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

There’s nothing like limitless strings of run-on sentences to fill up hundreds and hundreds of blank pages. I enjoy performing tasks that involve massive amounts of tedious repetition that incrementally lead to something larger. Like many of my friends, I exhibit certain micro- autistic character traits. Fortunately, for me, I’m a bi-product of the modern, western civilized world and I am tremendously thankful to have such a large body of almost completely useless knowledge at my disposal. I’m far enough away that the nihilism that comes part and parcel with the aforementioned does not affect me, so I can appreciate how fun and spectacularly fucked up it is to exist in an entirely artificial environment with no core ideology holding together, no vision, or underlying sense of order at all.
Out here in Mexico everything makes sense. Sure the road is full of holes, beer bottle deposit prices vary from town to town, and empties purchased in Guerro Negro can’t be returned in El Pescadero.
Yes, flush toilet plumbing systems will fail if the toilet paper is flushed with your excrement. Certainly these things are fucked up, but in Mexico it’s fucked up because nobody cares, and really, none of it is very important.
The developed world, North America particularly, regularly churns out disproportionate quantities of people who, for one twisted reason or another, ‘care’ enough to go to the trouble of inventing and mass marketing a plumbing system capable of handling the TP that some poison Ivy rashed ass clown somewhere around the turn of the century cared enough to invent in the first place.
I don’t waste any time worrying about success, or women, or where my next meal is coming from. I’m way too busy, day in and day out. Greasing the gears of an imaginary planetarium that meachanically whirrs and hums, a 3dimensional Mandala representing a corndog solar system that does not exist beyond the bounds of my own distorted cranium.
Troy is continually making dliberate and dedicated efforts to accomplish meaningless tasks, and in spite of being a very clear headed thinker, he persists in the maintenance of certain rigid and inflexible logical fallacies, which, as far as I can tell, exist entirely for the purposes of keeping his own sense of internal logic functionally out-of-whack, thus allowing him to maintain a perpetually absurdist/awestruck/apathetic first person perspective through the vise of a self mutilated world view of his own fabrication.

I’m soaking up Douglas Coupland’s Jpod like the Vaccum cleaner sucked up the aquarium water in the opening montage of the 80’s afternoon black family sitcom ‘Fat Nanny’ I can’t say if in fact the novel is great, and deserving of a place in the annals of Canlit, but it is a powerful dose of what I need wordwise. My only fear is that it will end too quickly. The characters contained within the pages of Jpod act and think much like myself and people I know, processing information and animal urges into maladaptive character traits, and in a fashion I am intimately familiar with.

They say familiarity breeds contempt, but Jpod gives me a taste of home: information overload, malaise, and long meandering, frequently interrupted conversations that span months if not years, yet miraculously manage to communicate absolutely nothing of value.
In Couplands world all culture and language has been mashed up and re-purposed as to render all things equally meaningless and therefore all that might fit under the heading ‘moral responsibility’ is made exempt from scrutiny. It sounds like nihilism, but at times I miss it and I want to be there.
Here’s why: if Moral responsibility is exempt from scrutiny, then the worst concept ever to enter my mind: Artistic responsibility, is all of the sudden rendered moot point and an irrelevant topic for reflection or dissection.
Couplands got a point: Fuck everything, and whence everything is fucked, it will no longer fuck with you. It’s okay if things fuck with you, and it’s okay to understand intrinsically that everything is fucked.
The auto spell check sorts out my spelling for me, automatically, and without my active participation and I Realize now that spelling bee champions are a shining example of biologically certified pre-planned obsolescence. We all the foresight to see how much bullshit is about to come raining down on humanity,s collective delirium, but it’s nonetheless something we’re all equally helpless to amend, both within ourselves and beyond, so therefore the ‘continuation of the species’ surmounts to inefficient subject matter for brooding upon. You’re much better off with TNA impact zone, and celebrity gossip rags if you ever expect to stumble upon the secrets of life, love, and happiness in the entirely manmade world in which we live, a place where up to 60% of the traceable brain function in the upper stratospheres of white, dendritic ether of a gamers head is dedicated to the memorization of maps and sequences necessary for Mario Brothers 3 and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. Basic survival is butter.
Academic thinking is entirely parasitic, but I respect it’s worth. It plays the role of the destroyer, yet Ironically, the creator: Punk bands for instance, fancy themselves to be the destroyer. Sex pistols might have well been singing nursery rhymes relative to what B.F. Skinner was saying at the time. The Destroyer encourages us as a people to settle with the notion once and for all that “We’re Fucked’. And the radical academic left is frightening to the other traditional bastions of because the notion of Fuckedness arouses so much repressive anxiety within those partial to the siamse conquistadors: commerce and messianicism. And in turn these conquerers seek to adopt the methods of academia’s cold and efficient destructionism to further their subterranean cause, and in doing so their noble utopias emerge as brutalist wastelands splashed with the brightly branded corporate symbology of the covert believer who much posture as a happy nihilist in the interests of a cover story.

I’m in a place where the Ocean Currents can run in one direction for years, then mysteriously switch. The Zeitgeists of bygone legends lurk in the hills with ‘la Cupachabra’, the creature, part dog, whom the locals say is living out there.

Yesterday morning I turned myself into a crab man after studying the creatures and learning their secrets. I took off, skittering out to the violent rocks under the cliffs and picked my way out along the stones out over the waves that licked at my feet while I climbed. The world shrunk to the patterns in the stone before me, I fingered ancient stone nostrils and swung from gigantic nipples, hooking lips and eye sockets, in a trance, until I had taken myself deep into a treacherous and alien landscape down at the bottom of the sea cliffs while the water beneath me slurped and sloshed. I found myself, naked but for sneakers and a bathing suit, way out there, in one of those harsh, and inhospitable end of the world type places, where the unstoppable force has been warring with the immovable object for eons. I was at peace while a maelstrom of white water churned all around me [los Cerritos psycobloc traverse: Crabman, 5.5, R (loose rock, sandy holds) Fa Robert Millang, 08.] Climb north from the last piece of beach at Los Cerritos, about a half mile across the face of the small mountain that is half broken into the sea.

Out point

Last Night I went out to the point, scrambling amongst the rocks. I found a nice patch of overhanging granite cliff that rose up out of some soft clean sand, and gastoned my way up fluted tufas and sandy jugs. After topping out I’d jump the fifteen feet back down into the sand, rolling to disseminate the impact. Sand clung to my sweaty back. Further out I hopped across a series of spires jabbing up out of the ocean along a cliffside, timing out my leaps to avoid the waves that jacked up and ripped their way into the cluster of jagged spires and boulders. There were hundreds of small crabs- some green and some speckled yellow and red. Others were whitish with purple flecks. They all had shells like formica countertops I used to build At gordie’s dad’s shop. I watched the critters clamor around on the cliiffsides- they were surprisingly agile and quick. They looked like the stop animations from life Aquatic.
Coming back to the beach, there was a black lab caught in the rip running along the rocks. A pasty family of chubby Canadians stood on the beach calling out “Rory” in Acapulco. The Dog was fighting a losing battle- he’d get closer, then take a short rest and float backwards out to sea, losing fifteen feet against the ten he just gained. Charlie, the spear fisher happened to be in a small, protected cove along the rocks, and he beckoned Rory into the safety of the calm water.
Unsuspecting swimmers get dragged out by the rip all the time. There’s a deep channel running along the beach with an undertow that carries excess water pushed in by the waves across the beach and out along the rocks. The current then spits them out on the far side of the breaking waves, just beyond the surfers. The Surfers watch them flail and panic for a bit before hauling in what’s usually some fat guy in his fifties who swims twice a week at the YMCA in Winnipeg but has no understanding of the ocean currents and how they work.

Our second day on the beach two young women pitched a tent about thirty feet down the beach. For the most part we hadn’t fully slipped out of desert mode, and we all still had the thousand mile stare creeping around in the backs of our retinas.
“What should we do?” I asked
“Let’s just go over there and man.” Said Troy.
“That’s probably a good Idea. But not all of us. It might intimidate them.” I said. Jay took off his shirt, drank a mouthful of Listerine, shook the sand out of his sheets and started doing pushups. Troy went over there and talked to them.
Between four thirty and sunset we rounded up a case of beer, wine, rum, marijuana, Ice, and specialty foods. We gathered up a pitiful quantity of bad cactus wood from the desert.
A roly poly little Mexican and his friend drove up through the sand in a red ford mustang with cans of pabst in their hands. I wish I knew where they got the pabst. They spoke little to no English, and with what little Spanish troy, Jay and could muster up, we were able to ween from them the nature of their presence. They were party dudes and were willing to provide us with anything we needed. We Needed firewood, and the two guys drove away.
An hour later one of the guys- Hugo- snorted up in a little white Toyota pick up loaded up in the back with fenceposts taken from somebody’s fence. A woman with screwy eyes got out and helped Jay unload wood from the back.
“You know, Hugo made me come with him because he needed an interpreter. He think he can charge fifty dollars for the wood but I don’t think you’ll pay more than forty.”
“What?” said Troy “We agreed to pay twenty five for wood.
“Pay Thirty.” I said. Troy only had a twenty and went scrounging in his van for change.
“Hey you guys watch out when you’re having fires.”
“Why’s that?” asked Jay
“Scorpions.” She sweeped the sand with her feet. “I’ve been stung fifteen times.”
“Wow said Jay.”
“Are you guys surfers?”
“Yep.”
“I used to surf here all the time before the Gringos came. Watch out for that rip you know. I had to rescue a man last Tuesday, the riptide was taking him out past the point. Then you have to get back to shore by going through the waves!” Her eyes were a little crooked, and her nose scrunched up and shiny. “I had to save him!” She announced.

That night we hosted an excellent Bonfire and everybody came. The Two girls- Joanne and Claire, from Wales and New Zealand respectively. Rory, a wanker from England and his two English mates, Tate and Finian, showed up, spoke little, and built a funnel from a water bottle so they could pour Coke into the bottle of Mescal they were passing amongst themselves. The bottle did a round, and then they topped it up again with coke and silently did another round.
I was talking to Charles the spear fisher, and his Girlfriend Ariel. Charles was a competitive swimmer and cross country skier from Oregon- he doesn’t swear or drink beer. His girlfriend has a Gordy style New Zealand necklace, stands six foot two, has the body of a South African supermodel and the head of an Albino Gorilla. Her IQ is double that of Charles. Charles plans to vote for Hillary in 08. His political ideology is summarized in the mantra ‘It takes a Clinton to fix a bush’
Charles was telling me about the other day when a drunk woman who hadn’t surfed in two years who went running up and down the beach and screaming “help, somebody is drowning out there.” Nobody did anything so she stole a surfboard from the rental shop and charged out into the ocean, still dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and a hoody. While she was fighting the break a couple surfers came and took the old guy in, and she got carried a half mile down the beach out beyond the break before she dragged herself, exhausted and sopping wet, back up to dry land. Charles was laughing as he told me how everybody was laughing about how funny she looked.
I’m glad the girls left this morning because neither of them had any personality or character. Joanne went to Uni to learn how to design lingerie and Claire was in Banff on a work Visa taking kids on sleigh rides before she came to Mexico. Whenever they we were sure we weren’t paying attention to them they’d start whisper to one another about Vegemite and tamarils. Always with the frock talk. Jay had a fancy black dress shirt and agent smith sunglasses that he wore with his faded red billabong board shorts and dusty flip flops most of the time Joanne was around.
After bacon and eggs Jay drove the girls to the bus station while I helped Troy with some lyrics to a song he was working on for the guitar. The big swell Jay had been talking about inVilla Maria came home to rooost, and the riptide was insane. Good surfers were getting flushed to the channel a half mile down the beach while trying to beat the break. There would be no going in the water. So I got shitfaced early, sunburnt my face, and napped most of the afternoon while reading Jpod to sober up.
I got out of the tent as our amigo hugo snorted up in his Toyota to drop off another load of wood, unannounced but just in the nick of time. He got his thirty bucks and we roasted hot dogs. Scorpions came crawling out of the logs as they got warm and Troy was afraid to sit down, winding up his battery free torch as he scanned the ground….

Everything's Swell

In the mid to late afternoon we go out and surf until sunset. When we come out we put a big pot of water on to boil for massive plates of spaghetti. It gets dark out fast here, and somewhere a beach fire will start flickering, and the campers gather to talk shit until the Moon goes down. Troy was up until sunrise drinking and playing guitar with some girl.
We take the mornings easy, drinking coffee and watching the sets roll in, spending two hours or more talking surfing and picking at food. I eat Peanut butter and Banana sandwiches, V-8 vegetable juice, bacon and eggs, cereal, and milk with Nestle quick during the day while drawing, reading, or writing, and maintaining the campsite. Our setup is now refined, elaborate, efficient and practical. The Coleman Camping kitchenette we got from the hippies in Ensenada is perfect for keeping everything organized and uncluttered. Every three days or so we go into town for groceries, ice, and roasted chickens.
At the surf hostel up the hill in El Pescadero we found a good deal, and Jay shelled out for my second board. The Blue Canoe is officially retired. The New board is a 7’6” funboard hand crafted by the legendary board shaper Velzy. When Jay learned to shape boards in Hawaii his teacher would rant about the virtues of Velzy, who died six months ago. The Board was first purchased by Jack O’Neil, founder of the O’Neil surf brand, for his son, who surfed the beaches in these parts before the Gringo’s began buying up property.
We’re camping out in a place that has yet to be too well known, but will be soon. Camping on the beach is free, and there are about twenty others, mostly young travelers in their twenties from various commonwealth countries, staying on the beach with us. A restauraunt up the beach from our jumble of sites is popular with day trippers from Cabo San Lucas, the resort town an hours drive south of us. We have two girls, one from New Zealand, and one from Wales, who wash dishes and collect firewood for us in exchange for beer and surf instruction. Beer and food are our only real expenses.
We’re supplied better than most of the people here, so we make the best hosts. We have extra surfboards, vehicle access to town, coolers capable of holding a case of beer, and secret access to a special grocery store in Todos Santos that sells hard to find foods that are a luxury item here in Mexico. Blueberry bagels and cream cheese, Bacon that hasn’t been salted to death, sharp cheddar, Quaker peaches and cream instant oatmeal- all rare items in Mexico.
Above the Rocky point to the north of us there is a massive hotel under construction, and about a mile down the beach to the south there is another big one being built. I’m hoping to try some spear fishing over the next few days, there’s a guy here from Oregon with the skills and the knowledge, and he’s been feeding himself and his girlfriend with what he kills while hunting in a little cove along the rocks.
We’ve been warned to watch out for Bull sharks, Stingrays, Black widows, scorpions, rattle snakes, packs of wild dogs, killer bees, and Bulls. So far I haven’t had any trouble.

Before Arriving in El Pescadero, we went looking for Punta Conejo, a remote beach with an excellent point break about forty kilometers off of the highway in a sparsely populated region of south central Baja.
It was getting late in the day when we found the turnoff that led us into the desert through to the beach. We drove 16 kilometres down a gravel road to Santa Fe. It’s marked of the map, but contains only a few trailers, some rusted out engine blocks, and an old church with no roof. After Sana Fe the road got worse: it became twisty, narrow, and rough with many sandy patches, but we had plenty of food and water and enough gas, so we continued further, driving directly into the setting sun through a forest of Cactus, yucca, and scrub oak, with hidden cows peering at us through the dust.
Just as the sun was going down the road began to split apart into a labyrinth of trails and paths winding around criss crossing one another. We did a rough crossing of a dry river bed and after a few more bends we entered what I think was Guadalupe, the next town on the map. We drove slowly past a thatch roof cinderblock shack, with smoke coming out of a tin chimney. Through the doorless entrance I could see the shape of a woman preparing food. The Sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still glowing. There was an oil drum with flames belching out next to three penned horses. An old Lincoln up on blocks was sunken half into a dune.
Amid the clutter of shacks there was a man, with his son, herding cattle into a trailer.
“Hola” Jay called out to him “Donde Esta la Punta Conejo?”
The Man took one look at us, and then began to flail his arms wildly and yelling in Spanish. His kid picked of a stick and gave us the evil eye. His dog started coming at us, and the cattle began to rear their heads and Moo. We didn’t know what to do: Both troy and Jay began backing up the vans to get outta there. The Lady came running out of the shack screaming and pointing at us. We were scared shitless, we turned the vans around and got out of there.
That night we camped near the river bed, collected our wits, and planned to try again tomorrow. We could hear the white sound of waves crashing against the shore off in the distance. We were not far from the ocean. I slept in Jay’s van that night, and we rolled out at sunrise after strong cups of coffee and renewed determination. Two hundred feet later, crossing the river, Troy’s van got bogged down in some deep soft sand. After three hours we were covered head to toe in dust trying to dig Troy’s van out. We jacked the van up and put rocks under the wheels, and let some air out of the tires, but every time troy tried driving out he just spun the back wheels for a couple seconds, again burying the van up to the rear axle. We all got pissed off at one another, and I thought we were gonna be there all day, but a red Jeep grand Cherokee came along.
“Oh shit.” Said Jay. It was the guy who yelled at us the night before. But he got out of his jeep and laughed at us. Then he pulled around in front, got out a rope and dragged troy out. He drew in the sand a map showing how to get to Punta Conejo, and off we went on what we presumed to be the correct road to the elusive and inaccessible point break.
We managed a few more kilometers of slow and treacherous driving, but the sand was getting too deep. We walked about a kilometer through the sand where the cactus forest dwindled out to an expanse of sand. Beyond the crest of some dunes lay the ocean, but the path to it was impenetrable for us, so we drove out, following a herd of cattle through to Santa Fe and the Main highway. By early afternoon we were in the water surfing in beautiful El Pescadero. I think that was four days ago now, but I’m not keeping close count.

Orderly Update, on Quatros Casas

‘I braved the sandstorm to urinate in the protected confines of a 3x3 rustry corrugated tin shack marked ‘Area 51’ in spraypaint. It rattled and clanked. When I stepped out and peered into the darkness of the valley with my headlamp, the glowing eyeballs of circling dogs shone back at me. They want our food. They ate the sand where we poured out the bacon grease. Zack was bit in the ankle today by one of them. Two of the dogs are half pitbull, the other two are part Doberman. I hope they don’t get any funny Ideas’

Hola Amigos. We’ve been camped out in Villa Maria for the past two nights, on the outskirts of the desert Oasis town of Mulege, on the banks of the deep blue sea of Cortez, after crossing the desert on the treacherous and narrow Baja Highway one. It’s been a nice little stopover, the campground is beautiful, we’ve got the internet, and the day was spent sitting under the shade of a cabana reading, surfing the net, writing, and Troys been working on Blackbird, a beatles song he downloaded the tabs to, and after hearing him fumble the notes about two hundred times he’s finally starting to get it, and it’s quite a beautiful song. Jay is getting a Massage from Gaylene, a kiwi and a professional Masseuse, and I have a felling she’s gonna charge him an Arm and a leg for it. The Tent is packed up and we’re preparing to head to Scorpion bay, where there’s a long mushy waves that, according to Jay’s research, will be packed with surfers. I’m not looking forward to crowds. We’ve been surfing these rare and amazing point breaks but all I need is some beach break to have fun. Jay keeps saying “We can surf beach break anywhere”, but I’ve had one solid day of Beach break this whole trip, weeks ago in Ensenada before coming down with a cold. So though Beach break is anywhere and everywhere, It remains just out of my grasp. It’s the best place for a surfer at my level to develop good wave sense and get strong, but Jay will have none of it. He shakes his head whenever I say “I’d be happy with some good old beach break.”
“That’s like going to a fancy restaurant, and instead of getting a cheeseburger, ordering the Filet mignon.” Jay says. Everywhere we go we run into Americans who only want to talk to other Americans so they can complain about how hard it is to find a decent hamburger.
I Haven’t said much about our stay at Quatros Casas- ‘The four Houses’ We were there for six days. It’s a gringo run surf hostel about seven miles up a rugged dirt road from the main highway, near the town of Camalu. There was weed there, and I spent much of the time there stoned- which was nice. My days


‘Right Now we are so very far away. I’ve never felt this far away from everything that is. Everything that ever was.’
The wind outside is howling, and spitting shrapnel. I spent an hour in the dark making emergency repairs and fortifications to my Sierra designs three season tent I got from Gordy before he ran away to Taz. The tent became severely lopsided in the wind, so I anchored it using thirty feet of 5mm perlon climbing chord, equalizing the line off three anchor points on the fly and securing the lines around the spare tire from Jay’s van. So far, aside from a zipper problem, the Tent is working fantastic. It is my home now. Thanks Mike (Gordey).
We ran out of Water this afternoon, but there’s plenty of Tecate. Troy picked up two case of the swill, and it comes in one litre bottles shaped like giant stubbies called Cuagumas. Troy says people can subsist on beer without water, but after watching him spend the morning stumbling around in the dust clutching his swollen, sunburnt head, I beg to differ.
‘I rammed down 6 eggs, a can of mixed vegetable, a cup of minute rice, a can of Tuna, a peanut butter sanfwich, the last of the orange juice, a cigarette, and four cups of coffee this morning.’
There’s an empty swimming pool here called the Showbowl, that you can skateboard in. The pool is modeled after the original Z-boys pool, and the coping is taken from the bowl used in the movie “Lords of Dogtown” about the original skateboarders who kicked off the whole movement back in the Day. You see Richard, the man who built Quatros Casas, was one of the original dudes. Tony Alva is a longtime friend of Richards. Tony Alva was a character in Lords of dogtown, and he put skating on the map. I met Tony Alva once in a videogame, He insited I do a bluntside on a rollercoaster in a virtual recreation of Santa Monica. Theres a wall of photos taken from skateboard magazines showing various legendary bowlmasters pulling off insane tricks in “The Showbowl” My efforts were a little less spectacular, but I tried my damndest, and skated that bowl and hour or two every day over the course of my week there. The Concrete wave did wonders for my surfing
We hung out a fair bit with a surfer dude named Zack. Interesting guy- a little strange- he had the deep, resonant voice of Martin Sheen. If he stood outside my tent quoting the Monologues from Apocalypse now, I wouldn’t know the difference. But Zack has been out of contact with what we consider to be civilization for a while now, and he speaks a surf dialect so thick with spanglish and surf/skate slang that it can be considered a form of pidgin. Zack had a bad back, but he shook it off and skated the bowl like a freak. There was some other people coming through the place hitting up the bowl- Guys who could skate well but haven’t in a while, they would drop in, make a sketchy lap around, and then smack the pavement with a thud. I managed to avoid any serious wipeouts, but this Ensenada kid who came down just for the bowl managed a compound fracture in his upper arm after taking a spectacular and awkward bail. Not only that, his tent blew into the ocean in the winds. His dad came to pick him up and take him Home.


‘I surfed my ass off so hard yesterday. Jay’s birthday. I had the ocean to myself. Jay and Zack watched from our campsite up top the dirt cliff, they said I was charging out there. I caught wave after wave for two hours and never spent more than five minutes in the lineup. I got caught on the inside, pushed under by a heavier wave that tumble dried me into a tangle of sea kelp. I was Bella Lugosi after he screamed “Lets shoot this fucker!” I made it back out to ride again. I caught 2 lefts, 5 long rights, 3 late and straight, and only 4 wipeouts. I got pinched under a closeout, and for a second I could see the whole world from the inside of a blue rifle barrel made of sea water, kelp mechanisms readying to release the firing pin. I got a hard bottom turn in with my knees skimming the water. I did little shuffles up and down the board, keeping it going in dying waves.
Quatros Casas offers up a wide, gentle reef break. Imagine a ½ mile wide duckbill stretching west just under the surface of the water. The Waves form up way out there, and roll in slow. One of the waves in each set is wreathed in a golden crest, and that’s the one you paddle out to meet at it’s breaking point. The Break point shifts around depending on the size and direction of the wave, so lining up is tricky business- like playing pong on a 200 foot wide video screen.’

The killer surf Session I had on Jay’s Birthday was a one off. All the ingredients fell neatly into place. The Endorphins were already flowing before I got into the water from the skating, which had me balanced and light on my toes. The weed phased out extracurricular thought, and I acted totally on instinct. It’s important not to think when surfing. But I burned myself out that day and my arms were like spaghetti for three days afterwards. I spent most of that time in my tent drawing, and filled about fifteen pages of my sketchbook. The tempo and feeling of this trip is really starting to take shape. My head was clear and still as a mountain lake.

‘Nothing but time and flies here, but time does not fly. It laps at the boulders in a gentle circadian rhythm. Between each breaking wave is a moment. Sometimes that moment passes quietly, and at times that moment collapses with a thunderous roar, to usher in a bold new era, that lasts between 8 and twelve seconds. We just rolled in here for a few passes of the sun to watch the sets come home to roost.’

Desert Delerium

The whole global torchlight parade, and it’s accompanying proceedings, came to a harsh and bitter finale when the gorgonzola sized flotilla of super Hadron colliders spontaneously combusted over the peculiatities of particle physics and their properties. Dust clouds, and windstorms, churning up seven hundred foot high plumes of powdered dog shit came marching from the inland dessert, and sprayed us with it’s fumigating black choke.
The Drugs where stale and the honey had bees embedded in it. The children, orphans, were shameless and disciplined. Ruthless in their endeavours. Canadian Jack Daniels and Mexican caguamas, Muy bien, Amigo, I’m rocking to the oldies and sweating on borrowed time. Two more days of this and the tans will push our faces back up the evolutionary chain several hundred more years. Thatt will be that. Bright white teeth, perfectly clean and straight, glowing at us from black Californian faces. We move up river, and get out of the boat here and there for chips, smokes, and drinks. We’re spiraling down the curvature of this globe, through the dusty, unpaved towns, dusty, unkempt bonitas, unpasteurized milks and honey’s, and flotillas of military men with covered faces. Protecting their identity from the dust I presume. At the checkpoints there’s always a mean looking one giving us the evil eye from behind a machine gun and a wall of sandbags. Spawning whales duplicate in the lagoons around here, their babies are stolen by buzzards with thirty foot wingspans, and hung to dry on cartoon cactihundreds of feet above the sun bleached granite boulderfields in the safety of the remote inner plateaus, through which this lone highway stretches, horizon to horizon, winding, twisting, and cracking on a slipstream of salt and broken dreams. Green Angels swoop overhead, twisting their matted feathers with the updrafts waiting for some maniac to get run off the road and left for dead by the screaming banditos that run wild in these parts after sunset.
“promise you will” she says. But my shifty eyes slip southbound, and I pretend I can’t understand what she means. The Deep blue sea of Cortez is in view, and its ultramarine hues collide with the mineral contorions of the dessert like they do in children’s drawings. Headless snakes and crushed bovines line the roads. Lactating dogs dalmations lick the sidewalks of Guerro Negro after we walk on them. Refried beans and earwax. Hugo de Naranja. Tecate caguamas. Carne y champinon pizza familiar. There’s less and less useful information to exchange the further we go. Change has become contant enough that I no longer notice.

The Dessert is hot and it burns with a white heat, And I watch it’s monitor lizards skittering across the Ashphualt like beads of water over a smoking greased frying pan. As the Baja highway 1 bends along the sea of Cortez, little hardscrabble dessert towns pop up, one after the other, nestled between hillsides and small valleys. Full of twisted metal, and reconfigured ship building yards. Rusted, salty, baked steel structures. Mineshafts open up directly off main street in Rosalia. All bets are off on right angles. There are none. Nobody’s out but a kid at a by-the-hour video game booth outside a windowless doorless building. We eat cigarette smoke and chug Gatorade, releasing peanut M&M’s to the crevices of Troy’s Van, and talk about superheroes and Competitive Kraft Dinner cook-off’s. We talk about spiders ad cardio pulmonary resuscitation. Bantha fodder and The Lumps. Jay’s nervous ticks.

Flock of Seagulls

We were jamming our sunburnt bodies into our wetsuits at the Spot we’ve decided to call “Fish Tail’s” after our encounter with a strange man carrying a bag of Fish Tails. We park on a road along that part of the coast between Ensenada and and San Miguel that runs through an industrial corridor bespeckled with various fish processing plants. The reek is atrocious. Often large flatbed trucks filled with fish parts come barreling along this road, chased by flocks of two hundred or more seagulls. The Gulls drop in on the trucks trying to snatch up some meat from the moving trucks. We park right at a bend in this road. A truck, loaded with tanks full of Sardines came around the bend a little too fast, and about two hundred pounds of silver fish came sloshing over the truck’s brim and spilled out as a shimmering, wriggling smear on the road. A frenzy of gulls immediately descended on the dying fish, hundreds of squaking, eager birds. Then another truck came around the bend, and slowly it mashed it’s way through the milieu of flapping wings. Most of the birds got away, but I watched as five of them got caught under the tires. After the second truck rolled off, five or six dying and dead gulls lay on the road. I watched one bird, it’s smeared guts pinning it to the ashphault, as it squawked out in helpless desperation to the other birds. The rest of the flock formed a roiling vortex overhead as a Mexican with a leafblower walked up and casually blasted the dead birds into the gutter. No bird would return to the scene of the crime. They circled over head, and we dodged their falling shit and watched as a van full of old Mexican men pulled up and began gathering the remaining sardines in buckets and little green bags. The fish bait gatherers were about to drive off when a police car showed up, and The Men could be seen sheepishly handing off their gathered sardines before being sent on their way. A pair of Barefoot teenage brothers laughed as they smashed bottles upon the rocks. The traumatized gulls eventually gathered out beyond the break and cleaned their feathers. The three of us paddled out across the bay and caught what waves there were in the weak swell. Such is life on the Baja coast.
We went into town for groceries, and bought some expired eggs and expired carrot sticks. There are men with whistles here, who direct traffic in the busy parking lot with whistles. They handed us little tickets indicating they are part of a volunteer program, and spend the day directing traffic in exchange for tips. I handed one guy the change in pocket, and Jay did the same. Matt Costa’s ‘Hey Mr. Pitiful’ played as I lay in the back of the van wondering how somebody could possibly earn any kind of living off the handouts they get directing traffic in a grocery store parking lot. Starbucks charges the same for a double Americano here as they do in Mexico. The tacos make me bloated and I can’t eat them every day.
We’re blowing about seventy dollars on groceries every two to three days. Jay’s picked up the guitar and hammers at it with an intensity, sincerity, and tactlessness that reminds me of Dean’s guitar during the early days of ‘Put’. Troy’s guitar has flourished, and he’s manufacturing some great riff’s. I’m in the process of resurrecting my Harmonica, but I’ve come down with a chest cold and it’s slowing me down. Troy’s much more difficult to beat than Jay at poker. We’ve set up a green chip economy- every won game of poker or crib earns the victor a green poker chip which can be exchanged for anything illicit, unhealthy, or sinful- thing’s such as prescription drugs from the ‘Happy Pharmacy’, cigarettes, or Lap dances at any of the ten or so strip clubs located in and round the Tourista district of Ensenada.

Cruise ships overrun with American spring break students have been docking every few days- only in the afternoons- and the party is carried off the ship and into town for a few hours of drunken debauchery. In theory this should be a great thing. But these American idiots are not the types we can associate with without stripping down to thongs and board shorts, and, with a bottle of Tecate in each arm attempting to dry hump jiggling asses while pouring beer on their heads. I’m not from America. This does not happen in Canada. Roving bands of milk fed shirtless mooks run around, hurling bottles of beer into the street and clawing at girls clothes, and hollering as they hop over the crippled legs of beggars and shove street urchins aside. Impoverished Mexicans stand with their families on street corners, watching, aghast, and it becomes clear to me where their resentment of white people comes from. Surfing here is fine, but I can’t wait to get clear of the foul stench of American arrogance. Events in Ensenada swing from one unacceptable extreme to the other. There is no middle ground.

Locals Only

We were getting ready for surfing this morning when a Mexican scam artist wearing red jeans, and his accomplice, showed up and lifted fifty pesos from Jay’s pocket using ventriloquism and fishing line. They also got away with two litres of Jugo and a bag of Fish tails they stole from somebody else. He seemed very affable at first, but he didn’t make any sense, and kept playing air guitar. This was his way of siphoning bills out of Jay’s pocket.
we paddled out across a small bay with a faint odour of raw sewage lifting off the seawater. The Spot was filled with proud Vuenuzuelan’s who wouldn’t share the clean left and so we were forced to surf the dirty right. Off shore sea spray picked up rivulets of water and flung them rudely into our faces as we dropped in. I got caught on the inside, tangled up in the seaweed which held me down while a double set of waves took turns gang banging me.
After the Vuenuzuealans left, we had the wave to ourselves. After about fifteen minutes this skeletal figure with hair down to his knees, a horsetoothed grin and and a psychedelic fun board came and started catching every wave. Jay couldn’t get a single ride in- The Joker would drop in to the shifting point break and charge down the line directly and purposefully coming as close as he could to Troy and myself, who were hanging around on the shoulder. As he got whizzed by he hurled flaming pumpkins at us, then did backflips off his board after the wave died out. Then the Fabio twins came out- a pair of boogie boarders with permed hair. They owned the spot and there was no more action. We floated like idiots and watched helplessly As the Cat in the hat and thing one and thing 2 did what they pleased.
The Next day, I had my wetsuit on, and my big blue kooky rental board under my arm, and was about to pick my way down the trail etched into the seacliff to the wet rocks below when this dude, standing in front of a BMW, with an Americano in one hand, his eyes hidden beneath a Quicksilver surf cap, and a single fin eight foot softtop mounted on his roof rack yelled out “Hey Gringo!” I looked up at him, and he was pointing at a slogan spray painted on the rock. ‘NO GRINGOS’ it said. Then he pointed at another rock ‘Locals Only’ was the slogan on that rock. What could I do? The dude had three friends with him. I walked back to Jay’s van- Troy and Jay were still only half into their wetsuits. Then Joker and the Fabio twins pulled up in a rusted out Toyota pickiup. We kicked the dirt beside the van for a bit, then Jay went and talked to Joker for a bit. Jay came back saying that Joker hadn’t even seen the BMW guy before. So whatever. They said it was all cool. Joker said he had friends from Canada. But Jay was still tentative. “I’ve dealt with this in Hawaii. Said Jay.
Jay and I went down the Cliffside and into the water. Troy stayed in the Van reading the last few chapters of ‘Fierce invalids home from hot climates’ Jay told me to stay close to him and led us to a weak wave leff than two feet high that occasionally forms in the shallows about forty feet outside of the main action.
“Let’s just stay out here” Jay was saying “I know how this stuff works. When they see how badly we want to surf, they’ll start to let us in.”
I paddled into a shallow bump and popped up for a three second ride. This middle aged looking guy wearing board shorts came creeping past, hanging ten off the end of his long board, sucking the last bit of steam out of the main break. “Yeah, go for it!” he yelled “Hang loose!” I thought he was being sarcastic.
“Don’t make direct eye contact with them” Jay said, And a little later “I’m going to go closer in. because you’re such a kook, Rob, you have to wait here for a bit. Stay away from the other surfers.”
Jay went up there, and just hung around. Then Joker came past me and said “Hey, go up there and surf with your friend.”
It turns out the locals, but for the one Jackass in the BMW, were all really nice. A weirdo longboarder- Richard- apparently runs a surf hostel about eighty miles south, near a point break, and with an empty pool for skateboarding in. Five bucks a night. How anti-climactic is that?
Maybe I should wrap this up with: The soft top rider with the BMW who said “NO Gringos” could be seen arguing with Joker on the inside after a bigger set came through. BMW then paddled off. Jay and I had a great time surfing but when we got back we found troy with an apple duct taped into his mouth, strapped tightly with yellow nylon rope to a chain link fence, and ‘Off the Pig’ scrawled in surf wax on his broken bob Mctavish that lay in two pieces in front of him. Then when the Federales came in…
Wait a minute- the Federales really did come in. An extended green pickup with a fifty cal. Mounted on top and eight armed soldiers came snorting and bouncing up the gravel road. But no, they didn’t us all up and throw in a dirt floor Mexican prison until uncle Ed could fly down and bail us out- Instead one of the soldiers knew some of the local surfers, and the soldiers had nothing better to do.

La Bufadora

2008, March 2: a different drum.

I’m sitting here with laptop in my tent. It makes a little dome, that glows around me as I sleep at night. It’s like having my own little planetarium. With the air mattress it’s more comfortable than any van, And warmer too. I can hear the waves crashing up against some rocks about two hundred feet away. In the evening I can hear soccer games, with drums and cheering, at the university next door. Sure, dogs will bark, gunshots will go off. High school age drunk Mexican girls will dance naked to Shakira on the patio of one of the nearby mansions that back the RV lot. But dat’s trailer park life.
In the mornings, I wake up sweaty, and with an erection. Amped up Mariachi music peaks the speakers of a nearby radio. It’s the same cliché soundtrack one uses in bad comedy montages of piñatas and chickens and siestas and sombreros. Mexico is all cliché, buddy, Everything here is a cheap imitation of a cheap imitation, and you’ve seen it all before.

My surfboard is pulling double duty as a kitchen counter. Our patio is pulling double duty as a skatepark. My penis is pulling double duty as a useless flap of skin. Our neighbours live in a bus sized RV, they have a hummer parked next to it, and they never go outside, until this morning, when I saw a fat man, his Mexican with, and two kids walk all the way from the RV to the hummer and drive off. I had no Idea, and I’m wondering how many other RV’s here have people in them who we will never see, because they never go outside.

I was eating a fish taco on the side of the road, when I had the good fortune of seeing a middle aged American lady being attacked by dogs. I was about fifty feet away, and I saw her go to the ground while a growling black animal holding her leg in its jaws jerked it’s head around. The Lady had grey hair, and a starched white t-shirt, and sunglasses. “Aaah… aaaaah… ahhh” She was saying, as she rolled around on the ground. Her husband got out of their Pontiac escalade and ran around the vehicle. It looked like he was about to do something, he raised his arms a bit, but then he just stood there, gawking. His blue linen shirt was very neatly pressed, and his khaki’s were glowing and fresh. There was another, smaller dog, yapping and jumping at him. “Now honey.” He was saying to his wife “Now honey…” and that was the extent of his usefulness. Quickly a group of young Mexican men ran out from behind a bush and coaxed the dogs off the Americans, and led the animals off into a fenced area. The American couple looked around, a bit dazed. Eventually the man helped his wife up, and into the SUV, and they drove off. I pushed my sunglasses a little further up my nose and ordered a coke.

Saturday we went to see La Bufadora. It’s the most famous thing in these parts of Mexico, and everybody always raves about how spectacular it is. I rode in Jay’s van about twenty kilometers out of town, past infinite hot tamale stands, and up another road that winds it’s way out another 15km out to the end of the peninsula that lines the south end of Ensenada bay. We paid two dollars to park, and then walked a half mile past farmacia’s and souvenier stands. It was a beautiful mountaintop location, with a wonderful view of Mexico, but you can’t see any of that: The walk way is lined with an impenetrable wall of shops selling useless crap. There are many tourists, but there are even more vendors. There are about five people at each little stand. One persons job is to operate the cash box, and the other four jump around in front of you, babbling like idiots, trying to get your attention. Every store sells the same crap, and all this crap is way up on a mountaintop, at the end of a long peninsula. After this walk of shame, all the tourists crowd around to see waves down below crash up against the rocks and make a thirty foot spray. That’s the famous ‘La Bufadora’. But I what I don’t understand is how a thousand people could be trying to make a living off of a few busloads of cruise ship tourists who ride up from the harbour evey few days to watch a geyser of water spray into the air. They form up around Ensenada’s one big tourist destination like barnacles of rocks trying to draw a nutrients out of the occasional passing wave of tourists. There’s a middle class here in this city, much like Edmonton, but imagine our city with about three or fourhundred thousand desperately poor people squeezed into every available nook and cranny, with begging children, festering wounds and blank stares. They Double up the sugar in everything here.

Mesopotamian Gang Bangers

It’s a Lovely Ensenada Morning, and Rusted out mid eighties model buick Skylark comes careening around the painted corner. The Driver’s neck is pencil thin, and his eyeballs are glazed over with the kind of thousand yard stare you see in a man who has been running on autopilot since he hit puberty. That neck is so damn skinny- and the skin a deep Mexican tan. I can’t figure out if it’s from a lifetime spent under the sun Or a thousand generetions spent under the sun. Some of the people out here are more olive, but others are tanned like rawhide. The Kids in the Back seat- I’ve seen many of these cars- The Kids in the back seat, there are usually between five and nine of them wave from the back seat, grinning as they claw over one another to get a better look at us. People in this country adhere to some very strict if not trashy conventions. They are nervous, timid people, in general. They have beautiful heroes but cruel leaders. They know to stay out of trouble- And I haven’t seen yet a mean looking Mexican. Purportedly they exist.

We crossed a bridge and looked down into the river, swollen to a reasonable size from the recent rains. A tidal wave was running up it and hamsters were surfing the break. It carried several hundred yards up stream, brown water rushing over black and rounded the bend.

I’m floating in the Ocean on a Surfboard and three Boogie boarders run their Spanish mouths off because we’re stealing their right off this point. I don’t know Spanish so it’s about goddamn time I got my flatulence under control. Seven or eight malignant retards hoist geriatric shaman types on their shoulders and the wrinkly feeblists twirl Aztec crucifixs and their pointed toques undulate over their pointed heads. The High water mark is visible as a ribbon of plastic flotsam from pacific places near and far. The ground is made waterless beneath me. I’ve come ashore and I’m ducking the crossfire of dueling gringos. The Land is privately owned by some Taco hating asshole. The nearby Marina is full of expensive yachts that are heavily guarded by gunmen who wave their rifle barrels across my chest and motion for me to turn around and walk another way. After wiping their ass, they put their hygienic paper in the wastebasket. This American made Rv park is a layer of gravel over another of pavement. Jay is Building an IED from his old cellphone and Troy picks out the elaborate two-chord structure of “Free Falling” on his guitar. Middle aged women in golf carts painted up to look like ladybugs snort around spinning doughnuts in the gravel and on this morning a heavy fog that rolled in over the night is slow to lift. I feel like dying, maybe. Or I feel like I’m already dead. Spilloff from the recent rains has turned the waters near shore from a crystal blue green to a murky brown. The Swell is at eleven feet and slowly rising. I don’t know how to skateboard, but I’m trying. I don’t recommend eating the Tuna in salsa- they don’t have the same kind of quality control standards here in Mexico as in the developed world, and all edibles are in question. The Mixed fruit jelly is 90% high fructose. The yogurt is watery. The bubble gum turns to powder when you chew it, and Mexican M&M’s are made with the peanuts that aren’t good enough for westerners. The salsa is soupy. Chicken burritos have a bit of chicken, but mostly contain unrecognizeable mush. The Beers though, are good. I went to urinate in the weeds and ended up pissing on a dog carcass. There is a gigantic Mexican flag snaking through the wind, the flag is fifty feet high, it’s pole is three hundred feet high. On a clear day, when the smog lifts, you can see it from fifty miles out at sea. The Americans here are kind, but ridiculously ugly.

Welcome to The Baja California

It’s a Foggy morning in the mission beach area of San Diego. The Taco Stand hasn’t opened, and sleepy Hostellers pack surfboards into their Mitsubishi. A Jacked Up Ford Expedition with a “Support The Troops” bumper sticker next to one that reads “Second place is the first loser” roars out of the alleyway and onto the street. The Swell, when I check it, is bigger than yesterday but blown out. It Matters not, we’re going to Mexico today. My Coffee is Starbucks- it’s the only place open this time. San Diego is a little dirtier than the other American cities, but the tits are as artificial as anywhere in California.
Last night when we pulled in, Jay and Troy were eager to gag on the Horrible food at Hooter’s in exchange for some PG titillation. Our server was a short Midwestern loudtalker with cannonball tits and crooked eyes. She told us her name was ‘Gina’ and wrote it down on a napkin in jagged italics with a sharpie on a napkin.
“We’re surfer’s” Said Jay “On our way to Mexico.”
“I’m Not a Big fan of Mexico. None of us are around here.” She said.
“We’ll be camping.” Said troy
“Camping, that sounds terrible!”
“We’re all the way from Canada, it was minus forty four when we left Edmonton”
I said.
She looked out the window towards the Ocean, and her crooked glassy eyes lit up. She smiled and pointed at a dark shape floating on the horizon. We all looked out to see “Is that a Cruiser or a Battleship?” She asked.

San diego is California’s southernmost city. A Military town with plenty of students, the Migrant workers that creep northwards are not welcome here, unlike the other cities in California.

Twenty four hours ago we woke up in a desserted state campground on the outskirts of Malibu. Driving through on the 101, the hilltops were lined with modernist mansions. Every gas station in that posh coastal beach community provides gas, oil, smokes, free water and air, and five to ten Mexicans eager to do whatever dirty work the Mercedes driving Mansion owning Malibu Stacy’s won’t do. In Malibu, the white people don’t work. Even in Santa Barbara, Work, as in labour, is something for the freedom earning underclass.

Three days ago, I was skateboarding around at sunrise on Presidents day in the Santa Barbara downtown. The Illegals, like gnomes or Oompaloompas, could be seen everywhere, quietly, and diligently polishing garbage cans, scraping gum off sidewalks, changing lightbulbs and cleaning out gutters. By the time the Jogging girls were running, and the Winos were rolling out from under their rocks hacking up the nightly accumulation of filth, the Oompas had again disappeared, magically receding into their underground chambers.
Santa Cruz, though, is the Ultimate California City. We passed through there briefly on our way south, Taking a couple hours to check out the world class surf spots that pepper the coastline of those parts, and the world class surfers that pepper those spots. There are thousands of surfers in the water at any given time around Santa Cruz, and more when the swell is good.
Steamer lane was by far the most impressive wave I’ve ever seen. Hundreds, if not a few thousand were lined up behind guard rails along the clifftops to watch the surfers. The swell was big that day, and it was ‘going off’. There is literally a lane of swell humps that can be seen rolling in from a mile out, and they slowly grow larger and darker as they form up into these unstable mountains of gurgling jello. The crest starts to form up as the off shore breeze lifts ‘steam’ off the top of the wave, and gunners waiting way on the outside paddle desperately in futile attempts to catch the fast moving mountain of water at it’s break point. There were some epic bails. Those who could paddle fast enough to catch the wave and rode down the point expertly wove their way through a gauntlet of forty or fiftry bobbing surfers all the way down the line up, before dropping off their boards just before the steamer crashes against the sea cliffs that line the coast along those parts.
The Spirit of surfing is king in Santa cruz, the people are all beautiful. If people aren’t in the water they’re riding a long board, meditating, tanning, or doing yoga or pilates. Skate and BMX parks are as common as gas stations. Along the coastal boulevard people in all manner of strange, self propelled, wheeled contraptions. A wide variety of longboards and skateboards in all shapes and sizes, roller skates, inline skates, and inline skateboards. All different kinds of bikes. There was a girl hustling along on some sort of penny farthing style unicycle, and a dude on some sort of weird bike that turns at both the back and front wheel. He was pulling off some bizarre shit. All the women have sun bleached hair, drum tight midriffs, and perfect skin. I’m not kidding. All of them- even the old ones. Happiness, at least the illiusion of happiness, is tantamount. Even the Winos were trim, tan, and Jolly.

Ahead of us Baja awaits, but first we pass through Tijuana. This is making Troy nervous, and in the San Diego Tribune, daily reports of kidnapped Americans, and assassinated police chiefs sprinkle the headlines. A photograph of some Fedrales (Mexican federal Sodliers) patrolling the Tijuana streets in a black armoured pick up truck with a gringo manning a .50 calibre machine is splayed across the front page of the weekly independent. I guess I’ll find out for myself this afternoon what’s really going down.


Welcome to the Baja California:

Crossing The border from Sandiego into the gaping, reeking jaws of Tijuana was like night and Day. What a difference a few hundred Metres Makes. There was no trouble getting through the border- the one border guard sits facing Mexico making sure nobody tries to sneak through to America. They don’t care who enters. Tijuana is organized chaos, and instantly we were in a place where nobody spoke our language. Everything is in a state of deterioration, or partial reconstruction. Taco stands blow smoke through the leaves of dead palms as hungry gringos gather around mounds of smoking meat waiting to eat. “Farmacistos” stand in front of prescription drug stands in shabby white uniforms shilling out cheap drugs and street vendors with sunken faces sell polished human skulls. The Peso is worth one tenth of a dollar, and the vehicles are not much crappier that the ones you see in Edmonton. Traffic lights are rare- There are no rules for crossing the street, you just deal with it. I saw a double parked Volvo get pushed out of the way by an angry Gringo in an f-150. Troy was very nervous, his eyes dodgy and his mannerisms stiff and jerky. He was saying “Gracias” to everybody. Jay and I were excited, you perk up in a dangerous place and it makes you feel alert, and more alive. I saw the federale manning a .50 cal mounted on the back of a pick up truck driving by. Just like in the photo.

After a couple hours running from lineup to lineup and wicket to wicket navigating the Mexican auto insurance bureaucratic nightmare, we got on the Baja Highway 1 headed south out of Tijuana, passing slums and crowds of riot police (doing what, I don’t know, but there was about twenty of them all scrambling off to some emergency with plexiglass sheilds, helmets, and batons.

Out of the city, running down a hundred kilometers of coastline there was garbage everywhere. The corridor between the highway and the ocean was filled with real estate developments- walled communities- either in a state of construction or disrepair. Also “Campos”, basically scummy trailer parks. Little towns blended from one into another the whole way down, and none of the town names correlated with the ones ones on the map. We Checked out K38- a famous Baja Surf spot, but the swell was bad. Half naked kids and flea ridden, crippled dogs running around everywhere. Abandoned diapers swarming with flies.

It took us about two hours to find a campsite. Signs for them are everywhere, but they were all just gravel patches with a barrel to put your garbage in. The thing was, they all wanted between sixteen and twenty dollars per person per night. It was tough to figure out, because we slept in a beautiful Cali state park campground near Malibu a few nights previous and didn’t pay a dime.
Just before sunset we found a place- Playa Salamando- where the ratio between first world rates and third world accommodations didn’t seem so severe. We rolled down a steep and crickety dirt road into a magical little world of white outhouses, white tables and a labyrinth of lanes and campsites lined with thousands of white painted boulders, all of it nestled into the steep, rocky hillside between the ocean and Baja highway 1. We pulled into a perfect oceanview spot, and the waves were looking great. It was looking like we’d be able to surf there in the morning. I set up Gordy’s old tent, and picked my way down a pile of grey red and black boulders to the rocky beach below to get a closer look at the break.

There were bits of plastic from all over the pacific washed upon the beach, up and down the shoreline. Shoes, rope, pepper shakers, Barbie shoes, spatulas, and a multinational myriad of plastic beverage containers.
I looked out at the waves. They were breaking beautifully, with a long peeling right on a perfect six foot wave, and a short, mushy left that looked good for Troy and myself. But an hour or so later the tide receded to reveal jagged, toothy razor sharp boulders- seven or eight, but spread out evenly through the surfable waves. It looked like we wouldn’t be going out there in the morning. I looked down at my feet, and the rocks were teeming with cockroaches. Fortune Cookie. There were thousands of them, swarming all over the beach. They scattered when you came close, but they were everywhere, crawling over every rock and in every plastic bottle, hording over washed up tangles of sea weed.
It was getting dark, but I found some wood lying around and gathered it up for a fire. Jay and Troy picked up a couple bundles more at five dollars a piece, and we made a fire. The wood was treated with some sort of preservative, and it belched plumes of toxic black smoke out over the pacific. 2 beers then bed. When I got up, it was raining and blowing, and the ground had turned to a watery grey-brown porge. After adding some more pegs to Gordy’s old tent, I walked up the lane towards the outhouse (Banyo) and my shoes clumped up with mud. As I approached the steeper part of the road it became slippery, and I was sliding around. There was a little river of mud running down the center of the road. A Snarling dog was straining his leash trying to get at me. It occurred to me that we wouldn’t be driving out of this place until thing dried up a bit.
Our last bit of coffee blew away and I watched as the filter and a puff of black granules drifted off with the wind towards the cruise ship at the horizon. Jay set up the table in his van and we played poker for about fourteen hours or so. I cleaned out the table six games in a row, and it made Jay’s face turn red and he began to swear more as the veins in his forehead became pronounced.
Next day the sun came out and things began to dry up around mid afternoon. The Gringo running the place sauntered over from his trailer and informed us in sign language that the road was dry enough for us to leave. So we packed up our shit and drove to the steep section. On one side, sheer dirt cliff rising up, and on the other, sheer dirt cliff going down. Jay took a run at it, and we got about two thirds of the way up before the tires spun, and with the brakes locked we slid back down to the start. After two tries we finally got up the hill, the Van’s tires spraying mud over Mexico. It took the full effort of myself and two Mexicans to pry jay’s fingers from the steering wheel.

Ten minutes later we rolled into Ensenada, and got a decent hotel room for little more than it cost us to be stranded on a cockroach infested unsurfable mudpit beach with pretty white painted rocks lining the treacherous crumbling roads

Ensenada is a tourist town, as megalithic cruise ships dock in the port so an unsexy conglomerate of Canadians can meander through the Mexican Klondike days style arrangement that the city has prepared for these pasty tourism aficionado’s to gawk at. Every restauraunt, bar, and strip club has a dude that yells things in Spanish in a fruitless effort to convince you to attend the establishment he represents. Mayan street vendors hawk Mexican wrestling masks and ‘your name on a grain of rice!’
A crowd of young male Canadian Lebs (The Same rancorous loudmouths I endured through highschool) swarmed us at a taco stand so I pulled out my Chuchillo and stuck the ugliest one in the kidney and flashed the shining red blade at the others. One of the Lebs, a fat one with hot horrible breath snuck up and grabbed hold of my knife hand hooking his other arm around my neck. The others were ready to pounce but Jay managed to get between them and let loose a furious windmill on the skinnier Leb with the furry upper lip and gold chain. Troy capitalized on the distraction by driving his foot up the ass of the slower one, and the bastard’s face went red and bugeyed as he keeled to the ground and recoiled into himself like a salted snail. I stomped the foot of the fat one who had me subdued- he squealed like a pig, and it gave me the time I needed to wrench my knife hand free. I broke loose of his grab and spun around, slicing open his gut, hari kari style, and the sweaty lummox came to his knees and died with his guts spilling out over the sidewalk. “Sorry about the mess” I said, and motioned for Jay to tip the Taco vendor handsomely as we went looking for beer. A mariachi band followed us up the street parade style and small brown children with missing teeth sprinkled flower pedals before our feet. It was free beer and hookers for the rest of that night, and I doubt there will be another one like it soon.
The next morning we woke up nursing hangover’s and after a couple hours lazing around the hotel room we sauntered down for a continental breakfast of tang and Due (Mexican cocoa puffs). We climbed into the Van’s and wove our way through a tangle of razor wire junkyards and shanty towns down ragged dirt roads to the ocean where we put on our damp, sandy wetsuits and paddled about half a kilometer across a small bay to a clean fifty foot point break that goes to the left and to the right. We shared it with a trio of boogeyboarding locals.
Bobbing up and down watching seals and grey whales in the clear green blue waters I thought about when we left fourteen days ago. The day we said goodbye to Poof and Fred and everybody. Troy’s hands and feet turned into icy clubs as we froze our asses off on the yellowhead in Alberta hustling west in a drafty 92 chevy astro with “I was washing my Hair” blasting on the radio.
I caught wave after wave until I was too weak to stand up on my board. I’m finally starting to feel as though I have Arrived.