Its Kinda Like Cocaine, With Less a White Powder and More Electronic Wires

At some point during my senior year of college I made a list of all the things I was addicted to. Now, I’m a nerd, not a rockstar…and not a Williamsburg Brooklyn live like a bohemian and buy coke with my parents credit card nerd…but an actual nerd. So, everything on the list of things I was addicted to was perfectly legal. It looked something like this.

1. 1. Video Games

2. 2. Gummy Candy

3. 3. Fast Food

4. 4. TV

The TV addiction is still alive and well (as you might have guessed from this post). I have more or less broken the fast food habit, and much like a “reformed” smoker I only really crave it when I drink. The gummy candy addiction is still alive and well and if I could I would gorge myself all day every day on sourpatch watermelons and jelly beans. I’m not kidding. I’d get diabetes so fast I’d have it before I started eating the sugar. Luckily the LR, understands my plight and stands firmly between me and my candy. She can be very persuasive when she puts her mind to it. Actually, given that she does the shopping, and I don’t know how to say gummy bear in Spanish it’s not that hard to keep me sugar coma free I guess.

Then there are the video games. I got my first Nintendo system somewhere around 2^nd grade. It game with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. My mother decided that she didn’t want to encourage violence in her children, so when she caught me pointing the gun shaped controller for Duck Hunt at my sister she confiscated it for what she said would be six months. She assumed I would forget about it, and that would be that. She underestimated my love for shooting ducks. Six months to the day later I asked her for the gun back, she had thrown it out. I still hold a grudge…but I learned my lesson. From then on shooting games were played at arcades outside the house. I wasted countless quarters beating Area 51, Police Squad and several Time Crisis games over the course of the last twenty years.

Over the next two decades I had the Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Game Gear, Playstation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Sega Dreamcast, Xbox, Playstation Portable, Xbox 360 and of course the Wii. Needless to say, I am quite addicted to video games. So, while you may think that the most difficult thing about my move to the drug war battlefield formerly known as Mexico might be the getting shot at, or the not understanding anybody, or two hour wait to cross the border, or any number of other things. It’s not. The single most difficult thing about moving to Mexico was having to wait three months for my Xbox 360 to get here.

The LR and I had our stuff get here in three stages. The first stage came in the car with us. Try as I might I couldn’t quite convince the LR that my 360 was more important than the four suitcases of clothes, the kitchen stuff, or other assorted household goods we packed. The next two stages were shipped on the slow boat and fast boat (which are actually an airplane and a train but that’s beside the point). It’s done that way because the LR’s job does it that way, and they do it for free. Which is great. Except that part of the deal is that the slow boat takes an exceedingly long time, and the safety of electronics is not guaranteed on the fast boat.

So, for the second time in my life I was without my video games (the first time being my freshman year in college, when my parents thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that not having video games would help my grades). And, as the LR can attest to having suffered through my withdrawal I am still thoroughly addicted.

The moral of the story? Unless the Mexicans start selling Call of Duty, or Gears of War they are in the wrong market to hook me.

This blog has been gang violence free for 58 days.

Body Count: Still 0

Yo Quiero Taco Bell

Well, on the bright side there’s always Mexican food right? Being on this side of the border I should at least be able to enjoy some authentic tacos while getting riddled by bullets shouldn’t I? Jalapenos so hot it makes my face look like a cancer patients (for those less quick on the uptake that means it singes of my eyebrows and makes me look like I’m undergoing chemotherapy. Its probably less funny now that I explained it, and because of the whole cancer thing), giant blocks of amazing cheese (or queso as the natives say. See, I’m blending in), and mole sauce, whatever that may be.

I assume that all exists, somewhere. I wouldn’t really know though. In two months we’ve been out to dinner on the Mexican side of the border precisely once. And that was for Italian food. Which to be fair was really not bad (definitely better than Olive Garden, especially because I really have no desire to be invited into any Mexican’s family). Why Italian? Well we were at the mall shopping and our options were Italian or Applebees. Now that’s some authentic Mexican options. It was a very pleasant experience…a little like dining in little Italy in NYC. The food wasn’t as good obviously, but you still got to look at your fellow diners and play guess the mob member.

Before we got here we had heard some stories about eating out down here that both amused and horrified us (so they were amusifying, maybe horrimusing?) Things like, people being out to dinner when a Mexican drug lord decided he wanted to dine at the establishment. Said drug lord would walk in and his cronies would collect the cell phones from all of the restaurants patrons (note: this was not an optional activity). El Drug Lord would then sit, dine on a fine meal (in my mind it must include a four digit priced bottle of red wine, although I have yet to find a restaurant down here that has such alcohol…although to be fair I haven’t exactly been looking), and then when he was done his cronies would return all the cell phones and leave. While that sounds like my idea of a raucously good time, we still decided to maybe avoid most of the places south of the border.

As for the northern side of our immediate area-- there may be some good grub places there. I don’t know for certain. See there’s this thing I may have mentioned, it’s called a puppy. Puppies apparently aren’t supposed to be left alone for long stretches of time. I know, who would have thought? So, after a long day of running all the errands north of the border that we can, when its finally time to enjoy a break and get some good food, the LR and I invariably go to the same place. We hit the Taco Bell drive through. That’s right, we are 2100 miles away from home in a place where possibly the only positive is authentic Mexican food, and our dining venue of choice is cheap fast food knock off Mexican. I felt really bad about it for a while, but I’ve come to peace with it. I’ve decided that its really no different from eating Burger King in the states. Of course, when I was in the states I pretty much never had Burger King, but that’s not the point.

This blog has been gang violence free for 50 days

Body Count: 0

How Do You Say Catch 22 In Spanish

Guess what kids, today is a day that ends in Y? Know what that means? You guessed it, time for another story about driving in Mexico. Or is it time for another story about police and crime in Mexico. Or is it time for another story about not going out after dark in Mexico. I can’t remember. So, I’ll just do all three.

The first thing you need to understand is that driving in Mexico is a little bit like driving in New Jersey. There are no left turn lanes. In general in order to turn left you have to go past where you are headed and make a u turn. In New Jersey it’s a minor annoyance and not a big deal. In Mexico its taking your life in your hands. The spaces in the road set aside for turning are not well lit, stop lights with green arrows. No, they are, tiny little, pull out across 3 lanes of traffic bearing down on you and hope that if you hit somebody they won’t decide to shoot you, u-turn lanes.

Our community is off a smaller side road, so you can only turn onto our road from one direction on the main street (which by the way is street number 1 from this post). Usually if we are coming from the other direction we just go around the block. That’s fine, usually it takes all of three minutes. Except that one night earlier this week the intersection to get onto that street was closed. Yes the whole intersection was shut down, not like one lane of traffic going through, or lots of traffic. The whole intersection was shut down.

This actually isn’t all that uncommon. Police Activity. I’m not sure what it actually means. Was there a crime committed there (there are some stores that got robbed from time to time on the corner there, but generally the police don’t seem to care)? Are they looking for somebody? Have they been paid off to stop traffic for some reason? The answer is lost to the mists of the drug war. All we know is that we get a text message from one of LRs coworkers to let us know that the entire intersection has been closed.

It turned out not to be a big deal, since we were already home that night. Lets be honest, what nights are we not already home watching tv-- its what we do. But, if we had been out (as some of our friends were) then it would have been impossible to get home. With that intersection closed, and there being no way to turn across traffic onto our block we would have been stranded outside at night in Mexico. Its not exactly like you can go kill an hour window shopping or something.

It’s a wonderful situation, get a text message saying, there is police activity near your community, go home as a precaution to be safe, only to discover that the police activity prevents you from going home. Yossarian would be quite proud.

Its yet another reason not to go outside. Even if you don’t get shot, mugged, kidnapped, conscripted into being a drug mule, run over by a crazy driver or bitten by a stray street dog, you might not be able to get home again due to “police activity.” See what I brave simply to amuse my adoring public.

This blog has been gang violence free for 50 days

Body Count: 0

Winter Wonderland?

I’m supposed to be in the desert. I know because there is sand everywhere. Dust gets into everything, and the temperature in a room goes up fifteen degrees if you just think about the sun. So I have one very important question. Why the hell is it cold? I know its winter. But winter is supposed to be like a pleasant spring day here. That was its selling point. When we found out we were going to the border the LR and I said, well at least we won’t have to deal with winter. LIARS.

There is snow on the ground. Let me repeat that. There is snow, on the ground. As I write this little flakes of frozen water are falling from the sky and landing outside. I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised, the weather forecast this morning did say 66 degrees with a chance of snow storms. This might seem confusing so let’s take a bit of a walk down science lane shall we? Water retains heat. When cold air moves into an area it cools the water in the area (either in the ground or the sky). This blunts its impact on the surrounding air, slowing down the cooling process. The border has no water, so the cool air is not blunted, making sudden temperature drops possible. It just so happened that this time the cold air brought with it already cooled water in the form of snow. And voila for the first time in two years, snow in the desert. I should probably note at this point, that I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. But the sciency type stuff sounds convincing even if it’s just random weather words strung together.

Regardless, it is miserable. It’s possibly worse than being shot by drug dealers who mistake me for a rogue drug mule. Although, I m slightly biased. I really don’t like the cold. I’d say super cold temperatures were the direct cause of at least five sick days over the past two years (back when I had a real job and stuff). And sure, I don’t have to deal with zero degree weather here as I would occasionally deal with in NYC (and by occasionally deal with I am of course referring to curling in bed under a giant blanket and not moving). But the fact remains it gets cold. Even when it doesn’t snow, when the sun goes down, with no water in the air to retain the heat, the temperature drops like a rock.

I could, of course, just not go outside after dark. Even without the temperature issues this seems logical. After all, people do things like get shot after dark, or carjacked, or have bad burritos. The border after dark is not the place you want to be, unless you are trying to illegally cross it. Then again, pretty much all of that goes for the day time too. And, I’m sure during the summer (or as its been described to us, the hellish miserable dust storm months) I’ll want to not go out in the day time with the 110 degree heat and what not. But, as for winter not going out at night is not an option.

See, there’s this puppy. And this puppy needs to learn to use the facilities. And he’s a puppy, so the facilities are outside. And he’s a puppy so his bladder is the size of one of those angels Thomas Aquinas said could fit on the head of a pin. So he has to go out at night, often. And, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, the not gainfully employed half of the couple gets to take him out. Yay. So I get to freeze my behind off on a nightly basis in the desert. So, the one thing I was looking forward to about the desert has been taken away.

But, at least the Notorious D.O.G. a puppy born, and now being raised in the desert had the chance to play in the snow. If I was a sappy family sitcom I’d say it made it all worth it. It didn’t, but it was closer than I expected.

This blog has been gang violence free for 43 days

Body Count: 0