Fifteen Million Pesos-Worth of Sheet Metal

There’s quite a stack of calendar pages in my life’s rear view mirror, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point. However, I’m still young enough to dream, I guess. I may have recently decided what I want to be when I grow up. It may not be what my readers were expecting.

Of course faithful readers of this spaced-out space know I’ve spun the tumblers of occupations many times in my life. Everything from a welder in the desert to a near-arctic handyman, with lots of incomprehensible stops and temperatures in between. Most of those stops were just me trying to get by in a world bent on pooping in my punchbowl pretty regularly. Like a lot of my brethren, you’re forced to choose from a very limited selection of grocery enhancers that’s on offer at any given time. If my wide range of affairs over the years signifies I’m a polymath, I assure you I’m a very dumb one, and doing it with a financial gun to my head at all times.

There was little time for dreaming about how I’d like my life to be ordered. I was just trying to feed my kids without being forced to feed one to the other. I might have been tempted to sell them to the circus, but they closed them all down after the elephants joined a union or something. The option of getting a few bucks by selling our tots for medical experiments dried up pretty quick, too, when the public school system started their free, forced injection and vivisection services and crashed the market.

But even at this late date, I still dream. I think I want to have hot and cold running potato chip faucets in every room. I may want to purchase Saddam Hussein’s used living room furniture. I might want my swimming pool to have more hot babes in it than JFK’s secretarial pool. I may want to be something when I grow up, even though I already have.

So I see a business across the street here in Mexico. It’s outfitted with three, deep, offstreet garage bays in a neighborhood where such a thing is unheard of. On the weekends, the bays are closed with elegant Zorro-style wrought iron gates, not the brutish, inelegant overhead doors we favor in the states. The climate here doesn’t require total enclosure of almost anything. In some of the older houses, many of the main rooms are gathered around an open interior courtyard. Kitchens and dining rooms are literally outdoors, even if they are under a roof. If the temperature dips to 60 degrees in this burgh, they set up shelters for people to warm themselves in. It’s hot here, they’re accustomed to it. No one is crazy except Americans. In Maine, for instance, people pretend they live in San Diego, and live in houses built to suit anywhere but Maine. Their children stand in the snow at school bus stops in January in shorts and a tee-shirt. They’re cold, but they’re cool, as we used to say. Everybody in the Yucatan knows its hot, and lives like it’s hot.

This part of town, Centro, sort of, Zona Paseo Montejo in particular, is kitted out with colonial houses and businesses all touching each other. A parking space on the housing side of the sidewalk is spoken of in hushed tones, accompanied by extra zeroes in the real estate peso department. So the purpose of the office across the street would have been obscure to me even if their sign wasn’t in Spanish. The structure itself was only half the conundrum. All the bays, and every parking spot for fifty yards on the curb out front was adorned with a car I could never afford, even if I was willing to part with both kidneys, instead of just one. There were BMW land yachts and myriad Porsches, Land Rovers, and Jags, plus wonder of wonders, the occasional big, black Suburban, a vehicle almost unheard of around here. The side view mirrors whack pedestrians in the head on both sides of the skinny streets as they drive along.

When the first Mercedes something or other rolled up this morning, I was thoroughly vexed. I decided once and for all that I needed to know what they were doing over there, because I wanted to start doing it as soon as possible. Drug lords? Nah, they’re closed on the weekends. Drug lords are like 7-11s. They’re always open, and their clientele requires daily fixes. Slave traders? Unlikely. You can get your pool cleaned for $2 a week around here. A slave would be superfluous. My thinker-upper went into overdrive, and I began to come up with very wild guesses. Is alchemy a thing after all? I didn’t spot lead ingots being loaded in, or gold bars being loaded out, so ixnay on that. Are they selling crypto bucks they manufacture on old Dells and sell to fools with new Apples? Very unlikely. The cars across the street were elegant, not ridiculous atomic doorstops like the Lambos and Veyrons that are favored by the Ukrainian internet scam set.

What could possibly merit three garage bays full of cars too expensive to lend to Top Gear, because they might scratch them? I had nothing to go on, until I noticed the little, stylized feather in the center of their sign. As it turns out, that’s the traditional way to notify the public about what goes on in a certain type of office in Mexico.

I think I want to be a Notary Public in Mexico.

I’ll have to hedge my career bets here. I’m not sure I want to be one, because I have no idea what they do around here. I have to go by surface evidence alone. Then again, one only went by surface evidence when judging Grace Kelly. It could soften her allure if you knew she walked around her palace eating beef jerky and telling servants to pull her finger, then delivering on the threat. It’s an IKEA world all around, and you can be certain that there’s a particle board interior 1/32″ below the sexy wood veneer on most everything and everybody. We’ll stick to what we can see, and worry about the rest later.

So a notary public in Maine is just a tubby girl who works in the credit union and has a stamp and a pen, and will notarize a bill of sale for a battered bass boat you sold on Facebook marketplace. I don’t know exactly how cool it is to be a notary in Mexico, but I’m beginning to think it’s more along these lines:

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I think I want to be a Notary Public in Mexico. I’ve been going to the gym, and my forearms are already pretty strong. I’d be a natural, I think, if I could figure out what they hell they do that merits fifteen million pesos-worth of European sheet metal parked outside.

In the Navel of the Moon

No one really knows for sure how Mexico got its name. I find the place, the name, and the whole lost in the mists of time angle appealing. When Spanish freebooters arrived, the locals they encountered spoke Nahuatl. This “encountering” consisted mostly of rapier thrusts and arquebus blasts, so perhaps the natives were mostly unavailable for comment about place names.

In Nahuatl, meztli (rhymes with Nestle) means moon, and xictli (sheek-ti-lee, best spoken with a Daffy Duck pronunciation) means navel. So for a long time Europeans thought Mexico meant the navel of the moon. Unless it didn’t. Other names like “place of springs,” and “killed by an obsidian arrow” were favored by other intrepid scholars who were scratching their heads and wondering why they were up to their ankles in a swamp with obsidian arrows sticking out of them all of a sudden.

About twenty-five years ago, the Mexicans got tired of people arguing about where the name of their country came from, so they convened an azul-ribbon panel to do what intellectuals do best: argue about it some more. They decided that the Aztecs (the Nahuatl, more or less) once had a leader of some sort named Mexitli, and he decided they should stop wandering around and set up shop for good in what is now Mexico City. His friends called him Mexi, and co in Nahuatl means “place of”, so you end up with Mexico.

Here’s Mexi’s picture, sorta:

I’m not sure I’d want my country to be named after a guy in a straitjacket, with two left feet, his dentures flying out of his mouth, and a barrage balloon of Binky from Matt Groenig’s Life In Hell comics tied to his topknot, but it’s not my country and they didn’t ask my opinion.

I know how modern intellectuals think. I imagine they fixated on the dubious idea they knew the nickname of a guy in a loincloth in the 1300s first, and they worked backward from there until they got the “facts” they needed to make it work out. My Latin is pretty limited, but I pretty sure I’m referring to ex post facto thinking, or petitio principii, or maybe post hoc ergo propter hoc, perhaps ratione conclusa, or it could be spaghetti bolognese. It’s one of those, surely.

Well, I’m in the Yucatan, and everyone around here is Mayan, more or less, and didn’t have a lot to do with the Aztecs back in the day, and don’t have much to do with Mexico City nowadays, either. The Maya, on the whole, look different than Mexicans from farther north. They’re low to the ground, and tend to be stout. A tall Maya is around 5′ – 6.” They’re a wonderful medium brown color, and generally don’t have things like freckles or any other imperfections in skin tones. They have straight, black hair as thick as minks, with dark brown, almond shaped eyes. With a description like that in hand, you can imagine what they think when we walk down the street. Oh look, the nice Italian lady is walking her albino giraffe again.

It took Hernan Cortez two years to conquer the Aztecs. The Aztecs were powerful, but not popular. They had an empire, and empires have a tendency to engender ill feeling from the assorted vassals. Cortez made alliances with various tribes in the area who tired of the Aztec’s approach to open heart surgery. That made it easier to turn Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) into just another excuse for a Spanish town hall.

The Spaniards decided they wanted the Yucatan peninsula, too. Instead of 2 years, it took them 175 or so. The Mayans were tough opponents, proud, pretty sophisticated, and could knap an obsidian arrowhead with the best of them. Perhaps the most vital thing they had going for them was a decentralized state. The Aztecs were an empire, and once you marched into the capital and fertilized the royal palace with the royalty, the war was more or less over. The Yucatan was more like a series of city-states, like Italy or most of central Europe once was. The locals fought like balams (jaguars), and once you beat them, there was another set right down the road to start all over again. And you had to hack your way through the jungle to do it, too.

But it was worth it, on the whole. The Yucatan is where the world of mammals was born, really. A meteor strike there killed off the dinosaurs. If it wasn’t for the Mayans, we wouldn’t have tomatoes, or avocados, or tobacco, or chili peppers. We wouldn’t call 200-mile-an-hour windstorms hurricanes, because they’re named after the Maya god Huracán. Many people still sleep in hamacas here, although we call them hammocks. Without the Mayans, we wouldn’t have known what to call them, and telling your wife you’re going out in the back yard to put your ass in a sling wouldn’t have the same connotation of relaxation, would it?

But above all, there’s one contribution of the Mayan people that tops all the others. Mi esposa y Yo will go out tonight and stroll down the magnificent Paseo Montejo in the cool of the evening, and eat our anniversary dinner under unfamiliar constellations. And for dessert, we’ll have chocolate (chokolatl) something or other, prepared by the very people who invented it. We’ll treat our waiter to a heaping helping of our barbarous Spanish, and tip him enough so that he doesn’t turn to his co-workers after we leave and call us the lint in the navel of the moon.