Cruising Spots In Los Angeles

Any generalization is a bold but, as not talking to Pedro Paramo but Gabriel is one of the privileges we have foreigners when we go to visit the lands distant. "We see a country we want see, "he said while talking about his experience with the kindness and patience of the bank tellers and drivers Lima, gentleness and patience that I -" Peru Peruvian, "as the donkey Vallejo-not remember. How to escape from the arbitrariness of a comment that is constrained to the few paragraphs that follow, how to give an opinion without appearing complacent or "much more complicated, but becomes a vivisection, clumsy and without anesthesia, just to not accuse the writer of contemplative with the country hosting it temporarily? I have no idea.

Mexico is a vast country, friendly and hostile, peaceful and aggressive, tender and fierce, selfish and solidarity, a country of extremes, horrible and wonderful, that can not close in the few lines of an article and not on preconceived ideas which foreigners arrived at the airport.

This Mexico is more than Pancho Villa and his gold, rather than movies or Indian Fernández Cantinflas, rather than the eight Chavo Chespirito, but Infante and Negrete, rather than Cuauhtémoc and Cortes, more than Nezahualcóyotl Rulfo rather than Dona Marina and María Félix, rather than Mayans and Aztecs, but the Chivas and America, more than tacos and enchiladas, but the metro and peseros, rather than trajineras of Xochimilco and the murals of Diego Rivera, but the Zocalo and much, much more that the Tlatelolco massacre.

Mexico, and again I agree with Paramo, who said that Mexico is not Mexico City, although it contains in itself, tortured and transformed the essence that defines it-can be a beautiful and peaceful place where people, friendly and helpful, is able to stop traffic on a wide avenue just to give you directions on how to get this or that street, where, contrary to what would happen in Peru, the other Mexicans, whose cars are blocked because the kindness of taxi driver will wait patiently without the horn, can hit the body or to remember the holy Mother of good man. However, this friendly and tame the violence lies behind that, as a sudden surge can come and turn everything into a bloody carnage if, for example, two drug gangs shot and decide to hold who knows how to settle accounts or stop corrupt federal at a checkpoint on the wrong truck and, as in the song "Los Tigres del Norte", criminals (disturbed by the ambition of the police calling for "too much"), decide to take the "goat horn" and unleash hell.

Mexico is a violent country, so its people have chosen to live in a gray middle ground, a middle ground, broken only innocently and occasionally exaggerated, in the celebrations in the Quinceanera where families spend the they do not have to dance with girls escorts, or funerals, holidays, music, sumptuous and surreal, when Mexicans shake the dust of fear, sing, dance and make fun of death to that of both fear, have lost respect. Since

to choose between being a coward and murderer, the average Mexican, a devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe, choose not to take away anyone's life, until it does. Then things do get ugly. Mexicans do not take the gun to impress, to pose as brave or off in front of the bride, they drew to kill. Fired at close range and not come with stories, cacerina is to be unloaded, not to play the shooting. Gang fights ending in massacres, crimes are vicious and it is rare to find mutilated bodies of people whose deaths did not happen before a long torture including burns, removal of fingers and genitals, and beheadings.

When the Mexican Mafia decides to kill someone, does not stop at trifles or expenditure measures, exaggerated at parties and in the horrors, send forty heavily armed thugs and as leaving "a job" is synonymous with prestige unfinished, it is not uncommon for the lucky survivor of a massacre to be executed in the hospital where he is recovering from the previous shooting. Paradoxically, the crimes are not indiscriminate and reckless, "it's getting to a restaurant and kill twenty people to shoot himself after the Yankees is, they're crazy." The hitman has its tradition and its school, not a makeshift, plans, provides and implements, it is not suicide, it is reckless. He has no problem sticking it a shot, "total, all going to die", but neither is daunted in a hail of bullets.

The violence is so prevalent that when a student told me that her father was murdered when she was a child, nobody in the room, blinked too. I then asked indiscreetly how it happened, "was an abduction or an assault?" I said, "was Mexico," she replied with the same tranquility. On another occasion, while talking to a dozen people came to me asking how many had been an assault on the family, all raised their hands. When I asked how they felt if they passed the night with a police patrol, answered "fear." But violence

is not the only tangible property, without the concept of "Malinche" the Mexicans could not ever explain all evils, because all the blame for the misfortunes of these people find their origin in "La Malinche", the "traitor." That, Dona Marina, unknowingly and unwittingly gave corruption, laziness and ignorance, birth and mother known (the father, not yet agree, it was Cortez or Uncle Sam, depends on moods and circumstances.)

Now that the "Spaniards" go too far, Mexicans are exercised hating Americans hating and admiring; because they envy and despise at the same level, in equal proportions, the flatter and spit, insult them and obey them, gouge their tourists and are exploited by their employers, all in the same circumstances, all at the same pace. Porfirio Diaz say the famous dictator, so loved and so hated, "said:" Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to America, "and something that should explain that worship so devoutly and so pagan virgin Guadalupe, colonial and indigenous virgin, untouched virgin and never questioned, patient mediator between the creator of the conquerors and the people overwhelmingly Catholic who has found, however, its very Mexican way being and not being at the same time, leaving stranded on the sands of oblivion, hamletian dichotomy, because in Mexico, as well José Antonio taught me when I first landed in this land, everything is yes and no, while at same time.

Thus we have, for example, that the players are branded as incapable but not a single restaurant in Mexico without a TV for viewing at any time and every day, some of the hundreds of parties that are transmitted to the delight and national pride. We have a president calling itself "legitimate," the candidate who lost the election - that he called "spurious" (sic) democratically elected government like it or not, and which, therein lies the paradox, given their lucrative salaries all democratic congressmen, who, in order not to confuse us, participate legitimately illegitimate government. We have "My house is your house" and invitations wholesale rampant but it is rare that materialize into actual visits. We have the largest national company Pemex throws astronomical losses just in the time that oil has reached its higher prices due to an organic corruption which everyone wants to preserve the name of "national dignity" (delicious euphemism for clientage party and trade union jobs that are inherited "revolutionary", the style monarchy). We have the most popular songs are the narco-corridos (who sing and know everyone from the poorest to the privileged students of the universities "strawberries"), modern hymns that tell the "exploits" of drug traffickers and corruption insults police (compositions distributed on compact discs, obviously, require respect for copyright that protects corrupt police). We have dozens of journalists killed each year at the impassive gaze of law enforcement and the silence of the two large chains that monopolize television companies, however, put the outcry if the government intends to lower campaign spending, the dead pass, but does cut the budget for commercials? That one is an attack on freedom of expression! We have two community radio announcers are killed and the School of Communication's most prestigious (or at least most expensive) of the City, nobody says anything (worse!, Nobody knows anything). We have not, it happens and no one knows, is known and not, so and so, yes and no, definitely, possibly, eventually.

All these are or appear to be (yes, no) masks that are used not to hide a face, beautiful or hideous, false or true-but to hide the fact that sometimes fierce, many times, the continent has no content, fills the void around and beneath-the ridiculous or ferocious-masks is not any face.

Why Does My Microwave Beep

MEXICO OCTOBER THIS TOO MAY JUAN PABLO

Beatriz and Gilda, whom he named "in strict alphabetical order, as they say in the contests, have played, probably unknowingly and unwittingly, the chair that my mother left too many Octobers ago this May. No wonder that both are, in turn, mothers of two of the most important people in my life, Mario and Mercedes (I with the alphabet.)

write full of doubts, wandering between two fears: first, relegating other endearing love and affection after the stubborn habit of classifying and ordering him to walk around and, on the other sin of vanity and give reason to say I Josefa love to boast of many good friends I have. Julio Ramón Ribeyro once stated that he needed money because he had friends, I believe the same thing (although I confess that I have not asked what they think those potentially affected.)

Mario've known him since we were the two maladjusted children in fourth grade, ran 1979, we had ten years, so its thinness and my fat had reached its splendor but we spent several hours at a sedentary task of reproducing, in the tortured past pages of our notebooks, the fiercest battles in which the Luftwaffe was ravaging the British skies defended by those "very few" of the RAF that so many owe so much from the speech Churchill. A Mercedes first met in 1983 when on a retreat (yes, those priests, confessions and talks tear) misplaced a quotation mark (which until today still under discussion) allowed me to intrude on your group, talk, brag and meet Ricardo's girlfriend (another friend who retain infinity). Existence without them would not be what it is; thanks and have shared misery, anger and joy, closeness and distance, funerals and birthdays, births and deaths, words and words are, along with my brothers, those few people you would not think chest without ever pretending that they do for me.

How could it be strange, then, that Beatrice and Gilda, who in turn have been known since the days of their own youth-were these two amazing women who, with a statement, tenderness, solidarity and unselfishness, to rise up in my life as these names I can put next to Victoria, my mother, knowing that not only do not offend but, rather, the honor honor them with the devout, simple and deep filial love they profess? Being in what were the family homes of Mario and Mercedes, it feels like mine, in my parents' open the door, answer the phone, pillage the refrigerator, eat dessert, sit at ease in their chairs or talk to any of its inhabitants, are actions so natural, so common, so everyday, that can only be done freely in the home that shelters us and me, forgive the vanity, I harbor those houses like mine. Beatriz

existed since the first time I visited Mario, we had grown, as were the two friends talking in the courtyard of the school while other, less fat and less lean, more agile and coordinated, popcorn filled the football goal with cries, claims and balls more than once broke windows or embedded in the stomach outside the epic fight. Everything else was a matter of years, to transfer the grating frequency, to be there every afternoon, making primers and endless lunches, to stay talking to Victor, her husband died when Mario was a child, listening to the songs idealized and truncated that love wrote on the lips of Beatrice, to share the stories of other times, a thousand times to hear the story of love that only a infarction, early and fierce, expropriated permanently. Beatriz was the loving smile, patience, pate incomparable while devouring, hungry, we waited for dinner redemption, long conversations about this and that, the worldly, neighborhood stories, novels exaggerated in the old saw, immense and wonderful black and white TV which takes so long to heat bulbs once forgot how to do and went out forever. Beatriz has always been activist and generous love, motherhood Assumed who saw (and see) in me a brother man who was not Mario, the other brother man she would be easier to take care of adolescence Mariana, the late sister's daughter, Lucho, remarriage, whose splendor bright girl still gets me every time I return to that house.

Gilda has always been a teacher, never had maternal attitudes, not a gesture forwarding an almost teacher, almost masterful. I started talking to her when, sometimes, delayed Mercedes in the street or in the shower, you did not bother to interrupt one of his hundred thousand activities and we sat in the room, under the gaze of two ancient Chinese porcelain my volume and my clumsiness were about to turn to shreds on several occasions. I do not know how everything evolved, but one day we were already corrected my clumsy first poems under the patient and rhythmic baton of its expertise as a piano teacher. It was hours, days, long days in which a Mercedes, bored with our talks on the meter and rhythm, used to play the piano, watching TV or going out with Ricardo (where delays are not "exceeded the excess" usually tolerated) . Of the sonnets and romances teenagers, whose dubious quality and abundant good will was the victim of "Mrs. Gilda", we turn to the endless conversations about life, in my arrogant readings of Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Russell or Hesse faced in very long and controversial kind, with his knowledge and experience. There was a conversation I will never forget, I write poems I was sore for a side whose favors were me and she corrected that impassive and implacable, he paused, confident that the years had given us, wondering what was happening. A "business as usual" was enough and embarked on a long talk of which I remember, as clearly then, the last words: "This is not your time, your time will come later when you get older, when other things that matter, those things are really important. I know that every time I tell this reinvented the phrase that my poor memory artful twists, but the spirit and the love with which it was spoken and heard are kept intact. Gilda and Beatriz

probably do not know, but, beyond the distance voracious beyond kilometers multiply beyond the unpardonable ingratitude of exile within days of visiting the city, beyond my stills in my absence, my forgetfulness never remember anniversaries and birthdays, beyond the letters of my stories, sometimes clear and sometimes confusing, sometimes sad and sometimes ironic, "beyond time and beyond all, they survive with the serenity of accurate, with the calm of what is true, with the quiet friendly than it already does not require proof or evidence.

As I know my mother is not to be (without ever leave me) in each of the steps I walk the way, I also know that Beatrice and Gilda, in its forms, in their ways, their respect and caution, in this triad are superb unique love that make this too May-December and lights too far, again, of hopes and plans, dreams and illusions, roads and stations likely safe where it will be impossible to be alone, where loneliness that old wolf-hungry because they can not eat me, real mothers, body and soul mothers, mothers endless, tireless watch, each in its own way, because I-still-child for them to reach the port again and sleep in peace and recovery in their certainty as forces for the next battle day.

Sleeping With Compression Shorts

At devotees who thought this article would be a kind of remembrance of Pope Wojtyla, sorry to disappoint, Juan Pablo is an Argentine of twenty years he has traveled much of Latin America on foot, by bus and boat, studies using their jewelry and their ability as a juggler.

I met him last night, had just seen a film that chronicles the anxieties of a young abortion in the midst of suffocating environment of Romania in the last years of Ceausescu, the dictator who would later be executed with his wife at Christmas 1989. The tape in question, worthy of European cinema was full of anxiety and distress, making digestion sluggish, so that to make the process less bitter, I decided to accompany it with strawberry juice and milk offered a kiosk has taken over the street only one block from the mall where I usually watch movies and a dozen of the door of the building that houses me.

Iba, mouth sweetened by the "strawberry milkshake," I thought I'd write this week. Had decided For several days talking about the rain, the rain comes, everything is flooded, all overflows and clean everything. Metaphors and ideas pondered looking at the light as usual, at the corner of the park, next to the gas station. The light had just changed and the red car stopped and I gave way in the opposite direction was up and slim blonde girl playing with something in hand, stood in the middle of the track, passing his hand, saw that manipulated colored balls with which he began to juggle.

closed as it was night, the balls, which were lit in colored lights and psychedelic, stood out. The juggler dominated his office, playing with them as the lead subject of some invisible thread, made them blow up, they are passed through the arms, shoulders, down his face, and performed her routine so well that he left me amazed spectator of the function. Ten seconds before the light turned green which again, work stopped, bowed and walked to the car smiling and more than a window relented and awarded more than one person working with a few coins.

I waited. Curiosity got the better of my desire to go to sleep and greeted him. He said friendly and soon we were talking animatedly about his adventures along the American continent.
is twenty
years and is Juan Pablo. It is Argentina's third generation, his great-grandparents arrived in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century and his grandparents moved to Bariloche, where he was born and where the "ninth" founded a funeral home. In the blood carries more blood (Creole, Italian, English and even a gypsy form their genealogy), but "I am Argentine, although I am vegetarian and do not like football." Gypsy leads in the veins, "we know migrants to stay put," I said in that plural I confirm that I am a stranger in this land. America began to go "just gave me the passport," because "in my country you can manage and buy beer from eighteen but you can not travel without permission from your old until you have twenty-one ", so I just put together a backpack fulfilled them with their things and left to roam the world. Earlier in the transport truck guy had gone half Argentina.

has lived in recent years thanks to two talents, his studies of gold, which allowed him to create with their tools, earrings, necklaces and bracelets that were sold or exchanged for food and housing (one bedroom, a mattress on the floor, a little water, even cold, but of course the first thing you have to do to get to any city is to find out where to spend the night on the street ever, it pays to be adventurous but not stupid ") and his folly (" the plantains are stubborn, years ago, when I was studying jewelry, my then-girlfriend showed up one day in the workshop and it took me three balls to juggle and challenged me to learn to use them, the balls were there several days, looked and looked, until one evening I started to throw into the air and it seemed impossible, I fell, I could not coordinate, they do not was the trick, but I'm banana and foolish and did not stop until I did, I took over a month, but I did, then I learned it's all about rhythm, if you have a musical ear is much easier but if you're someone like me without musical talent, you always are the numbers, each movement has a number and combination of them gives you a routine, now I can teach anyone the basic work in an hour " .)

long ago, his best friend ("friend of the soul?", "No, friend of life") emigrated to Mexico ("they came for laburo and now works in advertising model and doing well") and he made him a firm promise to follow suit ("I do not know when, but I will.") He did not realize, but at twenty, when with his knapsack on his back began his journey "by travel a bit, "he began to keep his word.

With passport in hand he headed north by train, first to Buenos Aires, this wonderful wilderness, later, Mendoza, Cordoba, Tucuman, Salta and from there on, start jumping borders. Bolivia seemed a beautiful place, "especially the part of Santa Cruz", the people are friendly and welcoming, then Peru, "a spectacular country, Puno, Cuzco, Arequipa, Lima, Trujillo, Cajamarca, Piura," I I toured all, working everywhere, I was living in Barranco, do not you think that look Barranco and Countess?, I think so, but most like Palermo in Buenos Aires, I loved Huanchaco, what beautiful beach, lived in an academy of surfers, eating ceviche, because the best of Peru is the food is delicious. " After Ecuador, "where they live half self-conscious about the issue of the dollar, the police chasing you because you expect to take their dollars, as their own and not of the gringos." After Colombia, "a beautiful country with friendly people and educated, but Cartagena is a very hot, a lot of drugs, many raids" and, finally, Venezuela "where I came twice and I do not know why, is where worse they treat you, do not let you work, you pursue, if they see someone laburando in the streets and stop it if you stop you put against the wall, you take all the money you have and will eventually rob you and go, I've been everywhere, I've gotten to poor areas and dangerous areas I never felt afraid, after I went to Brazil, Venezuela, I lived in favelas and I never had fear, the only place where I was afraid it was in Venezuela, and only when he saw police everywhere in America the police want something, Indeed, in all countries if they stop you, they'll make money, they ask for a contribution, some coins, some mangoes, and they know that you like them and you have to earn a living, but you get bullied Venezuela , say there are many Argentine hit you and steal; here in Mexico, for example, do not bother with one that is working on the streets, on the contrary, the patrol pass by and stare, even invite me a drink, the other day a girl half I cried out of place in this same corner, he said it was a cheapie, the patrol was watching my juggling stopped the traffic and the speaker said he would identify the person who committed the offense against good manners, was very funny see the police defend myself .... "

America has traveled a lot, "I could not continue my journey by land to Central America because there is no road, you have to take a plane to City Panama hundred dollars and require you to guarantee, in addition, being in Caracas I found out I was going to be an uncle, so I decided to turn around to see my sister, I went through the savannah, I went through the jungle, I was in the rivers, Amazon toured the ship and seen the sunsets, lying in my hammock on the deck, Mateando and pursued by a dozen pink dolphins that accompanied the ship as playing, I crossed all over Brazil and fell in love several times, which mines most beautiful after I went through Paraguay and Argentina and I was with my sister for the birth, I still spent a couple of months, bought new tools, new gems did, I put together some money and threw me back when I came to Peru for the second time I called my friend and said that now that I was doing a field in their depa, who was already there, a year after the plane took Caracas and arrived in Mexico. "

"The future? I do not know, I would not worry too much, I keep traveling, I want to know people and places, I think I'll stay a while in Mexico, I love, I live in the Condesa, a fifth, fourth little hard for me and with what I get working, I reached, of course, do it all, working as a waiter and model for commercials and extra in soap operas, I move all day, call here and there and always get something, thankfully I have never gone hungry, I always had something to eat and a place to spend the night, I have a backpack with my stuff but almost nothing is indispensable, several times I have sold everything to buy passage to the next city, I like to stay in one place for very long, but here the barbaric way, so I'm regularizing my papers to a lawyer working on migration trucho still owe five hundred dollars and still not give me back my passport, but I have a work permit when I get tired I'll go, as always, where?, I go to Europe, I have friends there, what I do and do very well and returning each year to see family, I first wanted to go to Mexico to fulfill my promise, then we'll see, if not together enough, maybe I'm going to Central America for a while and return to Argentina to see my old lady my mom always tells me wonder .... "