age against the machine

AGE ANGAINST THE MACHINE

Vermin shudders to life as the flashing lights and blaring of an oncoming Pickup trucks horn awakens him from a deep slumber. His noble beast of burden, Cack, is set on a roiling boil, howling down the highway sounding for all the world like a nitrous burning garden tractor ridden in anger.

He is now fully alert and inquisitive as to the nature of the unusual behaviour of the pickup truck. He crests a small hill and a previously obscured road washout comes suddenly into view. The Vermin pulls back on the reins with all his might as he tries to haul down a half ton of rolling rubbish. Tires scream front and rear as Cacks new dancin shoes search feverishly for purchase.

He enters the mudslide on the brink of catastrophy and pulls over to the side. He may have to change the cedar chips in his cage because of the violent contraction of his primary oh ring.

Since his abrupt removal from the cubicle (with his humiliatingly small box of personal effects and security guard) his transmogrification from pencil necked office dwelling geek to cunning, alert, and nearly feral rodentia can be abrupt. .

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His whiskers twitch with excitement as he surveys the scene around him. The game is on. Vermin is in his element at last. His thin ratlike features twist into a smile as his failing shrewish watery blue eyes twinkle in the blistering South Texas desert sun.

Fate (and a cast of thousands) has had a hand in the reuniting of these two beasts and Vermin feels whole again. His paranoia of a large overarching mechanism of doom destroying him is seriously diminished as he feels the force of cack coursing through his veins.

Vermin leaves the wash and is fairly ebullient at having his flesh still draped all over his skeletal remains. He is alive, intact and not leaking any bodily fluid and nothing can amplify that feeling of elation more then the threat of being unalive, deintact,. and his bodily fluid dispersed all over the pavement.

He motors down the highway toward his fate whatever that may be. He is not a great planner of events. His natural distrust of any kind of organization or quantification of earthly things has blossomed to a point where he is hurtling toward a meeting with two people he does not know in a vague location with the only direction being Presidio, Texas August 2^nd in the afternoon.

He made this plan contingent on the notion that 6 transcontinental flights and 4 total strangers could coordinate the deliverance* of his beloved Cack 5000 miles and make her reappear somewhere in the lower 48 states and he could get near her. And She would run good enough and the police wouldn't confiscate her and his wife would let him go and his presence would not be required at band camp as a chaperone and he could find Presidio.

The vast majority of the contingencies fell into place to perfection, Vermin did have to plausibly feign an attack of flesh eating disease in order to get out of band camp. He is fairly gaunt by American standards so he just told them the bacteria ate his ass clean off, which by the way his drawers fit was plausible, and then nobody would ask to look at the wound.

So Vermin and Cack find themselves burbling down a long stretch of road somewhere in the Great American Desert probably in Texas the “Drive Friendly State”.

By the way what is up with the “Don't mess with Texas” deal? I don't pay much attention to Texas but is there some deal where other states (which I previously presumed where just stationary governmental units with surveyed and agreed upon boundaries) actually come in and mess with Texas? Does Arkansas have a history of chasing Texas down the street and knocking it off its great big state bicycle? Did Oklahoma hold Texas down when they were kids and give it a Indian mustache or a wedgie? I mean why the defensive posturing, did Texas do something bad they are not telling us about?

He stopped to take a picture of the big friendly Texas sign and noticed half a dozen 38 caliber handgun shells laying at his feet. He figures you are supposed to start out friendly and if that doesn't work you blast them right out of their socks. He doesn't have a gun only a can of bear mace so he decides no matter what happens he is going to start friendly and stay that way

(artless and abrupt change from 3rd person to first person)

I spend all morning doing an easy but deliberate cruise into Texas from the north at this point I feel I am on a mission that even if all the forces of nature were to gang up on me I couldn't be dissuaded.

Hour after hour roll effortlessly by as I get into a decent road trance with one fairly spectacular vista after another being revealed to me by the highway and the shrieking rubbish betwunxt my knees.

During one stretch of absolutely deserted road I see a strange cube in the distance. There is no reason for a house or any commercial interest to be there so my curiosity is piqued. I roll up on it and it may be an apparition sent by the machine to taunt me. It is a Prada store in the middle of the desert with no way in or out. It is clearly a hallucination. It was obviously manufactured by my overactive imagination to taunt me about my newfound lack of numeric value. It was evil genius from my sub-conscience, what better way to say the suits have won and you will never get invited to the party again than a Prada store in my sanctuary, the desert.. I am going to have to look into some kind of medication.

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I took a picture of it to see if it was a hallucination or not and turns out it was real I think.

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If it shows up on a camera and you can touch it, it is real......right?

Seeing the monument to $1,000 purses in the desert freaked me out a little and as I started to roll again I tried to reconstruct in my remaining mind the events that led up to my mental state and I only reveal them to you (130,000 of my closest friends) to help fill in the blanks on my state of mind on this trip.

Shortly before the Detroit to San Diego: Zen and the art of motorcycle negligence trip I had an mild episode of exercise induced angina (latin for sore heart). Being a responsible human I went to the Doctor and he suggested I get an angiogram (it sounded like it might involve a stripper named Angie so I agreed)

I stroll into the hospital for what was portrayed as a routine type test and 8 hours later I am stuck in a meat assembly line totally stoked on some serious Class A narcotics with a 60 lb. Sandbag laying on my right groin and if I remember correctly they had a giant C-clamp holding my right leg tight against the bed so blood wouldn't come squirting out my femoral artery. I was told if I move one muscle I would bleed out and die. As I lay there in an opiate induced stupor I looked around at the heart patient cubicles with the blinking lights, wires akimbo and drippy liquid bags all hooked up to your body and realized that this was a system created to efficiently, mechanically alter human beings like a big ass meat assembly line. The cubicle causes heart disease and the meat repair cubicle furtively and profitably tries to cover its tracks. This gave me the kernel of the idea that something was possibly fundamentally wrong with my normal american approach to life. And I had better pay close attention to the systems and machines that, until that time, I thought were benign at worst and benevolent at best. I smelled a state fair blue ribbon winning, pedigreed , norwegian, brown RAT.

Come to find out I had a 90% blockage in my Left Anterior Diagonal artery

I find out that I have the latest and greatest advancement in science a “drug eluting stent” the only known negative side effect was sudden death unless I took a drug called PLAVIX for the rest of my life. Now I was dependent on a pharmaceutical company for my next breath.

The impatient, rude and very busy doctor did not inform me that I had any options other than having mechanisms run through my arteries. He did not tell me about [URL="http://www.heartattackproof.com"]www.heartattackproof.com[/URL]

Come to find out they didn't “fix” anything they merely ameliorated a symptom. So in a couple of hours I went from the fairy tale every thing is gonna be fine and “I will spend my golden years wearing beige bermuda shorts and support hose while shuffling around my double wide in Florida” state of mind, to the “I have no idea if there is a future I could fall into my goulash and die now” state of mind. And it was all perpetrated by machinery and cubicles. I had been bamboozled on a grand scale.

This prompted the biggest fattest WHY????? of all time. If all this machine age was fundamentally destructive to me and my vitality why bother. Who profited most from my ambition? Me or the series of machines, trinkets and extruded foods that I was trained from a very early age to desire.

There was only one glorious machine that lifted me high and never let me down (with the exception of the fork seals). There was only one machine that gave me immense powers and spiritual elation and routinely delivered me from the valley of the shadow of death ,

[SIZE=7][COLOR=lime]CACK[/COLOR][/SIZE]

My navigation system

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/launch/rain.jpg[/IMG] …..

The best of Japanese machinery melded with the best of American The Swing-a-way wall mounted can opener flying across the desert mounted to a Honda PC800 fantasy machine.

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for those of you still in your cubes, don't worry you are different and special it won't happen to you and you will get a raise next year double the rate of inflation. Especially if all the functions in the cells of your spreadsheets are accurate and the 2 powerpoints you do for management reviews per quarter are dynamic.

Big fat disclaimer du jour

nothing I type is accurate or factual but it is all true.

There were no old dudes hurt in the filming of Age Against the Machine

*bless each and everyone of y'alls hearts

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I am standing on the side of the road brandishing my swing-a-way brand can opener trying to get sustenance out of a can of beans and I notice that my phone has some messages. I listen to them and it is mi compadre nuevo TomBlum on the phone asking as to my whereabouts and whenabouts.

Ahhhhh I have a stickler for detail and planning on my hands. He wants to meet at certain places at certain times etc. This shows that he is a fairly normal respectable human being, for now I will have to overlook that defect as he is the only one of the 130,000 Cack fans that has volunteered to hang with me into Mexico. Using my experience with the west and judging by how big the word Presidio showed up on my Laminated Truck Driving Atlas we were not dealing with alot of variables as far as places to meet go. So I called him and we agreed to meet at the Thriftway grocery store/ gas station. He also wanted a time so I did some loose wild cypherin in my head and shot my mouth off.

As I traveled south toward the border it started to cloud up and rain off and on judging by the lack of folage that was a relatively unusual event.

To any of you younguns from the east that have never ridden out west the beauty lies in the ever changing visuals around you. You get an entirely different experience northbound on a road vs. Southbound, sunny vs cloudy and rainy, hot vs cold, it is very conducive to ramblin around also because in the desert, as beautiful as it is there ain't no dang reason for standing still in one spot there aint nothin there but dirt, some scrawny brown plants, a half dozen weird bugs and 25,274 poisonous snakes per square foot so you keep moving.

Anyhow I rolled into Presidio a little apprehensive because I am a hell of alot duller and weirder in person than I am when I type and I don't want to disappoint or frighten TomBlum and his big bend campin buddy Rhodyne. Rhodyne was tacking the momentous meeting of minds onto the tail end of his long weekend. I pull into the parking lot and I am thinking of all these clever routines to dazzle them with (cause there may be expectations) like Dr. Livingston I presume? Or Dr. Blum I presume or some such inane blather so I pull up, flip my helmet up and say "uh uh high you guys". Rhodyne informs me i am seven minutes early.

God I am such a failure!!!

I spend a little time imploring Rhodyne to go with us but he obviously has common sense and refuses. I realize these blokes could conceivably know every minor stupid detail of my life via my advrider typings and I know nothing about them this puts me socially at a disadvantage. As far as I know the word Rhodyne is greek for vermin embalmer. But I suppose it would be disengenous of me to claim to travel with absolute abandon and start getting nervous now.

Greight minds think alike

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So we did the high how are yahs and went and set up camp at a sweet high tone motel. This being the second time I slept in a bed in a month. Sheets and stuff seem real exotic. I feel we are glad we are us and the other 35,000,000 registered motorcyclists in the United States of Ascarerica are equally glad they are not us.

We all do a fairly relaxed verbal human version of "sniffing of each others butts" to make sure everything is copasetic. Even though by copasetic it is obvious TomBlum and I are in a very similar and narrow demographic which includes the Unabomber.

I determine that Blum and myself are far less anti-social and tremendously less intelligent than Mr Theodore (you can call me Teddy) Kac zynski, [SIZE=2]consequently we are both harmless and safe to wander around in our confused state without doing any real damage to ourselves or humanity at large.. [/SIZE]By the way I think that had mr. Kaczynski accidently stumbled into some female companionship in his life it would have confused him to the point where he would be working at Home Depot, griping about the health insurance, and the neighbor kids boombox now instead of blowing people up. Well at least he would have only blown people up as a hobby not his main reason for living.

[SIZE=2]

[/SIZE]

I explain carefully and earnestly to Rhodyne how every "advance" since hunting and gathering has been another nail in the coffin of the planet and must be immediately reviewed and discarded. Rhodyne is still youngish and (at that point gainfully employed) and takes the good natured haranguing like a man until, during a lull in the conversation, he ran for the door like a cat with turpentine smeared on his ass.

The adventureST susses out the sitchu and like what he sees. Cack gets a playdate.

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There is a subtle difference that appears between TomBlums style and mine. Toms motivation for his motorcycles evolution is the pervasive cheapness,and relentless practicality that comes with having an unknown amount of time left on earth but a very definitely known and finite amount of money. He has essentially taken a junk bike and made an awesome, bulletproof, all around road warrior.

My motorcycles development has stemmed from a combination of cheapness, aggressive neglect and a horrible attention span where even changing a tail light could involve a ball peen hammer.

What we share is a history inside the machine and a belief that the experience was fundamentally negative.

A list of things on my bike I have not hit with a hammer in a blind venomous rage[LIST=1]

[*]rear valve stem/cap

[*]Homer

[*]battery vEnt hose

[*]Sweet thang[/LIST]TomBlum and I share a lovely evening shooting the breeze and strolling around town. He is going to be a nice fit for the trip because at his core he is earnest, has a good practical knowledge of tons of stuff, and behaves for all the world like a grownup. I routinely need adult supervision so this would work out fine. Finally I feel comfortable enough to go asleep in his vicinity.

G'night Johnboy

G'night Lizabeth

Gringo Estupido, y Gringo Viejo meet the skinny dogs

Woke up bright eyed an bushy tailed just after dawn. Sleeping in a bed has its drawbacks but not worrying about snakes, scorpions, moose and gristle bares is not one of them.

I inform TomBlum that even though I have a tremendous disrespect for my machine and its maintenance i believe the time has come for an oil change and I would like to do it before I enter mexico. He is cool with that so I dig out a gallon of slimy fresh texas tea and a filter that I have had in my tank bag for possibly several years and look for a place to disgorge cack of its fluids. One helpful guy refers us to a city oil recycling station on the outskirts of town which we find post haste cause this town has a mini skirt.

As Tom and I are basically simultaneously total strangers and brothers from a different mother it is entertaining to see our personalities unfold as we attempt tasks.

[SIZE=5]Thorny decision dujour number one[/SIZE]

At the recycling center I asked Tom if he thought it would be alright to drive my shitty toolkit screwdriver through the oil filter and twist the filter off that way. He semi tersely replies "I have heard of that method and have no opinion" Mr. Blum has had previous managerial experience and it is obvious he wants nothing to do with the decision making processes of morons in the desert at this juncture in his life so he just flat refuses to weigh in on the topic. Which I incidentally respect totally. Rare is the male that refuses to verbalize his opinion, espessially on topics mechanical. His refusal to condone or condemn my Fred Flintstone approach is a tacit admission that he thinks I am a blundering fool. I immediately figure he is a fine judge of human character and perfect for whatever lies ahead. He does point out that in a previous posting on "Cack Comes Back" there was some talk of an oil leak that was fixed by tightening of the filter by Live2ride, a licensed marine mechanic with big muscular arms, who probably had access to good sturdy oil filter tightening tools.

So with that caveat firmly ignored I find a big ass rock and blast a hole in my perfectly good oil filter and spooge a cup of hot dirty 2 year old oil all over me. Does it spin off easily or refuse to budge and start tearing a slot into my filter?

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So I ask Tom if I could borry his bike to run back into town to buy a filter wrench. He agrees.

I return with one of those pressed tin end cap wrenches and a 3/8" drive ratchet which immediately spins on the end of the filter leaving the filter securely in place.

My blood pressure rises up to a reptilian 90 over 40 and he suggests we do the screwdriver and the wrench at the same time. Boingo off flys the oil filter. Classic Greek drama at its finest. Massive relief.

One of my compelling reasons for going to Mexico in the first place was because you guys sent me money to do something cool and write about it. I had big visions of my ride report going like this "couldn't get oil filter off, abandoned bike, so long suckers I am hitching back to Detroit, sorry". The other compelling reason was someone had put a Batopilas sticker on Cack and it was important that Cacks bumpersticker narrative be true.

Once we had the first hurdle hurdled it was off to the border.

We blasted on through the border no problema our first stop was the mexican insurance agency right inside the border. We waltzed in there and there was an old geezer behind the counter. What the hell is this? They let old guys work in mexico. We casually inform him we need insurance and he does not react to this request like it is a big shock as this is not a video store or a butcher shop.

Anyway he whips out an industrial strength magnifying glass the size of a bird bath and commences to slowly perusing several seemingly unrelated documents and finally susses out the motocicleta column. In point zero oh 5 seconds I figure there is a flat document rate of $15 US and a daily rate of $2 US for our 14 day intended stay leaving the math to 2X14+15=$17 I realize that if I keep my mouth shut and nod my head and hand him $17 (i only had $18.27) I can scam this bad math doer and bolt out the door without having to look for a ATM because I (gringo estupido) have cleverly entered Mexico with only enough money to buy a pack of gum and 2 gallons of gas. Anyhow I totally dig this guys math skills and make cartoon road runner noises toward the door when TomBlum (T-diddy or in mexican Gringo Viejo) decides he wants some too at that price (cue deflating balloon noises). I figure this guy is gonna redo the math and find his mistake and shriek at me in mexican. But no, he redoes all the math again comes up with an entirely different wrong number and shrugs his shoulders and writes $17 on TomBlums sheet and we both skate. I love this country it is apparent the numerical realm is as vague and shifting here as it is in my mind. The old dude totally dissed math and quite frankly i believe he couldn't have cared less.

Parking lot of insurance agent

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So outside the insurance joint we face our facts that I have $1,27 in US money and T-diddy has a big wad of travelers checks. Travelers checks? you might as well have sanskrit tablets. as gently as possible I inform him that the travelers checks may have more value as museum exhibits than legal tender as the last person to use them was Sidekick Jim in 1967 as he left Mutual of Omahas Marlin Perkins in the Sarenghety after one too many close calls with unrestrained carnivores.

You can't roll with no dough. So we slithered around downtown Ojinaga looking for a bank and finally found one after asking directions at the aduana (customs) building. The guy pretended to know english and when asked if there where any ATMs in town he said no! AAAAAAAARRRRRGH. Finally we found the bank and Tom stood in line till December only to be told his monopoly money was no good. But he did notice an ATM in there. So I went in and stood there while the bank manager stood there and asked each and every customer their pin number and amount requested and entered it as an added convenience. This of course was all done verbally so any slob (of which there were 10) in the vestibule could remember your pin and gank you in the alley and have your life savings. No problem he got a phone call when It was my turn so I conducted my own business and was on my way. I know you stickler types would like to know how much is adequate, i don't know, all i know is the lady in front of me got a thousand pesos and i figure i was twice as big as her so i got 2000 pesos because of my bad math I am sure I can buy something of value, a pack of tic tacs, or a Volkswagen Golf turbo diesel this point i don't know the exchange rate so i don't know how much i have, On an emotional level it feels like enough for a tank of gas and a lunch so I figure the morning can't go wrong.

The small crowd of loiterers outside the door will just have to wait for the next Gringo Estupido to come through for beer money. I ask them if they are the decapitators and would they please leave me alone till I get all my paperwork done. They look at me like i had purple hair. As a tech tip for traveling in mexico if you cover yourself in used motoroil and roll around in the dirt for 30 minutes and ride around on a trash heap they don't know how to read you, you obviously are not a good risk for robbery. Crazy has its privileges.

Viscious gringo decapitators milling about outside the bank

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[SIZE=5]Thorny decision of the day nummer zwei[/SIZE]

We had to decide whether to do our visa and vehicle permit paperwork at the border or at the first checkpoint that Tom informs me is 30 kliks down the road in the desert. Tom is voting for the in country version and I am voting for the one we can see down at the end of the street. So we do the logical thing and spend a half hour asking a dozen people at the downtown customs what to do. Needless to say we got a dozen different answers. There is no mexican word for "I have no bloody idea"

Finally Tom tires of my sniveling and agrees to go to the one down the street.

We go back to the customs joint down the road and stand in line for a long time while one semi-elegant woman does a guys paper work and another younger semi-hot chick with just a hint of nice brown mexican cleavage deliberately and serenly stamps an endless pile of official looking documents (churr chunk churr chunk) . Being as Miss Elegant (churr chunk churr chunk) is taking an hour (churr chunk churr chunk) per customer I can only presume (churr chunk churr chunk) that the semi-hot chick (churr chunk churr chunk) is probably just finishing (churr chunk churr chunk) the paperwork (churr chunk churr chunk) from Cortez's invading army of 1540.

TomBlum starts to get agitated by the inefficiency, I am absolutely unflappable at this point because I had been informed my head would be in a burnin bowling ball bag on the side of the road by now so I am pretty happy with the eternal methodical document-stamping cleavage.

So after an hour we find out we are in the wrong line and need to go to a different line with a very non-hot middle aged fat mexican guy with sweaty cleavage. This pretty much vaporized my happy place that the other cleavage had created. This guys cleavage is not why I bring this topic up what impressed me most about the guy was he was typing (I said typing, as in typewriter, for you people born after 1980 that was a mechanical contrivance that would strike carbon paper with a raised metalic letter on the end of a lever. Whats carbon paper? NEVERMIND......) on a typewriter.

Here was a man in the year 2009 that was reading information off a computer and typing it onto a 3 inch wide visa (in triplicate) using a 1950s typewriter with a 3 foot wide carriage (that 3 foot part was the gods honest truth). I love this country, they play by cack rules.

So we go to the hot looking copier chick and then back to line for the semi-elegant document talker abouter and filler outer. Tom starts getting chatted up by this semi-attractive 40 year old lady. They don't understand what each other are saying so needless to say Tom is coming off as exotic and suave even though he was whining about the efficiency of the document staff. Of course I know enough spanish to politely explain that I am his great grandson (or I have ministrone on my shirt). Of course any type of physical union between these two would be a travesty what with the 28 year difference in age. It would be like my 18 year old kid (wooley booger) dating a girl negative 10 years old, which would be impractical and illegal in every state but Mississippi.

Finally documents in hand we stroll out of the customs complex and for the first time I notice the skinny dogs. Skinny dogs with their junk intact. What is this? dogs just running around with no $1,000 high tech electic dog zappin collars? no microchips in their necks? No diabetes from eating table scraps? No high buck specialized age appropriate diet dog food? humping things other than old ladies shins? Every dog for himself? Livin by their wits, playin for keeps. How uncivilized.

They all have a little bit of their ribs showing and are loping around quite alert, looking for their next scrap of food. These dogs are playing for keeps and they gotta be sharp. I get the notion that this place ain't sterilized, highly engineered and safe and Mr. Blum and the Vermin better keep their eyes open and movin too. Thats precisely why I came here with my ribs showin. Game on.

SANTO jUDAS AND THE SCAFFOLDING OF DOOM

The Rat Duo ooze on out of Ojinaga the sun is high and the weather is hot. Apparently the desert south of Texas is warm this time of year. .I am starting the beef jerkyfication of my arms. I fully intend to use sunblock or wear protective clothing but everytime we stop I get overly excited about the situation and forget. Tom has a device on his dashboard that informs him of his numeric velocity and it is important to him that the number on the dashboard matches the number on the signs. . My technique of matching the speed of the cars around me is ignored which is fine. The Mexicans also appear to be ignoring their velocity quantifiers because cars either go wailing by us like we are road kill or creep along at 25mph. Few people seem to be going the recommended speed.

This monument has been cacked up, I think I am gonna like it here!

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There is a sign "No Tire Basura" (don't throw trash) in this cool monument parking lot on top of the first mountain we come to. The Mexicans, bless their hearts, are attempting to clean up their image. There is a large trash container in the parking lot that is overflowing with trash spilling out and blowing all over the area. Apparently they had the discipline to put in a trash barrel, put up a sign instructing you to use it, threw the trash into it, but never made a plan for someone to empty it. I love this country.

Shrine to Santo Judas Tadeos, Patron saint of lost and desperate bikers on the run

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[SIZE=6][COLOR=Red]Uncomfortable dementia revelation warning[/COLOR][/SIZE]

As I stink across the desert at a TomBlum cruise control determined 80KPH I reflect on the Santo Judas shrine and it makes me think about my own desperation or as I have come to personalize it as the "Vermin Paradox" I think therefore I am (the problem).

The physiology of this situation is quite simple, the human mind once it burns a pathway through a series of synapses will continue to use that route in the future and consequently build on that pathway and enforce it. Even if it is a nightmare scenario. The origin of this is a survival strategy of the human brain. In order to make survival decisions we would have to pare down our options to react quickly to developing situations. On the primitive savanna there would be no time for the mind to review

A) lions are brown

B) They have white sharp teeth

3) They are fast

D) Because they cannot synthesize their own Arachidonic Acid they must eat animal flesh

e) I am an animal and a lion has caused blood to spurt out my neck.

F) lions are bad

No that wouldn't work at all we have to go right straight to F) Lions Are Bad.

Well when I got out of the Hospital after the machine shoved a unnecessary stent into my heart I smelled a big fat rat with the way my brain had been wired to operate. I started to question some of the fundamental premises for my existence as a slobbering American consumer.

The problem was that the results were far more disconcerting than living in my American Stupor.

I came about my understanding of the sitchuation and the subsequent negative rewiring of my brain kind of through the side door via diet. I found conflicting information, the veggie types promised a reversal of heart disease and so did the Adkin types. I don't care to incite any opinions one way or the other I am just documenting the process that let up to the "plausible scaffolding of doom" by using scaffolding to illustrate my mental state is to point out that I am not educated enough to do much construction with bricks and mortar on my crackpot theories just put up the framework. For two years i put one stick after the other together in the scaffolding of doom until it was fairly strong and complete.

Because I am cynical I essentially threw out everything and started recreating the entire history of humanity from scratch (from what little I knew). I peeled back every layer of advancement to see what came before it and why. Hmmm Mass production (destroyed human crafts and much of its skill and turned people into robots) Hmmmmm Interchangeable parts (via engineering people where able to set the stage for mass production, Hmmmmm the age of enlightenment (people started to look at things scientifically, passion and mystery of life take a hit) And so on and so on until I arrived at Hunters and Gatherers. Then I faced a big cataclysmic what if?

What if gatherers preceded them using just the tools that they where born with? The primal, inherently human attributes. What caused each subsequent shift toward new technology (i suspect hostile and uncomfortable cave chicks)? What was the result?

I soon came to believe that each epoch of human history had fundamentally been driven by natural selection favoring "the rational tool/weapon making types" and each time these guys "won" valuable aspects of primal human skills and relations were lost or diminished. I believed that in the 21st century this has accelerated to a point were the data driven types had lost all human emotions and compassion and were entirely numerically controlled. The chilling part is they were running the show...... or are they? Did the mechanisms and electronic circuits allow them to run things because they both understood the flickering 00001110101011010101010's? I have sat around mahogany tables while grim emotionless men (yes they still usually are men, god help the female that smiles and whips out pictures of kids and laughs) stared at the numbers and made decisions based entirely on the flickering 010101010110s. They had acquired tremendous sums of money, but they had acquired so much that it was an abstraction, they had burned through tremendous piles of human labor and mountains of coal and steel to give themselves more commas in their salaries. Their burning desire was not ancient like acquisition of land or raping and pillaging it was solely to make a number larger on a spread sheet so they could compare their flickering binary digits to other like minded peoples on the golf course. "Information will not be reviewed unless it can be made numeric" sayeth the lord of our division. Human beings are absolutely irrelevant thinketh the vermin to hisself.

The problem with this line of logic was that I was here solely because of this degeneration of the Primal human form. I was a product of the machine, without it I would have been destroyed as a youth due to several fundamental physical limitations. Picking sides for dodgeball in gym and being picked last (with my buddy black sock wearing Russell) was a constant reminder to me that in any type of real primal confrontation my tribe was telling me I was gonna get ate by the Lion. I serve at the machines pleasure. On top of the scaffolding of doom I was able to unfurl a banner “technology cannot cure problems technology has created” fixing the messes of the world with technology is like giving someone AIDS to cure a head cold.

What gave me any kind of affirmation? In third grade A sheet with hundreds of small ovals to be neatly filled in with a number 2 pencil and read by a machine. The machine reviewed the ovals and determined I was a high value human being and could be usefull someday.

So to summarize the "Vermin Paradox" again. I think therefore I am (the problem). What was once cherished by the machine (my logical mind and ability to use computers to create ever greater and more complicated and efficient machines) had turned against the machine and itself.

My mind had turned its pathways from "Lions are Bad" to "my mind is bad"

It wouldn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out this convoluted logic could only lead to self destruction.

I had to flee to where the numbers fail. My life and sanity depended on it

[SIZE=6][COLOR=Lime]uncoMfortable dementia revelation over[/COLOR][/SIZE]

The Hi-Vis Helmet of dooM streaks across the desert.

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Massive stationary violent storm to the right, beautiful sunshiney day to the left, cleft hard down the middle by a determined Mr. Blum.

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Blum gets the once over from a stern armed chick

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We go through two checkpoints the first one is a regular customs deal and they had all kinds of stern questions and stuff for blum. me on the other hand they just wave through. Is it possible this country is so cacked up I seem normal?

We pull up to the second one which is a military command post with sandbag bunkers with a bunch of teenager types with automatic weapons. As usual blum is getting the third degree as I gather a crowd and inform them that Cack is my pretty baby and should not be screwed with as I hug her vigorously looking for all the world like a ginormous preying mantis tryin to hump your moms tupperware,. within 3 seconds all the weaponized teen agers are laughing and carrying on at my expense using a guy who had spent 10 years in a Kansas Meat extrusion factory as an interpreter. which reminds me as I was going through El Paso I saw a semi truck that said Cargill Meat Solutions on the side. So is that what it has come too? Because the truck was a reefer. I presume Living meat is a problem that needs a solution requiring refrigeration. I have a policy of not taking pictures of adolescent males with automatic weapons , laughing or not, so you are gonna have to use your own imagination. I think cack is gonna like this place.

We finally burble into Chihuahua and make our way through town. We cruise on through the busy streets loud mexican music blares from everywhere it is total sensory overload. The natives look like they dig the cack so I am entirely relaxed human threat wise. Automotive projectile wise is another story. There doesn't appear to be any consistent signage standards so your eyes must be scanning all the time or you may get smoked by a bumper of a 1974 AMC Gremlin which by the looks of the multicolored fender scheme it is not bashful about hitting stuff.

It has been a fairly tiring hot day so we start looking for a hotel. Tom takes the lead as he has a GPS that is 2 blocks off at all times that he can't read because of the old prescription in his glasses.

"I know the street is here, the bitch says so" (Daygum razzle frazzin $^%$^%$^% machine) "its gotta be here, honest"

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/little%20dogtown/gps.jpg[/IMG]

MOM DO NOT READ THIS PART

the sensory overload ends up nearly killing me as tom pulls through a corner into a left turn i numbly follow breaking one of my main rules of following which is forget the other guy is there and take care of your own business. Anyway as I pull into the intersection at 25 mph I hear screechin tires and realize I am running an unseen red light and am about to get smoked by a lincoln navigator. The highvis pays off, he swerves I swerve and we all get what we deserve. We pull up to a medium shitty hotel on the west side of town and put down the kickstands. I remark to Tom that what frightens me most about the near commingling of a lincoln grill and my vital organs is how little it frightened me. That can't be good. 20 years ago I woulda pissed myself.

We go into the hotel and Tom is eager to try out his spanish. The desk clerk is a youngun that is laying on the couch feverishly mashing on a hot young chick. He looks annoyed to be pulled out of his code pink situation into a commercial exchange. Tom hablas some espanyol and we cough up $20 total for a room.

Mexican hotel wiring exhibit A

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Yes that is toilet paper wire insulation.

We unload all our sundry crap in a dingy parking structure, get situated and talk a good long walk around downtown Chi-town

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The machine hates unauthorized nonrevenue creating art in the USA, here it is semi beautiful and right downtown. I wonder if cops had been around in the primal times if cave paintings would have been allowed?

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chihuahua cubed

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More dead bronze guys. I figure we don't make dead bronze guys anymore because there is no glory in the USA the machine works to make everything smaller and less significant and tear it down the the smallest possible dimension which is not a good environment for making great massive heroic gestures.. For instance I spent years operating a computing machine that had a .001 MM geometric tolerance. If something came up .002 MM it was a total failure. This might make for efficient factories but it makes very shitty statues in town squares.

It is just as well, who really needs a bronze Bill Gates in business casual littering up downtown city parks.

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full grown indian lady talking to a short mexican guy

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the indigenous chick is on the right

Blum and I stagger around Chihuahua town proper and enjoy the sights. There is an abundance of muy caliente mujeres but I am a bashful type and don't want to overtly photograph them for your viewing pleasure.

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Blum and I get directions to the post office from a blind guy and stagger around the city. He has surmised that the Post Office will cash his travelers checks. I continue the good natured travelers check haranguing that I had started in Ojinaga.

I am in heaven because gaudy ass western wear is revered here. Since I had to disband my swingin hillbilly band I have had a dearth of occasions to dress up like roy Rogers. As I am unemployed I have to cruise right by the ostrich baseball stitched purple and green 4 inch toed cowboy boots. Sweet thang would leave me for sure but maybe I could buy one camisa blanca (white shirt)?

Finally we get tuckered out, head back to the hotel, walk past the eternal heavy petting session in the lobby and retire for the evening.

I watch a half hour of mexican Simpsons and go to sleep like the dead.

ON TO CACKThehammock

So I hear a knocking on the door I wake up and open it and it is sandra bullock. I said what the hell are you doing in Chihuahua Sandi (she lets me call her sandi) and she said Baby I just need a little tenderness I have had it up to here with that brute jesse james. I say well come on in lets talk about it but be quiet I don't want TomBlum to wake up. She said vermin I came here to do more than talk. Then she whipped off her trench coat with nothin on under it but a pair of JB weld (quick set) promotional boxer shorts. She tore the shorts off like they were on fire and knocked me backwards into bed. I began to protest.... No I can't sandi you know I love and cherish sweetthang (sandi is strong for such a petit chick) she commenced to forcefully and lustily act out her aggression on me while I struggled to get away. just then Jesse knocks the door off the hinges calls her a dirty butt whore and whips out a gun. I scream like a chick “you don't understand I am a happily married man this is all a mis.....Blam blam blam ….....blam blam blam.

He unloads all six shots into my emaciated cadaverous self. But what is this, it didn't hurt? I look down at my fluorescent white chest and no blood is trickling anywhere. I look over to Sandi to see if it was her that took the punishment but she was gone. She musta left with the brute while I was in shock. I scan the room and realize it had only been a dream. TomBlum wakes up simultaneously and says “were those gunshots” further confusing my half awake state I had to relook down at my chest for holes. We chit chat about the plausability of it being gunshots and it seemed unlikely to be anything else so we figured something or someone got perferated. All we were sure of is it wasn't us. Urban gunfire doesn't rattle me that much as i used to live behind the projecks in an unnamed urban area in the metropolitan detroit statistical area.

I don't dare tell Tom about Sandi

I chucked my lanky frame outta bed to go do what one does first thing in the morning and took 4 steps toward the bathroom and rammed my pylon shaped head, (the one with glasses) into the bathroom door frame. Stars were dancing around my eyes and them cartoon birdees were singing and tying ribbons in my hair. Apparently short breeds of people make short doorways.

Ok I have been accosted by Sandra Bullock, shot by Jesse James, woke up in a sleazy mexican hotel with a stranger to the sound of gunshots, and used my head like a battering ram and I haven't even had my first cup of coffee. This is looking like a nonstandard day right out of the gate.

The first order of business is to chase down a resolution for TomBlums high fallutin lit up books. It is an electronic device that stores books I didn't even know existed, anyway he had sat on it and busted the screen and he wanted to order a replacement. I sat on my dog eared copy of Don Quixote and nothing happened, I guess even though I am younger I still like some things the old ways. My theory is if it has red pumps or batteries it is gonna give you trouble. He spends 30 minutes talking to a service chick and we finally bolt past the perpetual heavy petting party looking for coffee, Pancho Villa, an ATM, and a place to cash travelers checks written in cuneiform.

We get to the ATM and I get out twice what the lady half my size got out yesterday. TomBlum is tired of my age jokes revolving around his travelers papyrus so he punts and uses the ATM.

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We still gotta find coffee, Pancho Villa and a white country and western superstar rhinestone shirt that I intend to use as mexican camophlage as we stroll downtown. I don't know why I wanna see the Pancho Villa museum it could be my lifelong fascination with bullet riddled cars or a natural curiosity that stems from the cult of personality that he was able to create. He had an unremarkable peasant upbringing and commenced at a young age to shooting and looting and eventually put his knowledge of the land and lethal methods to good use in the mexican revolution. It is a phenominal achievement to marshal a big ass army around this hard country. to feed, cloth and arm blokes in this environment with no resources is a tremendous feat.

None the less long after his fighting days were done and he had retired to the life of a country gentleman someone had a bone to pick with the Chrysler Corporation over a warranty issue, and shot the hell out of his Dodge (while he was in it). I am not keen on chrysler at the moment myself after the family truckster puked out a tranny in the hottest part of Utah in the hottest time of year in the hottest time of day leaving a frazzled sweetthang next to a dumpster full of the hottest cat litter eminating the hottest cat litter stink. Causing me to rashly (car purchase decisions usually take me decades) purchase a another used minivan in the hottest car dealer parking lot on earth. Had Pancho Villa been in my mini van and had I had a gun....... nevermind I digress.

Anyway we couldn't get any real info off either TomBlums electric “bitch” or the internet as to where the museum was so we asked the few people that were visible for directions. Of course remember we don't speak spanish and our appearance actually seems to frighten one young street vendor so we don't have much luck until we meet this guy.

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Pancho Villas great grandkid Francisco (I think) Villa

he seems to understand our babbling and hustles us a couple blocks past where the internet said it was and points down the road and draws us a map to a street 10a on the corner of 10a and 20 noviembre avenidas he smiles and tells us that Pancho was his grandpa and showed us his drivers license to prove it. we promptly trucked over there and there was 9a and 11a and 8a and 12a but no 10a.. I love this place. Part of what got me excited about coming down here was the fact that google maps refused to cross the border. Now I see why, the cronick street construction and confusion totally bamboozles the machine. The skinny dog has to find his own way around this country using instincts and a good sense of smell...

We decide it is futile to look for it on foot. We slink back to the hotel and stroll past Mr. Mister and someones hot little sister starting a brand new petting party on the couch of the lobby. This dude gets more action before breakfast then I have got since Richard Milhouse Nixon was president, although I suspect he has a muy grande case of cojones azul. We load up our mounts and depart with the idea that we would use “the bitch” to locate the bullet riddled dodge. I put my spidey senses on standby because I have been assured that the numerically accurate GPS will lead us there. I have temporarily given up on looking for a hot looking rhinestone outfit this morning as all the shops are closed.

"I know the 10a is here, the bitch says so" (Daygum razzle frazzin $^%$^%$^% machine) "its gotta be here, honest"

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/little%20dogtown/gps.jpg[/IMG]

We spend a cursory amount of time looking for the bullet riddled dodge as I can find plenty of those in Detroit if I really want to see one. I have also noticed that, in an attempt to confuse TomBlum and myself, the Mexican government has cleverly made all the plaques on interesting historical stuff with spanish .

We decide to head out west on Mex. 16 and start making progress toward the Canyon. Where is it? I look to the southwest and see a gap in the mountains.

Me= Hey T-Wrecks I think it is that way.

TomBlum= "I know the street is here, the bitch says so" (Daygum razzle frazzin $^%$^%$^% machine) "its gotta be here, honest"

us=Riderideriderideride

we repeat this cycle of blathering and riding and get nowhere until T-mobil gives up on “the bitch” and finally goes the direction that I was pointing my finger. What a horrible mistake. I have a math situation on my hands. If I am right 50% of the time and he is Right fifty percent of the time we should be right a hundred percent of the time right? KNOT!!! We choose the opposite and are wrong and lost 100% of the time. Which wouldn't be a problem were we in a sweet air conditioned 1980 Ford fairmont woody wagon like everyone else but nooooooooo one of us is in the mexican desert sun in Augusto on a black bike with black lederhosen cooking up a set of cojones asado viejo (broiled old dude testicles), smoke from el cojones incinerado drifts up under his visor and makes him wretch.

This is making TomBlum understandably crabby. He gives up on the bitch and goes the direction I am pointing which leads us into a labyrinth of alleys and wild packs of barking dogs. A pattern forms with tom in the lead, we turn down a smaller (simultaneously dirt/cement/cobblestone/asphalt/crushed stone) street, tom looks confused and accelerates waking up a bunch of skinny wild dogs that consequently chase me and finally attack as tom gets to the next yet smaller street where he stops and the dogs catch me and try to drag me off my bike and he accelerates and wakes up the next pack, and so on and so on, until finally we are in a old lady's back yard under her granny panties hanging out to dry on a clothesline. I have determined the next time I see the movie “Old Yeller” I am gonna shout and cheer when he dies.

Tom rockets out of our conundrum leaving me to play fetch with my Tibia in the back yard with Lassie.

I finally get to a street with signs and Tom is nowhere In sight. This really doesn't concern me as we both vaguely know where we are gonna end up but I figure he likes a more standard situation so I should find him even though I have no idea where to look. I am standing there looking confused when two dudes pulled up in a chevy monza and said “your buddy went that way” or “euchre mother-in- law broom petting” how would I know, it was spanish? and they pointed down the road. I went the way they pointed and sho nuff there was T. What are the odds of a couple high tone americans on their way to work at the cubicle (in business casual) stopping their Ford Explorer to help out a confused mexican?

[SIZE=6][COLOR=Red]Possibly devisive letter to the mad guys on TV warning[/COLOR][/SIZE]

Dear foaming at the mouth middle aged white overweight television talking sobbing anxious white guys,

why are you so angry? You and your ilk have all the guns and control 99 percent of the all global resources. If you cant relax under those circumstances, what the hell? Are you afraid that your numerical control of your environment might slip to 98.35%. I am unemployed and approaching zero in my net worth and I don't really care. The material things I have accumulated (with the exception of my sweet ass polar white swing away can opener and Cack) have provided no happyness or value to my life, you, on the otherhand, are a kajillionaire and the veins are sticking out on your forehead and you are getting spit all the way onto the television camera. These guys down here have nothin and seem pretty content. I gotta say if you are living the american dream I am pretty sure I don't want it. I propose a revolution! Not an armed revolution but a lack of ambition revolution. hang out more, shoot the shit with your buddies more go in late leave early more. Miss deadlines Don't go to meetings (unless there is a sign in sheet, then sign in and say you forgot your coffee and leave). I think the unambitious revolutions rallying cry would be “Viva Minyana” There is an old management axiom “the 20/80” rule that states 20% of your workforce does 80% of the work. I used to pride myself in being part of that hard charging 20%. Then it occurred to me that the other 80% of the people were playing horseshoes out back and getting paid roughly the same. The people that are in managements favored %20 are suckers.

At the end of the day the uptight white guys (that are uncomfortable with eye contact) in suits end up with all your stuff anyway so relax. I would be shocked if my 401k turned out to be anything but flickering ones and zeros anyway but I will not have one second of anger over it (ok maybe one but I ain't gonna be angry at a mexican that snuck into the USA to work a night shift skinning dead cows at a meat extruder in kansas so you can have a cheap burger).

Signed,

underweight deeply confused middle aged white guy

Gringo estupido

[SIZE=4][COLOR=Lime]

[/COLOR][/SIZE] [SIZE=4][COLOR=Lime]End of possibly devisive rant[/COLOR][/SIZE]

maybe I will start a career as a Demotivational speaker. Hmmmm “Seven habits of highly defective people” by vermin Covey

We finally got into a long smoldering traffic jam on the road leading to Mex16 and just as the light changed to allow us to break free of the city and head towards the canyon..............

[SIZE=7][COLOR=Yellow]CACK WENT SILENT![/COLOR][/SIZE]

Jeez 19 years of continuous operation with no maintenance. 12,000 miles into this trip screaming across various deserts, ghettos, alpine meadows, sunny beaches and arctic regions, did cack lure me all this way just to strand me in the town of skinny little dogs? no time to mentally wax eloquent I have to leap off my bike and push this 850 pounds of refuse across 6 lanes of smoldering noonday mexican traffic. The scaffolding of doom is nowhere in sight, any anthropological/philosophical inquiries into the human condition will have to wait to see if I survive to the other side of the street (like a psychedelic version of frogger).

I rapidly push cack across the traffic into a convenience store parking lot. What with the tension of the traffic, heat and exertion I am a little worried the patch job they did on my heart might blow goo all over the front of my shirt. I add another level of exercise physiology to the chart,[LIST]

[*]Low Intensity: heart rate is 68-to-92 beats per minute. (burns fat, regular, even respiration)[/LIST][LIST]

[*]Aerobic: heart rate is 93-to-118 beats per minute. (burns a combination of glucose and fat, respiration increases, can still finish sentences)

[*]Anerobic: heart rate is 119-180 beats per minute. (Fast twitch muscles engage burning primarily glucose with occasional oxygen debt creating lactic acid in the muscles. Breathing is fast and labored, no talking.

[*]Vermarobic: heart rate 180-1,000,000 (every muscle and tendon is pushed past its breaking point Achilles tendons snap and rip your sox, respiration is one long chick- like shriek your liver starts to burn 3 bean salad you had at a church pot luck in 1972 your eyes fixate on the blinking orange Do Not Walk guy because when he quits blinking 6 lanes of 1970s latino driven Detroit steel will come hurtling toward you)[/LIST]All I am gonna say is I lived to the other side. We pulled into the parking lot of the quicky mart pemex combo, I start breathing again and try to calmly evaluate my sitchuation. My battery has died! I start off by presuming that spending the winter in a subzero arctic snowbank has created a marginally defective battery that was killed by near constant cooling fan operation and intense ambient heat.

A note on Mexican heat in the summer. Yes it is hot, get over it. Mexicans live there so it is not life threatening it is just occasionally uncomfortable. If you want comfort there is a Target store near you that can guarantee 68.75 degrees with a very comfortable level of humidity. If you want comfort never leave the confines of the attractive but not offputing Steelcase brand cubicle walls that surround you. Personally I would rather almost die in Mexican heat than almost live in a cubicle in an office park.

My motorcycle repair regimen starts of with a decision hierarchy tree that is totally irrational. I start with the cheapest easiest fix first and if that doesn't work I hit stuff with a hammer and if that doesn't work I cover it in lighter fluid and light it and get a ride home with the fire guys. For instance if my radiator starts to leak I will go into an auto parts store and buy a turn signal bulb and replace it and so on and so on.

Cheapest fix number one- while we are standing scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get a sikorsky cargo helicopter with a complete factory honda service center to come down and winch cack into its belly, a dirty 12 year old street urchin saunters up and scopes us out. He looks at me, Tom and our bikes and points at my shifter and holds up 2 fingers and makes a pushing motion. As if to say “what are you guys stupid? Just push start it in second gear,”

So we figure what the hell lets bump start it keep the motor redlined at all times and maybe when the battery cools off everything will be just fine, hunky dory.

Gringo viejo and street urchin push me and I do the butt drop bumpstart, cack shrieks to life, I twist the grip till it won't go no mo and rage off down the street. “This will fix it I just know it” said Vermins internal dialog in a strange overly optimistic Shirley Temple type tone.

I don't want to risk any more cooling fan use so I keep it redlined in 3^rd gear and pretty much blast westbound on Mex 16 libre and figure T-party will catch up onnaconna he is piloting an agile missile that goes about a thousand miles an hour.

20 miles down the road he catches up and passes me as we come into a little podunk town. He clears the main light in town on a yellow and I get stopped. Cack immediately starts to sputter. I max out the motor again, the motor redlines as I have no muffler, every one of the exposed brown heads looks my way but it was no use I had wrung the life out of that cheap whore and she had died again.

Looks like “cheapest fix number one” can be crossed off the list.

With my uncanny methodical mechanical deductionary skills I surmise my battery is dead. I am not entirely rattled yet because this would be a fitting location for Cack to go tits up. Cacks eventual resting place should be exotic. A Walmart parking lot in Evansville indiana? Oh hell no!!!! Out behind a taco stand on Mex 16 libre in the middle of the country. Perfect. None the less I start lookin into the plausability of cheapest fix numero dos. I ain't gonna youthanize the old girl just yet.

T-bone vanishes off down the road not noticing that cack has evaporated from his rear view mirror, or maybe he has figured at his age he doesn't need the aggravation of my company and left me for good. I oddly am not one bit anxious. This is the beauty of riding shit and I want everyone to know it. In poor countries every major road and town has tons of buses. If you break down you just prioritize your stuff and take what you can carry onto a bus and leave the bike. At this point however the cost of a combination of mules, buses, planes, trains and automobiles to get me back home is still more expensive than Cheapest Fix number dos-- put in a new battery.

Half a dozen nice (I think) middle aged dudes swing by and ask me stuff I don't understand. They look semi alarmed when I grabbed a rock and started mashing Buck Owens face to get to the battery just soze I could point to it. I finally pummel the plastic into submission as T-Party rearrives and looks simultaneously anxious, analytical, and disgusted. I get a mexicans attention and start caterwauling “donde esta battaria tienda por favor”. He points down the road and writes down the name. I commandeer TomBlums motorcycle and boogie down the road to the store the mexicans described. It was an auto parts joint that sends me down the road to another place, this goes on and on for about an hour. The store guys are all cool one even brings out his very cheerful and ultra hot daughter to practice her english on the pencil necked gringo estupido but no one had a bike battry. [COLOR=Silver]Finally one of the stores had a bike battery and I purchased it.

[/COLOR] [COLOR=Silver]We were sittin squat out on the sidewalk trying to fill the battery and the store guy came out and grabbed it and took it out back to where they could fill it and charge it. [/COLOR]At this point cue the swooning perfectionists into saying “when you first charge a wet cell battery you should do a 1 amp trickle charge for each amp hour rating on the battery so you can have a long lived battery”. Well it is a lot easier to be a swooning perfectionist at room temperature than it is at 110 degrees on a sidewalk in Mexico.

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We arrive back at the bike (rat advantage number 345a nobody touches your shit when you are not there because they think you are crazy or diseased and either one could be contagious). Needless to say the battery is too large for the battery holding crevasse in the bike so I take my multi-tool and gouge a hole in my trunk to run wires and jerry rig (I suppose I will get a strongly worded letter from the National Association for the Advancement of Guys Named Jerry aka NAAGNJ condemning the perjorative and implicitly demeaning use of the name Jerry) the whole mess into action.

Cheapest fix number 2 (tools needed: rock and multitool)

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did i mention that i left my original prop stick next to the bike in the belly of the alaskan marine highway ferry as I beat a hasty retreat into Haines alaska last year? Sometime I am gonna do a childlike rendering of north America that pinpoints all the stuff I have lost.

I reload all my crap, mount the old girl like Roy Rogers jumpin out the second floor of a saloon onto Trigger and blast off absolutely carefree down the road. Speaking of that I wonder if they warned Trigger that Roy was coming or if the poor horse was just hanging out thinking horse thoughts (bee stings and clover and horse bootie) and all a sudden a 190 pound man falls out of the sky on him. No wonder he always took off like a shot. It is kind of an old west horse version of starting fluid.

We are now rolling westbound toward Cackthehammock without a care in the world because I am “certain cheapest easiest fix number two” is gonna be a home run. I relax and start to notice that the surrounding areas are fairly lush and beautiful. I had figured that this would all be desert but it was largely green and agricultural. I also notice something else, many of the houses along this stretch are homemade out of rock. The cool thing about them is not that they appear to be in a chronic state of construction but that each has its own individual style and flair. It appears that the owners are the architects and builders and they have an artistic vision that only resides in their heads of what they want to live in. It looks like they want a good place for their spirits to live as well as their bodies. One small building for instance was rectangular with semicircular ends that had small windows with colored glass on the sides and a small stained glass window in one of the curved ends. This person may have wanted to blur the lines between church and home so he could worship 24/7 or there was a sale on colored glass and he bought a palletful. Ya never know in Mexico.

We go down the road I don't know how far and finally reach Cackthehammock which is supposed to be a lunch stop on the way to Creel. We pull up to the first light in town, half a dozen street hustlers of various ages and sized surround me trying to clean my windshield, decapitate me or give me coupons for a car wash and Cack Dies Again.

Watch street urchin as he cleverly sneaks toward Homero to decapitate him.

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I am normally relatively unflappable but at this point I have begun to flap a little. The heat is starting to get to me, about the second I was fixin to get a mental stress fracture I see a bus station a couple blocks down the road so I relax. Plan B abandon the bike and run away is an easy alternative at this point so all the tension drains out of me and right into TomBlum.

I start to suspect that the nervous tension created by the worrying young ones (ThomasClark and RyanIsMyName in Anchorage To Parts Unknown) as they doubted cack and ran around buying electronic components off ebay in the spring may have somehow messed with Cacks mojo and now the ratbike gods are taking their vengeance. Oh ye of little faith ye have smiteth me in the land of the skinny dogs

My trip via motorcycle may well be morphing into a bus trip. I was contemplating

c) the odds of correctly diagnosing the problem

A) the odds of getting parts anywhere near here

B) the odds of T-wrench and me correctly, and in a timely fashion putting the parts on

3) the odds of not making something worse

g) the odds finishing the trip

Things were not that bad though and Tom “bless his heart” let me take advST around town looking for stuff. Just to jack him up and add a little dramatic tension as I was pulling out, I pointed out how it might not be wise to let a stranger with a broken bike take yours out of your sight as I could just as easy go back to the states on his bike and leave him stranded.

Magic bus of comfort Plan b

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Every guy that pulled into my new home (the Dominos parking lot) came over and offered some kind of advice or offer of help. One of the most helpful was a wild ass in a new truck with a near lethal case of testosterone poisoning (you could tell by the scars all over his head). He suggested a Honda “dealer” down the road that was a buddy of his and told me he would hook me up with whatever we needed if I used his name (which escapes me). He asked us where we were headed and we told him Batopilas and he looked a little nervous and made the pinchfinger dope smoking sign and said “Oh you guys are going to the center of the Narco trafficantes”. He felt the risk factor was fairly high and I asked him what he did for a living and he said “I am a stunter that does motorcycle thrill show exhibitions” and he handed me a promotional poster showing him jumping through flaming rings with no helmet on.

Cue the nurvis twittering safety throngs. Having done no planning I did not realize that this was a dope area I thought it was over toward Sinaloa more.

I am fixin to do something on a broke bike that makes a professional danger boy nervous. Perfect.

I go looking for the Honda dealer on TomBlums bike with no luck. I figure wrongheadedness and nervousness are currently holding sway so it is time to slow things down and get organized. I again inform T-shirt that we have no relationship and should he want to continue free as a bird without me I would entirely understand and encourage it. Instead he hangs with me. I ask one of the street urchins where I can get my new battery charged just so I can get to a hotel and he points across the street and takes me over there and introduces me to the mechanics, explains my situmication and soon has me hooked up to a battery charger. I spend a couple of hours hanging out with the street guys and we get along fine. I go back and try to get my battery and pay them and they just hand me the battery and refuse payment. I love this place.

Monsoon season (we have picked a time of year that is not only very hot but it is prone to having violent storms at any time)

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TomBlum is sent up the hill to arrange our accommodations. As our method of transportation has been compromised we pick a hotel that is a little nicer than we like and comes in at $50. I finally get my battery reinstalled in my trunk and head on up the hill. As we unpack our stuff Toms anxiety actually increases because he couldn't get the internet to work. He seems to be taking all the tension for me as at this point I really don't care about the bike. I even start to surmise that Cack had arranged this whole thing to go to Mexico to die. I go up to the lobby/office to use the lobby internet so see if I had any mail and for the first time the locals gave me an abnormal amount of scrutiny. I can't blame them because I probably emitted an unsavory stank and had dirty clothes on and had been seen riding cack into their high class establishment.

The tension in the hotel room rises as tom can't get a connection while I have Mexican hillbilly music blaring out of the Telly.

I eventually stroll ONE block down the street to buy a coupla bottles of liquid genius from the store and on the way back I start to mentally go over my options. I kind of clear my mind of litter and go into a broke bike, long way from home, what should I do now trance. OOOOOHHHHHHM OOOOOOOHHHHHM Then it comes to me! One time I saw a junk goldwing in the weeds with a big battery in the saddlebag. Rather than fix the problem why not booger up a haphazard workaround by buying a big car battery and charger and never mind the stator, rotor and regulator. I resolve to tell Blum this when I get back but then I realize I've been in my bike boogering up trance for a half hour (which is a little long to go ONE block) and when I come out of it I don't know where I am. So I add another 20 minutes stumbling around back alleys trying to find the hotel.

I get back and tell Tom about the battery in the trunk Idea and It clearly makes him more confused and nervous as it is not the “Right” thing to do but by George it might get us down the road. He finally gets on the internet and queries all y'all trying to find a better idea and it turns out this idea doesn't suck.

With that glimmer of hope we relax enough to go out for our evening constitutional around town. I still am looking for a white short-sleeved western shirt and use that as a reason to enter all the stores downtown. One guy breaks from a pack and starts getting real inquisitive as to why we are there. I figure he doesn't see many gringos and may have some financial interest in locating and discouraging gringos in the area. Without too much talking we convince him we are actually confused idiots and not a threat to whatever he is up to and he lets us continue on unmolested.

I see a big Coca-Cola factory downtown and know that the end is near for them. How long will it take to inflate Mexicans to the size of Americans?

I am in hillbilly heaven here. These caiman shitkickers are running $35, in the United States they can run $500

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We find a storefront that is dishing out boiled corn soup and we have a cupful and wait out a storm

Me and bigT hangin out with assorted power-rangers and stuff out of the rain

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Neither of us knows what tomorrow will bring and I for one have a comfortable amount of apathy.

We go back to the room as the skies clear to a beautiful sunset. I hang out on the veranda and enjoy it while Tom gets on the internet trying to numerically justify the amperagesandvoltagesandwattagesandwhatnottages and drawages of my cockeyed scheme. He tries to debunk my bunk for a hour or so and finally falls asleep defeated knowing my idea may well work.

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I stay up later and watch mexican MTV and revel in the rhinestones

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I finally go to sleep contented that my bike is only "kinda" broke and Sandra Bullock might be waiting for me in her sexy JB Weld (quick set) boxer drawers behind the bathroom door just waiting for me to fall asleep soz she can attack me again.

Good night huddled masses.

I woke up again just a little crabby because it looked like Sandi gave up on the possibility of coming between me and Sweet Thang so she was makin herself scarce. I can't say as I blame her as the odds of me cheating on Sweets is negligible but it was a lot a fun fightin Sandi off. I also don't relish the notion of Jesse beating the crap out of me in a jealous rage neither annaconna the blood thinners. I throw my legs offa the side of the bed and T (Boonepickens) is rustlin about. I can't do no thinnin and cypherin till I do what one must do first thing in the morning so I casually sauntered toward the bathroom and astutely focused on the door frame so I could avoid hitting my head- and succeeded!

No gunfire this morning to give us a pre-coffee adrenaline booster so the day starts off much more leisurely. I finish my business and reiterate to T that he can flee at any time, no hard feelings, and I cook up a bowl of my morning gruel on the veranda using my gas stove. Just a note to young beginning travelers; I like getting into a routine that includes cooking my meals on my campstove. It kind of forces a deliberate attention to your situation at each end of the day and gives long trips a kind of homelike pace. It also kind of prevents you from over-riding during the day. I used to be an ironbutt style rider but now I would rather do less mileage over a longer time frame. You may say well hell I only get a week off I am going to ride like all getout but it just ain't worth it. While I am at it I would like to start a movement to get all of August off like the Europeans. They do some stuff way better than us and vacation is one of them. Ya can't throw a dead cat without hitting a rosy cheeked French dude on vacation in the USA.

We could learn a lot from the French

a) If you give up right away in a war you get to keep all your cathedrals intackt

B) If you give up right away overachievers will march right in and try to set things straight anyway while you drink wine and eat stinky cheese. Sure some of your women will find all the bluster and warlike behavior arousing, but eventually the overachievers will go home and your fems will come crawling back to you anyway.

3) Give a young whippersnapper country a lot of money and a big statue to fight the pig dog British and they forget about you right away and start naming their french fries something else the minute they stub their toe.

dee)have the audacity to imply the economy should be measured by its worth to humans instead of the flickering 0101110100011s

[URL="http://www.dowjones.de/site/2009/09/frances-sarkozy-crisis-forces-us-to-go-beyond-gdp.html"]http://www.dowjones.de/site/2009/09/frances-sarkozy-crisis-forces-us-to-go-beyond-gdp.html[/URL]

Tea Set and I get organized and do a early morning stroll around the west side of town waiting for the AutoZone to open. We start to investigate each others view of The Machine (or as I have come to know it the semi unnatural mechanical manifestation of unbridled amoral left brain thinking) We have a fundamental disagreement on its nature; T thinks it is just a bumbling short sighted human anomoly and I think it has morphed one level beyond short sighted and is tending toward unrestrained destructive evil.

Regardless at this point in the trip The Machine has reviewed the numerical demographics of this part of Mexico and felt it had developed enough to put in a Dominos Pizza and an Autozone. Was it fortunate? Maybe, maybe not, all I know is the small town auto parts stores I had been graciously helped in yesterday had been replaced by a clean efficient businesslike edifice that didn't have owners babies playing on the floor or dogs or teenage daughters that were trying to learn English. All the proceeds of my modern transaction with autozone would be promptly sent via the flickering 00101010100010011011101001's to New York City for review by agents of the machine. The agents will take their percentage and buy homes larger than most Mexican villages. Is it just me or is there a “let them eat cake” tone to these shows about rich chicks and their petty little lives (Paris Hilton et al). It has put a burr under my saddle. The machine's eyeball in my living room displays these women to me on occasion and I have a hard time understanding why it has shown them to me.

The Autozone finally opened and after some hemming and hawing I grabbed the biggest car battery I could find, miscellaneous wires and a 6 amp charger because I wanted this whole charging thing to be a non issue the rest of the trip. The Autozone was about a mile from the hotel so carrying the battery back had me looking all simian like with my battery lengthened arms dragging on the ground..

TomBlum has officially gone into no comment phase whenever asked about the plausability of the battery situation. He is a wiley compatriot. We get back to the hotel and I carve a hunk out of my trunk to run the automotive size wires to the old wires, hook everything up, unplug my headlight to save on juice and as I was about to stand back and admire my work my trunk lid fell with 100 pounds of crap on it driving the throttle lever from my lawnmower handle into the back of my head. I knew I couldn't get off this easy this morning without somehow receiving an additional purple spot on my noggin. At least this one is covered by hair.

Notice the new charging system and the busted lawnmower handle

Swooning perfectionists avert yer eyes

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also notice the missing lawnchairtractortrianglekinkyfriedmanbumpersticker where is it subybaja? Don't make me come back to alaska to look for it or I will be pissed.

We finally head out toward Creel in the late morning I am fairly confident that this was the last major thing that would happen to Cack. This fix even though crude pretty much eliminates tons of electrical failure modes.

T/4/2 insists on getting us out of town using his high tech gizmo with the same results we saw in Chitown.

RazzleFrazzin&**^&%%*&^*bitch machine

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so I take over and get out my wadDed up mexican map and blast off toward the horizon. Leading the way to our Glory/Fate/Doom whatever

The road south starts to get real curvy and fun.

Something T said about my near kamikazee approach to this trip started to bother me now that I had Unworried Helmet Time. I started to scroll through the flotsam and jetsam in my mind looking for the motivation. Why did I feel compelled to do something this stupid? Why did I know that I had no choice and that no amount of planning would affect the outcome? On the face of it the quest was geographic but that wouldn't explain my fervor. I have seen plenty of geography and this was no different than other large rocky areas I had seen. It was entirely an illogical enterprise but I did have an epiphany.

What I had learned on my last trip is that the important thing about the travel was the people not the scenery. So I started to look into why I wanted to immerse myself in this area and then it came to me.

[SIZE=6][COLOR=Red]Epiphany Warning[/COLOR][/SIZE]

It was January 2009 and the Vermin got laid off his hi fallutin cube job and had to lick his wounds and start over in something entirely different so he signed up for truck driving school. I drove westbound late one 6teen degree below zero Michigan night toward Fort Custer (named after Gen George Armstrong Custer, another Michigan guy who lost his job to Indians) in Battle Creek Michigan where the school had made accommodations for myself and my classmates to bunk in one of the barracks as the truck school of the local community college used the private road network in the fort as a range. As I passed a sign on the freeway that said Fort Custer/ Industrial park / National cemetery I thought to myself “well the cheeky bastards of the military/industrial complex have realized everyone is busy getting drunk and watching NASCAR so they don't even try to hide their relationship anymore”. The stupification must be complete. How did I escape the stupification process and why? Anyway as I approached the Fort/Cemetery/Industrial complex (on Denso Rd.) I noticed that every one of the large manufacturing facilities along what used to be army property were German or Japanese. I couldn't believe it. All those human beings in WW1 and WW2 starved, shot, gassed, incinerated, knifed, bayonetted, choked, run over, bombed, suffocated, froze and burned there is only one thing that actually flourished, the machinery.

I recognized the thoughts I was having were those of a cynic and having read the heart disease pamphlets from cover to cover I realized that the cynicism was killing me deader'n shit just like the extruded food that had been feverishly crammed down my gullet.

As I pulled toward the Fort Custer's guard shed I beat my cynicism back and vowed to thank the guard for his service to our country. It wasn't his problem he was a tool of the machine as he had enlisted to serve his country with I presume pure and patriotic intentions. He approached the car and politely but stearnly asked me to open my hood and trunk (Homeland Security ya know). I finally did something I had been meaning to do for years when I saw a man in the service I blurted out how proud and thankful I was that he was serving our country. He thanked me, looked at me kind of strange and ambled toward the front of my car and I read the insignia on his crisp uniform and the embroidered patch on his shoulder said “Secura” (absolutely made-up name of a true private security contractor paid to guard The Fort). The cynicism and disillusion are now complete. That was the straw that broke the Vermins mind, the machine had won and was in control. Fighting it with violence and weapons would never work- it had cornered the market on August 6th 1945.

Hang in there I am getting to the point.

Several weeks later when I had progressed to the stage of driving the schools old Frightliner on the highways I was rolling northbound on US127 with Herr Chief truck driving instructor Willman, and a recently released felon/student (he didn't do it! The bitch set him up). Willman and I started shooting the breeze as we were both middle aged men and increasingly confused by the events of the day. As I age I have an increasingly difficult time not saying what's on my mind so I let him have a look see at the first couple of levels of the scaffolding of doom to see if he would pull out a tazer and he just looked thoughtful and declared I was not crazy as batshit so I let him climb halfway up the scaffolding to see if he could see a different horizon than me to try to give my despair some relief. Instead he kinda agreed but he did have a fascinating observation that there were small pockets of people on earth that had avoided the flickering 0110110101011's and the machine and then he went into his knowledge of the Amish people he had met and how they had survived till today basically clinging desperately to 1825. Any move toward modern (ironically they call it English) decadence is strictly verboten.

The problem with the Amish is they are amongst us and had already bitten off 1825 years of the machines development and the boom times of the 2000s had them pimping out their carriages and working in motorhome factories in Elkhart (which is amish for Recreational Vehicle). They had been irrevocably tainted.

What if you could find some people who thrust a stick into the spokes in the wheel of time, oh, lets say 5000 BC?

[COLOR=Lime]Epiphany over 4 now[/COLOR]

T and I have a leasurly day blasting through the Mexican hinterlands soaking in the scenery and dodging stuff. The road was muy excellente and the sun was out. I am at peace because my boogered up electrical charging system seems to be working fine. The only slight risk is the lack of headlight would make me slightly less visible but with cows being the main obstacle in the road I don't recon they care one way or the other about headlights.

Watch out Bossi here I come

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we pull into Creel in the early afternoon and just walk around town and hang out. I have recently learned that there has been a fair amount of machine gun shooting and massacreeing in this area but I didn't see any. The fact that the federales where holed up in this hotel with armed guards makes you realize there must be something to the stories but I don't know about it so I don't care. As we begin loitering about I notice an old scrawny medium sized dog hanging around me. he has real tight longish fur that is real dirty, being old, scrawny, dirty and generally itchy myself I reached down to give him a good behind the ear scratchin to help a brother out.

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Well that was a big mistake. I somehow disturbed his misery equilibrium with a good behind the ear scratchin. After I quit he looked even more miserable and started to wobble around town behind us with his head being scratched by hands that were no longer there. His head quaked back and forth like he had the palsy as the imaginary blissfull ear scratchin never quit. I think I broke his mind. That was a good lesson to my do gooder self that you shouldn't give somethin out freely like that less'n you can keep it up forever.

The feeling I got in the town was that it was probably like Gatlinburg was like in the 20's. No big chains really (except I think one best western) and a ton of little mom and pop stores selling stuff ya need and not much more.

I am curious about my battery charge so we get a hotel room for the princely sum of $25.

and I plug in my electrical nerve center

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I was pleasantly surprised to find that the days travels had used very little juice

Mexican wiring part 2 (television wire had fallen into the heater and melted to the copper and nobody even put on the toilet paper insulation)

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T and I had a meal in a restaurant that was one small room with the kitchen in one half and the dining area in the other. It had no industrial appliances just yer standard ancient kenmore type stoves and refridgeraters and had a good homecooked meal. Notice I am wearing my goodluck excellent adventure shirt. Whenever things start to get questionable I put on that shirt and nothing bad has ever happened while wearing that shirt since its inaugaration ride to sturgis in 1989.

I figure being a tourist in these parts is a lot safer than being anything else so I make damn sure everyone knows Gringo Estupido is one with my hawiian viz anti decapitatin anti gettin massakeerd shirt.

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After our meal we do a lovely stroll around what are probably unsafe outskirts of town for a couple of hours having a thoroughly delighfull day. Idly passing the time with MrTis pleasant as he is good company, any topic is fair game and he has intelligent and insightful responses. My mom had asked me earlier about the poverty and it was then I kind of realized some where along the way I had quit noticing material variations amongst humans. I no longer valued wealth or feared poverty so it had managed to escape my attention but I s'pose these folks were poor if I had to measure. It didn't seem to bother them so I sure wasn't gonna let it bother me.

Like any small town Saturday night the youths would cruise town on their quads having a ripping good time in a very unsafe helmetless fashion.

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The whole thing kind of reminded me of what USA used to be like before the machine. But what do I know, most of my knowledge of americas past was spat out at me through the large glowing electrical ember front and center in the living room of my childhood. It may have never existed.

The people I had known that existed prior to the electrical illusion eminator seemed more like these people. They are mostly dead now.

We retire for the evening and I fall into a deep sleep with little on my mind. The scaffolding of doom can't fit down these tight mexican back roads.

I had fallen asleep with a uncommon serenity knowing that this trip was essential and I was far enough into it that, come what may, it was a success.

In the morning I awoke well rested and looked over at Tom and could tell something was up. I hollered "good mornin' sunshine" at him and it didn't help. He said, “Verm I am sorry but I don't think I am going into that canyon with you, you are on your own from here out”. I said “cheer up Tman no sweat”

He commenced to list off a couple entirely plausible excuses to not go down there with me (bald road tires, advanced age, heavy bike, heat, wisdom and an ominous feeling that he was about to get a case of pernicous alopecia) and they were all true. I entirely respect the notion that he ignored all plausable excuses and went as far as he did. We visited and watched a bus driver dip his bus washing bucket into a cistern that supplied our tap water (this grossed T out).

I did not encourage him to go with me further because I have a rule never to try to use badgering to get anyone to do anything on a bike. Never is it more important that a person follow their own vibe than when on a scooter. When the Harley deposit frenzy of the nineties was going on I was strangely silent as the motorcycle guru at work. I never want to be the one to get an ambivilant person to start motorcycling and have them get killed. If you are supposed to ride a bike nothing on earth will prevent it. I still remember the feeling of my buddy Dale letting me ride his Honda 90 when I was 12. I wanted to ride that bike more than I wanted my next breath and when I eventually got a chance to ride it up and down our road I got off and my legs were shaking so bad from excitement I almost fell over and pissed myself simultaneously. The hook was set that fateful summer day and it has never let up. 1970 was my summer of love for motorcycling.

Somethimes I wonder if I had never threw a leg over that Honda 90 how things might have turned out. Maybe I would have done better in the “Real” world not knowing the unreal world of hurtling through space much faster than humans were meant to go, feeling like a falcon swooping amongst the pines instead of a pencil necked geek sitting in a classroom looking at the zits on the back of some kids neck.

Maybe the cubicle would have fit just fine and I would continue to be a productive part of society eagerly grabbing for that carrot that is just out of reach. Maybe I would have been able to make sure all the formulas in the cells in my .xls spreadsheet would correlate so that big daddy in the corner office would come pat me on the head.

Who am I kidding? I had to ride that bike and nothing in this world would have stopped me.

At this point it doesn't really matter I wouldn't trade one moment of riding cack down a desert canyon for a lifetime of success in the cubicle.

I whipped out my campstove and bucket of morning gruel and placed it on the sidewalk and Tom and I sat down curbside and cooked up a meal amongst the tourists, diesel fumes, roving begging indians and scrawny dogs. No one paid Gringos Estupido y Viejo much attention. Tom was good company, it is really cool traveling with strangers, neither of you has a history or a future with each other you can just let the situation unfold organically in front of your eyes. Your relationship develops in the moment. I get the feeling that neither Tom or Myself were interested in putting on airs so there is a relaxed nature to our discussions.

Finally the time for hemming and hawing, kicking the dirt and saying good bye came and we parted company on mainstreet in Creel. T was going North with the aid of “that bitch” and I was going left for about a hour and then turn right on a dirt road till I get to Batopilas.

Adios amigo

What the? Bitch razzen frazzin ^*^%^$#%#

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I started to casually saunter toward Cack as a strange movement across the street caught my eye. It was the bobble head mange dog. He had spied me from across the street and made a hot beeline toward me for more ear scratching. At this time mangy marmaduke had started to creep me out so I sped up toward my waiting steed, amplifying the E=MCsquared nature of the force of my noggin into the wooden awning of the store front. My knees buckled a little and I winced again as the little tweety birds started flying around my head amongst the stars and darting fairys.

I recovered quickly threw my leg over Cack, put on my righteous vermin lid, looked through my nearly opaque windshield, and blunt force trauma induced tears and blasted off down the road.

The stone buildings and an exhaust system that acts more as an amplifier created a deliscous cackophonic reverberattion that got all the local perro locos going ballistic. A nice sonic exclamation point to the dispersion of rats of a feather.

Picture of machine gun totin teenagers timidly taken with my hand in the way so they wouldn't see the camera.

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On my way out of town I started looking for one of the Indian street vendors/beggars to buy some token souveniers for the family. I saw a woman and a couple of kids huddled up next to a building with a blanket on the ground with a bunch of cheap bead bracelets and necklaces. Being a cynic I thought no way did she do all this handwork it was probably done in China and sent over here and she is pawning them off on suckers like me. No matter, in an effort to stimulate her economy, I pulled over and approached her to peruse her wares. This was the first time I got to really engage with the indians I had come to see. Well let me tell you there wasn't much engagement. She was absolutely timid. I had a hard time getting her to even tell me a price for her baubles. She had a look in her eyes like a dog that has peed on the floor while you were out and was about to be spanked with a rolled up newspaper.

Photgraphic evidence that cack was in fact in downtown Creel Chihuahua

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[SIZE=6][COLOR=Red]Armchair Social Anthropology Warning. [/COLOR][/SIZE]

(All subsequent “facts” are from a myriad of sources which I cannot remember and are suspect on every level)

One of the main things that piqued my curiousity about these Tarahumara indians was they had survived relatively intact not by using the old “survival of the fittest” Darwinistic aprroach but by using a technique “survival of the runny awayist”. When confronted by the Spanish conquistadors they ran away and hid. Whenever they were discovered they convincingly pretended to be sub human and no real threat to the Spanish Steel plated people perforating dudes. They occupied a nitch between animal and human that appears to have confused the Spanish into leaving them more or less alone. They looked enough like humans to exclude eating them but behaved enough like animals that they were not a plausable threat to Spanish hegemony in the region.

I had discovered the Indian version of me and Black sOck wearin Russell. These guys were not even benchwarmers like me and B.S.W.R in my high school sports world, they were sneaking around under the bleachers eating dropped popcorn.

The main difference between the Tarahumara (or Raramuri as they call themselves) and me and Black Sock Wearin Russell was they timidly had their pick of timid chicks whereas being timid types in a land of testosterone induced, sweaty sportslike behaviour even timid chicks would rue the day they were seen cavorting with me and Russell.

Another interesting and not trivial feature of these people is that they had until recently eschewed written language and all mathmatics. How did math originate? By counting the clams or beads used to capture and hold the value of other peoples labors? The ancients that were good at this form of sorcery tended to end up with a big hut full of grain and a lot of goats, while the ones that were bad ended up eating lichen. Hot randy Cave dames generally hATe lichen.

As I descended into this canyon region and reflected on my depression/fear revolving around the left brained rational/tool making/weapon making human mind it started to dawn on me that these guys by virtue of their underdeveloped left brain (the center of symbolic reasoning like language and math) may not even be capable of creating or even understanding the scaffolding of doom.

These guys may be blessedly genetically, socially and in every other measurable way “Stupid”.

[URL="http://www.amigotrails.com/Raramuri.html"]http://www.amigotrails.com/Raramuri.html[/URL]

They have a simple understanding that divides humans into two groups.

A) People that run away. (Raramuri, made by god out of clay)

B) People that cause trouble. (Chabochis, made by the devil of clay with white ash mixed in)

“Rats like us , baby were born to run”

Bruce Ratsteen

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End of Armchair social anthropologist Warning

[SIZE=4][COLOR=White]I finally picked out bracelets for Sweet Thang and Doll Baby and gave the lady too much (or too little) money because I couldn't pin her down on a price. She didn't know what they were worth and I didn't know how to value my mexican money

I pulled out on the main highway and got the painted lady warbling toward the south in the full glare of the Chihuahua noonday sun.[/COLOR][/SIZE]

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WREKLESSLY CURIOUS

I headed out south of Creel and I mean to tell you it was a perfect day. The temperature was in the high 70s and the road was a smooth twisty paradise baby. I got my groove totally on for about an hour maybe 2. Lots of action in the x,y and z axises. There is no remnants of the nipponese noise nullifier so cack was just a wild banshee wail through the canyons on pristine pavement, until........................

WOOOOOOAAAAAH MULE!!!!! Major vaca splatter. This tightened my primary OH ring so tight you could not have pulled a needle out of it with a tractor.

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Yes virginia Mexico is dangerous. I would like to take time out of this report to apologize to all the nervous fems that read these reports of stupid stuff their males do. In my case Sweet Thang and Vermom. My report turns out decent but many don't (ozymandias) and for that I am sorry. This is the way we are wired and you have to take the bad with the good. You chose to love coyotes in a land of miniture schnauzers. This is what you get in the bargain.

I rode down the pretty pavement until I got to a dirt road with a sign to Batopilas. Even though I was at a fairly high elevation It was starting to get stinking hot. I turned right and "what the hell"? there was bulldozers, gravel trucks, graders and front end loaders all over the place.

The machine was insistant on getting into this outpost. It cannot have people outside of its control and to control the people you must be able to get ever larger machines to them so you build/improve the roads. Pretty soon you will be able to get a seat at the Batopilas TGIF

I tap danced around roaring heavy equipment for an hour or so and finally I came up to a flag guy who was holding up a red flag and he waved me down. He said something is spanish either

A) Dont go any further the road is closed

b) My cousin is down the hill about a mile and he wants to party with your hindquarters

C) Please enjoy your trip into the lovely Barranca del Cobre

I chose C) the least likely choice and hit the gas and blasted by him. He looked fairly shocked. I did encounter some massive vehicular resistance but nothing I couldn't weasel around.

This is were my first wave of anxiety came up. When I had planned on replacing my charging system with a car battery I had not counted on several hours of cooling fan operation. The temperature was well over 100 degrees and i was travelling in first gear at about 4 thousand rpm at 8.5 miles an hour my motor, consequently my coolant was schmokin' the fan was running non stop. This put an underlying angst in my brain that colored my entire afternoon. I mean dude if your rig fails out here you have a problem.

Cripe so that is where that glove went. Anyone want 6 right hand Home Depot leather gloves before I put them on EBAY.

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For the sake of anyone that wants to plan a trip to Bato I will just say that the dirt road is divided up into 3ree roughly equal parts.

A) the road grader High pArt, dodgeing tons of heavy equiptment. Unnerving to hear jake brakes come on behind you on a road that is 1.25 lanes wide. Various surfaces from regular gravel to golf club head sized road base with a smattering of sand and gumbo clay thrown in to keep things interesting.

b) WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA oh scheez ahahaha waaaaaaaaaaaaa See picture below

C) mommy,mommy,mommy,mommy One or 2 hours of intense heat riding on a canyon wall jeep trail that is three/4's lane wide with no way to see if a narco trafficante or federales with machine guns or regular shmoes in pickup trucks are hurtling toward you from around the corner.

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1=where the flickering ones and zeros think the road is

2=where the road is

3=where the small stone hut called la bufa is

4=where the machine thinks it is

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I went on google and measured this hill it is approximately 3500 feet from top to bottom (1km)

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I had navigated the construction zone relatively well. I felt that was probably the worst of it so I decided to take a break as I pulled into the scary zig zaggy part pictured above. as I was fixin to pull off into a wide spot in the road I noticed a small pile of rags in the ditch and didn't pay much attention. I put my kickstand down and got off my bike and was quite startled as the pile of rags stood up and took a human form.

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Please notice his stature. Cack is leaning and he still is quite a bit shorter than the windshield. A quick garage reference measurement places him at approximately 4'6" and he is a full grown man. It looks like not only the dogs are small around here.

Once I got over the shock of seeing this ragamuffin I ambled across the road to introduce myself "hola mi nombre es cacahuete cabeza"

I reached out my hand to shake his and got a mitt full of flacid noodles. It kind of gave me the creeps. I later find out that the standard hearty handshake i was taught as a youth is too aggresive for these guys they put as little muscle into it as possible (so they don't show threatening or aggressive vibes) for that clammy calimari affect.

I tried to talk to him a little but his subtle burbling and twittering was not spanish or english. In my role as ex carney/cube dweller/amatuer anthropologist i had intended to ask him first hand what he ate. The language barrier was too great and i also remembered that a few years ago the natives in Guatamala were killing US tourists because they thought they were there to harvest their childrens organs. With my luck I would incorrectly conjugate a verb and be hurled off the cliff in some sacrifice to the god of lunar moths,

So my new best friend and I exchanged good vibes and he went all around my motorcycle quite enthralled with the various non-stock features. The thing that fascinated him most was Homer duck taped to the right mirror. He got in real close and started to pet Homers head. I informed him that Homer was one of the great minds of western civilization, a good example of modern parenting practices and the author of "The Illiad and The Odyssey". He smiled, made some gentle purring and cooing noises, stood back and took in the whole bike and then looked up at me, turned and went and sat on the edge of the cliff and pointed to this hole. I believe he was telling me this is where he lived. I apologized to him for not offering him my kinky friedman for president slow moving tractor chair and had to explain to him how some heathens had carelessly lost it in Alaska.

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I sat down with my new buddy and we both gazed into the canyon. The wind was gentle and It was real peaceful. I was quite impressed with the silence. Dear readers do me a favor and listen to your surroundings, count the number of machine induced noises that permeate your life. Hear the car in the distance? The neighbors leaf blower? The kids tinny sounding earbuds? The A/C gently whispers shshshshshsh to you in your cubicle telling you everything is gonna be 72.5 degrees fahrenheit, your 401k is real, and this time there will be a decent raise after your review because you are special shshshshsshshshsssshsh. I could hear no machines in the canyon just the wind. I looked up in the sky and saw a contrail from a jet and felt sorry for the people on it that had to be somewhere and they better be there fast or bad stuff would happen. I used to be one of them during the great nervous gringo businessman invasion of the 90s. I remember looking out of the jets window on my way to a factory in Toluca at the great expanse of rugged terrain beneath me. I figured at that time I wanted to go check it out and, by the grace of god and Soichiro Honda, here I sat with this little feller in the midst of it. What a long strange trip this has been.

View from my rest stop perch.

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WRECKLESSLY CURIOUS 1

So as I sat there with my new vertically abbreviated buddy in a peaceful nature induced reverie I started to realize it was well over a hunderd degrees and I allowed as to how I might benefit from some water. So I got up to liquify my larynx and grabbed my water bottle, [SIZE=6][COLOR=Red]IT WAS EMPTY[/COLOR][/SIZE], In my teary eyed fair thee well departure sequence with Herr Bluminator I had forgotten to get new water.

No worries as a lifelong excellent adventurer I know well enough to carry redundant systems, So I casually rummaged around, through my 200 pound pile of miscellaneous shit for my 70 oz camelback with couple year old anchorage tap water in it.

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IT WAS EMPTY TOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! PHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK[/COLOR][/SIZE]

I tawt I ate a dead puddy tat (tweaty bird of death)

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This bird started to really piss me off. I really didn't know how far I had to go to get water and I knew I wasn't in immediate danger of dying (the bird thought otherwise) however just knowing the odds of me dying shot up to somewhere in the double digits spooked me. Thank god I threw away my Dorothy Stratton Playboy back when the twins were born.

The double wammy of no water is I rely on it for surface cooling on my abnormally large head. So the odds of me getting ultra hot and making heat induced bad decisions went through the roof.

My situation has gotten alot dicier here and I have to book on down the hill into far more intense heat. I hollered adios at my buddy, got on Cack and pointed her down hill, jabbed the starter button and started the 7,000 foot descent into Batopilas Canyon.

The maggot munching bird had to make a grocery viability decision on who was more likely to produce more carrionistic calories, me or short stack. Needless to say me and my new pet buzzard headed down the hill.

15 seconds later Cacks cooling fan kicked on and reminded me I was a goner.

Giddy Up Valiant steed. Our Fate awaits us.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/scene.jpg[/IMG]

I gotta go to the bottom of this deal

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I started to get a grim non-whimsical determination. Let me explain briefly to the uninitiated about my mechanical deal. One of the liberating things about an all purpose rat bike is that they don't cost much, you can leave them out and no one messes with them and there is an interesting cultural phenomenon in nearly every society YOU LEAVE CRAZY ALONE! There is however one drawback to this particular bike in this particular canyon it requires intense concentration. If I hadn't been mountain biking the last 5 years I am sure I would have crashed 50 times. This road is less than ideal for a bike with

A) 200 pounds of excess shit piled up way high and rearward of the back tire

B) Metzler fred flinstone front tire with 42 lbs pressure in it and fat discount road tire on the rear.

3) no discernable suspension on a rutted 10percent grade road

e) the gravel acts like ball bearings on the hard road base and any attempt to steer is taken by the bike as a casual suggestion

The heat combined with the bike handling challenges has caused a real deep down exhaustion. During my ordinary life I think I am gonna get killed maybe once or twice a year for a split second. In the canyon I feel like I could die constantly for what is developing into several hours.

[COLOR=Magenta]

[/COLOR] [SIZE=5][COLOR=Magenta]Internal dialogue warning, (for the hour following starting at the scary part)[/COLOR][/SIZE]

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes. God I am hot.

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

(Dear god I am sorry for making fart noises behind Mrs. Penhales back in 6th grade, she was one year from retirement and she just needed enough money to buy a drum of blue hair dye and she could head south to the dangly deal that hangs offa georgia. The last thing on earth she need was a ration of shit from me) God I am thirsty

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

(dear god, allah, buddha whoever I am sorry for accidently spitting in that old ladies hair from the gondola of the sky thing at Cedar Point. I was aiming at the fountain she was sitting next to honest. speaking of spit mine appears to have turned to talcum) TRUCKTRUCKTRUCKaiaiaiaiaaih I wonder how much of this crud the patch job on my heart will take?

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

(OkOkOKOK you broke me god I am also sorry for shoplifting that jacknife, in fifth grade((is the statute of limitations for petty theft less than 40 years)) no I never got caught but I did like the knife, but then when I saw the store owner and his family around town in their rustly old car it bugged me knowin i took money out of their pockets so I buried the knife but obviously not the shame). Why do they mount the machine gun totin teenagers on top the federales state sponsored chevy suburbans?

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

OKOKOKOKOK Dear Thug jesse james you might as well know it now. Not all of my thoughts about that sweet angel Sandra Bullock have been pure some of them have been tainted with devilish lascivous feelings.

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

okokokokok I am sorry Dear Sweet Thang if I live through this I will never think those thoughts about Sandra Bullock again.

TAIL OF THE RECKLESSLY CURIOUS MAN PART TWO

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes.

"Hey Sandy what are you doing here? What a coincidence? Sure I would like some Iced Tea."

The bird took off.

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internal dialogue warning over[/COLOR][/SIZE]

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I pulled into LaBufa absolutely ragged out and desperate. I needed liqification ASAP. Imagine the boost to my spirits when Sandra Bullock came out and personally offered me ice tea. However since I had revealed my true lustfull nature to the cosmos further up the hill Jesse never took his eye off me. After I spent a half hour under a tree cooling off, Sandy and Jesse turned all shimmery and transparent then vaporized and morphed into these two.

. They were nice as all get out. I told them gringo estupido thought he was gonna die and they told me they thought I already had. I was pleasantly suprised to remain relatively tangible and bird free with my eyes still in their sockets.

DID I MENTION MY FAN WAS RUNNING CONTINOUSLY

I headed down the Batopilas crick from la bufa into what the guidebooks say never do which is travel deep into this canyon in the summer. My engine cooling fan of which I had not figured into my auto zone induced grand electrical scheme was running full blast. I am well accustomed to tremendous heat on vacation but the heat combined with the constant gentle reminder of my impending doom with the hum of the fan was starting to really get on my nerves. The metamorphing Sandy/Jesse combo in La bufa told me batopilas was one hour down the hill. Of course that is if you are driving a four by four with half a ton of mexican bud in the back with the machine gun totin teenage federales on your tail, curve slidin like Bo, damn Duke. Me on the other hand gingerly tiptoeing my way down, like a pig dancin on vaseline (TM) who knows?

This road had been created by the conquistadors in the year 1927 to torture people who had not properly replaced their fork seals or rear shocks. Have I mentioned lately I have no suspension?

No seriously this road was a mule trail for the silver mines that had been in the bottom of the canyon. Lets take a break from the silliness for a minute to marvel at how hard core these people are. In 18somethingsAD some American omnipotent despoiler types figured it would be easier to move an entire mining power plant/ machine shop/ foundry/ mill etc. into the bottom of the canyon and ship out ingots rather than tote out the silver ore and smelt it (dealt it) elsewhere like they had been doing previously. So they hauled an entire mining operation and infrastructure into the bottom of this canyon on mules and set up a going concern in the silver business at the bottom. This all came to a grinding halt when my buddy pancho confiscated it. It has only been fairly recently that they turned this road from one mule wide to two mules wide so that cack might enjoy it.

Yer average DOT engineered bridge built to safely prevent stupid people from hurting themselves

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For the next I don't know how long probabably two hours I did the jake brake bit at a very high RPM first gear. Naturally the steeper and the more I loaded up the front tire with standard fysics the more inclined I was to crash. Machine management wise this was not optimum as the heat betwunxt my legs was tremendous..

AAAAIIIIEEEEEEEE ah ah ah jeez aaaaaaaIIIIEEEEEE woh woh woh ah ah yikes. God I am hot.

one blind corner after another, I was thinking each one could bloody well be my last.

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finally the shadows started to get longer and I knew bato was getting close as there was the occasion little trail running off into the brush

I was ready for this day to be over about three hours before it actually was. So about 3 minutes before delerious thirty i stopped to ask a guy (fan quitely humming in the background) and/or his burro how far the town was and his gave me the "what are you stupid" look that the suits (with oxblood tassled florshiem loafers) had perfected on me years earlier. He pointed to the other wall of the canyon and I could make out a couple of outcroppins that had non chaotic angles and stuff and I figured they were houses on the outskirts and I thanked him, his burro seemed largely unimpressed with my routine and wisely kept silent.

Finally I crossed the bridge that led into town. This town is built at the bottom of a steep canyon so it is only about 100 wide so all the growth in population since Cortez has been up the river. So I began to pick my way down the street between work trucks, yappin chihuahuas and youths screaming around on quads.

I stopped at a joint with a bunch of loiterers in front of it and asked them where was a hotel and they pointed my this away to this hotel.

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I waltzed into the place and a guy came up to me and told me to drive up into the hotel.

Safe at last, safe at last ! thank god a'mighty I am safe at last (kinda)

Cack next to the hotel owners hammock

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Once I got cack parked I decided to go infesticate the town it was still stinkin hot. There are little general stores every so often where people are hanging out. I am thankful I went to an atm and got out 2.5 mexican ladies worth of money earlier as this town is pretty secluded. No internet, local generator that fails routinely, and the only phone is one on a card table next to the plaza that costs I don't know how much to use.

I finally found a store that suited me and I walked in to get some agua. I almost tripped over a nice looking middle aged woman who was laying on the floor in her "sunday go ta meetin" outfit. I almost freaked out I thought maybe she was dead and nobody had noticed yet, but that didn't make sense cause people were visiting and stepping over her and her little dog. Then I figured out that when you are hot and tired down here you lay down on a cool surface and take a nap. NOTE TO SELF AND NERVOUS GRINGOS EVERY WHERE. Here is a concept when you are tired, take a nap. I think this should be a part of my ongoing slacker revolution. People are a lot happier and more sociable after a nap. Of course the suits will hate this idea so excuse yourself from your cubicle go down by shipping and recieving and there will be a stairway that no one uses that leads to some utility closet. Go sleep under there.

Eventually if everyone does this they will have to make so many stairways and utility closets they will just let people stretch out on the floors of their cubes and the world will be a better place. Think about it. If you went somewhere with an "urgent" request for a purchase order number and the number giver outer was taking a nap, would you wake her/him/it up ? Maybe your purchase order number request isn't even important enough to interupt a nap it sure wouldn't be important enough to upset your digestion if it didn't get done today, tomorrow or ever for that matter. Minyana if ya know what I mean.

If you knew you could return to your cube and take a nap for your trouble wouldn't it make you a little better person.

she was on this floor around this corner but my bashfullness prevented me from invading her nappiness.

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Finally I had procured my comestables for the evening and I retired to the hotel for some much need rest. A regular spanish mexican came up with an raramuri in street cloths. The urbane mexican guy knew a little english and explained that he was down there helping the indian guy move his cistern

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[SIZE=7][COLOR=Lime]

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I made the aquantance of two nice guys at the hotel

one of the guys was from Mexico city was a computer programmer named Edwardo and the indian guy never said much and I wasn't introduced so indian guy B is his name as far as i am concerned at this point.

Edwardo had decide to spend his vacation time down here helping the indian guy move his cistern. I asked him if he was part of a religious mission or something and he said no he just wanted to help the guy out. I immediately started thinking about the bobble head dog back in Creel and hoped that Edwardo didn't help the guy so much that he would be miserable when he left.

We had a diplomatic situation on our hands. Edwardo had purchased a meal from the store where the lady was laying on the floor and he could not get the main course out of the can. Because there were only inferior can openers in his kit and in the whole town for that matter. These two guys had very little anxiety over their impending starvation because they figured something would crop up.

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And sho nuff Swing Away to the rescue. Edwardo thought this can opener was the slickest thing since the Popeil Pocket fisherman.

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The three of us sat on the sidewalk and broke bread, shot the breeze and enjoyed the evening.

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[SIZE=5][COLOR=Red]Dietary Rant[/COLOR][/SIZE] [SIZE=5][COLOR=Red]warning[/COLOR][/SIZE]

I asked Edwardo to ask Indian guy B if was a raramuri of running fame and he claimed he was and could easily run for two days straight. The guy had a touch of grey in his hair and I presumed he could remember running for two days straight but hadn't done it since Miami Vice was on the air. Without calling him a baldfaced liar I just nodded. The running raramuris eat corn, beans, melons and nuts and berries they forage With the occasional fricaseed gopher to round out the diet. They have no degenerative diseases and have been known to run for 400 miles at a stretch. This bloke had moved into a town with Satan (Coke) in the pop cooler.

Notice what I call "the death bloat" swelling his mid section and he got to throw away his training bra for his budding man boobs.

This is were I get spit all over people at parties (which I am less and less frequently invited to).

When I refered to the machine as being evil I really mean destructive to humanity. I am beating up on Coke but it really pertains to any company traded on the Wall Street.

Cokes primary product is absolutely destructive to your body and so they could increase their profits they put an addictive kicker in there for grins.

This is were all the grumpy old men say well it is the customers free choice that they consume gallons of this poison per day. And that is somewhat true and if the consumers stupidity hurt only them I wouldn't care less but the damage is aggregated. In other words my health insurance has to pay to lop off the purple toes of the morbidly obese people that become enslaved to that liquid. This is one of the things that is kind of freakin me out about this country. Al quida kills three thousand plus or minus and we freak out and run around like chickens with our heads kut off and Coke and Kraft foods extrude their way into what I am sure is tens of millions of premature deaths while their "customers" walk around like bloated zombies until at the age of forty they cant hold their own weight anymore and they get those scooters.

Pay attention younguns it wasn't like that even 30 years ago. Look in the old pictures from family events. Go to cabelas and look at all the folks duck hunting fotos on the wall the dudes are thin. then look around you at the zombies. I know I was one till the stent and I had the big awakening.

I actually thank god that I have heart disease because it put me on this path.

I think there is a reason all religions had some food related restrictions because they knew people had to have the fear of god in them to avoid eating stuff that tasted good that is bad for you.

I don't really blame Coke, by the rules of the game they are absolutely forbidden to have a consciense but this has to start from the ground up in my slacker revolution. The guys in the cubicles at Coke wake up every morning trying to dream up new ways to cheapen the product and cram more of the product down your gizzard.

Slacker logic. Coke cost money ergo you need a job to buy coke. Water used to be free and it still comes out of the tap free usually.

Eat like the Raramuri = thin, tons of energy and endurance beyond your wildest dreams

Eat like your average midwestern cube dwelling resident = bloat out, type 2 diabetes by the time you are 40, walk around in a food coma, high blood pressure and lopped of legs by 45 and die of a heart attack when you are 50.

As it turns out because I eat exclusively out of a can on my excellent adventures by default I do eat like the raramuri. I pretty much eat beans and corn and yams and stuff on trips and I will generally loose 5 pounds per week.

Our current national debate on who pays for health care is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. We all pay for bad health one way or the other. The suits love your illness and death it is a treasure trove.

Did you ever notice most of the growth industries in this country are actually failure modes of humanity? Prisons, hospitals, casinos, law enforcement it is all pretty much trying to fix the stuff after it has broken. Well it aint gonna work. Can you imagine Chinas Nightmare if they have the same results as we have with our much touted western lifestyle? 3 billion people with diabetes. Merck will love it.

Our country is full of people trying to make slam dunks without even knowing how to dribble the ball.

I hope I offended everybody

[SIZE=5][COLOR=Lime]Dietary RAnt over[/COLOR][/SIZE]

Lets leave beer out of this discussion for the time being. I went to the local bar for a cold one and walked through the front door. There was no ceiling and only two walls. No one was there but two guys playing dominos. One of them was the owner and he went and got my this beauty out of the cooler. I was in heaven. I started thinking the only thing that could improve this moment would be a lime but I didn't want to sound too effete to the domino playing guy so i just sat there nursing this beer and a lime fell out of a tree onto my table. I shit you not!

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After I had climbed the first couple rungs of Maslows needs hierarchy I figured I should set up electronics central so I could get a shot of my latest Mexican wiring. The car battery showed almost no charge. If that fan had been on for ten more minutes Cack would have been left down there.

More Mexican wiring. The light socket was the only 110v in the room.

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I don't want to sound like a whiner because I was perfectly satisfied with the accommodations. It was probably a 200 year old building with no glass in the windows just chain link fence and shutters because the weather never gets bad enought to need glass or they couldn't afford it? It didn't matter I didn't need glass. There is only running water if the cistern is full and as it hadn't rained for awhile there was no water. He did give me one bucket of flushing and face washing water. I pulled off the lid to the toilet tank and found 2 inch deep mud in there.

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I talked to Edwardo and he said the guy ripped me off because he only paid $5 and he made me pay $7 I paid a premium because I was a gringo I guess. Hmmmmmmm $150 a month to live in a hotel where the weather is good all year round.

After awhile one hell of a storm came down the canyon. The mother of the owner, Indian b, edwardo and myself sat in the hallway just quietly watching it rain. No one filled the void with blather. I got a chance to look at the woman. She was probably 80 years old and had a beautiful quiet grace to her. Her eyes were dark and they looked just a little uncomfortable with each other like some of the pretty women I used to see in Catalonia. Maybe her husband sat on that couch with her years ago and they held hands and watched the rain like my grandparents used to do. Now that her son was the proprietor she could spend more time on the couch watching the rain but the husband was gone and she had to settle with Gringo Estupido

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Finally the silence was broken when the lady started to talk to Edwardo and motioning toward me. Edwardo related that the old lady was worried about me getting out of the canyon safely tomorrow and I had better hang out a couple of days because washouts would make the road impassable at best. Part of the old ladies union creed requires concern for all other old ladies offspring.

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Regular kid doing what a regular kid is supposed to do in a rain storm in a hot little town. Play.

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Finally I laid in bed listening to the violent weather, pretty glad that it had held off till I got to the bottom. Then I started to worry what if drug smugglers kill me in my sleep and stuff. But then I started to worry they wouldn't. I had to make a rippin yarn for my fans just like striking viking and if someone didn't start decapitating me pretty quick this wasn't gonna make a best seller.

I woke up bright eyed and bushytailed and cooked my morning portion of gruel and coffee on my cookstove right in my room, once again this deliberative ritual gives me a nice cadence to each frenetic day. I took my nebraska cornhuskers coffee cup out to the village plaza about 7am and just took in the scene. A bunch of miscelleneous dudes sat around visiting and maybe making fun of me. There only appeared to be one guy working in the whole town. His job was to patiently shovel sand into a sieve over a wheel barrow and shake it till he sorted out all the rocks chuck them in a pile and then tote the wheelbarrow up a ramp into a building where I presume a mason mixed the sand with something to do something. I don't know the language so I can't tell what the plaza guys are saying but because it is early and they are guys I presume it is not too profound. They are all comfortable with each other I recognize the vibe as the same one that permeated my grandpas gas station counter back in the 40s 50s and 60s you know a bunch of guys hanging out that have known each other their whole lives that aint in a hurry. Each of them fully aware of the stupidest thing each other has done so should one of them get a little too big for their britchs the rest of them would pile on and bring em down to size. Oh that is right .... nevermind people don't know each other their whole lives anymore they desolve their relationships and move about the country as the economy requires. The machine resents human familarity because it has a hard time understanding it and it seems to slow down the meat in the cubicles. Make sure you get some of the more grim primates in the cubicles to police the area and make sure there are no personal photos on the walls that might start a personal discussion or remind a person they are human.

I finally sauntered back to the hotel and found that grandma had resumed her perch on the threadbare couch. She was so still that she appeared dead so I was a little startled when she opened her eyes as the hinges creaked when I walked through the hotel gate. I figured

as the road was probably washed out and nearly impassable I would hang out for a day and take a hike. I was good and sick of death defying on Cack and needed a break. I asked the old lady how long did it take to walk to Satevo? She said about an hour. I thought oh cool I can make it there and back by noon no problem so I won't have to get smoked by the sun again and then take a nice long nap in the afternoon.

This time I was smart and filled up my camel back so they wouldn't find my husk on the side of the road several days later. I have deeply not studied this area so I don't really know what lies ahead except a big old church that has been abandoned.

I took off out of town full of vim and vigor. walking past all the wrecked cars and debris that lines the side of the road. I would be more judgemental about the trash but it really is no different than the refuse alongside a county road in southern Ohio or West Virginia. There are quite a few expensive SUVs driving around with Sinaloa, Texas or Nevada plates so I decide to not take alot of pictures during this stretch as I figure curiosity could probably kill the Rat.

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I presumed the punitive economics of getting one of these wrecks up out of the canyon dictates that once a Batopilian buys a truck and takes it down there it will probably stay down there forever. Anyway I walk and walk and walk. I hear giggling and soft burbling sounds in the underbrush along side the road. I figure some indian kids are following me down the road and don't want themselves to be seen.

Cool cheap bridge, a small pedal driven river crossing device for one person

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I cruise along for about an hour marveling at the scenery. I am thinking, so this is what being a tourist is like. All prepared and expecting stuff to happen at certain times, going down certain roads to certain destinations. I think ya know it aint so bad thank god it is only a hour away cause my water is gone but the town would certainly have more water. One hour comes and goes.....NO TOWN.

Shirley the town would be around the next corner..... Next corner=no town this goes on for several corners. There is no town as far as I can see up the canyon. I feel really stupid for believing the lady when she said one hour. What was I thinking. Fortunately it is a town and would have water.

I am a little disgruntled with myself as I know I am probably not gonna die but am gonna get real hot, dry and deeeeeply uncomfortable again. I was looking down at the road, trudging along, all of my vim was gone and about two thirds of my vigor, when I almost walked into 2 hot french chicks in spandex that were wailing down the road Bato bound on nice mountain bikes. I thought I had finally out vacationed the french but I was wrong. I waved at them and they smiled and blasted past me like i werent nuttin but a flat possum. I was pretty sure they were real and stuff. Pretty soon a pickup truck rolls up on me and pulls over, it is two french guys with mountain bikes in the back. I asked them why they didn't let their ultra sexy fems take the truck, they said that would be stupid we want to be comfortable and we are their masters. Holy crap those French guys have this whole routine sorted out. Why, oh why wasn't I born a French guy?

I keep trudging along and viola! The town shows up and none too soon. One hour and thirty five minutes later. This means I will be heading back to Bato about the time I thought I would be finished meaning I would be hiking at 1 oklok in the afternoon in one of the hottest places on the stinking planet. What an idiot!

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Scenic Arid type folage

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Finally I make it to the stinking church. There is some mystery surrounding this thing as no one knows who made it or when it was made. The indians supposedly are not big on numbers so no one can say when this church showed up. The town is full of brownish average mexicans not indians. I go up to the door and try to get in but the door wont budge so I stick my camera through a hole the door to take a pic.

There doesn't appear to be enough religious fervor in this town to support a church so it is pretty much just a big scenic building in town.

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I swiped this religon hunk from wikipedia

[/COLOR][COLOR=LemonChiffon]The Rarámuri religion is a melange of indigenous customs and Roman-Catholic Christianity, characterized by a belief that the afterlife is a mirror image of the mortal world, and that good deeds should be performed not for spiritual reward, but for the improvement of life on earth. In certain traditions (perhaps those more strongly based on pre-Columbian practice), the soul ascends a series of heavens, is reincarnated after each death, and after three lives becomes a moth on Earth which represents the final existence of the soul. When the moth dies, the soul dies completely. However, this end is not regarded as negative or a punishment, but merely as a continuation of the order of life. In Rarámuri cosmology, God has a wife who dwells with him in heaven, along with their sons, the so-called 'sukristo' (from Spanish 'Jesucristo') and their daughters, the 'santi'. These beings have a direct link with the physical world through Catholic iconography, respectively crucifixes and saint's medallions. The Devil's world is not necessarily evil, but is tainted through its ties with the 'Chabochi', or non-Rarámuri. The Devil is said to sometimes collaborate with God to arrange fitting punishments, and can be appeased through sacrifices. In some cases, the Devil can even be persuaded to act as a benevolent entity. The Devil and God are brothers (the Devil is the elder) who jointly created the human race. God, using pure clay, created the Rarámuri, whereas the Devil, mixing white ash with his clay, created the Chabochi. Thus, the Devil is as much protector and life-giver to the Chabochis as God is to the Rarámuri. [COLOR=Lime](ya ever wonder why a fair percentage of the earth thinks white guys are the devil?)[/COLOR] The Rarámuri share with other Uto-Aztecan tribes a veneration for peyote the spirits of which are said to be mischievous and capricious.[/COLOR]

[COLOR=LemonChiffon]Luis G. Verplancken, a Jesuit priest who lived among them for many years and is probably the greatest authority on their history and culture, describes them as loyal to God, to their own traditions and their own culture. Although the majority of them have converted to Christianity, there are still some "gentile" groups who have refused baptism. Those converted have introduced their own ancient concepts into their new religion.[/COLOR]

[COLOR=LemonChiffon]The Rarámuri are also known for the brewing of tesquino, a corn -based beer brewed in ceramic jars, that features prominently in many Rarámuri religious rituals.[/COLOR]

I myself haven't been in a church much since "the incident" it was just past labor day 1973 and I was in the full bloom of adolescence. I found everything on earth to have some sexual meaning or desire. I couldn't take riding the bus to school without getting so worked up I would have to chew through the steel legs of the seats to distract myself. The age old anguish of havin way to0 much supply of something there was no demand for. Anyway this one sunday I sat there stiffly in my stiff outfit on a stiff wooden pew and the best/worst thing on earth happened. Mrs. Ziegler (the names have been changed to protect the mentally violated) sat down in front of me. She was the uber hot 30 year old wife of a square jawed ruggedly handsome FBI agent that was always off doing shit too dangerous and manly to even talk about around pencil necked dweebs like me. Now in a seemingly unrelated topic, in my moms (god bless her) never ending attempts at improving me, had just the day before taken me to the eye doctor (whose lakeside mansion I was largely responsible for) to get a gillion dollar pair of hard contact lenses. The doctor assured us that this would halt my exponentially deteriorating eye decay and the chicks would quit being revolted by me.

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Back to mrs zeigler.... 30 years old, cornsilk blond hair, stacked, smelled nice and worse of all she had a damnable lazy eye. Now remember I am the zeta male bashfull type so to openly gaze at a hot chicks cleavage is out of the question I would have to rely on furtive stealthyness to cop a look. So here was the hottest living female in front of me and I couldn't check her out cause I never knew which eye she was looking through and Mr Zeigler had been dispatched by HQ to do dangerous and manly shit. It was the perfect storm. It was a test from god. So I sat there with my chin resting on my hand looking at the wispy hair that tumbled down off the back of the pew as the HVAC unit hypnotically murmered in the back ground occasionally making a few strands float around in front of my eyes. I was so aroused by this point looking at her earlobes would have given me a cerebral hemorrage. I finally couldn't take it anymore so i assumed the ancestral Ratkowsky meditative pose, elbows on knees, cheeks in hands, puddle of drool on floor, while the guy in the front yammered on.

So I assumed the pose and started to meditate (sleep) to relieve my anquish. What is this? I am wearing a loose fitting tunic and wildly riding a raging arabian stallion off of the steppes of russia into a lithuanian peasant village and lighting the tinder dry thatch on their roofs. My cossack blood is boiling with venom and passion for the fight of this conquest. The lethargic lithuanian men are no match for our invading hordes and unbridled vitality. I rage through the village running prehistoric Mr. ziegler through with my glistening sabre, his lithargic lifeblood seeps through his peasant clothing into the street. Nearing the far end of the village I see two eyes looking in slightly different directions semi staring at me from a chicken coop. I ride over ready to saberize some ratskallion when out comes a primitive Mrs. Zeigler. "Oh great and verile invader, (with a manly fizzeek but shrewlike demeaner) please spare my poor but voluptuous self" said ancient mrs Ziegler, ample breastes straining against her threadbare peasant dress. "I will grant you your wish peasant wench, I will spare you life but not your honor" said primitive vermin. So I grabbed her by her cornsilk hair to pull her onto my raging stallion and I was awoken by a tarnished collection plate being shoved in my nose.

This is were it gets interesting.... In my post nap funk I look up and can not see a damn thing! God has looked into my soul and smote me blind (we methodists are lukewarm on smoting so I knew I was in deep shit) for the dark and lewd thoughts I had just entertained. I did the only thing I knew how to do I shrieked like a little bitch right into Mrs. zieglers left ear.

Apparently the nap pose is the same one that is used to remove hard contact lenses and mine had quietly fell to the floor. Needless to say upon finding that his moron son had just lost the equivalent of 3 mortgage payments on the floor and any thick ankled old lady could step on them and break them my dad freaked and loudly informed the congregation he would kill any sumbitch that moved a muscle. I had to have my sister get down on the floor and search for them gingerly because I was blind as a bat.

I died a thousand deaths that morning. I went home and glued the hard contact lenses into the headlight buckets of an old Ford duece coop model, took a nap and pretty much vowed to stay home and watch the Bowery Boys from then on instead of going to church.

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So I stumbled around the outside of this church wondering if a primitive mrs ziegler had decimated this congregation too.

Looks like this guy has the same problem I had with church.

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I stumble around Satevo looking for drinkable water and have no luck. I am glad that I am here but my personal suffering is starting to get ludicrous. At this point having been in the desert noonday sun for 45 minutes with no water I was into the tolerable but unpleasant range on the Vermin sufferometer. All I would need to set thangs raht is to get another quart of water from somewhere. I am pretty sure; I am not going to die but am going to get increasingly uncomfortable at an exponential rate. There doesn't appear to be any commerce in the town and all I can get out of some kids that where standing around a refridgerator is that the only water is back down the road by the bridge. I don't really know what bridge they were talking about but I obviously am not getting any agua purificada out of this town so I start the trudge back to Bato. I remember a small 2 foot wide suspension bridge down the road with some kids playing around by it so I hope that this is what the other kids were talking about. NOT!

One half hour goes by and I make it to the bridge and start spitting out gibberish and dust at these kids trying to get some relief. No dice! The kids just pointed down to the river.

These dudes have the right idee on how to spend the afternoon

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I had seen the blind guy downtown who had lost his sight due to riverborne parasites so there was no way I was gonna drink any of that. The kids must have thought I was a real rocket surgeon because I asked them where the water was and then when they showed me I denied it.

Don't drink the tapwater, No Really!

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Oh crud I had to do more survival math to figure if I would run out of life before I rehit Bato. These are times when I wish I was better at story problems but it was looking like I was gonna end up with 2 hours of brisk hiking in the desert sun with no water. Survivable? probably, pleasant? Probably not. So I commenced to trudging on down the road.

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I like the flair of a people that are reminded of their own mortality at every corner in the road and still drive like hell. A guy downtown told me that the indians pull this off not necessarily because the they have faith that everything will be alright, but because they have a fatalistic view that everything is out of their control so it will be as it has to be and it is out of their hands. That is why they made good silvermine workers because they cared not a whit for their own safety.

Me being an old school white boy was still trying to math my way out of this situation. It was only marginally life threatening yet and I was pretty sure if it got death defying I could flag down (or lay in the road and feign death)a 4x4 Nissan Decapitera to get a ride or a drink. As I walked along I noticed an entire family playing in the river. What a concept. Spare time in the middle of a Wednesday. Mom, Dad, 4 kids frolicking in the river. Jeez why don't we go down there and improve them? Send the mom off to work in the morning, make the dad leave town for weeks at a time and then wonder why the kids turned into zombies all so they can afford the zombie accoutrements like PS3 and big screen TV and a Chevy Trailblazer. What? Now there is no time to prepare food? Just pick up some edible extrusions? Eat yer heart out Maslow ([URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs[/URL]) we successfully replaced all yer stupid hierarchy of needs with a hierarchy of really stimulating stuff that provides no human benefits. The main problem with stimulation is that you become immune to it so new intensities have to be added at each deadening phase. Pretty soon we will be communicating with cattle prod morse code because our synapses will be so fried. An example is tail lights. In the 1930s cars tail lights where the size of quarters and I don't know that they had a lot more rear end collisions than they do now, now the rear end of each car lights up like a time square billboard and morons are slamming into the back of each other all over the place. Slacker revolution answer is to go out to that little stand of trees, the developer left behind yer office building, and take your nap there.

As I watched the family enjoy each other in the river I made one of my semiannual vows to be a better dad. What the heck was I doin in this valley when I had a hot wife and three good kids at home?

Any way I trudged on getting increasingly hot in my new blue jeans and black t-shirt. I know I ranted about the uselessness of indexing the weather to exacerbate the misery of the people staggering around naked in the winter in Michigan but I found myself wondering if I could start a vermindex were they tell you how 118 deg ambient temp. feels to a dehydrated person on a long treck in the desert with new blue jeans, redwing insulated work shoes and a deep crispy sunburn. I was pretty sure I had left fahrenheit in the rearview mirror and was approaching absolute hotness in the kelvin and hobbs scale.

Only mad rats and englishmen go out in the noonday sun.

I had to dig into my mule like mentality to finish this leg off. Fortunately I am of british heritage so we are accustomed to suffering tremendous hardship successfully with poor outergarment selections (without complaint).

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[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_expedition"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_expedition[/URL]

I finally staggered back into town and stepped over a passed out drunk in the doorway of a restaurant and went inside. There I was alive. That was bloody well a satisfying death defying sequence and it was about time to quaff a heady yeast related beverage.

There was no one inside but the waiter/cook who was sitting in the side door threshhold. I asked for a beer and a lot of bottled water. He politely informed me all he had was beer and the only size he had was a quart.

Houston we have a problem. I courteously said the cervesa mas grande would have to do. Just to show I was high class I ordered a glass to go with it so it wouldn't appear like I was a lush. So I opened the beer and my body totally sucked the beer down without even waiting for me to drink it. It simultaneously evaporated and got sucked through every pore on my body. I don't know how or why but it vanished in a flash and the glass was still dry. I began to relax.

Just as I started to savor that slight sudden beer fog that stole over me and enveloped my senses a stranger came in and sat down and looked at me suspiciously. He consequently ordered himself a beer and I thought that I should too just to alleviate his suspicions and be a little neighborly. The beers came up all sweaty and sexy lookin and I gave him the old “cheers” line that I like so much when the english guys do it.

He looked at me a little longer and said “tocando la guitarra?” What the hell. The guy must have had a guitardar on. I still don't know why he thought I played the guitar. Any ways like an idiot I said "not really, ask anyone in my band"

He hollered at the waiter to bring out a guitar and one showed up from the back room. I thought holy cow I hope this isn't some kind of guitar playing litmus test cause I suck . So I asked him about music, what he liked and so forth, the dude had never heard of johnny cash or Elvis. I was totally outside gringo influence. He ended up semiforcefully shoving the guitar into my chest. I took a couple more deep swallers of liquid Buck owens and detuned his guitar. I had no pick so I cleverly pulled out my social security card to use as a pick. Then with much fanfare I did my most impassioned version of the Ramones chestnut “I wanna be sedated”, he was not really impressed. I then did the rave up clash version of “I Fought the Law” complete with my tortured yodeling. by now a crowd had began to gather and that gave me my usual flop sweats. I don't think they liked it. By then all sorts of ominous outcomes started to creep into my mind because I was zeroing in on a half gallon of beer, more bad math, on a hungry dehydrated belly.

“Gringo Estupidos mutilated corpse found in gully next to the bridge, no body saw nothing” I can see the headlines now in the Batopilas Intellegencer

I finally offered him the guitar and my social security card (that part is true) to show me what he knew.

That dude threw the card on the table and started doing the most beatiful spanish finger picking and singing. I realized this is why the crowd had gathered they knew where the good singing came from and wanted to be there when it started. He sang with passion and abandon. I could not understand the words but the feelings were laid right out on the table.

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Now I gotta back up a little soz you understand what an act of faith/fatalism was on this guys part. The narco trafficantes have been beheading 2 groups of people, the law enforcers and inexplicably they have been beheading singers as well. So here was a guy in the valley of the shadow of death singing like it was his last day on earth because it bloody well could have. He sang because he had too. His towns soul depended on it. The drug guys know that if they can control the soul of the people by killing the singers they will have won. The stakes where high and this guy knew it.

[URL="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/03/entertainment/e210919S65.DTL"]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/03/entertainment/e210919S65.DTL[/URL]

I recognized the passion in his voice was the same as Ralph Stanley or Hank Williams when they came down off the mountain in the great depression in all their naive country boy glory and sang their hearts out. The guitar was cheap and out of tune and his voice wasn't pitch perfect and he would not have made the cut on Nashvilles music row today but I would give up 100 Kenny Chesney tickets to be sitting in this mexican honky tonk listening to this guy sing his ass off. When I say you can crush the soul of the people by killing the singers you can also anesthetize it by running it through the machine. Listen to all modern country music it sounds like the singers are singing an ad companies target demographic list and nevermind that all voices have the imperfections squeezed out of them with the computer auto tune machines. Ernest Tubb never once hit the right pitch and he was outstanding (and would look like a walking bike rack when put in tight sexy cloths). I think it was Ernest that said "I cain't read music and I'd kill any sumbitch that tried to teach me"

The country and western executive says “Here Kenney we will cross market this one, sing about drinkin Coronas on a beach and we will force feed it up the charts, corona is in, princess cruise lines is in and walmart will put your CD on an aisle end cap with you in tight butt blue jeans so the zombie

women will desire you and buy their husbands wrangler blue jeans.

I am here to tell you old school country soul is still alive and well you just gotta go to another country.

Now back to the show.

where have I seen this scene before

After an hour of mexican hillbilly music bliss the natives started looking restless and staring out the window. I asked one guy what was up and he said “sheriffs!”

Just the good ol' boys,

Never meanin' no harm,

Beats all you've ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.

Straight'nin' the curve,

Flat'nin' the hills.

Someday the moutain might get 'em, but the law never will.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/wreck2.jpg[/IMG]

Makin' their way,

The only way they know how,

That's just a little bit more than the law will allow.

I knew the deal the dudes in the crowd were not the types that were into law and order and probably lookouts for drug dudes so I took that to mean I should get the hell out. I may have been over reacting but there is times to over react.

I wanted a picture of the singer, before I did the side door shuffle so I snapped it and asked him what his address was. (of course sitting here in a Ohio hotel it occurs to me that taking the dudes picture could have got me killed.) He didn't understand. I thought it was my spanish so I tried half a dozen different ways to describe address and it finally came out that they don't have addresses you just send the card to the town and they hand them out to the guys. I thought wow these guys live a life that is absolutely number free. The don't have student ID numbers, Social security numbers, credit card numbers NO NUMBERS they are just humans judged by their merit by the people they know. It freaked me out so I took his name and promised to send him a picture.

I have plenty of practice slithering out

of joints right before the flashing lights and maglights come through the door so I bolted out the side door (and stepped over the unconcious side door guy) before any kind of shit hit the fan and walked back to the hotel to get some much needed rest as it was still the middle of the day on Wednesday and I had a full Friday and Saturday amount of beer.

So for the second day in a row I was glad to see this ancient crappy hotel and cack was still resting comfortably by the hammock as I stumbled into my room and went into a deep death defying sleep still fully undecapitated

[B]gonzo tOUrism[/B]

---

I woke up with a Sunday morning head in the late afternoon of a Wednesday. There were considerable cobwebs, it was still in the high 110s degree wise but inside the stone buildings out of the direct sun it wasn't uncomfortable. Compared to my death defying trek earlier in the day I was quite comfortable.

Death Defying bathroom.

The water all comes from the cistern out by the hammock and judging be the amount of rain we got the night before the indoor plumbing should have been working but the plumbing musta been getting fixed because nothing came out of the spigots. To flush the toilet you had to go and dip that aluminum pot in the cistern and use that water.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/bthroom.jpg[/IMG]

I decided that I was getting homesick for sweet thang and the younguns and was tired of death defying so I would spend the rest of the day hanging out in Bato and then point Cack back up the hill first thing in the morning so I could avoid the major effects of the sun. So I plugged in my chargers for my phone, my electric razor and my car battery just to top everything off and took off to take a leasurely stroll down town. I was also hopeing to stir up some decapitating action so I could have a spellbinding end to my made for TV movie.

So I set out down the street on the hoof again and I'll be danged if I wasn't attacked by one of those viscious micromutts. The lady 2 doors down from the hotel had a dog that determined every wheeled or walking human being was a threat to him and his family and must be attacked with vigor. Being as this was the only street in town and there wasn't anly plausible way to go around him he had all the action he could handle. So I sauntered by him and he came into the street with all the fury of the hounds of baskervilles. His little needle teeth couldn't penetrate my pantleg and his little hi rpm bite stroke just made my leg vibrate and tickle so I started to laugh. This made him even madder. Finally outta respect for the ferocity of his efforts and so the fella could have some peace I feigned terror at his attack and moved on down the road much to all the local loiterers amusement.

Scenic bridge to the houses on the other side of the river

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/swingingbridge.jpg[/IMG]

On the way across the bridge I saw the two pretty daygum hot scantily clad frolicking french chicks swimmin in the riVer. I remembered some of you advrider types had chucked some money into this adventure on the shaky premise that they might see more pictures of Kelsey from CETME's reports in a bikini in Mexico so I felt a moral obligation to try to get a photographic record of some hot chicks even though the hottest chick on the planet is called sweet thang by which all other hotness is measured (shew I dodged a bullet that time). Anyway as I mentioned earlier, being a zeta male and too bashful to actually overtly take their pitchers I did the quick point and shoot from the hip.

Turned out pretty good I thought, you just have to imagine hot cavorting french chicks off to the left.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/scenicfrenchshicks.jpg[/IMG]

If you every find yourself shopping for one of them microdogs and a frozen metallic looking plastic showercurtain in a freezer they sho nuff have em in Mexico

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/scrawnnydog2.jpg[/IMG]

I ended up down at a little local history museum downtown. They have artifacts from the mine there from the original nervous gringo businessman invasion of 1890. I expected to hear tales of exploitation and horrific conditions but the curator said the owners of the mine were generally benevolent and actually supplied a hospital to repair broken workers and a support system to help maintain human life in the vacinity. This was apparently from an era when the owners were human and recognized that the brown meat that scurried about making them incredibly wealthy were human too. This was before the machines intellegence had eclipsed the human population and started turning humans into serial numbered profit generating, trinket mesmerized bloated zombies.

Eventually our buddy Pancho Villa came a hollerin and shootin down the canyon and turned the mine into an ours.

I told the museum guy that I was interested in the Raramuri and he told me I should go get a pair of their running shoes (huaraches, [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1x1sBwEzmo"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1x1sBwEzmo[/URL] cut down car tires with leather straps) from this guy down the road. I walked to the vacinity of where the museum guy told me to go and couldn't find a store per se there were just the usual bunch of guys hanging out. So I asked the guys about this sandal guy and they said he lived here and he would be back soon. I love this, it is a fair bet he would be back semi soon because you can't really go far in this town so there is no hurry. Then it dawned on me this is alot like the small towns I grew up knowing in Michigan in the Early sixties. My grandpa owned a one pump gas station/general store/plumbing supply/hardware/electrical contractor and these dudes were the same types I was used to back then. So feeling like I was hanging out in a mexican version of Mayberry RFD I kicked back with Floyd and Howard and Goober on a park bench and listened to them lie about stuff I couldn't understand because I don't speak spanish. Finally the sandal guy showed up and I recognized him as a guy I had hung out with earlier (even though I didn't understand a word he said and vicey versey). He took me into his "store" which was one bedroom with a bed, a chair, a fan and a burlap sack full of these sandals. I noticed on all the sandals that the front portion was waaaaay wider than normal american feet. I surmised that these people spent a good deal of time running on the balls of their feet and the impact had splayed them out over the years.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/sandalinstallation.jpg[/IMG]

[SIZE=5][COLOR=red]"Biting the wheel that used to feed me rant warning[/COLOR][/SIZE][COLOR=red]"[/COLOR]

I was looking at these crude sandals and I started thinking about stuff. I started thinking about when I started smelling a rat in my indoctorination. I think it was sometime in the 1980s and Sweet thang and myself went to Epcot Center in the wonderful world of diSney in Florida. This was a place for grown ups to go kinda like the old worlds fair. I went into the General Motors Pavilion and the first display to assault me was the picture of a caveman sitting on a rock in his paid for no tax havin cave with his feets up all swollen and red. There was a big sign above him that said something like "this original cave dude had a horrendous life and it was entirely due to his lack of Buick because feet are the least plausible form of transportation and a horrible aberation on the end of the human leg" at that time I was still partially a zombie but even then I smelled a ignorant arrogance about the western civilization that I was being shoehorned into. I am from the Detroit Statistical Metropolitan Area which means I was born to serve men like Henry ford and his ilk. They were gods among men. Around the world they controlled the mechanisms to turn mountians to a red powder which was brought into the River Rouge plant in Dearborn Were they opened the conflagratory gates of HELL to form that earth into mustangs and pintos and mavericks. It was a mechanical violence that every 7th grade shop class went and paid homage to. We watched in awe as large piles of sand were turned into windshields and huge piles of red earth were slowly and violently formed into intake manifolds in an environment way hotter than dante ever invisioned. It was clear that the violence of this machinery should never be questioned it was in charge.

you know I like a soundtrack. The sons and daughters of henrys machinery created primal aural violence akin to that which their parents visited upon gods creation.

[URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYALsp-sIg&feature=fvw"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYALsp-sIg&feature=fvw[/URL]

Felt live this music will incite violence and mayhem. (un)Fortunately this song was mixed by englishmen and quite watered down. They hadn't seen or heard music this raw and didn't quite know what to do with it.

Very few heretics would blaspheme the lord of lincoln continental. In the background I heard the occasional grey haired dude say geez in the old days we had electric street cars and we walked all around downtown and had a nice time. Then shortly after they would vanish into a nursing home never to be heard from again certifying that one must never question Ford, Dodge or Durant. You are only paranoid if they arent actually out to get you. [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_A...eetcar_scandal[/URL]

Anyway chicks really dig engineers (what with being the designers of the machines and all) and the engineers bred like uncoordinated lethargic meticulous rabbits and populated the suburbs and built great ring roads around the city to prevent interaction with the loud people who made eye contact and put large brick rectangles up to efficiently dispose of the national wealth to china.

Again Like in my zombie food eater rant I personally could care less how other people behave but basically can't live a live without a car at the moment because the entire racket is set up to use cars. Since I have been truck driving I have been doing alot of walking around miscellaneous areas and you really take your life in your own hands being on foot in this country. Not to mention everyone at best thinks you are on foot because you have had 5 DUI's or at worst are a cereal killer. When I get old I plan on getting rid of my car. I think i will have to live in Mexico to pull it off though.

Anyway the vast majority of the people down here don't have a car or a car payment, how uncivilised

I wonder what other quaint faulty life style issues the caveman had like having a tribe that hung together through thick or thin, a cave chick that stayed with him and never left him for a cave tennis coach , had cave larvae that he could teach how to hunt and gather. How did they survive without implants and liposuction.

Thank god we have cured all of humanities ills with technology.

As far a china is concerned this is a cautionary tale.

Lets do a chinese story problem

Question number one

If your streets are crowded elbo to elbo with people on bicycles, what will happen if you shoe horn in 1,300,000,000 (ein punkt drie billiion) buick lesabres.

2) 1,300,000,000 people sitting in beige buick lesabres in motionless traffic will not have time to cook they will become anxious because they will not be able to get to their jobs to pay for their buick lesabres and become obese and disease riddled. Then who will pay for 1point3billion stents and angioplastys and diabetes test kits.

3) disolving social structures and new found mobility will inadvertantly cause an increase in crime, extrapolate the US incarceration rate from 2.4 % times 1.3 billion people equals 31 meeeeeeeelion people in jail (roughly the population of California)

4) how are you gonna get the electricity to charge up 1.3 billion amigo powered wheelchairs when you end up with 2.6 billion swollen purple diabetes feet

fumf) 1.3 billion people have 650,000,000 marriages, half of which fail you will need 325 million divorces 50 divorces per lawyer per year over twenty years you are gonna need 325,000 divorce lawyers.

never mind the pain in the ass of having to supply tons of cloths and guns and missiles to armies just so people resent you globally

Actually nevermind. China we ran the world for a hundred years we are tired and have lost our ambition, here is the keys to the planet see what you can do.

[SIZE=6][COLOR=lime]RANT OVER[/COLOR][/SIZE]

The sandal guys room, how on earth could he be happy. where is his garage?

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/sandalhouse.jpg[/IMG]

watch all of the unsafe children

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/quadkids.jpg[/IMG]

the danger is not that they will crack their heads but that the meat that is dangling off the fenders will eventually atrophy.

this is were the guys that really have to worry about decapitating work.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/mayorshouse.jpg[/IMG]

Final huge devisive rant (i hope this one doesn't send in the decapitators and the black helicopters)

The machine has mixed feelings about the herb cannibis sativa on one hand it is a good source of funds for clandestine operations* but on the other hand it cuts into the profits of the patent pill makers advertised on TV and makes the meat that produces their wealth sluggish. . Americans go to bed each night pretty sure their lives suck (having seen just the last few layers of the scaffolding of doom) so the ones with insurance go to the doctor and get a happy prescription the ones inside the ring roads don't have insurance, a prescription or a future so they smoke what grows here in this valley. What percentage of americans go to bed a couple degrees offa plumb? The economics of the thing makes me think we should starve the decapitators by legalizing the herb. Don't be skitzo america either legalize pot or make Beer, wine, [FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2][I]Lexapro, Effexor, Cymbalta, Zoloft, Paxil, Prozac, and Wellbutrin illegal.[/I][/SIZE][/FONT]

By the way if you think the mexican version of Andy and Barney that reside in this building are vigorously persecuting the war n drugs in this valley against a tremendously well armed and funded crime organization you are smokin way too much weed. If I was them I would never leave this building exept to go up to the decapitors house to get my paycheck.

I as an individual do not smoke but the practical results of leaving this shit illegal has become ludicrous. As far as the availability of the stuff for my kids goes it is already plentiful. It is my job as a parent to raise my kids in a life that makes being high seem an undesirable level of zombification. hopefully my kids have been presented with a life that is significantly better than that lived with a buzz and will choose it.

potential devisive rant over.

*before i was insanely paranoid and still 3/4 zombie I had a small business downriver detroit. This was during the Reign of Saint Reagan. I heard on the news that a jet carrying several tons of cocaine had been apprehended on a largely abandoned navy airbase on Grosse Ille. You know the one the first george bUsh ex CIA director spent time on during WW2 (i can find no evidence he was there during ww2 on the internet but during a fourth of july speech I heard him give he said he was there during that time so i might be false or insane). The name of the airline escapes me but it was the same name that was being bandied about as a CIA front during the Iran/Contra scandals. I thought to myself holy shit this is gonna blow the lid offa the government. Oddly enough I saw no outrage, no mention of it in the media ever again. This scared me. As a matter of fact even mentioning this in this report i presume will send up red flags on various datamining programs the govenment runs to pay extra close attention to me. Even at this time I have to wonder if it even happened because it strains my brain that my fellow zombies did not become alarmed by this. If this was a paranoid conspiracy theory i would have alot more details this is more of a vague recollection.

Finally I got tired of traipsing around and being interested in stuff and I went back to the Hotel Batopilas and went to sleep.

[SIZE=4][COLOR=yellow]ALERT.... I LOST MY KEYS I HAD FOR 30 YEARS IN CREEL OR BATO...[/COLOR][/SIZE]

and probably a gooey slimey hunk of my mind

tHEY are an old man janitor size gob of keys with a small craftsman crescent wrench on them. If you find them at los pinos hotel in creel or hotel batopilas call me my phone number is on them. Dont make me go back down there and look for them.

So I woke up with the roosters as the sun was coming up started a sooty billowing fire in my cookstove (in my room) for the breakfast gruel, put the newly charged truck battery back in the bike and quietly reloaded my two hundred pounds of shit, while the little town slept. In a rare lucid moment it occurred to me that a lot less air in my tires would make the uphill climb a lot easier so, psssssssssssssssssssst, pssssssssssssssssssssssssst. I let out I don't know how much air, I know some was left because the rims did not get near the ground.

I had decided to leave Bato as early as possible without sacrificing my gruel ritual so that I might better be in the higher altitudes when the blister generator gets up into the middle of the sky. I felt I had to make one last trip around town as I figured I would probably never be down mexicos plumbers crack again. So I fired the old girl up and did one last dozeeedoe & an alaman left through the town square.

The same group of life long loiterers were hanging out visiting in the square as they were the day before.

After about 15 minutes of bumping and grinding I came to the upriver end of town

I saw a bunch of guys sitting on the ground by the bridge. I recognized Eduardo and pulled over to shoot the breeze. He had been sitting there for awhile waiting on the daily bus to show up. I happened to know the bus had already left so I asked him why was he not on it? He claimed it was full and he would have to wait one more day for the next bus.

It didn't make sense to me. If the bus was not gonna show up for another day why was he standing here? I didn't ask him because that is how it is down here. He might as well stand here as anywhere else. Who knows maybe someone will let him hop in the back of their pickup and haul him up to Creel. He didn't appear to be the least bit concerned about any of his travel arrangements so why should I be. I was a little bummed out that I had so much stuff I couldn't give him a ride.

A picture is worth 6.5 words

Notice the hair sticking up on that vischiss nanobowser, he would have liked to rip my leg off but it was early in the day yet and he wasn't sure if he should pace himself or let it all aloose first thing. Fortunately he let me live.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/bp.jpg[/IMG]

Morning rush hour in the canyon.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/standard.jpg[/IMG]

A combination of having cAck pointed uphill and letting the air out of the tires improved the old girls handling tremendously, unfortunately pouring the coals to her in first and second gear going up a mountain made the fan kick on again instantly as I started out. I knew the charge in the truck battery in my trunk dang near didn't make it all the way to bato so this gave

just the right amount of low grade pissyness to keep me alert.

The traffic wasn't horrible but keep in mind on a one lane road every truck you see is a "situation" but none the less the wailing pickup trucks seemed to show up at decent intervals when the pull offs were handy. Wether or not they had machine guns and tons of dope is nearly irrelevant it is the front grill of these speeding units that is the real danger.

I was fortunate enough to take a picture of this outlaw narco trafficante kidnapping a family

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/crowding.jpg[/IMG]

notice the passenger, an innocent female victim, clawing at the interior of her captors vehicle while trying to escape

The road had quite a few washouts and cross road cricks,from the heavy rains but cacks garden tractor power delivery slogged right through them with alot of front fork and rear shock banging and groaning. I started to get into a decent flow as time went on. On the way down I did alot of shrieking and praying now on the way out I had begun to give up control and relax into my fate (for good or ill).

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/labufa.jpg[/IMG]

I pulled into La Bufa and decided to take a break. The nice lady that liquified me back to life, two days prior, came out to see what the comosion was out in the yard and she saw it was me again. She laughed and said "La resurreccion de Gringo eStupido" I had made a big fuss on the way through the first time about being certain that road would kill me before I got to bato so she was pleasantly suprised I was still alive.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/morningsun.jpg[/IMG]

I bid a fond farewell to the la Bufa lady and headed out up the hill toward the twisty switchbacky part. The air was perfect, dry and 80 degrees. The sun that had been quite punative the day before was just kissing me all over my face purring and cooing soft apologies for the havoc she had reeked on my flesh.

I ran across another Raramuri as he popped out of the bushes with his family. These are supposedly shy people so I had mixed feelings about asking him to pose with the caCk but I was running out of time to get a good picture of one of these guys so I kind of manhandled him into standing next to her. I handed him all ofthe change that was in the cupholder on my fake gastank. I didn't want to insult him but I figured this was probably the last thing on earth this guy wanted to do this morning.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/injun2.jpg[/IMG]

Ever wonder how a guy can survive with no written language or math framework.

How could he argue points in ancient text and get enraged enough over interpretation to kill his fellow humans if he has no text?

How could he sit motionless for days at a time at a computer in a skyscraper and figure out complicated mathmatic algorthms that only funnel money up the pyramid never down if he has no math?

How could he sit in a cubicle and fly remote control unmanned bombers that blast stone age huts in faraway places (i have been assured by the glowing zombifier in my living room that only bad guys are killed and these missions will endear us to the natives as saviors)?

How could he ever devise a bomb that kills all the meat but leaves the buildings intackt (proof positive that the machine finds humans troubleing and material objects sacred)?

How could he ever abandon his family and tribe to go off to a faraway places to collect stimulating shiny hypnotizing objects?

How could he ever afford to put his kids in the kid warehouses by the ring roads so his wife could help him collect the shiny objects?

How could he ever afford the tasty poisoness extrusions handed through the window of the restraunts?

How could he afford to have his purple feet removed?

Ignorant savage

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/morerocks.jpg[/IMG]

I got into quite a good mental zone for the next coupla hours on the switchback section I was able to see up the road a fur piece and anticipate the trucks. rev shift rev, down shift rev shift rev, downshift rev shift rev.

I was totally in the groove sashaying up the mountain. I felt like I was on top of the world! [SIZE=5][COLOR=lime]I am the bullgod I am freeeee[/COLOR][/SIZE] I commenced joyously caterwailing the Kid Rock song over and over inside my helmet. My bike got hotter and hotter the fan never let up.

Finally as I was about to leave the switchback section and semi reenter semi civilization my bike lurched violently to the left snapping me out of my reverie. I nearly went zipping off into space in all my glory. Come to find out one of the bungees holding on my dads 1973 back pack had come aloose causing it to tumble off the side. I am glad I didn't crash and die but i am even gladder that i didn't scuff up the back pack because i have a long history of destroying stuff i borrow from my dad. Even though he hadn't used it since the summer of Mrs Zeigler it would have been one more reminder to him how chronically unreliable i am with his stuff.

Follow the yellow arrow to the dangling participal

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/ratopilas/loadshift.jpg[/IMG]

I got off the bike and resecured the pack. I had a feeling of peace and calm about me. I knew I would never have this particular moment to live again so I sat down on the edge of the road and dangled my feet off the cliff. It was totally quiet there were no machine sounds anywhere around and my mind, absolved of the knowledge of the scaffolding of doom, slowed down to a halt. For fifteen minutes I sat there with a serene calmness I really had never experienced before. The chronic clenching of my jaws abated and a wave of peace enveloped my poor abused heart. I just sat there soaking in the glory of that canyon and my life.

I finally got up as it was becoming quite hot again and went and threw a leg over the old girl. I noticed the heat emanating from cacks tupperware was intense as I

OK PAY ATTENTION THIS NEXT PART IS THRILLING

A) Stood the bike up and punted the kick stand

b) Turned the key to the on position

C) PULLED IN THE CLUTCH

D) [SIZE=4]THUMBED THE STARTER[/SIZE]

5) [SIZE=5]LURCHED FORWARD 3 FEET[/SIZE]

6) [SIZE=6]REALIZED I WAS SEVERAL THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME ON A BROKEN JUNK BIKE WITH THE CLUTCH VAPOR LOCKED IN THE ENGAGED POSITION IN A LAWLESS DRUG INFESTED AREA WITH NOTHING BUT A CAN OF BEAR MACE AND A BIG CRESCENT WRENCH [/SIZE]

I had gone from peaceful blissed out reverie to fearful panic it .005 seconds.

Think quick weasel

I didn't see tons of options. I knew my fan had been operating even more on the way up then it had on the way down so so my truck battery might be nearing uselessness.

I made up my mind to try starting the bike uphill in first gear and see what happens knowing that I might be down on juice and these type of starts might leave me dead on the side of the road. I took several deep breaths to try to get my "Poop in a group" and thumbed the starter, cack lunged forward grrrrah, grrrrrah, grrrrrah, vroom we were off like a really slow rocket.

In the back of my mind I figured that there were non too many of those lucky starts left in her so I vowed to myself to not stop no matter what because it would probably lead to me abandoning cack on the side of the road and hitchhiking back to creel.

So whats a dood to do but put on his blinker, apply the brake, and set his feetses down like nothing happened as the cars went wailing by. I openly cackled inside my helmet because I had basically pulled this deal off. From here on out it was pretty much an open and shut case of swipe the card and ride the bike. No worries, no brains, no nothing. The cars cleared and I pointed my raggedy rig toward Creel and twisted the god-awful-racket stick and burbled into a motorcyclist's heaven.

I was elated. Was this whole thing good luck, physics, Divine Intervention or a combination of all three? I know for a fact I am lucky, I took Remedial Physics in college and understood there was probably a rational answer. Then I started to wonder about the miraculous. When did I lose my sense that miracles were possible? I know globally miracles were bludgeoned by a fledgling country who felt it was onto something new in the late 1770’s. If it could construct a newish style of representative government why not join European intellectuals and question the whole ball of wax with an ideology ironically called “The Age of Enlightenment”. In a new country with a social order that was in a violent state of flux it was the perfect moment to embrace and institute new ideas i.e. The Age of Reason and Deism. Biff Bang Boom no sooner had the gun smoke cleared at Yorktown and a new country woke up with brand new freedom all they had to do formally was sign some paperwork, invent interchangable parts, give up miracles and go on their merry way. Now every year we celebrate Machinemas on the Fourth of July.

I didn’t drag you through all that historic bullshit just for fun; I got my own angle, my own enlightenment or how I became a born again rational person. I didn’t tell you the whole story about the Mrs. Zeigler incident in church. It was around the time that playing Twister became imprudent in youth fellowship that we were to be groomed for glory. Now that we were budding adults it was imperative that we go through “confirmation”. I never really had much success at confirming or conforming to anything, but I thought I would give it a try because a truly hot redhead named Mindy had joined the confirmation class and we got to play Stratego for hours after the bible lessons. Anyway, for several weeks the preacher informed us about what we believed in and why. I occasionally awoke from my teenage lust trances and asked some fairly pointed questions, some stuff seemed at best implausible, he would just kinda roll his eyes and say, "Listen kid shut up and have another donut, and believe me the whole thing comes together in the big glorious finish."

So the big day comes and I gotta put on my extra-uncomfortable clothes with sleeves that only come halfway down my spidermonkey arms and go to the extra special ceremony. The details escape me so if any of you are Methodist theologians with a photographic memory please pipe down for a minute. The preacher gives his big Pre Welcome Our New Fledgling Christians speech and part of the speech very specifically mentions that those who come forward actually swear to God that they actually believe most of the stuff was not only plausible but that if you don’t believe some of the key points you best not let the door hit you on the ass as there wouldn’t be much use in you hanging around lusting after parishioners. So the true believers were asked to come forth and I sat there like a big lump. I believed in God enough that I thought it might be dangerous to declare you believe somethin you don't. So my buddy Matt said, “C'mon Gomer I don't believe this either, but we gotta get to the donut part asap”. Even in wishy washy Methodist world I couldn’t buck up and cross the end zone. Imagine my parents' pride. Without knowing anything about “The Age of Reason” or any of that stuff, like the USA in the late 1700s, I by religious default, declared myself a miracle-free zone.

Now as I motored through this Mexican canyon, I subtly changed focus and began to wonder if on that fateful spring day in 1972 I didn’t accidentally throw the bathwater out with the baby Jesus. Where had my miracles gone? Well, all I had to do was quit staring at my belly button and look around me. Aren’t the Raramuri Indians miracles? There was no enlightenment for them, no space flights, no movements, no revolutions, no predator drones - they just ran away and hid. Instead of a big fat book full of spell binding exotic religious tales (numbered so that they can be readily directed at someone elses behavior) in my best Foghorn Leghorn voice I blurt out, “Boy, I say boy, fortunately I have my verses numbered for just such an occasion”. They have a quiet story they tell. They believe the soul ascends a series of heavens, is reincarnated after each death, and after three lives becomes a moth that promptly flies to the moon and that’s pretty much that. Of course when the loving Spanish religious guys came thru in the 1500s the Raramuri tacked on some stuff about Sucristo to prevent having their hands lovingly lopped off as was the custom at the time. Well I would have no harder time believing that as I would believing in virgin births, raining frogs and speaking burning bushes but, hey, I really like the results. As far as I am concerned the proof is in the pudding. I like that they irrationally cling to the sides of mountains, they take their pain, disease and suffering as it comes. Without a struggle but they still get to keep their miracles. Instead of having western aid agencies build quonset huts to teach them how to read, write and do math I find myself yearning for them to teach us how to live off the land, how to turn the other cheek and how to suffer without turning into assholes. Isn't that part of the problem in the USA, that people think that suffering is a failure mode. So if you are suffering, eat a handful of the pills they advertise on the glowing humanity condensor in the living room.

I have recently read that these guys are so incapable of deception (Bearing False Witness) that some scientists are trying to run their brains through a scanner to identify if they even have that part of the brain which generates deception. Little do the scientists know that the part of the brain which deceives is probably directly related to the part that makes scanners.

While modern sons of Abraham enthusiastically embrace miscellaneous end-time doom scenarios and increasingly mechanistic scientific ways of disintegrating human beings, these Indians just run away and hide in their holes in the cliff. I reckon in my lifetime the increasingly bizarrely unstable machine structure (the scaffolding of doom) will collapse under the duress of its own success and it won't affect these guys one bit. Global warming? They already live in a desert. No fuel for tractors? They use the same hoe for centuries. Poisoned by extruded food? They strip theirs right off the plant. No million dollar medical machines to mechanically “fix” your heart? No problem, no heart disease. Collapse of the financial/monetary system? They have no money. In my search for adventure I had accidentally stumbled on a true ancient miracle I could see with my own eyes. I was given living, breathing evidence that the machine did not hold sway over all mankind. Every day that they wake up alive is a shocking miracle to them. They have not been anesthetized into a zombie-like domestication.

I started to look into my own life for the many good things that have happened and gave myself the possibility that they could be my own personal miracles. Was it a natural primate response that a real smart pretty girl fell in love with a pencil necked geek in 1982 - or a miracle? If I allowed as to how that might be a miracle, then what about the kids? Is Cack a well-engineered motorcycle that could easily handle 100,000 plus miles of horrible neglect and abuse, or a miracle? After earnestly abandoning my bike in Alaska, on a whim I casually mention wanting to see Pancho Villa's grandson, my bike reappears in Colorado Springs and 2 days later I am standing in downtown Chihuahua talking to Pancho Villa's grandson. Regardless, here I was cruising on the sweetest road on a perfectly sunny day. Yep there were shootings and lootings and beheadings all around me in the past, present and future but I think I had subtly absorbed these Indians' fate/fatalism/faith. I had taken the baby steps toward a belief in miracles and faith. Of course before infidels among you roll your eyes back in your head and go on to another page, let me report that my religion is not STAUNCH it is a lot like my bike, a hodgepodge, a wishy-washy very low horsepower Christian motor that keeps chugging through the mud, regardless of its abuse, with some Buddhist bumper-stickers, lawnmower handles and bangles. Vermin's “Technicolor Dream Bike” that transported him to the promised land. All along, Cack's travels have been a testimonial to faith and thumbing its nose at Reason and Rationality. But the beauty is that none of it made any sense to me until I met these Indians. They are miraculous!!!! They helped me understand that miracles never did really go away. I didn't really have to live in the “Age of Reason” if I didn't want to. The Vermin Paradox was solved. I swept up the highway on cloud nine. The day seemed like a sparkly new shiny penny.

I finally weaseled my way back into Creel. Just a couple days ago this seemed like an exotic remote encampment. Now, having been to the bottom of the canyon it seemed a lot more like a dirty version of Paducah Kentucky. I rode into town and pulled up in front of the Best Western and pulled in my clutch and it worked AGAIN but now I was back in civilization so I had a slight chink in my miraculous armor, a moment of doubt. And to be prudent I decided to get some brake fluid so that my clutch, should it act up again, could be fixed by a roadside hydraulic burping session.

I wandered in to one of the many local hardware, beauty shop, party store buildings. The lady behind the counter asked me what did I want. I didn't even feel like trying to pantomime out the concept of D.O.T. Number 4 Hydraulic Brake Fluid so I whipped out my pocket translator. The place looked like I would have better luck buying tampons or asparagus but I gave it a shot.

[SIZE=6]“Necesito el líquido de frenos” [/SIZE]- she nodded her head, set down her baby, and reached up on a shelf among a jumble of sundry products and grabbed what was probably the only bottle of brake fluid in town. (ADVrider Tech Tip: I always carry a length of brake bleeding hose, along with my can opener, cable ties, Harley towing clothesline and JB Weld. It also comes in handy for siphoning gas into Pepsi bottles.) Yep another miracle. I could get used to thinking like this. I pay the lady and stroll back out onto the dusty street and chuck the brake fluid into a Cackal crevice, light the old girl up again and point her north. The same bobble-head mangy dog that had greeted me as I came into town days earlier walked around the corner and sauntered across the street in front of me. He was one of the first to welcome me to town so I pulled over and even though I suspect I would mess up his fleaquilibrium I bent over and gave him a good scratchin' behind the ears. I waved at the miscellaneous machine gun toting teenagers and headed out of town.

As I gradually reapproached “civilization” it occurred to me that Maslow was probably full of crap. There really ain't no point in homeostasis, (or its smelly brown cousin excretion) if you don't believe in miracles. Instead of a hierarchy it turns out to me that the whole concept is messed up. Maybe the more plentiful food is, the less you can achieve morality. Maybe it is upside down, maybe there ain't no point in eating or breathing if you don't have the other less concrete stuff. Maybe without friendship and family there is no point in making the food extrusions.

I head north into a welcome cold rainstorm south of Cacktwohammock, pickup trucks swerve past me with wet Tarahumara families in the beds. They don't have enough sense to come in out of the rain, god bless 'em. I look into their eyes as they roar past and see a quietness that doesn't seem to exist anymore in the USA. I eventually slither up toward the border, burbling along at I don't know how many miles per hour, getting I don't know how many miles per gallon at exactly I don't know which degrees of latitude and longitude. The “knowing” is the problem not the solution. How many times have I read here on Advrider about the need to get away from “something”? Maybe if you find just the right GPS track and just the right bike and just the right bags and just the right fork stiffness and just the right skid plate you can reach adventure nirvana and get away from “it all”.

[IMG]http://i239.photobucket.com/albums/ff46/ahendepe/excellent%20adventure%202009/exit/highwaylong-1.jpg[/IMG]

Like the irony of the rational mind trying to use scanners to identify the glory of the irrational mind of the Indians, so too does the ADVrider use increasingly bizarre technological tethers to try to achieve freedom. Technology is not the solution it is the problem. I know I have tried to get away too but it wasn't the surroundings that was the problem it was me and the way I approached things.

I think back to my misguided youth and remember my blind grandpa sitting on the porch on a quiet fall evening “watching” migratory birds feeding on bird seed he had scattered in the driveway. He couldn't see them but he knew they were there. He knew also that they may need nourishment on their journey. He was one of seven of his thirteen siblings that had lived to adulthood and he knew in his heart that every breath he took was its very own miracle. He could not quote scripture, he could not read, he had no known political ideology; he was raised in a land and a time before The Machine. His chair, that porch and my Grandma was all he needed to testify to miracles. And I never really had to leave the house to find peace, I just had to live more like my Grandpa. He had nothing to run from, did he? Do I have that level of peace? Would buying a BMW GS Adventure give it to me? Would charting some unspoiled hunk of terra firma give it to me? As Robert M. Pirsig once posited in his epic tome [I]Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, [/I]"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower." I no longer believe this to be true. Something far more sinister lies in the computer and motorcycle gears. The Godhead lies in motorcycle negligence and the abandonment of the computer. Maybe instead of penetrating some far off lands with our superior technologies we should stay home and be a little more humble. Turn off the TV, put down our computers and take a walk in the remaining woods near our homes. No matter how fast, difficult or exciting the ride is, you can never outrun The Machine. The harder you fight it the more it controls.

Yeah, I have plumb lost my mind, THANK GOD. Vermin is dead, long live Vermin. Nobody is kidding any one here though, I was given a number at birth and I have a numeric obligation to The Machine (which has plausibly insisted that I need it to survive).

I cruise through Juarez unmolested.

[B][/B]

So I re-enter the United States Of Ascareica with a vow to lay low, use the tools and adaptations I have figured out on my journey, and get a job so The Machine doesn't smell a Rat. If you become numerically inert in the USA people turn very hostile toward you.

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I reenter the land of the fee at El Paso, and check in for a noRmal comfortable night sleep at a chain hotel. Cubicles have studied the traveler and know numerically exactly what they feel and how they feel it and how many flickering ohs and ones can be extracted from the traveling unit. It creeps me out to the bone but like I say, now that I have personal knowledge of these Indians I have tools. The lady at the desk is well-groomed and professional, there are no dogs or babies playing around her feet. It is all by design. The glowing Reality Transducer is radiating over her right shoulder informing me that Fear and Trepidation are the order of the day. Insurgents, markets, blah blah blah. It informs me that the drug decapitators are alive and well and working their magic in the rehab clinics three miles away in the city I just rode through. Dontcha know healthy humans are bad for business. I have no doubt it is true. I also have no delusion that my journey was safe. But I do know it was my journey and by no means was my physical safety certain but finally the entire thing made sense to me; I finally had faith.

Two middle-aged ladies stood in line at the counter behind me. “I don't know what to do about my dad” said lady number one. “He is in the hospital and his numbers don't look good”. “Don't worry” replied lady number two as she reassuringly patted her on the back. “The Doctors know when the numbers get bad enough it is time to take him off the machine”. The first lady started to tear up and then looked toward the television screen. Michael Jackson's untimely death still dominates the Zombimatic Thought Eradicator. “I remember Michael before he turned into such a freak,” she said, “he was so good.”

Finally I was back “in country” and “safe”. A bone-deep shiver went up my back.

I know all too well what happens when your numbers are deemed insufficient so I walk down the hallway to my room, swipe the card in the door, lay on the bed, and call the trucking company recruiter.

Final Vermon on the Mount

---

So there he was, humanoid 379-70-1225, driver 452417, piloting ol' 362958, a choked down, gutless wheezy 425 horsepower Peterbilt, in the rolling hills near 33.6660,- 93.5994. Home (42.43417,-83.98635) was 971 miles in their aerodynamic rear view mirrors. Their? As in Plural? Yep ol' 452417 had not paid real close attention to the yapping truck driver recruiter on the phone (she shounded cute) he never would have voluntarily signed up to spend 24/7 with 452009.


Ironically both men had been seeking freedom in their own way and had ended up incarcerated together in a truck on the interstate. The horrible turn of events as they had unfolded put neither fellow in particularily good spirits.




53 years prior 452009 had come screaming into this world into the city of Rafaela. Argentina. His madre named him Jorge (pronounced Whorehay “don't call me George or I keel you) Bonafede. Or as '417 anglicised it “George the real damn deal”. Any attempt to “Gringo” him up was met with violent resistance. As Jorge would say “I am true American but a gringo only on paper”. Even though he had been in the USA for 14 years he only knew half a dozen verbs (most of which involve miscellenous mucous membranes) and could correctly conjegate none of them. The American melting pot couldn't get hot enough to blend in this bad ass argentinian vaquero. In Argentina he had been the boss so he routinely tried to push around '417 both physically and mentally but '417 had 52 years of getting pushed around and had made a vow to fight back so the two men fought tooth and nail back and forth and up and down the United States and Canada.


Jorges (“stop calling me George”) claim to dominance finally rested on the fact that his serial number was lower hence he had more seniority so as far as he was concerned he was still the “Big Man” in the cab. At 6'8” and 6'4” the two tried to survive in a space not much larger than a portajohn. A combined 13 feet of aging human flesh and 105 years of combined experience and they had both tumbled down the ladder of success and land together in a heap in the cab of this Semi. This put neither of them in a particularily good humor.


It finally came to a head one day as ol' '417 was nearing the end of his shift.


('417's translation)
“Argentina is a beautiful place” I have many cows and many people respect me”. Said Hoarhay, “on Friday night I would come back to town from a week on the pampas and we would have a band set up in a field. We would kill a good bull and pigs and chickens and whole town would party and dance in the field all weekend. By Sunday morning , no grass on ground.”


“Sunday we wake up hurt head and go to church and then family, cousins, brothers, sisters, aunts, unkles everyone would gather at my fathers house and we would have beautiful feast and laugh and talk, sitting in the shade in the afternoon.”.


Do you do much dancing now, George? '417 replied provocatively. His proding is met with sullen silence.


“Hey George why did you come to this country anyway? Said 417. Seems like you are always yappin about how you had it made in Argentina.


“I came here for the opportunity”. Said George.
What opportunity said '417 sensing a chance to really get under Jorges skin. The opportunity to be locked in a rolling canister with a wrinkly, rashy gringo 24/7 making way less than minimum wage.


Jorge had seen images of America on MTV and he had to admit the reality of America fell considerably short of the hype. George just lost most of his life savings by purchasing a house in the Detroit statistical metropolitan area, causing him to go truck driving and leaving his beautiful wife alone to teach disgruntled youth in the critically aclaimed Detroit public schools.


In the age old shop rat tradition of screwing with a coworker till their mind snaps just to amuse themselves '417 goes in for the kill.


“Well you may have given up dancing and a vibrant community of loved ones but at least you are making a lot of money and living the big life here in the USA”.


Born and raised into the big bamboozle '417 has more or less accepted that he is a slave to his algorithmic lords but he is astounded that someone would have made a bad deal for themselves by buying high into the big bamboozle and giving up all that he supposedly cherished for a shot at what?


So why exactly did you move here, Jorge? Asked '417 again.


Finally, out of good reasons, the last desperate answer is “So I can buy a Camaro”


Where is this Camaro Jorge? Asked '417


Sensing that Jorge is about to break, '417 putting his trivia pursuit knowledge to use, goes in for the kill.


“How about the Falkland Islands, Jorge” Poked '417


“Of course you must mean the Malvinas”!!!! Jorge replied as his Latino pride raised up again.


No jorge you can't call them the Malvinas until you big bad Argentinian men can kick Margeret Thatchers ass. Face it you had control of the islands and an old shriveled up english woman
sent some boys down there and ran you off like the damn egg suckin dogs that you are.


“HO! HA HA! GUARD! TURN! PARRY! DODGE! SPIN! HA! THRUST!” *WHACK*


Jorge snapped and began to pummel '417s right arm as the trucks satellite navigation system informs '417 his federally mandated hours of operation are up and he must be relieved of duty.


The odd couple pull into a Wal-Mart parking lot off the freeway at Longitude -93.59012603759766, Latitude 33.66648723151936 on their way to Longitude -98.75661849975586 Latitude 30.18155881039127


As he finished his driving stint the fatigue of an irregular schedule sets in and he excuses himself to the sleeper portion of the cab. As has become his habit he reflects on his blessings in a spirit of gratitude and promises to be nicer to Jorge tomorrow. He oddly also thanks the heart disease that has set in motion the bizarre turn of events that has led to the state of mind he has today. As Jorge grinds through the 9 forward gears and reenters the freeway the click clack of the expansion joints and the gentle rocking motion of the air ride cab lure him off to a deep sleep.


His arms begin to feel hot, it is a familiar feeling. Is he on fire?


Vermin shudders to life as the incinerating heat of the desert sun burns his pasty anglo flesh.. Cack, is set on a roiling boil, howling down a deserted jeep trail in the desert, sounding for all the world like a nitrous burning garden tractor ridden in anger. A long plume of dust billows out behind our High vis hero.


He is now fully alert and inquisitive as to the nature of his unusual surroundings and his technicolor motorcycle as it bucks and slithers over the desert terrain. He crests a small hill and the previously obscured Bob the mangy bobble head dog comes suddenly into view. He is standing right in the middle of the trail. The Vermin pulls back on the reins with all his might as he tries to haul down a half ton of rolling rubbish. Tires wallow front and rear as Cacks wore out dancin shoes search feverishly for purchase.


Vermin is alive and enveloped in a cloud of gathering dust that his faithful companion cack has kicked up, his shrewlike eyes blink revealing two moist slits in his facial dirt as he squints at the dog.


My whiskers twitch with excitement as I flip up my face mask and ask him.


“Howdy there feller, hows them fleas treating you”?






The dog just looks at me funny and with his palsy beckons me to follow. I put down the kickstand and gracefully swing my leg off the saddle as Cack sinks into the soil and flops over on her side like a terrier in a fresh deer turd. This seems natural and an omen that I should join the dog. I telepathically know the dog has told me to follow him. The head bobbing that had seemed like a sad plea for affection in Creel had in reality been an enjoinder. He and I start to lope down a trail that runs perpindicular to the jeep road. My cowboy boots start to hurt my feet and I kick them off and start to run barefoot behind the dog. Memories of my lethargic cube dwelling past are laughable. Ten years prior I had been winded climbing a flight of stairs, now I find myself joyfully gliding through the desert brush following Bobble Head Bob, my breathing is easy and my heart pumps a steady rhythm.


As Bob and I headed west the surroundings became more mountainous. We continued into the night, one by one small tightly knit Tarahumara would come out of the scrub and burble a few gentle sing song syllables and fall in behind Bob and Myself. I recognized my buddy in the tattered dirty modern cloths, and the guy in red that I had met in the road. The fellow that had moved to town joined us for a while but he became tired and dropped off. The lady that had sold me trinkets in town sprung out of the bushes and nearly scared me half to death. Her cowering subservience that expressed itself in town was gone and was replaced by a gracefull confidence as she danced and glid between boulders adjoining the path..The family that had been hunkered down in the back of an old truck in the rain tumbled out from behind a rock and joined us.


Dark gave way to a glorious desert sunrise as our determined band ran along. All day and into the next night we ran until we came to a precipice overlooking an incredible canyon. I was rather bulloxed by the termination of the run until I looked about me, in the light of a full moon, and noticed we had arrived smack dap in the middle of a primitive ceremonial circle. I followed their cues as they took their places surrounding a flat rock at the edge of the canyon.


I had been invited to join in an ancient ceremony, I looked toward Bob and his head motioned to an empty space.


The Indians started burbling some pre columbian chant, it was subtle and unobrusive but it did lay spine tingling aural tapestry down in the clearing. I settled into my spot as Bobs head quit shaking. My friend in tatters quietly walked off into the mesquite and came back with a spear. The indians chanting became more intense but still not obtrusive, like a burbling creek as you come around the bend . The chanting grew and grew as Tatters walked to a flat stone at the center of the ring. The sun had long gone behind the mountain but the full moon still illuminated the surroundings. Tatters took the spear and balanced it on its point on a flat stone in the center of the circle as their chanting increased in intensity.


He pulled his hand away as the spear began to quiver, only I was shocked as a bow and arrow sprang from the top of the spear, whats this? Then wheels, ox yokes, chariots and plows one springing from the one before. HOLY COW! Chain mail, cross bows and my personal favorite the trebuchet. These indians are ceremoniously witnessing the birth of my own personal scaffolding of doom! One I have recreated over and over in my head. They all stare at me looking for signs that I did understand what I was seeing. I just nodded.


One by one every advance in technology sprang from the top of the previous one before my eyes. The humans that were tangled in this technological tower of babel became less vital and a dullness and lethargy was revealed.


Legs became still as the wheel is introduced. Farmers became tethered to their plows as well their ox.


The scrambling surging tower reached toward the sky. Finally in a flash “the enlightenment” happened and the steady linear growth of the tower began to reach horizontally toward all four corners of the earth steadily extinguishing the starlight an enormous cantilevered cancer metastisizing and engulfing the world. The machine/human hybrid began to destroy living things with absolute abandon. Flashing lights, blaring souless sounds and electric current animated the undulating mechanical miasma.


I was gobsmacked to see the Indians calmly sitting there watching what was essentially armaggedon with out even a hint of curiosity or fear. They had witnessed this ceremony for centuries and always chosen to stay on the ground rather than start up the tower.


Something was different this time though wasn't it? They had invited a Gringo, he was an integral part of the scaffolding, what was their purpose? Why let a part of the problem into their lives?


Finally as the tower started to threaten to blot out the full moon I saw a flourescent yellow flash. A hiViz beacon. What the hell? Of course Cack was part of the tower why shouldn't it appear? I had pretended it was of fairy wings and pixie dust but it was in fact nothing more than just another machine.


Just as this realization was about to crush my soul I noticed someone other than me was astride her. I squinted my shrewlike eyes into the heavens and was able to make out the the waiflike cockeyed 70's sitcom star Sandy Duncan. That bitch Cack was cheating on me with a chick.


Then it occurred to me I can't even do dream sequences right as my subconcious had accidently replaced hot Sandy Bullock with the elfin non hot Sandy Duncan. Close but no cigar.


I started to chuckle at the stupidity of the whole thing. How ludicrous. This was the sign that the Indians were looking for as they also began to laugh. Our laughter began to feed on itself like a bunch of kids at a pajama party that have been told to be quiet “for the last time”.


The big joke had been revealed! The peals of laughter started to cause the scaffolding to vibrate ominously. Like the famous mechanical failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge The frequency of the laughter had set up a dissonance in the structure that caused it to begin to buck and shake.


We gathered our composure and began to run away from the canyon as, one by one, the useless hunks of the tower began to crash into the desert around us. As we headed toward the horizon the indians, being superior runners, slowly began to pull away. I was heartsick, I had finally met people who understood, a tribe that I might belong to and they too were leaving.


Like being chased by the devil in the nightmares of my youth I began to run as fast as I could and pump my arms ferociously but instead of catching up to my friends I began to lift off the ground. I ran and pumped my arms harder and faster as I lifted higher into the sky, trying to avoid the fate of not only of being hit by the falling objects but trying to avoid falling myself. Finally it all became hopeless and I accepted that my fate was to fall to the desert and be crushed by the remnants of the scaffolding. I gave up with a sigh, resigned to my destruction I quit my struggle and prepared for my screaming fall from grace. Shockingly instead of falling I had begun to swoop and soar.


I looked down and instead of arms and legs I had a beautiful pearlescent set of moth wings. I had been released from the earths pull and began to gracefully fly toward the full moon.



----------------------------------------------------


''417, still sleeping, flys through the air of the sleeper and lands with a thud banging his head on the refridgerator. Still in a confused state he realizes that Jorge has jammed on the airbrakes in a rest area with the sole purpose of catapulting '417 to the ground. Apparently the steady diet of beans and corn has created an untenable spike in the methane levels in the trucks cab.


'417 leaps to his feet fighting back the instinct to choke the life out of the Argentinian. All he can do is scream gutteral nonsense into his right ear. He is wildly angry and confused. Jorge immediately returns fire and starts shrieking in Argentina language. '417 notices the moon is full and beautiful coming up over the Texas Hill country. '417 has revealed nothing of his alter ego or its trips to his partner, he wouldn't or couldn't understand, few people do.


He reaches under the passenger seat and grabs his running shoes. Jorge knows he will be gone for an hour or more and starts to complain that if '417 goes for a run they may be late on their delivery, but stops short realizing nothing can disuade him when the moon is full.


'417 jumps down out of the cab, runs to the back of the rest area, clears the fence, and glides like a ghost in the moonlight as he vanishes behind a rise. He wants to be worthy, ready, should his friends choose to show up again.