But is it the Top or Bottom Half?

The body count at the end of this post has now been changed to .5. Yay? Now, as I will explain presently it’s a little bit of a stretch, but it’s my blog and I can do what I want. I’ve been here for 3 months for crying out loud! There is a record setting pace for murders and I haven’t even seen one; I’m antsy. So, without further ado, this is the story of me almost witnessing a murder.

Well, with a little further ado. This story takes place a few weeks ago (or as I keep track at this time of year, the Wild Card playoff weekend of the NFL playoffs) and between then and now my parents came for a lovely little visit. I neglected to mention the following incident so that everybody’s sanity would be preserved. And now, really without any further ado, onto the story.

A week ago Saturday, while we were sleeping, somebody was offed outside the wall of our little housing development, on what I generally refer to as street number one. It happened around midnight and me and the LR were sound asleep. How’s that for a story. Our first murder and we slept right through it. Gunshots less than a football field away and we were callously disinterested. Mexico must be converting us after all. Our neighbors (also Americans and coworkers of the LR), who had only been down here a week and thus haven’t become the grizzled veterans the LR and I have, (although Mr neighbor is actually a grizzled veteran but I digress), had to relate the story to us on Monday. (I understand that to imply that I have become a grizzled veteran of Mexico stretches your credulity just a tad…lets just agree to ignore that fact and move on).

Apparently around midnight they heard gunshots, awoke, and looked out their window (a rookie mistake if I’ve ever heard one) to see a body in the parking lot of one of the stores on street one. They kept watching as lots of military type vehicles and people sped up, sirens a blaring, and stood around. That’s it, that’s the whole story. By morning we had no idea anything had happened. The body was gone, there’s no such thing as a crime scene…and if it wasn’t for our neighbors we never would have known. Makes me wonder how many other bodies I may have half missed.

Three days later my mother was here, and I was driving her down that exact street, telling her how (relatively) safe it was and that she shouldn’t worry. And I wasn’t lying either. It is a relatively safe street. One presumably drug related murder doesn’t even come close to changing that. That’s the crazy thing about this city. Drug violence happens absolutely everywhere, but if you’re in a safe area and not involved in the drug trade that makes you more or less safe (with the usual proviso of paying attention to your surroundings and not being an idiot). I did mention, however, that I wouldn’t want to be out walking alone at night though.

So, sorry mom…but all things considered I think we’d both agree you were better off not knowing while you were here.

This Blog has been gang violence free for 20 days.

Body Count: .5

The Spanish French Quarter

I apologize in advance to the one person from Cincinnati who I know reads this blog…to the rest of Cincinnati, meh I couldn’t care less.

I have had enough of the Cincinnati Bearcats and their fans to last me a lifetime (to my Mexican neighbors, please do not take that as an invitation). You might think it would get hard to be sick and tired of Cincinnati related things in Mexico, and you’d be right. It would not, however, be hard to get tired of “Bearcat Nation” if you were in New Orleans for New Year’s weekend when they were playing Florida in the Sugar Bowl, which the LR and I were. Forget the fact that the team was clearly woefully overmatched in the game, which they lost 51 to 24 (and it really wasn’t even that close), their fans couldn’t even muster a proper fight song…mostly it was just a lot of random yelling while walking up and down Bourbon street.

It’s sad. There used to be lots of human white noise on Bourbon Street no matter what time of year it was. It used to be you couldn’t hear yourself speak over the din on any given Monday afternoon, let alone a Saturday night. Now though, it takes a bunch of in over their heads inarticulate Bearcat fans drowning out an embarrassing bowl game performance (and on the flip side a bunch of mildly excited at winning a cake walk of a consolation prize Gator fans) to make the French Quarter hum. And on Friday night it was certainly humming. A party the old New Orleans would be proud of. And by Saturday night, January 2^nd, one day after the bowl game, the scene was mostly dead. It doesn’t bode well when you’re depending on the largesse of the people of Cincinnati of all places.

On the other hand, Saturday officially reminded me of my adopted home. (Can it be home, if you don’t speak the language, don’t go outside, and spend the vast majority of time talking to your dog?) About a month ago we took a tour of the city. In a wonderfully planned scheduling moment, it was the Sunday morning right after the Christmas party when we dragged our asses out of bed. We thought we were getting a functional tour…you know things like, these dry cleaners will neither shoot you nor steal your clothes.; this dentist speaks enough English not to mistakenly give you a gold tooth. That kind of stuff. Instead we got a tourist’s tour, an odd holdover from the days when there were tourists. We learned all about the history of our cute little Mexican drug riddled city.

It went something like this. This area used to be nice, now it’s not. This area was historic; then in a war, one side or the other burned it down. Rinse, repeat. Then we got to downtown. Despite looking nothing like New Orleans, smelling nothing like New Orleans, and being substantially less safe than even the very unsafe New Orleans, I almost instantly turned to the LR and said it reminded me of the post Katrina mess. One of the saddest things about the drug trafficization of the Mexican border is the degree to which it has destroyed the tourism industry. That degree would be total, at least where we are (I suppose some drunk collegians are still dumb enough to go to Tijuana…but not nearly as many as used to).

Walking around downtown here I could see all the remnants of an economy that used to cater to people who would come over the border for lunch and some cheap shopping at the market. But now, even the most dedicated of bargain shoppers have decided they’d rather not get shot, and stores, much like the boobs and bars in New Orleans, stand almost completely empty.

The difference in New Orleans is that during the Sugar Bowl, or Mardi Gras you can see glimpses of what once was. In Mexico,that past is a lot farther away. And it’s not like they can just hold a Sugar Bowl every once in a while for a taste of their former glory. Lord knows what the sugar would actually be.

This blog has been gang violence free for 77 days.

Body Count: Still 0 (I thought I heard gunfire the other day though. I was wrong.)

Ode to Bark

I am very white. Obviously I don’t mean in the albino sense (if we’re just referring to skin pigmentation the Irishness of the LR means she takes the cake), but in the existential sense and all that it represents. A quick perusal of the stuff white people like website (creatively named stuffwhitepeoplelike.com , shocking I know) shows me batting about .750. And in the rare instances where I don’t like stuff that white people do, by and large it’s because my laziness trumps my whiteness. I may be really white, but I’m epically lazy. For example, number 27 is marathons and while I like them in theory, in practice Wes Anderson (number 10 on the list) will make a summer multibillion dollar blockbuster before I would ever run a marathon. Not that this is news to anybody, nor should it be. Big deal, I dance with a horrific overbite and like to sleep late and play video games…what’s the point.

Well, moving to Mexico was supposed to beat some of that lazy whiteness out of me. I mean, people are shooting each other. While planning a vacation we are warned to expect men with guns to be around, as private security abounds and tourists in the area we’re going to have been robbed before. Ethnic people, dirty water, Spanish, it should all counterbalance my whiteness. (I suppose we can just ignore that being the only white person around, bottled water, and promising to learn a foreign language are numbers 71,76, and 115 respectively).

Somehow though, not only has my whiteness not dimmed, it has become positively incandescent. How? Well, referring back to stuffwhitepeoplelike.com I point you to item number #53 on the list that currently stands at #130 entries; Dogs. The Notorious D.O.G. has single handedly (pawedly?) made me infinitely whiter. So what follows is a thoroughly incomplete list of ways in which my dog has made me whiter.

• 1. Even other puppy people are amazed at how much we talk about our puppy like a child.
• 2. Friends routinely ask us how our baby is.
• 3. We have taken more pictures of our puppy than I have taken in the rest of my life to the power of 10 (one of them is with him sitting on Santa’s lap. Not only do we treat him like a person, but a goy at that. Oh wait, he has a menorah picture too).
• 4. Our primary communication with friends back in the states consists of said pictures.
• 5. I constantly talk out loud to the Notorious D.O.G. (then again he understands what I’m saying better than most Mexicans).
• 6. I have decided his favorite TV show is Scrubs.
• 7. Sd;f;dgskv (he just jumped on my keyboard and I decided not to delete what he said).
• 8. He got a Christmas stocking.

I’ve always been sort of proud of my whiteness, so I’m not entirely ashamed that living abroad has only amplified it. Now where I live, instead of being generically white, I’m uniquely white. I’d bore you further but I must run, my baby has the hiccups.

This blog has been gang violence free for 71 days.

Body Count: Still 0 (maybe I should go outside more?)