VIP, a San Marcos Tale

News of the impending visit by government dignitaries spread quickly through San Marcos. And while, in the new new parlance of the day, there was no shortage of questions about the congruity of using the words 'government' and 'dignitary' so closely together - even referring to the same personages; yes, even amid that debate, there was something in the air that swiftly grew from mere curiosity to exhilaration. We were all, even the most cynical among us, swept up in the news of the day. Things must be put in order. Plans must be made.

I knew that I would not be called upon to take any significant role in the inevitable parade, but I wanted the best vantage point possible. So, I searched through my contacts for the number of my oldest, most faithful friend, the Romanian taxi driver who had saved my life on so many occasions. Even though he was clearly the best person for the job, I had two nagging reservations about calling him. The first issue was that I had never actually been to Romania, never walked 1.6 kilometers in his shoes. The thought and culture police would hear his stilted accent in my mind and accuse me of culturally appropriating him. I met him years before this was considered a problem and I am reluctant to allow it to color my relationship with the best damn taxi driver and most reliable friend a man could have. His sense of direction can be frightening, but his loyalty is unquestionable. When he is by my side I am always reminded that it is more important who you are with than where you are going.

The second problem that I have been wrestling with since our last adventure is that my Romanian taxi driver is quite possibly totally imaginary. Fortunately I live in a town where mermaids populate the peripheral vision of all the residents, trickily morphing into humans when observed directly. We forgive ourselves quickly for lapses in reality in San Marcos.

You can imagine my relief when, despite my concerns, he showed up at the house only slightly late in a newish Mazda with a handful of candies for the girls. I felt a pang of sadness that he had traded in his Peugot 504, an old school Cairene black and white taxi, for a modern sedan. But who am I to hold my friend in place? His smile and enduring confidence were the same. We embraced and set off into town.

The town was aflutter with activity. On the square, under the shadow of a large bronze statue of Jack Hays, our mayor stood on a hastily constructed stage and excitedly shouted orders to what appeared to be members of the high school football team. They had been volunteered by their coach to help with the lifting and moving of things. The mayor was a kind soul, whom everybody in town seemed to like, though nobody could actually remember voting for him. He was elected on a two plank platform. The first was renaming an alley that jutted off the square, 'The Kissing Alley'. His second promise was to bring mermaids out of the periphery and grant them full, perhaps even enhanced, citizenship. I personally could care less what you call an alley, though I am suspicious that the mayor's activities in that alley had been different than mine, or most of my fellow graduates of SWT. If we had called it anything, it would probably have been the 'peeing alley' or maybe even the 'puking alley'.

The recognition of the ever present mermaids struck a deeper cord, curiously uniting in descent three seemingly disparate groups - devotees of a nearly forgotten swimming pig named Ralph, those who are uncomfortable with the cultural implications of characters that seem to fetishize feminine beauty and vulnerability, and sailors who both desire and fear the formerly mythical creatures. As a sailor, a father of daughters, and a fan of Ralph, I find the mermaid movement unsettling at best.

Perhaps in some token nod to the cult of Ralph, hog hunters were brought in from Luling for the parade. They would be running wild hogs through the streets, behind the middle school marching band in the parade line up. There were obvious concerns about safety and sanitation, but the hog hunters confidently reported there would be no unseemly incidents. They assured the city counsel that their heavy chested, square headed dogs could keep the hogs under control, while delighting local children with abundant tail wagging and face licking sweetness. As the parade was to end at the Rio Vista waterfall, there was even a chance that fans of Ralph would have the increasingly rare opportunity to see pigs swimming, as they had done regularly during simpler days of yore.

At the airport, a group of mariachis were gathered and practicing to welcome the guests. Clearly somebody had to be on the ground, ready to perform the moment the plane landed and the door opened, our honored visitors experiencing San Marcos for the first time. A city counsel member had suggested that a line of hula dancers present the guests with leis, but that seemed more confusing than ironic. Another idea, which unwittingly revealed deeper fissures in our seemingly harmonious town's culture, was that Little Miss Cinco de Mayo could perform a Selena song, wearing a sequined push up bra and a ridiculous floppy hat. The town's anglos reportedly felt beleaguered in their attempts to rectify a clear desire to bridge the gap with their hispanic neighbors with their unwavering insistence that most Selena songs were jarringly annoying to actually listen to, regardless of their cultural significance. Fortunately San Marcos is blessed with an abundance of talented mariachis who graciously took their places on the tarmac, at least delaying the debate for another day and cementing the illusion of unity. Everybody loves mariachis.

Perhaps it was our collective desire to impress the outsiders that prevented us from questioning who exactly our guests were. Nobody seemed to wonder why we should care what these very important people thought of us and our town or even what was so important about them. Yet there was little debate about how the visitors should be treated, regardless of which side they were on. One of the appeals to life and culture in this particular part of Texas is how tricky it can be to discern the roundheads from the cavaliers. So many of us hide our rabid partisanship under camouflaged baseball caps and an adherence to old fashioned manners. And so we pandered on and on.

Schools and schoolchildren were called into action. Their normal math and reading lessons were suspended in order that the kids could make preemptive thank you cards from brightly colored construction paper, glue sticks, and mountains of glitter. Music teachers practiced vaguely patriotic songs on the bleachers, pig tailed kids mouthing the words along with the canned music. A dunk tank was set up and the most charismatic teachers took their places on the damp bench, preparing to entertain the crowd while they waited for the arrival of the dignitaries.

After considerable debate, the university was temporarily shut and the college students were encouraged to retreat to their parents' homes in Plano, Pflugerville, Pasadena, and other suburbs where their terrible driving and relentless parking could be reabsorbed into the local fabric of their youth. A cheer rose up from the center of the collective throats of townies as the last of their cars was seen merging onto the highway. Of course there would be stragglers who stayed behind, estranged from their parents and already on the schedule to work at various restaurants and coffee shops around town. Life must go on.

My driver and I set off early to pick up a torta and get a good spot at the airport. The fellows at Taqueria Patroncito, caught up in the momentum of the day, stuffed our sandwiches with extra meat, spicy green salsa running down the sides. We drove too fast and listened to an ironic version of the Australian pop song 'Live is Life', covered by the former Yugoslavian band Laibach (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC73Os9NmZE) at least nine times over and over on a pair of busted Kenwood eight inchers. It was equal parts grueling and exhilarating.

When we arrived, the crowd was already swollen at the the tiny municipal airport. Surrounding pastures became makeshift parking lots. Snacks were sold, mostly breakfast tacos, which speak for themselves and are beloved by every citizen down to the last child. While there was considerable jostling for a good view, particularly as the small jet landed and taxied toward the waiting crowd, people remained in high spirits and reasonably polite. Nobody wanted to screw up this historic moment, to blow our best chance to really shine.

Silence as the plane's slow roll become a full stop. Breath was collectively held, thousands of pairs of eyes watching the door, waiting for it to open....






For an audio recording, read by the author.....

https://soundcloud.com/user-704968293/vip-a-san-marcos-tale

Chasing the Shadows

Well, the clouds didn't look like cotton.
They didn't even look like clouds.
I was underneath the weather.
My friends looked like a crowd.
-Townes Van Zandt


It makes me crazy when I am trying to understand something and somebody tells me that there is no way that I can possibly understand it, that I have to experience it to know it - whatever
it is. I try not to do this, to tell people what they can feel. It is so much kinder and easier to do my best to explain, or show and see what happens.

Who am I to tell you what you can know?

Often it starts like this - in the car, so often when I am driving. One of those Story Corp. pieces or something similar comes on the radio, distracting me from myself and drawing me into somebody else's life, somebody else's special pain. On clear days, melancholy, sweet and satisfying melancholy drapes her arms around my shoulders, dries her tears on my hair and holds me in bliss. And I love these moments, savor them. I drink in the soft sadness thirstily, greedily. This is the good half of being half crazy. Still, I greet her cautiously, knowing all too well that melancholy is often a harbinger of darkness.

There are other warnings that darkness is coming, most unpleasantly notable is anxiety. Sometimes anxiety, depression's manic conjoined twin, grips my brain in its teeth, gnawing holes in sensible thoughts. Anxiety is every bit as irrational as depression and even more dangerous with its urgent calls for imprudent action and the totality of it's declarations and resolutions. Relationships can be inflated and destroyed in these tricky, twisted moments. Fortunately this also passes.

Then there are shadow days and I never really know when they will occur or how long they will last; in the car again, but this time chocking, weeping like a broken person, not even knowing who I am crying for. This is when the darkness creeps into every part of life. It is exhausting, paralyzing. The simplest of tasks last week seem nearly unthinkable today. My life is not set up for depression. I simply do not have the time. There are lists to be made, children to be raised, and dishes to be washed. There are people who rely on me not only to be present, but to be happy and alert, sometimes even inspirational.

If it were just a day, it would not be so difficult. And sometimes it is. But when the darkness really comes, I can be chasing shadows for months, or even years. Recently I was feeling particularly self-indulgent. Flirting with my not so secret mistress, melancholia, I read through my old essays, particularly those from the first months after I returned to live in Cairo with Jenn and the kids. It was a very difficult time. I made a hundred contacts and very few connections. The world was turned upside down and I felt everything, amplified and distorted. The writing was pretty damn good though.

And for so many artists of one sort or another, that is just another part of the rub. It is impossible to deny the powerful influence that depression sometimes has on creation. I am not saying that depression makes you more creative. In fact the debilitation overshadows nearly everything. But, when the shadows recede and calm returns, it is clear that some of my best work has been done in darkness. And so it goes.

It is probably for the best that most of this is entirely invisible to all but the most naked eyes. Laughter conceals almost everything from friends and bystanders. I recently read some comments about how happy and adjusted people appeared in a photograph, which struck me as ludicrous. There is no way you can see what is going on in someone's mind from a photograph. Even up close and personal, emotions can be hidden. This is not so terrible. Nobody has time in their lives for depression.

I only understand a little slice of all this, and even this is just a piece of that. I know that moods can be tangible, and hard to know, and that things will always pass and change. I know that breathing helps and so do dogs and that while nobody can effectively tell me to get over it, I'll be happier when I do. And so it goes.

Under Water

I never really believed that the stories I read in your magazine were true, until yesterday when a very strange thing happened…

I love to snorkel, on reefs near beaches, in lakes and seas. But my very favorite place is the top of the San Marcos River. It is a convenient ten minute walk from my house to the headwaters of this beautifully clear and refreshingly cool spring fed river. And on warm days, of which we are rich beyond imagining, I will often take a short break from whatever I am pretending to be working on for a mind clearing, energy restoring dip in the sacred waters. I only swim the first half mile of the river, getting out before the riverbed becomes a tangled mess of algae and beer cans.

Of course I bring my snorkel. On the walk to the river, I typically pass people. It is curious that almost every day somebody asks me, "What are you looking for?" And, when I am getting out of the water, dripping wet and headed home,  somebody else usually asks, "What'd you find?"

I shrug uncertainly when asked what I'm looking for. I'm not really looking for anything more than a few minutes, swimming amongst the fish and plants. There are other snorkelers out there some days. Some of them are hunting for treasure, either artifacts from any of the many peoples who have populated this section of river for thousands of years, or more modern treasures. I've certainly found both. I have friends who are really into finding indigenous artifacts and will spend hours scouring a section of river for that little gleam of flint that is sometimes an arrow head. I don't really care much about arrow heads. They all look pretty much the same to me, and I couldn't be bothered to search so diligently.

Modern treasure is slightly more appealing. I've found money, keys, plenty of sunglasses, and a pretty large cache of jewelry. I'm not really looking for that stuff either. But it is always cool to find something valuable. I have found one class ring and several wedding bands. The class ring was fairly easy to track to an ungrateful sorority girl from San Antonio. The wedding bands, when they fit, I use to replace the more than twelve rings that I have personally lost in that same river. Sometimes I wonder if the marriages that these rings represented were good ones. Were they accidentally dropped by someone madly in love or thrown from the bank to carry away the despair of a bad marriage? I doesn't really matter. I always lose them before they bring me either good luck or ill. Things come. Things go.

My older daughter is a huge enthusiast of treasure hunting. This summer, she found five dollars and decided that she would search for money on the river bottom until she found enough to buy a GoPro camera. The very next weekend we were snorkeling at Sewel Park. She got out at the ladder. "Dad, I think I see something at the bottom. It's a little too deep for me. Can you get it?" And so I swam down about ten feet to the spot where a GoPro camera was resting on the river bed, its head band swaying pleasantly in the current with the long, slender leaves of wild rice.

We tried to find the owner, to return it. There was one clue, a video on the camera. The video reveals a pair of scuba divers performing routine safety checks on one another. All is well, camera adjusted on head mount. They swim down the river about 100 yards. There is a moment of awkward equipment adjustment caught on the video, and then you see the divers swim away as the camera slips off and floats silently to the river bed. Then there are ten minutes of nothing but rice moving serenely in the soft current until the battery goes dead. We called the local dive shops to see if anyone had come in to return an air tank, griping about losing a camera. We even scoured the internet for stories of woe and loss in the San Marcos River. After a couple of weeks, I let Mina buy some GoPro accessories and really call the camera hers.

I mostly just pick up pieces of broken glass, which are sadly plentiful, even near the headwaters. They fill my pockets, providing ballast to offset my preternatural buoyancy. For some reason, I avoid beer can pull tabs. It would be easy enough to collect them also. Maybe it is a touch of OCD that compels me to stick to my plan - just pick up glass. Perhaps it is that the aluminum tabs are too light and would do little for my above mentioned buoyancy issues. The glass in my pockets does give me something to say, when I am invariably asked, "What'd you find?"

Yesterday I was avoiding looking for a job. I was avoiding looking at all. So I headed down to the river to look for nothing. It is still hot here, and the water felt divine. My anxieties were rinsing away and I was going into the snorkel zone, calmly collecting broken bottles and gazing into the thick beds of wild rice and red hygrophila when I swam around a bend in Sewel Park, finding myself suddenly snorkel to fin with a group of nearly naked mermaids.

This section of the river is popular with students, so it's not strange to swim up on coeds, but these weren't regular students in regular bathing suits. There were three of them. One had the long flipper tail that you immediately thought of when you read the word mermaids. The others appeared to have legs and were wearing uncomfortable looking thong bathing suits. They were topless, save a smattering of what looked like pearlescent barnacles scattered across their breasts. I think they were those large aquarium stones, maybe affixed with glue. I don' know. I have heard enough stories about sailors and sirens to be cautious.

It was awkward because this is a spot where the water deepens and I usually like to swim around a bit before heading downstream to the the place where I get out. I also wanted to know what they were doing and how they got the stones to stay glued to their breasts in the water. But I didn't want to disturb them, to be that creepy guy with a snorkel. Neither did I want to be dragged to the bottom, drowned by them as their faces changed into those of hideous monsters. And so I swam on.

Oddly, it seemed at first that they were following me, past the bridge and out of the section of park with walls and ladders. I turned once and saw one of the mermaids a short way behind me, slipping effortlessly through the water and the thick river foliage. I kept on my course until I was alone again, just turtles and fish in sight. Rounding another bend, I came to the place where I like to get out. Climbing from the water, pockets full of glass, I saw an old guy with a skinny dog and a large can of beer. "What'd you find?" he asked.

"I'm not really sure."

The Night Sky by Mina

I don't typically invite guest writers to this site, not being in a hurry to share the attention. But Mina wrote this one last night and asked me if I would post it…..

One evening I was enjoying the dark sky.

I saw a small light flickering across the yard.

It was a firefly!

I thought my sister would love to see the sight.

I ran inside and told my dad what I saw.

My dad said it would lift my sister’s spirt, because she already felt bad. She had a

stomach ache. So I brought her to see the starry sky filled with fireflies.

She is one of those people who gets interested in lots of things.

We came out to see the sky filled with stars, fireflies, and the almost full moon.

My dad was right; it sure did lift her spirit.

I watched as my sister gazed at the sight. Her eyes were filled with excitement.

When I went into the backyard, my dog jumped on me.

I heard my dad in my house calling my name

and went to bed.

And a Slightly Late Eid Said to Y'all

I was wandering through the produce section of my local HEB, marveling over the amazingly cheap price of bananas, when I looked up and saw a young veiled woman, also shopping. I paused a moment. Having lived in Egypt twice in my life, I am very accustomed to living with Muslims. But you don't see too many veiled women at the little HEB in San Marcos, Texas.

I felt an awkward desire to say something pleasant and welcoming, the way so many people in Egypt did to me and my family. But I don't know her. Maybe she has always lived in San Marcos. Maybe she says "Y'all" and "fixin' to" like the rest of us rednecks. This was a couple of months ago, during the weekend of Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. I'll say, "Eid Said!" (Happy Eid), I thought. It always made me smile when people wished me a "Happy Christmas" in Egypt. And then I thought that maybe it was not appropriate for me to approach a Muslim woman alone, to say anything to her at all. My goal was to be kind, not pushy. But then again, this is America. Hell this is Texas, where we pride ourselves on being friendly and where there is no taboo against saying something nice to a stranger in grocery store, man or woman.

But why did I want to say anything? Was it really to make her feel better, or was it selfish? Was I just trying to counter my own strange and irrational discomfort with diversity in my little corner of the world? I think that the truth is that I just like making connections with people. Still, I didn't want to feel like a tool, like the annoying white folks who went around trying to high five black people right after Obama was elected.

We have such a peculiar relationship with Islam, here in the United States. While there is a large population of Muslims living in America, public discourse around Islam rarely rises above a discussion on middle east politics, and always seems to end up with some sort of talk about terrorism. This is beyond unfortunate. I spent nearly three years in a city teaming with Muslims who were, by and large…. wait for it… wait for it…. Yes, totally peace loving, decent folks who abhor violence and prejudice as much as any hippy in Austin. It is really true. For years I wandered through busy streets without being really scared. Well, maybe I was scared a little, but that was because Egyptians are such terrifyingly awful drivers - even the Christian ones. The fact is that I was overwhelmingly and vigorously welcomed by people when we mingled freely together in the largest predominantly Muslim city in the world.

I still really don't understand much about Islam. I know some of the basics, but have never delved too deeply into learning about the religion. It may actually not really be so different from my own tradition. I am a secular Catholic with a deep fondness and admiration for the story book Jesus of my youth - the one who preached only peace and forgiveness. That Jesus didn't talk about revenge or crusades. He included everybody. His whole bit, as I learned it, was about loving sinners. That's you and me, guys.

I guess I don't really understand much about Christianity either. Fortunately I am rarely asked to defend it or to explain the actions of crazier, less secular Christians. I have no desire to team up with the fundamentalists either, though it wouldn't hurt for me to behave a little more Christ-like.

I am generally skeptical and more than a little bit suspicious of all religions, and particularly of religious people. Perhaps that is why I find the veil threatening. It seems like a big commitment, certainly more than one that I would be willing to make. But the veil isn't Islam either, just one aspect of a complicated and broad tradition. It is certainly not for me to tell anyone how to dress, or what to believe.

That's a job I don't want. What I want, I suppose, really is to be more Christ-like; to be the guy who says "welcome" or "Merry Christmas" or "Eid Said" to a stranger in the store, and to really mean it. But I guess that's not me, not yet or at least not all the time. I didn't take a chance to make even that small, momentary connection when I had it, by the bananas in HEB. Instead, I just smiled mutely and moved on, hoping she had not noticed all of
the attention that I had given her.

A Snake by Any Other Name

This is an essay I wrote in September 2001 while living in Guanajuato, Mexico. I thought about it again yesterday and decided to share it here. I don't think anything has changed, not for the better anyway.

Letters to Gringolandia - Part 14.5

A Snake by Any Other Name

September 2001

There is a legend of a snake in northern Mexico that my friends and I learned about last summer while on vacation. This snake slithers into the cradles of nursing babies. Whereupon it enters the child's body through the rectum and slowly, in its snaky way, works its way through its victim's digestive system until its head is poised just inside the child's mouth. As the child nurses, the snake steals the nourishment, growing larger and stronger while its victim withers.

Like all of you, I have been badly shaken by the events of the last few days. I am at once confused, saddened, and angry beyond words. My feelings of helplessness and inability to help heightened by my remoteness from my country and people. The people of Mexico are similarly shaken. They are worried about the 200,000 Mexican Americans living in New York City, and the millions spread throughout the United States. They are worried about the instability of the US and of the world. The value of the peso is dropping rapidly and hard times are coming. But that is secondary, I believe, to their concern about the dreaded humanity of it all. What has happened? What will happen? Our government is recoiling into defense and attack position. our president has vowed revenge. And it is certain that we will find some measure of revenge. Whether it is the leveling of Afghanistan, the destruction of Baghdad, or another public execution of one of our own fanatical citizen whose nourishment from mother's milk was stolen by the snake that lived within him. I am doubtful that we can or will rise to this occasion to right our wrongs and view the world as our joint responsibility and our home. My friend, Jonatan, reminded me that we can look into every event and see the positive ways in which we react as people. I am certain that he is right. But at this hour, I am only seeing red.

What will happen next? Who knows? And this is just one event in our story. Even as i write this, we are coaxing more serpents into the asses of hungry children, in the jungles of Colombia, the archipelago of Indonesia, the mountains of Eritrea, the deserts of Irag, the slums of Gaza, and in barracks on the Golan Heights. How does the song go… "From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.." With snakes under our arms and in our bellies, we march to the corners of the earth. You know that we helped make Bin Laden? We fed his snake that was born of desperation, supped on American rations, and grew ever more dangerous in the throes of fundamentalism. We taught his snake to shoot guns and to fly aircraft. I am not trying to jump on the liberal bandwagon of blaming the US for that which has befallen it. It is not just us, but all of humanity. It is the story of creation. The snake that became us from the beginning of the world. The snake that learned to climb ladders by impaling itself in the rear end of humanity.

So where do we go from here? I do not know. How can we starve out the beasts within our own hungry bodies and find the good that we posses? I do not know. The positive is already coming to light. Citizens of the world are lining up at hospitals and clinics to help replace the blood that has been spilled. Yesterday Arafat sent a pint of his own. I do not know what his blood type is. But it will find a new home somewhere in New York or Washington, in the heart of one of our own. I only hope that we can overshadow our destruction with our healing, that we can rise above our own fundamentalism and our desire for blind and vicious revenge. It is possible, if unlikely, that we will have the power to end the perpetual violence and corruption to humanity. I am not speaking from atop the mountain. I, like you, wanted to throttle the Palestinian woman, whom the TV showed dancing and singing in the streets, joyfully celebrating the attack on New York. If the people who performed and planned these acts of terror were in front of me right now, I would probably try to kill them with my bare hands. The snake is within me. But where do I go from there? I do not know. I only know that we will never find healing in blame or revenge. "We shouted out, 'who killed the Kennedys' but after all it was you and me."

-by Paul Koonz in Mexico, September 2001

The Hunt

The hunt is becoming me. I am learning and growing through the hunt. There may be moments when I will feel hunger, frustration, possibly even desperation. But I will persevere. I will come out stronger, smarter, more employed. 

My brother in law may be the only person in the family who is experiencing some degree of financial success. He is an engineer. He designs things, builds things, has an extremely useful shiny metal object in his hands at the end of the day that proves that he has not wasted his time. Of course, I had to ask him for a job.

“Do you like drilling mud?” he responded to my inquiry.

“Uh...” I quickly did a search on drilling mud. It was a perfunctory search, just scanning the top few items to appear. I didn’t need to be an expert. I just wanted to know what the hell he was talking about. I quickly read and absorbed the high points in a feeble attempt to gain an instant, conversational knowledge of drilling mud.

“So, is the drilling mud that you are referring to intended for a high or low velocity bit?” I asked, starting to feel smart.

“I didn’t ask you what it was. I asked if you like it.”

“Um... yes, I like it alot. I didn’t get the job, did I?”

Afterwords, I read a little more about drilling mud. It turns out that I probably would really not like it at all. But I sure would have liked having a job.

All Summer I watched as Jenn filled out one online application after another. She wrote and rewrote her resume, concocted multiple cover letters. Every morning she checked the status of each application, hoping for some kind of response. After well over a month, the “Thanks for your interest” emails started to arrive. She wanted so badly to talk to someone, to explain the gaps in her resume, to show them that she was the best person for the job. And now she is back with the district, working hard and barely being paid.

I decided to work backwards, to talk to people first and then, if they seemed interested, I’d fill out the application. I wish that I could say it is working. Well, maybe it is working. Maybe it just takes time. I’ve met with some old friends, talked to former bosses and colleagues, not so much asking for specific jobs. Mostly I’m trying to pick their brains, to come up with an idea or direction to take. Invariably I keep going back and talking to my brother, John. He doesn't have a job for me, but he usually springs for beer when we get together. And that is something.

I am trying to break into the world of professional writing. This search is taking a two pronged approach. The most obvious route for me, a former teacher, is through educational writing. While not particularly sexy, it could be enjoyable and lucrative. This is where my brother has been more than simply a beer donor. He works for an academic publisher in Austin and has written a number of science text books. I have been writing to the contacts he provided, hoping to find free lance work. 

I've also been fortunate to reconnect with an old high school friend named Jay. Jay was a couple of years ahead of me in school. He was always a good guy, kind and interesting at a time in life when that wasn't the norm. Now he is employed by biggest of all educational companies (bigger than Jesus) and has kindly offered both advice and contacts. It looks like he may have some freelance work for me soon too.

The second prong is more creative, writing essays and feature articles. To this end I am reading the entire Writer's Market 2013 from cover to cover, learning the tricks of the trade and how to get started. It seems like a long road. It is possible but it is going to take time. I have a couple articles written and submitted to an Austin based online newspaper and I am hoping to write more for them. Writing articles about Austin is fun and ironic. I probably should not have told the editor that I don't like Austin. It's neither true, nor a really good way to ingratiate myself to a guy who does Austin for a living. Since I left the public schools, my filters have been largely off. Good that the editor is also a friend and has a sense of humor, even if Austin often doesn't.

And so it goes. Things will work out. If they do not work out as planned, there are always tables to bus and dishes to wash. I've done both in leaner times. For now I will continue the hunt. I will search high and low. And when the thirst becomes too much to endure, I will venture back to Austin and ask John for another pint of contact.

Stupid World

I was walking my dogs down the street, our morning routine. But this morning was different, my heart was heavy and  my mind racing. You see I can't seem to get the image of that guy being beheaded out of my mind. I should clarify that I haven't actually seen the video and I don't intend to look for it, but I still can't shake the image. Walking and trying not to trip over the dog leashes in my quiet neighborhood I couldn't make sense of it - of the vulgarity and brutality, that humans can be so devoid of mercy.

I am an adult and I can barely stand it - don't even know what to do with the emotions this evokes. And if it were just these few incidents, it would be hard enough. But it isn't. Violence is pervasive, a real part of humanity that we can't ignore or deny. How do I explain this to my kids? How do I explain God to my kids, or Allah, or whatever name people hide behind when it seems like we are farthest from divinity?

I wanted to walk and to clear my mind, but it just wasn't clearing. A house door opened and a young mom walked out onto her front porch carrying her baby.
"See, two dogs. One dog, two dogs." I could hear her telling her child in the sweet tones of a mom who is not thinking about decapitation or how seriously fucked up her son's world actually is.
"One dog, two dogs." Maybe the baby raised two fingers or giggled. I don't really know, my eyes suddenly full of tears. I felt like I needed to run home, to get away from this perfect scene before I corrupted it with my own despairing thoughts .

I also wanted to stay and to listen to this exquisite little conversation. Mom makes observations, baby smiles and responds. Everything she told him was true and wonderful. There were exactly two dogs walking by. I didn't stick around but I am sure that the next thing she said was equally loving and correct. Maybe she mentioned the clouds, which were plentiful and with a hint of a promise of rain. "Clouds, grey." Maybe they switched gears and she started talking abstractly about how much she loved him. I knew I had to keep moving.  She wasn't telling him the whole story. When would she talk to him about death? That would be hard enough, but what about murder? War?

I thought of my own daughters, old enough that we don't count dogs together anymore; old enough to hear the news on the radio on the way to school in the morning. Sometimes they ask questions, difficult questions. And I try to answer as well and as honestly as I can, even though I don't have any answers, not to the really tough questions anyway.
"Dad. Can we just listen to music?"
"Sure honey, of course."
"Dad. Did you see the deer?"
"No. How many were there?"
"At least two."

Unemployed

It seems like just yesterday that I was on summer vacation, sleeping late and swimming in the river with my kids every day. We relaxed and watched very nearly every World Cup match, did day long marathons of Cake Boss on Netflix, and took impromptu overnight trips to visit my mom in Shiner, sometimes during the middle of the week. What did it matter what day it was? For two amazing months we allowed ourselves to shed the trappings of time and timeliness. We did what was needed, but mostly what we enjoyed. We even finally got around to taking the dogs for morning walks around town, changing our route daily to follow our whims. The days were long; the lid of my grill almost always warm to the touch. It was a fine time. At least it should have been if not for one thought constantly nagging me, dragging me into a profound state of anxiety.

You see, I am now unemployed. My final paycheck from the district arrived on Friday. I probably should have seen it coming when I turned in my letter of resignation over three months ago. I suppose that I could have spent the summer searching for a job, embarking on a new career, and reinventing myself. But I really needed that time off. I earned it. I only wish I had been better at enjoying it.

I was a teacher for over ten years. Most of that time was spent in the field (trenches really) of severe behavior. It was difficult, generally thankless work that took a toll on my health and on my very sense of being. I don’t really want to talk about it very much except to say that I was initially chosen for that line of work because I was seen as being creative and open minded. The experience wore on me, leaving me feeling cynical and conventional, not a person who I want to be.

It is not quite accurate to say that I did nothing practical over the summer. I applied for several teaching jobs in my district. These were for academic positions, still stressful, but somewhat out of the line of fire, safer feeling. I had interviews and perhaps naively assumed that I was a shoe in for one or another of the jobs. That I was passed over twice still stings like an insult, but it is quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to me.

It should not be a surprise that they didn’t take me back. In one interview I described my resignation as jumping from an airplane. “About half way down I realized that I had not packed a parachute,” I told the interview panel earnestly, “But I don’t even care. I just know that I had to get out of that plane.” In my other interview I told them that the only way to save special education was to abolish it. I think I used the word “crap” twice. Remember when Joquin Pheonix went nuts a couple of years ago and said crazy things on all the late night talk shows? I was sort of like the elementary school teacher version of that.

Now I am free. Well, that is to say that I am as free as one can be with a mortgage, car payment, multiple bills, and a family to support. I am nervous as hell and more than a little bit desperate, but I’d be a liar if I told you that there wasn’t something really cool about the prospect of being unemployed - no boss, no schedule, nobody trying to bite me or thinking of suing me. Probably the best thing about unemployment is that I don’t have to go to work in the morning. It is a little thing, but marvelous. I could get used to this if I weren’t certain to run out of money in a month or two. 

Still, it is liberating not to be a public school teacher. I feel compelled to finally be open about my political and religious beliefs, to draw cartoons with controversial topics, to use profanity on facebook, perhaps to quit writing under this goofy pseudonym, to no longer labor under the weight of having to be a role model for anybody else’s kids, or conform to the lunacy of public school.

So I am committed to enjoying this new time, this weird uncertain time. I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I am opening my mind again, crawling out of the box. And outside of the box, where I belong, it seems that there are prospects. I think I just sold my first essay yesterday. So I will rejoice and move from one adventure to the next, blessed and confused - maybe just a little crazy, but inspired.

The Name Game

She told me to meet her at the new Chinese buffet, the one by Weiners. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a Weiners in San Marcos - well at least not as long as I’ve been coming and going. But I knew what she was doing. I knew the game we were playing, the game of ‘let me show you how long I’ve been in San Marcos’.

The rules of the game are simple. Always refer to any building, business, park, or even personal residence by the name it had the year you arrived, or were born, in San Marcos. If played well, it will solidify your relationship with your San Martian contemporaries and provide you with ample opportunities to feel smug and more settled than more recent immigrants. 

Like many college towns, San Marcos residents can be roughly divided into three groups: those who have always been here, those who are passing through, and the ones who came and never left. This last group, the ones who came, generally for school, may or may not have ever graduated, but they never got around to moving to Austin. These are the people who mostly play the game. They tend to take more pride in the town than even the people whose families have been swimming at Rio Vista since the Alamo was besieged. But like so many adoptees, they harbor a deep need to belong and to reinforce their relationship with momma San Marcos. And so they play.

The most commonly changing businesses are bars and restaurants. These places also tend to loan their personalities to people who identify them with a particular time in life. As such, people who came to Southwest Texas in times of yore, still refer to the large music venue on the square as Deveraux, with little regard to an ever changing marquee  that has claimed so many names. Others, who came later to Texas State, may fondly remember eating a burger in the same place, only it was called Gordo’s.

Extra points are awarded for using particularly colloquial names from specific times. Let me give you an example. The little HEB was an AppleTree from the late eighties until the mid nineties. It is a smallish store, located very close to campus and has always been heavily patronized by students and younger folk. It is traditionally a place that could be hard to visit without running into a friend and feeling obliged to chat. A quick trip for a frozen pizza and ice cream could take an hour for a social type. And so it became known as ‘the Appletrap’. Using this term now will either befuddle or amuse whoever you’re with. Even as I write this, my wife leans over my shoulder and smugly says, “Oh, are you talking about the Safeway?” Well played, spouse, well played.

While the San Marcos River is generally simply called ‘the river’ by young and not so young alike, various banks and parks along the river have multiple names. Across from Rio Vista Dam, is an area many refer to as ‘the girl scout camp’. Deep behind tangles of grape vines and poison ivy is an old, rectangular swimming pool that has filled to the rim with dirt. If there was ever a girl scout camp here, it was really long time ago. Most people forgo this part of the park, never thinking about what it might be called. At the other end is a fantastic swimming hole where Spring Lake cascades into the top of the river. This is a very popular spot for many generations. As such, it has quite a few names. The area is called Peppers, ‘the headwaters’, ‘the top’, The Salt Grass, or even ‘the forbidden’ zone depending on who you ask and when they arrived. 

So she wants to meet near the Weiners, eh? Not wanting to be beaten by my slightly senior San Martian, and remembering that the new Chinese buffet is on the highway near where the Blanco and San Marcos Rivers converge, I decide to break the rules a little, to pad my San Marcos resume. I responded in my best 1800‘s Comanche dialect, “Oh, you mean the one near Paa Tosaybita (Blanco River)?

But she was quicker and older than me, shooting back, “Yes, Ligai Koh“ in what certainly sounded like fluent Lipan Apache (circa 1750). I am bested once again.

Out of Chaos

"You know, although it's crazy and loud, it all somehow seems to work," Jenn's dad comments, his voice barely audible over the din of a thousand car horns as our taxi stubbornly inches its way through the congested streets of downtown Cairo. I squint my eyes a little, breathing in the insanity, and retort, "No it doesn't! It doesn't work at all." We have been in traffic for about an hour and traveled less than ten miles. To be certain, we will probably (insh'allah) reach our destination eventually. In that sense, he is correct. His optimism is refreshing, if slightly optimistic.

 There is a natural tendency, arguably a compulsion, for people to seek and recognize order when we are confronted with chaos. We want to to make sense of information and sort it into a meaningful pattern. It is calming. Writers take it another step, needing to explain the order that they have found - to show off how simply and succinctly we can tame the madness into a (possibly humorous) story.

And so here I am in Cairo, one year later, punch drunk from the fight and still searching for that one knock out analogy that will satisfy my own desire for order as well as my writer's need to share it with you. Life in Egypt is frustrating and I want to pound some sense into it. But the chaos here is strong and the best that I have been able to do is to take small jabs at it while I duck and dance away from the jarring blows of insanity that this mixed up town provides.

The ancient Egyptians believed in a concept called ma'at. Ma'at is the natural balance and order in the universe. The ancients believed that it was essential that ma'at be maintained. They had a cool Goddess whose sole purpose was to keep the ma'at. They constructed a highly advanced civilization, complete with a complex written language and awesome architecture thanks in part to ma'at. They built the pyramids. But that was a long time ago and as far as I can tell the ma'at, like so many temples, has been covered with sand and buried by the chaos of the desert for many years.

Modern Egypt is a different story. It lacks structure and is very noisy. Sometimes it seems like twenty million people are all talking at the same time. These conversations are loud. It is hard to tell when people are angry because people are always shouting. And yet, for all of the yelling, people are remarkably indirect in what they are saying and very little ever seems to get accomplished. Egyptians tend to take it all in stride, having long since abandoned ma'at. They are generally quite good natured, laughing as loudly as they yell.

Back in the taxi, Jenn's folks try to decipher the incessant honking that is a constant, looping sound track to life in Cairo. They are not the first to suggest that there is a genuine, symbolic language to the hooting, a code that can be interpreted. I have heard Egyptians make the same claim - that all of the beeps and rhythms have specific meanings, like some sort of brain wrenching Morse code. I don't believe this either. The honking is more like the barking of dogs than words. There is intensity and tone, but not consistent language.

Thinking of finding order as a fight might be a little too intense and counter productive, like pounding a square peg into a round hole. I can blunt the edges and bully my own simplifications into words, but it will not solve the problem of finding the hidden order - the ma'at that already exists.

And so I increasingly find myself standing by the Nile and staring at the water. Perhaps I have been trying too hard to find ma'at and not simply allowing it to be revealed. Do you remember those posters that were so popular a few years back? The ones where a pattern or image was hidden in the pixels. In order to see it, you had to stand a while, slack jawed, while your eyes unhinged from the apparent randomness. After some time you were able to look beyond the picture to some place in the distance where you hoped to see the simple, perfect image of a flower or a sailboat.

Christmas in Cairo

Jenn made the mistake of telling me that she was certain to win an online wager to see who could get the closest to Christmas without hearing the song, "Little Drummer Boy." She foolishly mentioned this while I was in the very act of trolling Youtube for oddities. Within moments, her dreams were crushed as a terrible modern rock version was pumping (rump a pumping?) out of our tiny, tinny computer speakers. I don't remember what she threw at me, but Christmas was definitely on.

One of the glorious things about living in a predominantly Muslim country is that it affords you the opportunity to allow Christmas into your life in small, digestible pieces without much of the wanton commercialism that has come to define the birth of Jesus in America. There are lights in some places and there are creepy Egyptian mannequins in shop windows wearing ill fitting Santa suits. But, by in large, it is a low key event.

The exception to this is at the American school where I teach. It is a school populated by international expats from all reaches of Christendom and a large group of demonstrative, filthy rich Egyptians (mostly Muslim, but with a love for gift giving). There is considerable competition to see which room parent can raise the most money to buy extravagant presents for classroom teachers. Tales of gifted iPhones and pearls replace discussions of curriculum in faculty meetings throughout advent. I am a special ed teacher. While my general education colleagues were raking in Amazon.com cards and bottles of single malt scotch, my kids seem to have forgotten their presents at home - possibly on the counter with their homework. I am not bitter. I don't like expensive presents and am grateful for the bottle of maple syrup and a partially consumed bar of dark chocolate that I did receive. It really was partially eaten. I do not make this stuff up.

In a gesture that probably seemed ironic the first time they did it twenty years ago, Santa arrived at our last school assembly on the back of a camel.  While not quite as common as cars in Cairo, camels are not particularly rare and all of our kids have seen or ridden on one at some point during their stay in Egypt. Still, they love the moment when the enormous beast invariably urinates all over the school lawn. The kids will be remarking about the amazing volume of pee expelled until the cycle repeats itself next year. What would Christmas be without traditions?

We bought a live tree that is small and bordering on being too obvious in its likeness to a certain, unnamed cartoon boy's tree. We didn't bring ornaments with us from Texas, so the girls made some while I played DJ, finding carrols online by the likes of Lou Reed and Dwight Yoakem. Luci worked on construction paper stars and Mina ripped the heads off of Luci's Barbies to attach by yarn to the small, almost pathetic branches. Some blinking lights and garland narrowly save the tree from appearing to be a yuletide homage to the French revolution.

And so I played more versions of "Little Drummer Boy." I like the tune, but have some sort of word/sound aversion to the phrase, "rump a pum pum." It just sounds wrong and makes my skin crawl. In the Johnny Cash version, the man in black won't even sing that bit. In his brilliant baritone, he practically grumbles the cool parts while a small choir of lessers follows him around, chiming in with the annoying "rump a pum" bit. The worst rendition we heard was by the Cranberries. Jenn disagrees, but I am convinced that her Irish accent is fake and that she is actually from Plano. I remember faking an English accent once. Many people do it. Some people don't know when to stop. The coolest of cool versions of the tune has to be the one by David Bowie and Bing Crosby. Their singing is great, but it is the funny banter between the two before the music starts that is priceless.

We will probably not have port or tamales this year. Nor will we have the opportunity to see many of our friends and family (though Jenn's folks are visiting for the holiday). There are traditions that will be missed or poorly recreated. But we are healthy, the weather is fantastic, and we have survived another year of transitions and apocalypses with more smiles than tears. And so it goes until the next time we find ourselves on this side of the sun.

The Desert and the River (part 2)

"Run!" I implore them, "Go as fast and as far as you can. Do not look back. Just run. Do you see those rocks, way over there? Run to them, touch them, and then come back and tell me what you saw. Or don't come back until the sun is setting and the smell of dinner grilling reaches you on a breeze. Go and follow the curve of the Earth until all I can see are the tops of your heads racing across the sand. Go."

At first it is difficult for the girls to believe that they are free. They have been tethered to us on such short lines these last few months. "Don't touch that. Come closer. Hold my hand. Look out for cars. Watch your step." We are all conditioned to the city, always fighting and flying - looking both ways before crossing every one way street. We are jumpy, hyper alert and flinching at the sound of car horns. But this is the desert and we have left the daily rules and frustrations of society behind in the city.

And then a scarab emerges from a tiny hole in the desert and they are off, chasing the bug on all fours - clambering to grab it and feel the tickle of six little legs, teasingly putting it on each others' backs. We are all laughing as they kick up sand, scampering around with their new toy. They play like puppies, tumbling and rolling. They play like children should.

I try to help our bedoin guides put up the brightly printed canvas wind break. They smile and humor me, allowing me to uselessly hold up a corner post while they neatly hammer stakes into the sand, fasten ropes against the wind. They are a father and son team, quiet and calm - proud in the subdued manner of the vast western desert. A smile between them tells me that they have everything under control, that they have been doing this for a thousand years.

I sit back against a white chalk boulder and breathe, attempting to comprehend the vastness. This desert flows across the great sand sea, across Libya and the seemingly endless Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean. It is too huge for me wrap my head around. Eventually I relax into the realization that I don't need to understand it, to grasp it or own it. My thoughts retract to the enormous glowing monoliths that jut out of the desert floor haphazardly, and closer still to my breath that is finally calm and even for the first time in months.

Our guides have been cordial, if slightly remote. Mina cements the relationship when she explains to them in gestures that we don't want to sleep in the provided tents. She lays out our familiar pallet of blankets and sleeping bags on the sand as the sun sets and the first stars appear on the eastern horizon. She helps build the fire and insists on heating pumpkin seeds on rocks beside the grill. She is in heaven, useful and competent. She glows with the confidence of a person who has broken the language barrier, communicating fluently with her actions. She is furious with me when I share a sheesha with her bedoin friends. Luci quietly busies herself just being Luci.

Our guides never stop feeding us - bread, slow cooked fava beans (fuul), tomatoes, carefully grilled chicken, and tea. The making and drinking of tea is a ritual of highly practiced motions. Small shot glasses and a steel kettle are unwrapped from a soft cloth every few hours. Water is poured and poured again over gunpowder tea, sampled and distributed. The tea is brewed brutally strong and sweet with small mint leaves delicately floating in the potion.

Night falls and the foxes emerge from the desert. This is the moment the girls have been waiting for. We have been observing their tiny prints in the sand, seemingly trotting from nowhere to nowhere with obvious purpose. They come in close to the fire, searching for scraps. The bemused looks on the faces of our guides tells me that these are the racoons of the deserts - fearless scavengers who are waiting until our guard is down to steal our food, to tear into anything that has not been carefully stored - sand colored varmints with burning eyes and enormous ears.

Jenn and the kids fall asleep, exhausted and contented. I am tired but not ready for sleep. Mars glows orange on the eastern horizon. I lay awake for hours, back on the sand, eyes in the sky. For the first time in my life I can actually feel the Earth slowly rolling eastward. I am riding it, flat on my back watching the horizon drop farther and farther away from Mars. I drift into sleep and I dream that I am in an enormous desert on a glorious planet breathing fresh air as a fox slips in close to steal my breakfast.

Pressure

"So do you understand what these numbers mean?"

"Clearly doctor," I replied. "Cairo is now officially killing me."

It is no longer simply a metaphor. I knew Cairo was frustrating, annoying, often agitating - but deadly?

I went to see the school nurse two weeks ago. My daughter had contracted a strange, but not particularly dangerous virus called hand, foot, and mouth disease (not the cow one). She had a sore throat, low fever, and a nasty rash on her hands and feet. The disease is quite contagious. So she was at home, supposedly resting while the virus ran its course. I went to work, but I wasn't feeling so hot myself - run down, depressed, exhausted. The nurse looked at me and told me to sit down. She wanted to take my blood pressure. It was high. She told me to come back and have it checked the next day.

The next day it was still high. And the next. Appointments were made. Blood work was ordered. Damn, I hate needles.

 She sent me to the doctor; the same doctor who nine months ago told me that I was surprisingly healthy and would be even healthier if I drank red wine, cooked with olive oil, exercised more, and dropped a few kilos. I have been remarkably compliant in matters of red wine and olive oil consumption.

Apparently that wasn't enough.

It seems that both my blood pressure and cholesterol have moved up the charts from, "Drink red wine and try to get a little more exercise," to, "Take these pills every day for the rest of your life and dramatically change your lifestyle." 

"So, have you been eating a large amount of beef?"

"No. Not really. I do eat entirely too much bread." Ironically, my pork consumption has also increased while living in Egypt. There is this great little Coptic store nearby that sells hand cut bacon. Also, I tend to binge on sausage and ham when we go for Friday morning brunches at the US embassy club house. It has been a delicious way to feel slightly subversive, a scrumptious and subtle protest against my life in Cairo. Now my bad cholesterol is up, good cholesterol down. I suppose Allah always gets the last laugh.

"What do you do to relax? Do you exercise much?"

"Mostly I brood and sweat as if I were exercising without actually doing any excercise. Do those count?"

It is hard for me to relax here, hard to exercise. My favorite things to do are to walk and swim. The streets are loud and chaotic, a little dangerous and uncomfortable for strolling. Swimming, the kind I like to do, is out of the question. Though I feel a sense of peace when I am near the Nile, I am rarely tempted to jump in for a swim.

In Texas I was stressed. My job was actually more insane and I was a regular at at least half a dozen local TexMex joints. I probably should have been in much worse shape than I am now. But in Texas I had outlets. I could walk for hours without hearing a single car horn, without quickly jumping out of the way of a careening taxi.

But things are looking up. Perhaps I needed a jolt to help me break some of my bad habits. I have replaced the daily lemon squishies and thick, melted mozerella sandwiches with raw veggies and cool, refreshing water. Breakfast now consists of only one (albeit large and strong) cup of coffee and a small bowl of muesli with honey. I am taking my pills. The doctor says that if I can get this under control quickly, I may not even need to take the dreaded pills forever. I have already lost some weight, my pants loosening after just two weeks.

But I know what really kept me relatively sane and healthy before I came to Cairo, and what will restore me upon my return home. It was the river that washed away the daily madness. I realize now that I am destined to be one of those crazy old people who wake up at the crack of dawn in any kind of weather, pull my swim trunks up too high, mount an old cruiser bike, and peddle down to the place where water magically pours from the ground. I will pause for a moment, take a deep breath, and serenly dive into the cold, inviting river that seems to make everything in this crazy life just a little better.

When I Grow Up...

When I was eight years old I wanted to be the pope. There was a priest at our church, Father Lagezi, who delighted in weaving jokes into his weekly homily. Sometimes he was quite funny. Other times, not so much. But regardless of the quality of the humor, the congregation laughed at every punchline. I figured that if a simple parish priest could garner that kind of power, the pope could say almost anything even slightly amusing and sit back, self assuredly listening to the multitudes chuckle.

But time passed and I moved on to other ideas. It wasn't the incredible improbability of ever becoming the pope so much as the intensity of the vows that dissuaded me from my lofty goal. So, if not the pope, what would I be when I grew up? I toyed with possibilities without committing to anything. At times I wanted to be a journalist, a cartoonist, a bartender, an orator, a gentleman farmer, a feluca pilot, and an international man of leisure, among other things.

A month before I graduated from college with a vague and immediately useless degree in Communication and English, Jenn bought me a homebrewing kit. I made my first batch of beer. It was terrible and so I made another. The second time it was not so terrible. A few more batches and the stuff was becoming delicious. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Remember that this was in the early days of the micro brewing revolution. There were still more NBA players in this country than professional brewers. The very first brewpubs in Austin were just starting to open. So I bottled a couple of batches of beer, printed my resume onto labels, and started knocking on the doors of these new breweries. I did not get a job on the first round. There were already too many ambitious homebrewers and too few breweries to employ us all. Still, I told myself that somebody had to be a starting forward in the NBA. Why couldn't it be me? I went back again and again.

While I had struck out with the first generation of brewpubs, my persistence paid off. I picked up a job at Austin Homebrew, which morphed into a brewing job at what may well be the coolest bar in the known universe - Lovejoys. It was a fantastic job and I worked there for four years. My boss, Chip, was great. He told me to make whatever I wanted. And so I did. Some of it was pretty good. I loved the artistic freedom of brewing small batches of craft beer for an eager and open minded clientele. Eventually the desire to move on and my waning interest in the science of brewing overcame me and I didn't want to be a brewer when I grew up anymore. Or maybe I just wanted to grow up again.

I started teaching because I heard that I could find a job in Mexico as an English teacher. I had never wanted to be a teacher. I never even wanted to step inside another school after graduating. I often ask myself now if I would be back in school if I had paid more attention the first time around. If I didn't want to be a teacher, I really never wanted to be a behavior specialist. But I am good with kids and for whatever reason, I have an ability to talk people down when they are about to do something stupid or dangerous - a talent that is sadly in high demand in American public schools.

A minor nervous breakdown and a lucky(?) break landed me a teaching job at an unnamed international school in Cairo. The job is OK but I'm tired of the stress and sick of the city. My blood pressure has become a clinically significant problem and I am increasingly asking myself, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" Last week I tendered my resignation and have until the end of this school year to reinvent myself and perhaps grow up a little.

I was discussing the prospect of growing up and moving forward with a colleague and told him that what I really want to do is this - write. I told him I want to be an essayist, or what the kids today are calling a blogger.
"People make a living writing essays." I naively told him.
"Sure, five people do." He replied
At first I was crestfallen. It is true that in a world where everyone is giving away milk, it is no easy feat to sell a cow. But then I thought about the five people who are doing it and about NBA players and how I was once a twenty-five year old hobbyist, pounding the street with a six pack of homebrew under my arm, knowing beyond any doubt that what was in my bottles was worth buying.

Acclimation

It is not a long walk to the school where I work, just a few blocks. I leave early, while the traffic is still relatively calm and before the cruel sun has risen over the jungle of dusty six story buildings that spread east to the Moqattam hills. But it is hot already. By the time I arrive at work my forehead is pouring, my shirt soaked. As Ra begins his daily journey across the sky, I settle into another day of moist discomfort.

You have to know that I am not talking about a little bit of sweat - dark, damp circles on my shirt beneath the arms. That is typical. My case is more severe. My head sweats. The backs of my knees, my belly, chest, and even my buttocks are not immune to the daily drenching.

This summer, while back in Texas, I ran into a girl who had been in my kindergarten class four years ago. It is normally a joy to see former students. Although I was not a very good kinder teacher, I humor myself with the belief that I might have imparted something meaningful and long lasting upon the lives of the kids I taught - that they would have something special to carry with them that they learned in our class. I said hello to her and her mother. "How are you? Are you ready for fourth grade? Have you read any good books this Summer?" The usual stuff. She looked up at me with a quizzical expression, "So, do you still have that sweating problem?" She asked. That's what she remembered? I was stunned and embarrassed, unable to stop myself from quickly jabbing back, "I don't know. Do you still have that impurtenance problem?"
"Huh?"

People tell me that I will acclimate. I respond that I have lived in hot climates for most of my adult life. They look at me with a strange mixture of perplexity and pity. "And you haven't acclimated yet?"

 

Yes, in fact I have acclimated. It's just not particularly pretty or comfortable. Dogs shed their thick coats in the spring. Flowers close petals around delicate blossoms as the sun rises and the heat of the day increases. I sweat. It is remarkably efficient. Despite constant misery, my body temperature rarely rises above 97.2 F.

I have acclimated but not adapted. It took many, many generations of people living and mating happily on cold, rainy islands in the north Atlantic for me to become who I am physically. In context, I am really quite practical, if not beautiful. The thick, furry pelt that covers nearly my entire body ensures that I rarely feel discomfort in the cold. Even my pasty, white skin would be useful for gathering sun light if I were blessed to live in a land that didn't have quite so much.

If I can't change, at least there is hope for my children who were born in Texas. If you believe that, then you fundamentally do not understand natural selection. The best chance for my children is that they might have inherited persperation characteristics from their considerably less sweaty mother. If my moisture traits are dominant, they will suffer as I have.

The only way for evolution to work progressively, would be for me to have been so repulsive to the Texas girls I pursued in college that I would have been denied the opportunity to mate and produce viable, sweaty offspring. I would have grown old and died childless, with nothing but undesirable traits to keep me company. But I was crafty. I met Jenn in the dead of winter and courted her on the banks of a cool, spring fed river. We would sit together by the San Marcos that first Summer. Whenever my body temperature rose, I slipped into the water like a Galapagos iguana. She was smitten before she ever realized just how physically repugnant I actually am.

And now I live in Egypt, surrounded by people with dark skin and small, dry pores. I begin each day with a cold shower and then stand, drying myself in front of a small window unit air conditioner. I smear antiperspirant under each arm and across most of my torso and put on a clean shirt, dry for the moment. I gather my things and open the door, stepping out into a new day. I have not even left the porch before the first small drops begin to bead up on my forehead.