New Year's Eve Blow-Out

And so it’s the end of the year and I guess a good time to write up what I’ve done these past twelve months – and in particular these past four months since I moved to Mexico (given that I haven’t written a single private personal word this whole time) – and maybe clean out the pipes or the mind or the system or whatever the hell I am.

Blah blah blah…I guess that’s a little something to get the fingers working, some kind of opening paragraph, some little…

So, yeah, now it’s New Year’s Eve and I live in Cabo San Lucas and I’m a school teacher and it’s sunny and warm all the time and – somewhere in there there’s a distant memory of being on this cold wet rock called England, and also of being this human being boy called “Rory” who wandered and wondered all existential and crazy and thought lots about dying and was really kind of miserable and I guess in the wrong place and –

Well, yes, it all pretty much disappeared when I took the plunge and flew to Mexico the beginning of August on not much more than a desperate whim and –

Is it worth looking at those times and reasons and everything that led up to that?

Exeter

I was living in Exeter. I’d been trying to go there most of the year and I guess I eventually did, after continually telling everyone it was my favourite place in England, and, it’s true, I liked it.

I remember one day walking down by the quay and having literal tears come rolling down my cheeks for the single solitary momentary contemplation of how nice it was, and how groovy to be in that city of outdoor folk riding their bicycles and jumping in canoes and girls like Colorado girls not wearing make-up but liking to get rough and dirty and truly digging nature in their North Face clobber and –

I was getting into it. Playing soccer. Working my little job. Biking to the Tesco and buying my medjool dates and feeling kind of lonesome and –

It’s all distant history now; I can barely remember it.

I tried to make the best of it, but something happened once I rented a real actual room and got to work on these computerised projects I was into and, I guess, the honeymoon and novelty wore off.

I still had this sense of being in the wrong place. My dreams and messages spoke to me of it, told me I in the wrong job, as they had been doing for months.

But what was the right job? Surely not the school in Mexico that had been emailing me for the best part of six months repeatedly asking me to come work for them, despite my best attempts to put them off, to point out my lack of qualifications, to say, “well, I’m sure there must be other people out there you want to interview, let’s check back in a little ways down the line.”

But they kept being insistent. And I kept stalling. And the feeling and thought of that job never went away, until I finally sat down in my room and tossed a dear old sweet I Ching – you know me: can’t do anything possibly reckless without first consulting an ancient Chinese oracle – and the I Ching pointed me to the chapter, “Nourishment” (or “Nurturing”; I can’t remember which) and – well, you know me again – that was enough of a “yes” to have me immediately heading for the email and sending a message to the nice lady saying, “okay, yes, let’s do it; I’ll come” – and life got pointed in a whole new direction.

It was interesting how, as soon as I did that, all my connection and fondness and interest in making something happen in Exeter just dissolved. All of a sudden, beautiful and wonderful though it was, I had absolutely no desire to be there. We were done and we were through. It’s still the nicest place I know in England – and if I stretch my memory a little to what now feels like a past life, I can picture its loveliness – but…

Exeter. Done. No more. Over.

And pretty much immediately I left, and zoomed up to Yorkshire, and spend a couple of weeks in the bosom of the family being taken care of and putting everything straight for the coming journey ahead.

I jettisoned all possessions, leaving only one tiny folder of old school work (from the eighties) and necessary papers.

I had nothing left, save what I was going to take with me as carry-on on the plane.

Nothing in the whole entire world.

That’s a pretty nice feeling.

Yorkshire and London and maybe elsewhere and then ZOOM

I was with my mum for her birthday at the end of June; I remember that much. I was finishing a project or two of work for my chum and his consultancy agency, late nights and early mornings and mucho computerising, wot.

Yorkshire was nice but I think I mostly spent it in my room debating flat earthers and foolishly trying to point out to them the folly of their ways (a very bad habit I’d gotten into while living in Exeter and distracting magnificently from my work).

They’re a very crazy bunch – but perhaps not quite as crazy as the supposedly non-crazy ones who try to explain to them why they’re wrong.

A Grinch, I tells ya! Just let the children have their little Santa Claus and be done with it: that’s what I invariably decide, and rarely manage to stick to.

It just seems so obvious, you know – but the CT mind is strong, and its follies clearly way beyond my understanding and ability to deal with…

So I was doing that in Yorkshire – and eating good, parent and step-parent cooked food – and being asked nothing of me – and sleeping in a large comfy bed – and looking out the awesome window over a stunning green Yorkshire valley (when I could pull myself away from the computer) – and also just biding my time while waiting for Mexican bureaucracy wheels to turn and hook me up with a visa-making appointment at the embassy, plus awaiting something of a high school reunion back in the ol’ town where I grew up, with chums some not seen for nigh on twenty years.

There were about eight of us in the end, including my very first girlfriend, who I hadn’t seen since I was maybe nineteen or so, and I guess it was fun. Certainly, lots of laughing happened and cajoling and stories. One thing that was nice, I noticed, was people didn’t bother much with talking about work or achievements or all that blah blah – just skipped straight to the jokes and banter and frivolity.

Still, next day I woke up feeling like I wanted to kill myself more than ever, and I can’t work out whether it was something to do with the night, or maybe because I’d slept uncomfortable in a cemetery about three quarters of a mile from where I grew up, and the next day was a horrendous one.

In any case, lackaday, I jumped on a megabus to London and threw myself on a good and kind friend who’s a champion at tolerating my grumpiness and woes – one of the few and only ones, I guess, ‘cos I pretty much never ever share them, and also don’t really know many who would have the stomach for very much of it – and, I don’t know what happened next, but I guess I probably went for a visit or two to Kent, and had my bike stolen for foolishly leaving it outside, and finally did the embassy business and had Mexican work visa in hand, and then all that was left to do was go half-crazy for a week trying to buy a last minute, reasonably-priced one-way ticket to San Jose del Cabo for the beginning of August – and finally I did.

Like I say: ancient history. Funny to dredge up those woes and feelings of lostness and crisis.

A good idea?

Hoo! I don’t know and I don’t care – ‘cos after four or five months or not typing ANYTHING, jus’ typing WHATEVER is all good by me.

What a feeling, huh? It’s all grand, even when it’s dirt.

Mexican plane ticket

So, yeah, even magic Rory with his magic ticket-finding fingers struggled on this one: spent entire days searching and working on all the different machinations and beat his brow at not quite buying a very last minute ticket to Vancouver, only discovering it three hours before departure, and not acting quick enough to buy it and make the ninety minute journey to the airport with full certainty of getting there in time.

Still, I finally got one – a holiday-maker flight from Manchester to Cancun I planned to ditch the return portion for, and then a cheap one-way on a Mexican airline over to Cabo – and the price wasn’t all that bad, given I bought it like two days in advance.

A train up to Bicester. A meeting with a friend who happened to be driving from there to up past Manchester. A bit of thumbing and walking round unknown Lancashire villages and a great, groovy, out-of-his-way ride to the airport, and there I spent the night eating my last meal of English bread and cheese and sleeping groggy in the beautifully lit, perfectly noisy all-night airport lounges – and if I was feeling anything, I know not what it was: just forward motion; just a man on an airport moving walkway.

Everything was done. The right thing was happening. I was on my way to Mexico and what need for thought?

And the next day: one last British challenge – for these bloody, ever-cheapening airlines were now offering me only five kilos of carry-on luggage, and I had something more like twenty, and obviously checking in, and paying the associated charge, was out of the question.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve checked in a bag, and I don’t think I’ve ever done it on a flight where I had to pay for it. So…

Here’s a fun tip you’re welcome to use yourself: what you do is, go to the toilet before you check in; hide most of your stuff in the toilet trash can underneath the plastic sack; go check in and let them weigh your little red trolley-wheeled suitcase (which is by now 75% empty, since the thing itself weighs probably four kilos); do that business and then go wheeling back to the toilet; get there like literally seconds before the cleaner goes in, and race in in front of her; relievingly retrieve your stuff, and load up the suitcase once more; scuttle past the check in desk, and hope they don’t notice anything; and climb on board, safe in the knowledge you’ve done your utmost bit for world peace and global harmony, et cetera.

And whaddya know? I only went and got upgraded to ‘Premium Class’ too.

Extra legroom. Better food. A pillow and a blanket and even one of those lovely eyeshades and a few tiny bottles of cream I’ll never find reason to use, just like it was in the old days.

I tells ya: it just gets better and better and better.

Mexico

I landed in Cancun and –

But wait: should I maybe look back again at the whole seven months before all that? Think about England? Think about the weirdness of my year, which I’m now given to understand most people think a truly horrendous year ‘cos of Bowie and Trump and Brexit and Carrie Fisher and –

Ah, man, I had the horrors too, right up until I made my Mexico decision – but now I’ve spent the last four months in shorts and in the sun, and am currently sitting by a pool still in shorts and barefoot and in a t-shirt on the last day of the year – after five days over Christmas of laying in hot springs pool in my still beautiful canyon and digging all – well, yeah, 2016 don’t really feel all that bad to me, now it’s done. Now that my existential horrors of those first lost weird six months are ancient past life history.

Was I wrong in going back there sixteen months ago? Or was it just that I needed to suffer the doom to the utmost and final degree, to get me out of there once and truly for all?

I dunno: maybe both is true. But I’ll tell you this: there was a time, after I’d been here not too long, and school was kind of kicking my arse, and I wasn’t sure I could handle the teaching lark, and was even thinking some of England – there was this morning when I woke up from one of my timeless recurring dreams of yesteryear: when, in my dream, I’d found myself disembarking a plane in England – and then pretty much immediately found myself running around frantic trying to rectify the mistake, wondering what the hell I’d done in going back there, and feeling awful at how far I was from delightful Mexico.

It was the selfsame dream I’d had several times over when I was first at the hot springs canyon in ’99, still holding onto notions of going back to England and being ‘normal’, as I’d long been planning, and still not fully surrendered to the entire crazy magic trip that Mexico had lined up for me.

The dreams were awful – I was always so grateful to feverishly stick my head out the tent and realise I was – thank God! – still there in beautiful Mexican nature. And they only went away when I flung up my hands and said, okay! okay! I’ll stay.

And how wonderful to be visited again by that dream, as a silencer of even such a slight stirring of doubt, and maybe something more too…

The previous August had been a horror show, more lost and uncertain than I ever was in my life. I had no idea what to do, and wasn’t sure if escaping Mexico’s clutches was the right thing or not. I prayed and prayed for an answer: my usually infallible dreams gave me nothing, and what signs there were were inconclusive and could have been interpreted either way.

In the end, I went back, for lack of any clear other direction (and also being dirt broke, and all travelled out) and, despite the misery and hardships of that last year in England, there were still a lot of good and – you know me – seemingly pre-ordained and all in the grand scheme of things happenings too.

Just because it’s miserable, I guess, doesn’t mean it’s not meant to be.

Nor that escaping that misery, finally, when all karma and debts are paid; all desires exhausted; all necessaries achieved and accomplishments, ends tied up, preoccupations cleared – nor that that’s not the right thing too.

In any case, that dream was doubly wonderful to me, ‘cos not only did it mean that – yay! – there I was once more, in right place, right time, with faith and trust enough not to doubt it, but also this other subtler (and possibly invented) layer of meaning to the whole thing, predicated on the makes-sense-to-me notion that, well, couldn’t and wouldn’t Life have just as easily given me such a dream last year, when I was longing and sweating for it so much in my awful confusion?

And in a word: yes, in my philosophy, Life could and surely would have, had it been what was needed at the time.

So: England was the right thing. Everything that happened there was the right thing. Not taking the job the year before, or going elsewhere in Mexico, or not flying back to England was the right thing.

In a nutshell: everything was right. And after such an awful year of never feeling right, of always longing for the feeling of being in the right place, doing the right thing, and of being so constantly conscious of the absence of that…

Well, yes, gratitude and happy are the words. And smiling now at the thought of it and the breeze that just blew across my bare arms, and the rising of my thankful, heart-bursting chest.

It’s a mad life, you know – but a good ‘un.

Smilies

Now please note that I’ve probably wanted to end every little section with a smiley, but haven’t done so. Also, there were maybe a few other times I’ve resisted the urge. That’s interesting to me. Maybe it marks a new direction in my ‘writing’; I do tend to overuse them somewhat.

But, you know, typing makes me smile (he resists once more)…

Next

Something else happened that I can’t quite remember. Maybe I was going to say something about being back in England, and the things I accomplished there. Oh yes – a bit part of it was, believe it or not, my whole hang-up and preoccupation with being a football referee, and the weird bizarre idea that I could make up the ladder (my usual pride and ambition).

It’s funny and weird and bizarre to mention it now because, although I have a remembrance of being a chap for whom it was once a huge part of his life – and, indeed, often fuelled thoughts of England during my California and Colorado days – it’s really not something I think about at all anymore.

Weird that, that a desire and a mission and a plan and a real huge part of a person’s life can, once taken to its logical extreme, can so thoroughly and utterly dissolve that it doesn’t even figure or register and necessitates some heavy reminding from a part of me that is almost someone else to get me to realise that, not just ten decades or ten years, but ten months ago, it was pretty much the biggest and most important thing in my life.

Well, yes, thank God I went back to the UK and did it as much as I could and did and saw with my own two eyes and feet and whistle-blowing mouth that I wasn’t actually all that cut out for it after all – certainly not to take it the professional big wage, semi-fame, long holidays level that my foolish ambition had once longed for and – yup, if I wasn’t writing this it wouldn’t be in my head at all.

And another thing…

Eyes

One of the really awful things about going back to England – about going back to Europe actually, given that it started in Paris, before I’d even made it back to the UK – was that my eyes went mental. Suddenly everything was completely blurred. Signs at a distance I was reading without a problem I could no longer read. Faces and places and –

It was wicked sad. I couldn’t understand it. I thought my laser eye surgery had worn off. Or that I’d done something bad by taking too much LSD that one night.

Also, I thought maybe it was something to do with my leaving Mexico. That maybe I’d not only abandoned this fair country, but that I’d abandoned my soul; left my spiritual path; jettisoned ‘the way’, and the way that I’d fought so hard to rediscover after all those years, by breaking into and repeatedly crossing America; something like that.

I went to opticians. I went back to my laser folk. My eyes were getting worse, and seemingly worse by the day.

I got some contact lenses.

I cried in my soul.

And when I returned to Mexico, I remember standing in the awful Wal-Mart – I never dreamed I would end up as a man who shopped at Wal-Mart! – and realised I could barely read the big bold signs not even twenty feet away.

In my classroom, kids’ faces were a blur.

I couldn’t read the board from the back of the room.

And then one day, a few months ago, with me barely noticing, I realised I could see again. I could drive at night. I could read the grocery store signs, and see my kids’ faces.

So make of that what you will.

Where was I?

Sort of wondering whether to type more about England. Remembering other things fulfilled during my time back there, but also remembering them somewhat sensitive subjects, and ones I really should have learned by now it’s best not to wave around in public.

Like the time I…

And the thing with…

And – oh yeah! – that other one, on…

And…

I guess we can nutshell it: I guess we can say that – well, what I said above: that things and desires and ideas and notions and all the rest of it seemed to have gotten cleared up and, maybe it was right and maybe it was wrong – I don’t know! I don’t know! – but, when you get right down to it, I sit here today a happy chappy – and jolly happy for typing! – and groovily grateful and even heart-gushingly thankful that I took this plunge and that I came back once more to Baja – after I swore last year that I was done, no more! – and that that horrible feeling of being in the wrong place, of not knowing the right place, or carrying it day after day after day has gone.

That, you know, is pretty much what my life is about: feeling in the right place, doing the right thing, and avoiding feeling the opposite.

And the last four months – though, don’t get me wrong, not constantly ecstatic or perfect or without their own woes too – have been a testament to that.

Amen, you know. Thank you.

I guess I feel kind of rescued.

I guess it’s not necessarily happiness or comfort that matters, but just that feeling of doing the right thing.

For me that’s what it seems to be, anyway.

And enough of the abstract, more of the –

Well what more is there to say? That I became a school teacher in Mexico? That I woke up at 4am on my first day of classes not having a clue what I was going to do, or how I was going to do it, totally unsure whether I was cut out, whether I might not freeze, whether I would last even two weeks, and maybe let everyone down?

That I wear a nice pair of Costco trousers, and a checked Mexican Costco shirt tucked into my nice Mexican school teacher’s trousers, and brown shoes and a belt?

That the kids at my school are all so unbelievably lovely, and that in four months, in a school of 150+ teenagers, I haven’t heard one single cross word, seen a single argument, heard one angry raised voice, save my own?

They boggle my mind, these kids. They make me question things I thought about reality. Things like…

Teenagers, huh? They’re supposed to be difficult, right? And they’ve got raging hormones, and they can’t help themselves. Puberty. Rebellion. All kinds of confusion going on.

But Mexican kids have hormones too, have puberty – and yet there’s none of the confrontation and aggression and rebellion that I’ve seen in England, in the US, in pretty much everywhere else.

They’re just cool. They’re happy. In my school, literally every single kid is friends with every single other kid, across all ages and backgrounds.

There’s something more going on here than just hormones and puberty – for if these kids can deal with things and express themselves maturely and eloquently and talk without anger, why can’t ours?

It’s an echo of something I’ve been saying for years: the only angry people I’ve ever seen in Mexico were the gringos, were moaning Brits at the airport on their way home.

There’s something in the bones down here. Something we don’t have, and aren’t likely to ever get, no matter how hard we try with our spiritual posturing and endless meditations and babbles about love and peace and oneness.

I’m reminded often of an event when I was in Mexico City back in 2009, staying in the very wonderful and exclusive and fairly European neighbourhood of Condesa. The woman of the couple I was staying had taken her dog to be shampooed, etc – they all get their dogs shampooed in Condesa; and the dogs always come back wearing neckerchiefs around their neck, which I guess I interpreted as being some hip and cool and chic middle-class sort of thing, but perhaps it’s not – and, anyway, since we were all off somewhere important she’d explained to the guy that she absolutely and without failure had to have the dog by, let’s say, noon and noon sharp and no way could it be later than noon, ‘cos we had things to do, and must be off.

Anyway, we get there just before noon, and of course the dog’s not only not finished being seen to, but not even started. And the bloke just smiles and says, oh, no problem, we’ll do him now, and the woman comes out and says what’s what and everything’s just accepted, life goes on.

But my English brain was bubbling and boiling. How could she let them get away with this? Surely she was angry? Surely she would be demanding some form of compensation? There was no way she should be paying for this, or the next one, or the one after that. And the manager must know. And letters must be written. And, if not heads must roll, at least a grovelling apology and maybe a firing or two.

I asked her, aren’t you angry? – and all she said was, what would be the point in that?

It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t stuffing it down and breathing to eleven and muttering one’s mantra.

It was natural. It was, as I’ve said, and will keep on saying, in her bones.

I marvelled, as I marvel today at the kids at my school who show me, again and again, that it’s in their bones and, much as I try, and far as I’ve come, it’s not in mine. And in that, the other great lesson for –

Well, you know, you become a teacher and you have foolish ideas about this and that, such as all the other extra curriculum things I can teach them beyond grammar and literature and – hitchhiking! life! camping and nature! and all the great groovy things I learned sitting at the feet of saints and crossing my legs alone atop mountains and –

Yeah, that sort of thing: the things that were so valuable to me when I was finally learning something useful, around my early to mid-twenties.

How to process emotions. How to deal with projection. How to not be pissy and petty and passive aggressive and proactive and all those other useful things that begin with p plus other letters besides…

But I spend a few weeks with them and I realise they’ve already get it all. They know this stuff, not ‘cos somebody taught them, but, because – altogether now – it’s in their bones. And I see it so clearly, in the ways they interact with each other, and in the ways they just smile and me and carry on being happy and calm in the moments when I let my teacher frustration get the better of me and raise my voice and feel annoyed.

But they just smile, and in that smile I see so clearly the reflection of how ridiculous and useless it is to channel emotional energy into feeling angry with someone who’s not quite doing my bidding.

With life, for not quite doing my bidding.

I have nothing to teach these kids. All my Buddhist posturings and ego ambitions were nothing but hopeful preparations for maybe approaching a place where I might get to be born with bones like these. And that makes me question even more: makes me question the whole nature of Western spirituality, which I maybe know a thing or two about, and makes me think of a lot of people I know too.

These kids, you know, I think a big part of what they’ve got is the whole growing up in the Mexican family structure where children aren’t necessarily seen as a burden to be shed as soon as possible, as a hindrance that keeps one from one’s dreams, or just from the pub, but – shock, horror – as a blessing, and something to be well and truly loved.

We know all this of course, and we try to do the same – but what we don’t realise is that the ability to do this, and to pass it on – well that’s in the bones too, as well as the lack of it.

These kids here – and the people here in general, it seems – seem to have an almost total lack of the insecurity which plagues almost everyone I know, and perhaps drives our entire (so-called) civilisation.

It was striking when the gringos all came back in October – those awful, awful gringos – and I watched them skulking and scuttling through the stores and streets, hungry expressions in their eyes, as though there was something forever missing, something they were looking for – that they hoped to find on shelves, perhaps, or in bars – and it was an absence that the Mexicans didn’t seem to have.

I wondered, God, do I look like that too? Can they sense it in me?

It’s so clearly writ on the faces of the Americans I see round here.

I sure hope it’s not writ on mine.

And – as I was saying about Western spirituality – which is of course born in gringoland – is it not then possible that the whole thing – the whole apparent “search for God” – “transcendence of the ego” – “following one’s bliss” – is nothing more than an extension of this awful pit of insecurity and lack of love in one’s upbringing, and the emptiness in our bones, inherited and passed on down from generations hundreds of years passed?

I know people who think they’re somewhat enlightened – and, when you get right down to it, they’re some of the angriest and most insecure people I know.

What could be a better tonic for an uncertain and afraid ego than to grasp onto and wear the robes of a holy Buddha, and to be looked up to and adored?

We think we’re so evolved and far along the path. We think we’ve discovered secrets and entered into ancient mysteries reserved for the chosen few.

We’re frightened children who want our mummies, ‘cos we never really had them in the first place, and we’re covering all that fright in posturings the smiling Wal-Mart checkout girls see right through in an instant.

That’s what I think.

Next?

Well that was fun: it kind of flowed out and probably expressed more than fifty percent of what I hoped it would while it was a foetus in my head. There’s more I want to say – thought I wanted to say – but now it’s pretty much time to go to a New Year’s Eve dinner and play games with my one friend here in Cabo and his family.

Perhaps lonesomeness: that’s what I should be talking about next, given that it’s what I’ve been thinking about lots the past few days.

Though know that I’ve done gone typed a good five thousand words and been overtaken once more with the joyous spirit of the typing fool I am, lonesomeness don’t seem such an issue.

I guess the keyboard is my bestest friend. An ever-willing ear. A captive and attentive audience. And one who never interrupts.

Oh, what a fool I’ve been procrastinating all these days on flat earth numpties when all these words have been right there waiting to be birthed, but my fear kept them within!

And how that sentence strikes at my very heart – whatever a “very” something is – when I contemplate all the hundreds of hours I think of all the words and stories and books I would like to set down, but constantly run away from doing so, because of this fear – and one day, don’t you know, we’ll all be dead, and then there’ll be no possibility of fulfilling anything…

But, as I was saying, lonesomeness – and note I say, very specifically, “lonesome” rather than “lonely” or “alone” – for that feels the more apt word – and, anyway, it also feel like a very specific type of lonesomeness: lonesome for a woman’s touch; the softness of a woman’s body; a tender kind of love.

The remembrance of a hand brushing through my hair on a beach, and the shudders it sent through me, and almost shuddering me to tears, how beauteous and long-missed and true it felt.

And not that I’m talking about sex – that so often seems to mess things up, to pollute, to complicate and sully – but…well, it’s true and weirdly true that I’ve been thinking about woman, and looking and longing these last few months, perhaps more than I ever have in my life.

Ah! How good I used to be about never thinking on such things. How striking the comparison between the five days I just spent at the hot springs and the seven weeks I was first there, when I don’t remember yearning for woman once (thinking only of soul matters).

But, you know, reality is reality and one must accept it, not push it away – and this is my reality right now.

Though I did get to wondering: is lonesomeness really a thing that needs to be dealt with, or is it perhaps symptomatic of something else? Which is, of course, a horrible and meaningless sentence, so let me try and explain…

What I was wondering was…in the moment –

(Three days later)

And then I went to my New Year’s Eve dinner feeling like I was twelve feet tall and ate and chatted and was silly and played board games and, once more, typing had to wait…