, it too would disappear and I would be left drifting, untethered, in cold, dark infinity. I don't have a problem with that idea. I prefer it, actually, to being anchored to planet earth, given how things are. But I felt this ominous hostility coming out of the low light of non-morning. And maybe I was still half-stuck in dreamland, because I was convinced that recognizing that curtain, and by extension the room, would protect me from said hostility.
My first thought upon touching my feet to the floor was: I don't want to study Spanish. I don't want to do anything that serves the intention of relating to other people. I want to let the over-stretched elastic relax so I can sink back into myself and peer out at the garishly bright world from within a comfortable cocoon of darkness.
All night last night, deafening bursts of firecrackers exploded throughout San Miguel de Allende. Parades of singing, dancing people descended from the two most ancient neighborhoods in town down to the Jardin Principal in el Centro. A mass of cheering voices rose all the way from the valley up to the top of the hill on which I live.
It's a holiday weekend. People are celebrating the patron saint of the city, a Catholic friar named Juan, who traveled Mexico in the 1500's with a group of natives and other friars, converting "savages" and establishing towns. According to legend, the first 4 natives to convert to Catholicism in San Miguel were slaughtered by other natives who chose not to conform. Their limbs were buried under stone crosses in several different cities that were also founded by Friar Juan. These four martyrs are being celebrated as well, by natives in traditional native costumes dancing traditional native dances. Something about this seems off to me.
After breakfast, Shengjo and I walked down the street to a Mercado. I grabbed a basket and tossed a bunch of loose fruits and vegetables in it. They have reems of little plastic bags, and you're supposed to put mangoes together in one, guavas together in another, just like at any supermarket in the US. But I despise plastic bags. One of my least favorite things about living in the suburbs in the United States was those gargantuan piles of plastic bags that would pile up in my apartment after each weekly trip to Wal-Mart.
The line for the cashier was extraordinarily long, maybe because it's a holiday weekend, maybe just because tomorrow is Sunday. When I finally set my basket on the conveyor belt, the cashier started taking out my loose fruits, and as she rang them up, she complained in Spanish to the people around us about how, when people don't separate their fruits into individual plastic bags, it makes more work for her and people have to wait in line longer. I am a six-foot tall blonde with pale skin; they know that I'm a foreigner. Obviously, they're under the impression that I can't understand a word they're saying.
It irritates me to the core that they are assuming I can't speak Spanish and that they are talking shit about me while I am standing right there.
Fuck people. Fuck all people. Ninety-seven percent of them are despicable, petty, small-minded, myopic assholes with no class. Fuck your plastic bags and fuck your backward Catholic holidays that force natives to celebrate the bastardization of their own culture.
Maybe Kiarga has a point: maybe it's better if you have no fucking idea what anyone around you is saying. Maybe the three hours I spend studying Spanish every day after breakfast are just needless masochism. More and more, I believe the only way for me to be sane or happy is to disappear into the bushes.
Bitterness always flows out with the blood. My bullshit sensor is extra-sensitive today and my tolerance level is extremely low. But this is not just a monthly thing. I hate everyone all the time. And today, I am not in the mood to be that world traveler who appreciates all the quaint little nuances of a different culture. Instead, I insist on pointing out that this isn't a different culture. It's just more people working miserable jobs they obviously fucking hate so they can buy food and live to do the same bullshit again tomorrow. And just like everywhere else, they are spewing their unaccountable feelings of total dissatisfaction all over everyone they're forced to serve. Well, maybe not everyone. Maybe they don't have the nerve to spew it all over their neighbors who they'll have to see again tomorrow and every day of their miserable lives. So they'll just do it to me, because I'm a foreigner and I won't understand.
This place is just another goddamned hamster wheel. Only it's made out of tin instead of gold. These hamster wheels are everywhere. The world is a giant theme park of bullshit and all these people think they're buying tickets for a fun ride on a Ferris wheel. What no one ever tells them is that Ferris wheels, when you can't ever get off, are monotonous enough to make you want to carve your soul out with a spoon so you won't have to feel anything anymore. These Ferris wheels won't ever stop. The only way off is to jump and risk splattering your entrails all over the puke-encrusted asphalt.
I don't fault Mya for insulating herself in her little circle of gringos, for living in her fantasy land of philosophy debates and science discussions and meetings with nearly blind expatriates who help poor blind campesino kids who would otherwise be kept in the house by their parents out of embarrassment. She believes that the world is fascinating and that she is doing some good in it. She has conversations that stimulate her mind and she has no idea that people are criticising her right in front of her face. She's constructed her own little Ferris wheel, and she'll ride it for the rest of her life and believe that this place is different from the United States, and it may be a total illusion, but at least it makes her happy. At least she's trying to spread love instead of giving people shit about not using enough plastic bags to kill every water-dwelling creature left on the planet.
