Weekend in Cabo

The Swell had been too big, and mostly blown out, for nearly a week. Jay’s shoulder was bothering him. We were all going slowly insane with Boredom so we headed into Cabo for a couple nights During April’s full moon. Cabo has a reputation for being a world class party town, with it’s selection of high priced resorts and nightclubs, many of them owned by aging rock stars.
We rolled in, and found a Hotel room. We got lunch. Jay didn’t want to do nothing except drink, so he set himself up at an open air bar about three in the afternoon, and Troy and I went wandering down to the beach to see what was what. The beach is lined with exclusive resort hotels, about ten of them, and their deck chairs run out to the high tide line. The beach is steep, and the water crystal blue. Mexican kids frolic in the surf ad gringo kids poke their toes in the water. Offshore there are hundreds of yachts and jetskis, and charter boats. Dudes yell at fat guys on shore, trying to persuade them to go marlin fishing. People everywhere are trying to sell you shit. The family patriarchs of the families that tour these resorts are almost exclusively miserable looking: they spent a year saving up for a week or a few days in a place only slightly more interesting than the living room and not nearly as relaxing.
This was the place Poof hung out, and raved about Cabo’s virtues. Troy and I spun off into an endless succession of Poof jokes, as we walked back towards the centre of town, traversing an industrial corridor dividing the town and civilization from the alternate universe of the resorts, a place nobody is allowed to enter of leave. Posses of maids in pharmaceutical grade smocks wandered to and from their workplaces sipping coca colas, and trucks loaded with Haagen Daas ice cream and other American luxury items roared up and down the starkly utilitarian service road.
When Troy and I met up with Jay, he was making small talk with a couple of stunning young Spanish ladies. Jay then took off with them and their group of friends, tagging along with them to dinner while Troy and I chased down Emily and Ashley (Two students from Reno) and the two of us took them through the famous nightclub, Cabo Wabo. These girls were difficult to connect with, they were American, and they spoke only in code. After a couple tedious beers the girls split on us, running away with a pair of Mexican wrestlers they met the night before.
Troy and I struggled to make headway the rest of the night, but we ended up just getting so drunk and demoralized that Troy the game theory specialist wound up losing twenty dollars at tic tac toe to a Squid Roe waiter who drew a # on our table and laid out his money. Shot girls injected Tequila jello into our mouths, while blowing a whistle, tweaking our nipples, and slapping our asses. Things got blurry.
The Next day we nursed hangovers and watched latin television all day in the hotel room. Jay had arranged for us to meet Daniella and Loquisha, and a couple of her friends outside the movie theatre at 7:00. The girls ran into their friend, Mariella, shortly after. Mariella was even more stunning that Daniella and Laquisha.
These girls, the women we met there, they are entirely unlike any females I’ve met before. They may well have been leading ladies from unreleased Pierre almovar films. They were fiery, voliatile, but entirely even tempered and wise. They were sharp, and they would cut you, but they also glowed from the inside with a soft warmth. These Spanish ladies are of an entirely different breed than those you find in the northern provinces. Daniella was the girl jay was after, but she was too good for him. She had, in early april, come to Caboafter breaking up with her fiancée of nearly a year, after their relationship fell apart while she was working in a Washington DC embassy. Daniella had cat eyes, and the bone structure of women you see in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daniellas close friend Loquisha, was the youngest and the loudest. She spoke fluent Italian and French on top of English and Spanish. Loquisha Snowboards in Taho, summers in Italy, and spent nearly a year in San Fransisco before coming to Cabo San Lucas. I’m guessing she doesn’t really need to work if she doesn’t want to: She’s taken care of. When Loquisha drinks she goes crazy. On the first night she threatened Jay with castration if he tried anything on Daniella; and she threw her cell phone into the marina in an unrelated incident. She has the look of a glamour model, and the amped up, ultra-extroverted personality of the latin afternoon talk show hostesses you see yakking on the local televisions. Troy and her were locked in verbal combat most of the second night.
Mariella is a Scotia Bank employee who arranges loans for the investing Americans and Canadians who come here to blow cash on retirement homes and southern getaway’s. She grew up in a middle class family in central Mexico, but drives a BMW that we all piled into for a snort from the dolphin petting zoo on the Marina to Cabo’s club district. Mariella was very quiet and reserved until after her first beer, when she took off her shoes and lterally let her hair down. By the end of the night she was dancing on tables, and clapping her hands to Madonna tunes, while blowing kisses to people all over the room.
These women were beautiful, I can’t stress that enough: I don’t know how to talk about them, and from the moment we met them, Saturday evening, until the wee hours of Sunday morning, the night was a delirious blur, as they escorted through the sparkling ruins of a crystal town. We cartwheeled down golden stairways through plazas of ganglia glitterati, amidst the stroboscopic camera bulbs and the thumping of electronic dance music. We laughed, drank, and danced the night away. So much happened, we visited so many places, and I became so razzle dazzled by the surreality of it all, that trying to recall is like waking up from an epic dream and trying to piece together the details: It just goes and goes.
We drank champagne on a thirty million dollar yacht, and joined a birthday party at an Irish pub that served Canadian beer, we danced at the Zoo, Squid Roe, Red’s Martini bar, and this place on the Marina. Mariellas laughing face is permanently etched into my mind, and it’s the only memory that remains in focus. These girls knew every important person in the town, it seemed: Laquisha parted waves of stone faced bouncers with stretched arms, and Daniella laid out gringos with blown kisses. Mariella brushed off Mexican suitors left and right, and everywhere we went we were with the most amazing women in the joint.
We caroused until early in the morning, just before dawn, just before the Sunday churchbells began ringing, the girls bid us farewell, and vanished quietly into Cabos secret places where they slept.
Jay Troy and I walked back to the Hotel Dorado single file with a brown bag full of Whoppers(ironically, though burger king was the most familiar food we’d eaten in a while, it was what made us sick). The Roosters had begun to crow, and the casualties of the night were being collected up from the gutters into plywood boxes by stout but muscular cigar smoking men. Old women with jangling rosary beads prayed to Mary on behalf of Cabos victims

We stumbled into our room and sprawled out on our lumpy beds, saying nothing. Soon we fell asleep watching Jackie Chan leap Spanish subtitles with partly chewed mouthfuls of taintburger in our mouths.
After getting back to the beach, on Sunday, the full moon waning, the three of us flopped around in a semi arid dream state until the crystalline fringes of the golden halo envcircling our weekend in Cabo San Lucas slowly disintegrated to hangover.
I sat down with a local guy who eats a potato for breakfeast each morning. He wouldn’t give his name, because if I knew it, I would have power over him. He told me how he bussed it into Santa Rosa to the docks where 700 hp fast boats unloaded their wares, after crossing from the mainland in under two hours (a 16 hour ferry ride). The man told me he was a botanist, and he had attempted to cultivate 70 marijuana plants but they were eaten by the rats when he had to hide the potted plants out in the dessert for a few days. A boy selling freezies from a cooler came by, and I bought my nameless, sketchy Amigo a freezey.

I was gonna say that the 3 girls we caroused with over the weekend had blessed us somehow, but really, our testosterone levels were through the roof, and we surfed like maniacs, the three of us, in the gigantic and terrible swell that’s been smashing los Cerritos beach for over a week now. Sea monsters were rearing up from the depths and draped their liquid jaws down over us. But we persevered, and battled those mythic creatures until our lungs were full of water and our arms and backs were burning from paddling. Though Jay is a knight, and Troy and I are but squires, the two of us both managed to get some good slashes in against the cool blue hides of the dragons that were swimming out there.

Boredom and Nonchalance

“It’s seventeen.” Said Troy
“That’s in. It’s a three.” Jay’s eye was up near the tail of the fin
“Don’t be a rat bastard about it, and everything’s Good” Said Troy, lining up. thunk thunk thunk “Dopey doubles and triples man. That’ll gitcha.” He moped up to the board and yanked them out.
“Okay. It’s just cause.” Said Jay, yanking a burr out of his sandal
“Not really” Said Troy “You so lost a bullseye.” Jay walked up to the bad darts, and stood there blankly.
“I like How you reach down to write something, until you realize there’s nothing to write.” Troy was Tweaking his nipple. Which he does a lot, and without realizing it. Especially when his shirt is off. The darts got handed off to Troy, who was ahead in numbers but had yet to strike a double or a Triple.
“Exactly.” Said Jay, “There you go.” The third dart went in “Wow.” Said Jay, hinting at sarcasm. “What were you shooting at there?” Jay asked.
“Bulls…well, doubles. What else?” Said Troy, “I love it when it hits a hole that’s, it makes a thwack sound.”Troy added, yanking the darts out with a single swoop.
Jay’s game had slowed down tremendously “Unfortunately this thing’s gonna last quite a while.”
Troy’s game was speeding up. He was making subtle efforts to play poorly enough as not to demoralize Jay with darts until the appropriate moment “It doesn’t have to be good out of the starting gate, Just so long as it can sprint at the finish line. Like I always say, man, there’s nothing better than a come from behind. Troy made lewd gestures with his finger while Jay lined up his darts.
“Wow.”
“Wow... I love you… hey Jay… I love you.”
“Shut up with that already” Yelled Jay, throwing open fists at the defending Trojan. “I’m fucking sick of it!”
Troy threw perfect darts, with two doubles and one on the line. He sauntered up to the board “Yeah, that’s a trip.”
Jay took a look “yeah, it’s weird, because these bars are better than these bars are thicker than these bars.” The dart board, carefully inscribed by hand with a sharpie onto a sunbleached boogey board and mounted with bungie chords onto a rebar tripod embedded in the sand was slightly less than perfect, and Jay had taken the better part of a day to build it. It had gone through several redesigns before beach darts could be considered functional as a game.

“Yeah, I’m just like lobbin’ ‘em at it. I got a triple though. There’s no way I can aim from here.”
“Did you see the way that dart fell out? Fuck! Nice and close.”
“Went in, close. A bit on the line.” Said Jay
“I hate shooting triples when I need them.”
“You know, not trying got me a lot closer, Troy, I think if I’m gonna throw anything, I might as well throw a triple twenty.”
thunk, thunk, thunk
“Wow.”
“There’s nothing like working on your craft.”
“It’s ridiculous how close we are though. Why would I go for a bull?”
“I have no Idea. I go for double 18.” Troy lobbed three in short succession “As you can see, I know where they are.”
“That was brutal man. You moved into first.”, Jay was now holing his head with both hands and grimacing “ I haven’t seen you throw like that in a while.”
Thunk thunk piff
“I can’t believe that third one missed the board.” Jay moped up to the darts.
thunk thunk thunk
“Whoa man. Close. Wow. That was close.”
“Yeah. That’s it for sure.”
Thunk thunk thunk
“Oh, nice.”
“Wow.”
“Going surfing?”
“Beer. I’m thirsty.”
“Yeah, I guess, hey.”
“They’re still cold. You want one?”
“Please.” Jay started fucking with the table.
“Whattya got?”
“I just wanted to move that leg.”
“what? That wasn’t there before?”
“Good?”
“It’s not gonna work at random.”
“Diddle or Muggets?”
“… Muggets I guess.” Answered Jay.
“Muggets is more of an insult than anything.”

Night Orphans

Night Orphans

Night Orphans are Aborted babies with severe fetal alcohol syndrome who survived because they were so havily pickled while in the womb. Their unpigmented skin sweats mucous, and they live in holes in the sand, just above the low tide line. They crawl out at night to feed on the plentiful crabs and suffocating blowfish. Night orphans will foray inland under a full moon to feast on the putrid honey of carniverous bees. Their Knobbly white knees quiver as the orphans buck in ecstasy after every sting, their grey teeth chattering behind shrill grins in the moonlight. Only in the Fog do the night Orphans come out to play, tickling one another in blobs of washed up jellyfish. They cocoon themselves during the dry season in husks of hardened yellow sinus excretion. The husks ferment as the Orphan pickles itself into hibernation for another long nightmarte in the womb.

They’re gonna pupate soon, so I sit in my tent sucking on cigarettes and shuddering with fear. I’m expecting a tiny pair of clammy hands to reach in through my tent walls and silently fondle my toes. My lighter is secure in my hand- I heard the little fuckers are flammable, but it doesn’t always kill them quick: Their hides crust up into shingles of charcoal. Blinded, the scorched Orphan will crawl around wheezing until the crabs come to pick it apart.

I Managed a monster leap yesterday off one of the cliffs into the sand. I Jumped off that chunk of rock about fifty times at various points before I summoned up the confidence to go from the top, I was there several times over the space of the last week. The sand makes for a surprisingly soft landing. I think this is my biggest leap to solid ground to date. There was a big one I did off the tower in Kinsmen park that I think is comparable, but I don't have measuring tape so who knows. That's not whats important. What's important is that I'm not too old to pull shit like this off, though I must say, I'm alot more strategic and careful about it than I used to be. It's good to have a nice parkour playground nearby. I can only fail at surfing so many times in a row before I get dejected. Jumping off stuff might be dorky, but it's refreshing to do something you're good at every now and then to remind yourself that you don't suck completely at everything. (photo courtesy Jay Fedun, who did an excellent job with Troys peice of shit camera that sucks for action shot because of the delay)

Here's a post I made on the EDPK forums last summer, when I was pretty involved with them. It was a rallying cry, and became sort of a local manifesto on Parkour in Edmonton:

Having thought about it, I've come to realize that seeding the growth of parkour in this city, escpecially for kids who would otherwise be sedentiary, is not only good for parkour, but good for Edmonton. There's a documentary out called "Jump Westminster", and part of it is about how a public school official looking for ways to curb obesity and inactivity in school age children witnessed parkour, and was subsequently inspired to make Parkour an active part of the school cirriculum. It probably won't happen anytime soon, but it would be great to see parkour get that kind of respect here- and the onus is on us. Teaching, demonstrating, and spreading parkour should be as much a part of what we do as is our own training. Toasts thing at the Ledge was pretty cool. And at that level it's not about the biggest or the fastest or the furthest, it's simply about learning how to move, how to coordinate your body, conditioning, and physical confidence. Sometimes I wonder if it should be more about teaching kids or teaching adults. Kids have a natural tendency to run, jump, and climb on everything they see. Their parents have a natural tendency to say "hey, cut that out, you're gonna hurt yourself." If you can show to parents that this running, jumping and climbing is worth pursuing for its own sake, and not simply misbehavior, they will be far more likely to encourage it, or at least permit it in their children. As much as some of you will hate to hear me say it, Skateboarding is something to look to when trying to understand the growth of a new sport, and how that trickles down to a place like Edmonton. A few years ago I read a study that claimed more Canadian kids own skateboards than skates- making skateboarding bigger than Hockey. Though Tony Hawk, skateboarding's most visible and vocal promoter has frequently referred to skateboarding as a 'Daredevil Sport', and it is frequently sensationalized in the media, Parents still buy their kids skateboards for Christmas and let them ride them at the local skatepark. The fact that several public skateparks have been built in this city, and that they are open for anybody to use is surprising. Skateparks are dangerous places- The biggest quarterpipe at castledowns is about twelve feet high. It's not there for looking at, It's meant to ridden on. The ground is hard concrete, there are six foot high flights of stairs meant to be ollied, and 200 pound full grown skateboarders are zooming around inches away from 40 pound kids. The whole place is an accident waiting to happen- yet somehow the skateboarding community managed to convince the civic policy wonks that Skateboard parks are safe enough to be legitimized and built as public places. More power to them- it activly demonstrates that kids have a built in and intrinsic ability to asess risk, and make sound judgement calls in hazrdous environments, and to graduate to more difficult terrain features slowly with time and practice. As much as Edmonton's skateparks foster the local skateboarding community, Edmontons neighbourhood playgrounds are a natural choice as the breeding grounds for future traceurs (it was for me). Unfortunately, playground design has suffered greatly over the years out of litigation fears. Playgrounds are now designed to restrict movement, and to dissuade kids from challenging their own comfort zones. This is tragically ironic in lieu of the aformentioned. Because the new playgrounds are so fricken lame kids are usually completely bored of them by age seven or eight and they move on to other things- like videogames, or bowling. The quartermillion dollar playstructure stands alone in the schoolyard, alone, unloved, and unused. An authoritarian sentinel of supermodernist suburbian dystopia. The playground I grew up playing in would be regarded as a lawsuit waiting to happen by the parent teacher comitees who lobby against the underlying principles of fun, and get all in a tizzy looking for someone to blame everytime some kid skins his knee or sprains his ankle.Baturyn playground was built in the early eighties during a development boom that hit edmonton beginning in the late seventies as a biproduct oil shortages, and rising gas prices. This development boom attracted many world class architects to our city, and for a short time Edmonton was a hub for world class architectural development. Out of this Boom we got buildings like Hub mall,the muttart, and coronation pool.(I've seen pictures of all these places in international architecture publications). On the Downside we also got things like the pedway system, the courthouses, the citadel, and the Art galley. Many beautiful old buldings were razed to make way for these concrete monstrosities: A form of Architectural nihilism designed to be authoritarian and overbearing. Reffered to in Architecture circles as "Brutalism", these new buildings make people feel like termites, and have turned our core into a wasteland. It was before my time, but once Jasper avenue was as vibrant as Whyte avenue is today. Now days nobody goes downtown unless they have to. After working hours the "Arts District" is the sole domain of Homeless persons, Traceurs, and the security guards who shoo us away. At the same time as world class brutalists were busy dehumanizing our downtown core, what was then a new movement in playground design took hold in the schoolyards that were going up in new neighbourhoods like Castledowns and Millwoods. All this came from a group of urban planners who came to Edmonton from California, where a revolution in playground design had taken place. Edmonton was lucky enough to catch the crest of this wave, and many of the playgrounds built at the time were world class, excellent terrain parks that facilitated creativity through movement. Maybe some of you remember the Playground at Hawrelak Park- it was a real centrepeice, a phenomenal playground, and though I've travelled all over canada and parts of the united states, I have yet to see one better, Though it has since been razed and now all that remains is a concrete husk in the middle of a patch of dirty sand. A demoralizing epithet to the condemnation of fun in an overprotective, and surreptitiously paranoid age of litigation and beurocratic improprety. Almost all the great playgrounds of yore have been systematically dismantled and replaced with these brightly coloured mass produced modular arrangements of metal crap that are playgrounds in name and name alone. Most of the friends and aquaintances I have who are my own age are way out of shape, and their bodies are already falling apart. They wince when I jump off something over six feet , and fear for my life when I climb something over ten feet high. They are fish out of water on anything but flat, level ground. I don't have superpowers, I can jump and climb because I've been doing it my whole life, and for me it all started in my local playground. My first big leap was about ten feet, off the ufo shaped structure. When I was nine I Jumped off the tip top of the Twirlyslide,three and one half times my body height, almost as high as Foucans battleship leap in "Jump London" (though into nice soft sand, not steel). All the structures in my playground were connected with a network of balance beams about four inches wide that made for excellent games of sand tag, and over the years I ran these beams thousands of times, and did my first precisions going to and from them. The confidence I have with precisions stems directly from that. During the warm months I was in that playground every recess, and every chance I got after school and on the weekends. During summer holidays from grade three to grade six I'd be out there all day everyday for weeks at a time, usually playing some form of tag, or having chicken fights, or doing stunts. Through elementary school we had this little club called the "Jumping Jets" (Cheesy, I know- it was founded in grade two) We would challenge one another to jump from the boxes to the beams, or from the orange tube slide to the silver slide, or from the pirate ship to the tractor tires. We always pushed each other to do newer, bigger, and more creative things. By the end of grade nine I was doing front flips from fourteen feet off the structure we called 'Endor'. As I grew older I took it to the mountains, and spent many weekends hiking, scrambling and climbing there. But I right up until they tore out the last vestiges of my local playground i would return and repeat all my old jumps and lines, and right up until the end I was clearing new gaps that looked impossible when I was younger. Thanks to the playground I developed a resilience and physical confidence that most people don't have. And I enjoy it, and I confess to being a bit of a showoff sometimes. You get different reactions from people- Some say "Wow", others get angry and say "Fuck, dude, are you trying to kill yourself?" I've sprained my ankles, bruised my heels, I've needed stictches in a few spots, But I've never Broken a bone. (except my nose and my cheek- that's a different story) So parkour is important to me. It's important to be, and to last. And it's important for our small community to work towards the growth of Parkour, especially with kids. And It's very important to ensure that the uninformed don't become the misinformed. We have an Image to uphold, and a message to spread. Over time we'll work towards being more visible. An image in the paper or on the news of us getting big groups of kids and teens out, and teaching them basics, in a responsible and nurturing manner will do alot, and hopefully get people thinking about it the right way.

Here's The peice Fred did on the EDPK crew last fall. It's kind of dorky, but since I'm on the subject I may as well include it:

http://www.helptv.ca/online.aspx?FlashVars=admin/uploads/vid/parkour.flv

Here's the link to the EDPK website, which I was moderating for a while last year. Those kids are still going at it the last time I checked.:

http://www.edpk.ca/forum/

While I'm at it, heres a pic of me doing a huge leap in 2005. The Photo was taken by Dallas Whitley, for a magazine that never got off the ground:

I did alot of Skateboarding in Ensenada, and then later at Quatros Casas, and subsequently went on a little drawing kick dedicated to Skateboarding. These are the ones that turned out the best. All of them drawn with Blue ball point pen and highlighted with pencil crayon:

I’’ve put on my suit of terminal armour, I’m stagediving Into The Extras from Braveheart screaming ‘Long Live England’ with a fistful of Mel Gibson’s hair extensions in one hand and a giant rubber dildo in the other. It’s only in these sorts of situations that it dawns on me ‘Willpower is arbitrary’.

“If he were here he'd consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse”- Mel
‘
As you fall towards wooden blades and sweaty toothed creative anachronists, time slows rapidly, quickening into a medium format production still of a man who appears to be breakdancing on sword tips. Time keeps on moving forward though- but there’s a rare lurching of the cosmic mechanisms, and my psyche lurches like big ben when the pendulum drops, 2000 pound gears grinding against iron ratchets and dusty springs uncoiling.

For that bump, I forget and act on instinct, tumbling in the hands of the gods, and wake up a different man.
The man I used to be skipped town , on a flaming horse, with the most expensive prostitute in the town’s one room brothel. The Man I used to be yehaws while she chirps and giggles. The Horse has never felt so fierce.
That man reminds me that I am childish and severe. I would send my men after him, but they are drunken and fat now. I know better than to follow the man I used to be, he is running his own errand.
So I remain, and run my township as if it were a British telethon- punishing, and banal. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded on the class television set in 1986 it celebrated the climax of Sharon Christa McAullife’s frst and last earth shattering orgasm.

“McAuliffe had been born on September 2, 1948, the oldest child of Edward and Grace Corrigan. Her father was at that time completing his sophomore year at Boston College, but not long thereafter he took a job as an assistant comptroller in a Boston department store and the family moved to the Boston suburb of Framingham. As a youth she registered excitement over the Apollo moon landing program, and wrote years later on her astronaut application form that "I watched the Space Age being born and I would like to participate."”
-NASA

Animals of Mexico

Here's some pigs I drew before I left. It took me most of the day to get these pics up. Today's theme is 'Animals of Mexico'

There was a dog sitting around our camp one afternoon in Quatros casas

These are some birds

Here's those seagulls getting gushed