Hola from Manzanillo

Hello again! This missive comes at you from Manzanillo, Mexico where I am staying at a beautiful rental with the wife and our friends Jenn and Hector. Jenn and Hector have decided to tie the knot down here in paradise and we're lucky enough to be a part of this glorious celebration. In about two hours, we are meeting up with Hector's family for dinner and birthday celebration for one of the kids. If you recall the last time we showed up for dinner, it lasted eight hours and we stuffed our gobs with huge amounts of food and beer. This time, I came prepared! Stretchy shorts, a loose shirt, and a well-trained liver that's undergone a serious weight-training regiment of consumption throughout the holidays. The hard hours of training will come in handy tonight, I'm sure. As for the place we're staying, it is a bungalow-style house in Barra de Navidad that's right on the canal, run by an elderly couple who are gracious and kind. I'm watching parasailors cruise the dusk sky and listening to the sound of birds on the wing. It's gorgeous here. I promise to post some pictures as soon as I have a chance to breathe. The flight(s) in we're great. Jenn had been upgraded to First Class but decided she would rather sit I coach with the wife so she passed the seat onto moi. My first time riding 1st Class! Wow, what an experience. It took relatively little time to realize that the booze was free and the food was fantastic. Plenty of leg room and some cool single-serving friends from Seattle to LA and from LA to here. The first guy was a real cad. We had a great discussion about redoing the calendar to fit in 360 days with a 5.25-day Festivus party to compensate for the leap year to be held on the Spring Equinox. Very cool. The next lady was a very nice woman from Arizona whose son lives here in Manzanillo but commutes to LA to visit his kids every weekend since the divorce. That's pretty great. But not as great as the womn herself who claims that she dated Brian fucking Wilson in high school! Yeah! That's right! Brian fucking Wilson! She said he used to show at the reunions for a while but expressed sadness when the last time she saw him, he had arrived with a nurse and as really out of it. She said he claimed to remember all of them, but it was obvious he didn't; that he was simply trying to be nice in an obviously uncomfortable social situation. I was floored. Brian fucking Wilson. No joke. Well, the wife has just left the shower after a terrifying incident with a spider that I had to go crush under my boot heel so I should probably get going. It feels good to be writing out here again. It feels natural. Simple. I hope to get more on the page soon. See you again, I'm sure. -Dan

This is what I think

When I was in Ft Augustus Scotland, the bartender told me a story about a local retired fireman who went door-to-door and raised a collection to bring the families of every firefighter who had died on 9/11/01 to their little town. The whole community, one tiny village of 650 people, paid for their flights. Doors opened to homes and businesses and the mourning tourists didn't pay a dime for their entire stay: everyone simply refused to let them pay for anything. They were given a place to come and mourn and grieve amongst strangers who had taken it upon themselves to be friends.

 

I have mixed feelings about this day.  Whether or not we should be celebrating it with the jingoist slant that we tend to have.... whether or not I believe every lie that's been told to me.  How I should react to it, if at all.  I'm still frustrated that a war that started ten years ago is still going on today and angry that I disagree with so much of all of it.  Those who perpetrated one of the worst crimes of the modern century are still profiting from their crime (yes, I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney and Junior Bush and your entire Axis of fucking Evil).  Every year I rail against the catchy slogans that are supposed to embody our collective anger and sadness in nice little bite-sized portions and get pissed that our memories and feelings are so easily manipulated and used by others to support causes I don't agree with.  Every year, September 11th is just another fucking day to me.  And just because the difference between the number of years since then and now has a convenient "0" behind shouldn't make the event any more or less important than the year before or the year before that or the year before that.

 

But this year, I'm reminded of sitting in the pub on the ground floor of the Catalonia Hotel with a local named Duncan and a bartender named Mike, far after closing time, listening to him talk about the father who lost his son in the second tower, who traveled thousands of miles to come to the gorgeous majesty of Scotland, and cried into the arms of an old, weathered ex-fireman whom he had never met before.

 

And all I can think of is how, if some random stranger can take the time and effort to do something like that just because of the sheer need to empathize with someone else... maybe our species is not so fucked up after all.

 

Dan Tabayoyon

09/11/11