pixelated.me

I've recently been poor, broke, skint, strapped, impecunious, indigent, destitute (well not really)...but i had very little cash. A payment i was owed was delayed which lead to me low cash flow situation. This served to put things in an interesting perspective: the perspective of eggs.

9 days ago i was down to my last 90 pesos ($8.30 USD) The fridge was starting to look emptier and i went into what many nyu film students know as ramen noodle mode, except i fucking hate ramen noodles, they make me fat, and i'd rather be hungry than fat. no offense to hungry or fat people. I've been both.

So 90 pesos and i knew i had at least a week before i had any money coming in, what to do?
Eggs i though surely 90 pesos is enough for at least a dozen eggs, i can eat eggs twice a day for the rest of the week! Might even have some money left over for some bread or some cheese!

Well i walk over to the woman who sells fresh produce and eggs from a little hole in the wall (a block from starbucks, just to give some perspective, i hate cliched ideas about mexico having dusty roads, tequlia, and cacti, i've never seen a fucking cacti in mexico EVER.)
I ask her for a dozen eggs, she informs me they sell the eggs by the kilo and that a kilo is roughly sixteen eggs and each kilo of eggs is 13 pesos ($1.21 USD)...13 motherfucking pesos ($1.21 motherfucking USD) ! i had to ask twice. Yes 13...'cuantos quiero joven' (how many would you like young man) Fucking hell suddenly my 90 pesos no longer felt measly, i felt well off, i could feed a whole village of well...one or two people for weeks on 90 pesos worth of eggs. I asked for a kilo. 16 eggs which i've yet to finish.

ever since, everytime i pay for something i do the currency exchange.

my 36 pesos grande capuccino at starbucks = nearly 48 eggs.

the starting meter rate on a cab 20 pesos = 22 eggs give or take

an airport extreme base station 1,923 pesos = 2366 eggs!!!

puts things in perspective.

Day's slip by unnoticed and i feel I've lost my grip on the steering wheel.
It's been a straight road and I've been lucky, but i think i just saw a sign that says "dangerous curves ahead".
Deliberate-ness, choices,
'course laid in Captain'

The rest will fall into place. Gotta know where i'm rolling before i can invite someone to roll along.

Time to clean the fountain.

i want you
for me,
in whispered moments
in morning breaths
anticipation of uttered words.
of 10 am's 'i'm hungry'

want you,
damn it. with me. because.
just.

seemingly improbable, i want to be one of the great loves of your fucking life.
i think i'd be fun.

at the very least a beautiful mess.

I've decided that i like having old late 60's early 70's movies playing in the background as i do other things. There is something about those old color stocks that they used that just 'feels' cool.
as if, by osmosis. I, sitting in my blue stripped boxers and beige t-shirt, will somehow absorb some 'Cool' from Bullit or Doc, or hell Newman in...anything he did in the 70's.
they had some really great wardrobe designers back them.

I once read an article in GQ that mourned the utter lack of off-set movie star style in our present day movie stars. i.e. how many times have you seen Leo DiCaprio wearing fucking sandals and socks....anything higher than "0" is one too many.

So here's to 70's movie stars playing on the TV in the background as i write about them and feel a proximity cool

* and yes that is a black and white picture taken by peter schroeder of paul newman, i stumbled across it and thought it was cool so there it is.

'all you need is love' - the Beatles

'what the world needs now, is love, sweet love...' - the carpenters

'At last, my love has come along, my lonely days are over, and life is like a song' - Etta James

'As long, as long as i have you' - Elvis Presley

Beginning to see a pattern? The holy grail perhaps? I've been in love. truly. honest i have. We in fact loved each other. In the end that really meant fuck all. I don't mean to give the wrong impression. That in and of itself is rare, and it was a large part of the years we shared with each other, but in the end love really had nothing to do with it.

Nothing new right?, i could find and equal number of songs detailing that one fact 'love is not enough' in fact that's a nine inch nails song right there. The irony is we are fundamentally conditioned to believe the opposite. We are bombarded by happy endings, love stories, fairy tales. We place love above self. We attribute it as the reason for any number of silly things.

"you're nobody till somebody loves you...." says Dean, and Dean Martin can sound awfully convincing when he's crooning those words. But i think we can handle romanticism without the fairy tales, i think we can deal with the fact that love is only the main ingredient in a recipe as complex as Molé Poblano:

1 chicken or turkey - love is perhaps the chicken or turkey in this analogy

11 ancho chiles - sex

6 mulatto chiles - sex

3chiles chipotles adobados - sex

3tablespoons chile seeds - making love

5pasilla chiles - sex

4oz. almonds - cuddling

4oz. peanuts - sharing

8oz. sesame seeds - communication

2oz. pumpkin seeds - compromise

1bar dark chocolate - chocolate

6 allspice - humility

6 cloves - understanding

1 cinnamon stick - humor

A pinch aniseed - spontaneity/adventure

4 tomatoes - passion

10 green tomatillos - ego, self, to thine own self be true

3 cloves - joy

1 medium onion - pain

3 tortillas - self confidence

1 stale white bread roll - stability

1/2 lb.lard - all the messy misc. stuff

2tablespoons vinegar - independence

I'm sure I've left out a few things. but it gives you a rough idea of just how over simplified our ideas of relationships are. Maybe if we knew going into it how complex the recipe was we'd never attempt it?
As it stands, we clutch onto the first chicken we see and wonder why the fuck we aren't feasting on mole poblano yet?

i fear my analogy is starting to fall apart but it looks too clever to let go of, so I'm gonna hold on, Relationships are like mole poblano. OKAY? and love is just a chicken.




*the original text of this asterix was here for the wrong reasons, now it is gone.

http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/flickeur.php

this is beautiful.
this is tapping into the dreams of an emerging artificial intelligence based on the stuffs of our digital selfs.

i see such beautiful random images, they are fleeting and i wish i could keep them.

this also works really well if you're listening to "how it ends" by Devotchka

so easily become a blog meditating on loss.
It is the narrative of everything that came after "us"
i wonder how many blogs don't liter the blogspehere with the same seemingly singularly felt emotions.

thousands of years of human evolution and we are still all reduced to the most predictable patterns of broken heartedness.

and yet every single one of us believes at some point that they have in fact found the 'one' as i did.

and a great many find themselves re-evaluating the filtering software used to make the original assessment, as have.

none the less today at this hour i do miss something*








* nothing specific. in some ways what i miss is that nothing.

If i don't write something i'm liable to stick my finger in my ear
and start pulling the by now atrophied pieces of my brain out little
by little.
My days have started to blend into a gray fuzz of listening to music,
drinking tea, and fucking around on my computer.
i adore my friends...that is the preface to me saying that lately i
don't seem to feel very connected to any of them. They are pleasant
sensory patterns my brain recognizes as familiar.
I need someone who understands words the way i do. Who can spend the
stuffs of days making chocolate chip pancakes out of words. In this
city there is one person who does that. She does that in spanish
though and i don't play as well in spanish. I want to feel
challenged, confronted by someone's wordering, comforted by it.
Comfronted*

"Because everyone else is boring. And because you are different." -
Stéphane Miroux

Vibrant, organic, chaotic, clusterfuck,
that´s Mexico City. It is a little bit of what nyc was in the 1960´s and a little bit of what Soho is now. Half pretentions, half genuine cesspool of creativity and creation.
I think i am slowly falling in love with the city of my birth. I`m wary of her, i dont really trust her, but i am intrigued by what her energy does to me, by a city of contradictions. It is a country unto itself, our 20 plus million people.

It is a primarily catholic, somewhat conservative city where it is not uncommon for people to live at home all through their college education and only move out when they are ready to start their own families. Its a city of great economic inequality that bore one of the most voracious billionaires. Mexico City is also a place where nearly twenty thousand people stripped naked in the historical center for a new york photographer. It set a record turnout. eclipsing even the most liberal european cities. We have legalized abortion, same sex marriage, and will have free wifi throughout the cities public spaces by next year.

This is a city of the most beautiful dichotomy and in a way it seems perfectly suited to be the place i was born. I too am a hybrid, I am neither here nor there, i feel somewhat at home in Houston, New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. I am a wandering nomad with a hermits habits. I grew up on a mix between Shel Silversteen books and my moms Mafalda comics (i always prefered Garfield as a kid, and now Calvin and Hobbes) my two earliest memories of LP´s are a Cri Cri album of kids songs and a Twisted Sister record which i would play adnaseum because i loved ´were not gonna take it´ I speak both English and Spanish almost wholy independantly of eachother. In english i sound american, perhaps east coast. In spanish i sound chilango though perhaps a slight wattered down version.

The more time i spend in this city the more i realize that it is me. Full of conflict and texture. A place where we all carve out the bits that best feed the hungry beasts of creation we carry wrapped around our intestines.
I will always love New York. she was good to me. she taught me about dreaming and loss. i met my first great love there. i hit rock bottom there. I confronted my demons there. I broke there. When New York finally unwrapped me from her bosom it was to say ¨goodbye¨.

I hope my years here in Mexico City prove as fruitful.

eyb she typed.
i didn't know what she meant and when i don't know what she means i often reverse the letters.
and it was then that i realized.
she'd said 'bye'

a muse is defined as a source of inspiration.
that intangible addictive thing that most creatives come across, ones in a while.
It is unlike anything else I've ever known. Inspired i can feel, in the way words flow from me, the very idea of god.

it's astonishing that such potent stuffs can lay in the hands of a muse. To think that she, with her many ways, can stick her fingers in the liquid mush of my creativity and stir things up. It's only occasionally pleasurable, more often terrifying, and always irresistible

alas the problem with muses is that they are always innately human. The Greeks had it right. The muses of Greek myth were the nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus. They were the offspring of GODS! That makes sense, entrust the power to incite creation into the hands of the offspring of gods.
Sadly that is no longer the case and every single one of the women that have been muses to me have all been human, flawed, at times broken, and every one of them has left me, with the scars of where all the stuffs she inspired blasted out of me like the fragments of a grenade.

In the end the trouble with muses is that they can disappear.

i don't sleep much lately.

We live in a society of voyeurs.
everyone likes to look but few to choose to interact.
Which ultimately just means that no one comments on this blog,
and on some level i think i'd enjoy the idea of a dialog.
or perhaps it's just ego.
in all fairness i think it's a bit of both.

things are slowly dying.
connections whithering.
static of time.
irony is prevailing.

i miss your hands, your courageous hands, that weave worlds together carefully,
i miss that intoxicating scent of you, that human scent, of waking up together in the morning, of unfolding ourselves from each other.
i miss the noises you can't help but make when i make you cum, when you let me make you cum,
i miss waltzing with you on the tops of undulating beds in all the places we go when we travel.
i miss running my fingers through your tiny hair as you make tea in the mornings, in the middles, in the evenings, or even in your sleep.
i miss long afternoons we'd spend talking about all the little things and the not so big things as you held your purple pen like a wand.
i miss pretending not to watch you draw with the fascination of a little boy seeing his mother undress for the first time.
i miss your self conscious breasts and the way your thighs frame the soft whisper of your pubic hair,
i miss feeling terrified at the possibility, the danger, of almost, maybe, kinda could, if only, when there's time, and room, and courage, falling in love, with each other.
i miss it and I've never met you.

Like a monkey loves bananas!

noticeable, dull ache, somewhat more bearable than i thought it'd be.
it still sucks.

"focus on something else."
anything else.
it's hard to ignore rain on your glasses when you're trying to see past it.

i miss her.