May 18, 2003
Puerto Escondido, Mexico
~2800 miles

i wake in puerto escondido with the following playing over and over in my head ...

out of the dust i came and into the dust i shall go.
but one day, maybe i will return to live as one of the great ones,
and oh, what a marvelous thing that will be.

hey, that doesn't even rhyme.  the great ones?  what, has he totally buggered his cpu chip?

i guess i have a personal concept of what life will evolve into over the next 500 to 1000 years-- assuming we ever get that far.  its a vision of something like a collective mind connected via superfluid interfaces to our own personal selves. bodies which are not bound necessarily by human shapes anymore, but only by other more fantastic and glorious things of our own imaginations ... (thinking of smoke curling up wistfully from the nose of Shepard's fanciful caricature in "the reluctant dragon")... a time when people have realized that all things are precious, and all beings are precious...

yes, perhaps its a little too john lennon "imagine" for your tastes ... but it must come, or we will perish... i truly believe that. gone are the times when a disgruntled lot can sail across the seas and find a bountiful new land to call their own--one only sparsely populated by mostly friendly natives.  we are at elbow-room only now, and it will get much worse before it gets better. 

think me a little crazy... a little idealistic... ah yes, but ask yourself... what is the endpoint? permit yourself a little wild extrapolation (as mr. clarke would prefer) for just a silly second... what happens to a world where all the free space has been used up, and the population triples from where it is now? what happens when all the fresh water has been drunk? all the oil has been burned?  what happens when the u.s. military can defeat any army at will, and uses robot drones to patrol the skies?  what happens when technology keeps getting faster and faster and smaller and smaller and we start to clone ourselves and grow human kidneys inside of pigs?  what happens when goats are modified to spin spiders silk in their milk?  its not just a hairy-armpit hippie mantra or a right-wing rabid conservative lament anymore... it is the future, and we are rushing headlong for it.  some try to deny its coming and legislate it out of existence.  some call it the singularity... i am unsure, but hopeful.  we must run out to the street corner and meet this crazy thing.  we must think about what we are doing...  and we must shape it into a positive vision for our future.  but it requires thought and intention and cooperation.  things that i'm not sure i see a lot of these days...  without them, i think what we tend to end up with is political compromise.... which has been scientifically proven to result in nothing.

i used to think when i looked at an old person and i saw a timid withdrawn look that it was just the price of age... weakness... frailty.  but sometimes now i think that maybe they've seen enough of a span of time, and seen so much incredible change in their lives, that they're just scared like fucking hell for the rest of us...  maybe its a look that says:

i'm about to go, but you have more time... look around you... care about what you do and what you say... care about what you leave behind.

mom, dad..  are you optimists or pessimists ... and as you get older, do you care as much?

...

yes, we are now a single organism to a degree.  maybe it happened when the first three computers were connected together, or when the www was launched and web-pages were created and could be browsed.... by robots... so that they could be found by humans through searches...  or maybe it happened when bell said "watson, come here i need you"....  or maybe when someone put pen to paper, or pigment to stone wall... or when we first crawled out of the muck and <burped> at one another, or when the first cell divided.  where ever you draw the mark in the past, from now it will become more and more apparent that as we superglue ourselves together with cellphones, email, sms and instant messages we are becoming a single organism constantly in communication, our veins flowing with tcp/ip.   in 75 years, when we seamlessly instant message each other straight out of our own minds without keyboard or screen, when you are subconsciously aware of the presence of your lover's beating heart, even though she is 3000 miles away, people will think back and they will ask:  when did this begin?

if there is truly a larger human mind now, then its magic floating genie head has got to be Google...

"ask Google... " i say to my father over the sat phone... "oh, do a 'Google' on that... "use these three words... "

over the past couple years i have gotten addicted to being able to search at will, to let my mouse wander over the collective mind... i miss it... and then of course i am reminded that separating my self from that so i can get some real thinking done is why i am on the trip in the first place....   ha!  fat fucking chance... there's an internet cafe on every goddamned dirt road on planet earth now.

...

puerto escondido is the first real town with "the flava". that surfer-dude, 'cas attitude flava. it has a beautiful beach, with a wonderful little cafe called carmen's cafe-lita.

.... but
south of puerto escondido... ah yes...
south of puerto escondido...
south of puerto escondido...

the road narrows...  and the air changes...

it is palpable now... i can feel it. my guard is up. i keep the alarm separate from the keys in the ignition when i drive. it is wilder down here... the people are poorer. much poorer. they don't just set up roadside stands now, they rush the car in a flock of 10 or 20, all with things to sell, and few with smiles on their faces. coco frios? coca? plantano? por favor, por favor!  jesus...

i am beginning to understand i think... the closer to america, the closer to d.f. you are, the more people have... but once you pass that point where you are no longer getting closer to one or the other, but rather getting further from both... things change markedly...  not even fucking coca-cola sponsors these little towns with welcome signs down here.  did i mention the coca-cola welcome signs?   at the beginning of nearly every town up north... ugh...  and vincente fox, the president of the country, used to be the head of coca-cola mexico... just what have we wrought?  how far has our hand gone?  ah... but the answer is so obvious, isn't it?   mexico's political history is a history of corruption, power and exploitation... and one wonders... for coca-cola to be so powerful, so all-pervasive, don't they have to be the ultimate masters of playing that game... can i go so far as to say purposefully perpetuating that game?  isn't the answer to that question essentially self-evident?  in a country where nothing gets done without greasing a palm, to have your sign at the beginning of every town is a testament to having the biggest grease-pot around.   hmmm... i wonder where that expense goes on the P&L statement?

later.... approaching chiapas....

my poor radiator is thirsty all the time now... i try keeping the release valve on the radiator cap up all the time, hoping she will drink from the overflow, but no such luck. i must just fill her when she begs for more.

on to salinas cruz... for a radiadores shop i hope. ...

eating pollo late in the afternoon and watching Fox Kids en espanol... i finally realized where these guys make all their margin... i mean... even as low-budget as the cartoon work is on kids shows these days (not to mention what they must have left over to pay for a plot) it must be pretty labor intensive to make a cartoon... but hey... to make the same thing look as professionally produced in spanish, all you have to do is dub it over. since their mouths never move in sync with the words anyway, it looks just the same! (or maybe all the cartoons these days are really done in russian first and i just never realized it).

paulina rubia .. tal vez quiza -- paulina rubia is a babe...
mana - eres mi religion ...

spanish (mexican?) mtv (ritmoson latino) is way better than american mtv... the videos have real
meaning and passion that shines through.... (even though i have no idea what they are saying... must watch mtv back home with the sound off and see if i feel the same way).

...

and from there i climbed up into the mountains towards san cristobal...  good to finally get into thinner, cooler air. and the rain...  a beautiful transfixing landscape...

like an idiot i drove too late and missed what must have been a heart-stopping view on the drive up to san cristobal... got wrapped up listening to iio - rapture (stephane k & creamers mix) had an idea for a music video... cars, trucks moving, dancing to a beat.  my mind is seriously warped.  someone please tell me to shut up and go to bed.

shut up and go to bed.