I had chosen to take the #22 Clark bus south to meet my friend at our chosen destination, a Scottish pub in the City’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The Clark bus is one of those lines that seems to extend forever and goes through so many of Chicago’s key neighborhoods. Start riding at the northernmost extreme, and by the time you reach downtown, you’ll have passed through the trendy LGBT neighborhood of Andersonville, taken a gander at historic Wrigley Field, whizzed past the Chicago History Museum and landed in the thick of it all in Chicago’s Loop.

I boarded the bus at 11:45 AM, just in time to catch the beginnings of a crowd headed over to the Friendly Confines for Game 3 of the Cubs’ home opening series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cubbies are an institution in the Windy City, one of the National League’s original teams founded in 1876. Yet 135 years later, there’s still something so magical about those early season games: the predictably uneven April weather which can have you reaching for your winter coat or a pair of shorts with equal likelihood, the unblemished statistics of the Lovable Losers, a time when you can still believe this might finally be the Cubs year.

On this afternoon, shortly after I took my seat on the crowded bus, a man boarded with his adorable two year-old son. Father and child, decked out in their Chicago Cubs finery, were en route to the boy’s first baseball game. At any time, I would have been struck with this child’s preternatural cuteness: dark red hair, fair complexion, precocious yet clumsy walking ability and the hugest smile I have seen in awhile. His vocabulary, rather limited at this stage of toddler life, was big enough to convey the child’s most important thoughts, alternating between “Are we there yet?” and “baseball!” I am nearly 33 years old, and I could relate.

The boy’s father was nearly as excited as his son. The thrill of being able to share a beloved experience with his offspring, introducing the uninitiated into the magical world of balls and strikes, the beauty of whiling away an afternoon with peanuts and crackerjack, the man’s joy was palpable through the crowded bodies and smell of exhaust. And though this scene was one of honesty, delight and love, it kicked me right in the gut.

I am about to be divorced – for the second time. My two failed attempts at matrimony produced no children, a scenario for which I am usually grateful. I have made the conscious decision to leave my womb barren and given my track record with “forever,” I am grateful that I have not subjected another generation to my personal instability. 99.9% of the time, I am at peace in a world in which I am beholden to nobody as I struggle to find my place.

But oh how that 0.01% can hurt, as it did last week. As I smiled at the boy and his father, passing the short ride to Wrigley in innocent, excited conversation, a small voice inside my head began to grow louder and more demanding. “Who will remember you when you’re gone? What have you taught anybody? And for God’s sake, why is it so damned hard for you to hold onto love?”

How can it be that something a majority of the world does, like settle down with someone and have a couple of kids, is so thoroughly beyond me? It is my habit to ask rhetorical questions for which there are clearly no answers.

A minute or so after my silent foray into existentialism, I felt awful for making a beautiful moment between a father and son about me. The writer’s pitfall I guess. Nothing really happens unless it relates to the self, right? Then I realized, as I continued listening to their happy chatter, that my aim was one of a social scientist, as if by eavesdropping on the easy conversation of the fulfilled, I could figure out the formula. I might be able to crack the code of “normalcy,” absorb it by osmosis or something, and leave the bus somehow more whole, more open to giving and receiving love than I had boarded it.

But before my work was done, the charming duo reached their destination. The boy excitedly bid everyone aboard the bus adieu and within moments, the two were lost amongst a sea of peanut sellers, ticket scalpers and throngs of baseball fans waiting to endure enhanced security checks. There is no inconvenience too great for the happy tailgater.

The father and son’s absence was immediately felt aboard the bus. The elderly woman who had been beaming at the two, and asking questions about the boy’s development for the last several miles, returned to her newspaper with a serious mien. The bus driver, amiable and upbeat moments ago, retreated behind his bulletproof shield, eyes once again focused on the road. And as I headed toward my final destination, a carefree brunch with a friend who had nothing real to gain or lose by my presence, I realized I may have come as close to a secure sense of belonging as I will ever get.

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,
I had to stop for the night.
There she stood in the doorway,
I heard the mission bell.
And I was thinking to myself -
This could be heaven or this could be hell.
Then she lit up a candle, and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor -
I thought I heard them say…

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room in the Hotel California
Any time of year, you can find it here …

You know the rest of the song. While there are many Hotel California’s on the peninsula, the one in Todos Santos capitalized on the legend the most. The whole world vision of some tropical episode of The Twilight Zone accurately captures the essence of Todos Santos, except that the reality is more positive. The bottom line is, there are touristic experiences and there are touristic experiences, and perhaps the way Todos Santos was in the beginning goes a long way towards explaining why it’s a refuge for lefty expatriates from American Bohemialand who want to go native.

Geographically, Todos Santos sits at the very end of a funnel for a vast watershed that flows down from the mountains. Because of this, Todos Santos has the incongruous air of Hawaii or Cuba sitting smack dab in the middle of the Mexican desert. In 1800, it was the site of sugar plantations, and you can still see the ruins or restored buildings when you walk around the town. Fast forward to the 1930s when Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paid a visit to the exploited sugar cane workers. You can see the results from that era, not only from the remnants of a revolutionary mural painted in his style, but by the original self-portrait of Frida hanging on the wall among the amateur and lesser artistic lights in the Centro Cultural. Forty years later, an earthquake cut off the water supply, and Todos withered on the vine. While this was an extremely bad thing at the time, it turned out to be a positive for Todos in the long run, as the Mexican government decided to put all its chips into developing the little fishing village of Cabo San Lucas instead.

I don’t care what you’ve been told, or by whom. Cabo San Lucas is an abomination and a low grade tourist hell. I tell all of my ignorant, stupid California acquaintances that Cabo is the only place to go in all of Baja. The rest of the peninsula is infested with scorpions, rattlesnakes, banditos, and drug dealers. Enough people go to Cabo in their timeshares, and they’re as happy as pigs in slop, and that’s just fine with me. That way the Mexican government can keep the white man on the rez, leaving the rest of the peninsula to me.

Moving forward slightly in time to the late 70s and early 80s, some American refugees from Taos and Southern California settled in the dry abandoned town, including the soon to be world famous painter, Charles Stewart. Boho attracted boho, and the makings of a real honest to goodness artists’ colony was born. Charles Stewart told his friends, and the rest of the history is what you see in the main part of town. When you walk up and down Calle Juarez, you’ll see tiny tienda after tienda of artists selling their own work. And then you have the world class restaurants with internationally trained chefs trying to outdo each other, and the small four or five star boutique hotels. And they’re all surrounded by Mexicans.

The whole feeling is very much like a summer camp for refugees from Beverly Hills. Because it’s Baja, there’s plenty of Third World vibe here. But the food and the art and the world view and attitudes and sophistication give Todos Santos a very different ambiance from the trailer park full of gringo fishermen or the millionaire ghettos that you’ll encounter elsewhere all over the peninsula. And yes, there is a substantial industry presence here. How else do you explain my movie habits? I never go to the movies in the States because all the good ones are shown while I’m in Mexico, and I don’t believe in DVDs most of the time. But here I was, watching bootleg copies of The King’s Speech and True Grit when I wasn’t putting in requests for illegal copies of Inside Job and the latest award winner from Cannes. 50 pesos each. No more, no less.

But of course, in the culture here there’s a reverse snobbism at work. The tiny hotels and most of the shops are really for the suckers. And the highest status americanos are actually the ones that have assimilated the most into Mexican culture. By far, you’ve got more street cred if you speak Spanish well and pursue your art. The actual lower status gringos live in the conventional millionaire ghettos along the beach. I saw the winner of the status contest in grocery store while I was shopping. “Are you gringo or Mexicano?” I asked. The man admitted that he was originally from Southern California, but that he’d lived here full time for 35 years.

And because the refugees are from So-So Cal, you’ll find more New Age, healing crystals, yoga, and astrology than you could possibly stand. As for example, I was talking with Michael, the chef at Gemini – named because the Tropic of Cancer is so old that the heavens have actually shifted one astrological sign, thus making Todos sit on the Tropic of Gemini. We got into an extended discussion on the nature of Betelguese, the largest star in the constellation of Orion which is currently in the process of imploding. At some time in the near future, Betelguese will explode, going supernova. Michael contended that within a year, we’ll be able to see another sun in the sky at night. I bet $500 to his $1 that by the end of 2012, Betelguese will still look normal. My wife asked where the name of the star came from, and I joked “the movie.”

And to add a bit of spice to the mix, this is an excellent place to retire to if you’ve spent a lot of time in the CIA or other such establishments. An indicator of this is the “ham radio operator” sitting on top of a hill with all of the usual equipment, except for the stuff on steroids. He has a giant movable earth station dish that’s usually pointed straight up. I suppose that if he was a radio astronomer, he could scan for signals from alien planets all he wanted to. As a cheeky response to that, another rich Californio built a very futuristic house on an opposite hill that has what appears to be a giant flying saucer hovering over his abode. When I climbed up to the top of another hill to take a picture of the two juxtaposed, I was disappointed. The earth station guy had his dish pointed at the horizon, monitoring the nuke plant chatter from the Japanese earthquake disaster. The earth dish was invisible.

Recently there was a little incident that took place on Calle Juarez. Wifey and I ran into a big, fat, red-faced guy with his porky family taking promiscuous pictures of everything from their day trip up from Cabo. I disparagingly remarked that they must be Germans. I was wrong. They were Canadians. He looked at me in my Ray Bans, and my black tee shirt, and faded designer jeans with contempt, and he said, “It’s too bad. Some people just don’t know when to give up work when they’re on vacation.”

I knew I was superior. Or at least, I’d like to think that I’m that way. But what do I really know?

It wasn’t the first time I had tried it or the last time I would regret it. But early in the winter of 1969 it became clear that regret would be taking a backseat to risk if I were to ever make it out of my teens alive.

So when my boyfriend slipped that frail needle into the raised blue arc of my fourteen-year-old veins, I smiled with compliant trust and a virginal anticipation endemic only to children and the clinically lost.

At that fledgling age, redundancy is unknowable and ignorance unimaginable. That any of us survived the repeated missteps of our youth at all is ample evidence of divine intervention.

Initially, you might assume that my addiction began right there; as a rebellious, self-loathing newcomer to autonomy caught in the volley between conscience and need. I was, after all, an impetuous, distractible, second-rate firstborn whose choices swayed decidedly to the far left of consequence with a desire for external validation, so insidious, it was an addiction in and of itself.

But that would be a false assumption.

Addiction is not seeded in desire or in its object but in their respective abuse, and I cannot remember a point in my life when the abuse of both has not been my reality.

The object of my desire has always been more accurately, an objective: escape; but until the winter that followed our family’s relocation from New York to Kansas City, all means to that end had been ostensibly innocent, organic and internal.

Previously, escape had been facilitated by the vagrant chords of music and song that drowsed endlessly through my head from infancy. Music that would later speak directly to me throughout my childhood compelling me to rock back and forth on the floor or on the edge of my bed for hours as I ruminated over which of the four Beatles I would marry or how to best get the attention of the boy down the street.

The further away in thought I could get from the clumsy, unexceptional, pudding-faced, non-entity whose spirit felt trapped by circumstance and cursed by a conscious awareness of soul and self, the more graced I became with a forbearance to take her sad visage into the following day.

But the radical shifting that occurs in both personal and family dynamics after a long-distance move provides unusual opportunities for reinvention, and I took advantage of all that were available to me.

The non-entity was vanquished and in her place came the maddening rebel whose lack of respect for her host purged the odds of all restraints. There was little I would not do for attention or liberation from the cloddy and cumbersome introvert shackled to my past even if that entailed censoring my conscience as I navigated my present.

And so at fourteen years old I began an intimate and dependent relationship with hallucinogens, amphetamines, barbiturates and heroin that lasted well into my twenties.

Unfortunately, it is not over.

That deadly barge of desire and myopic obsession for quick passage to Anywhere But Here still yearns to sail every single waking moment of my life, and although I have not yielded to its darkest cravings since the birth of my first child twenty-eight years ago; I have only to think of that child – now a man – to understand that the worst part of any addiction is that we never self-destruct before taking hostages.

Every single person who has ever loved us is an innocent victim of our deliberate indifference. I know this because as my son now suffers the retributive justice of succumbing to these same ruinous impulses from his small cell in a state prison, neither can I see any further than the mortar and brick that close him in.

If anyone doubts the genetic probability that constitutional discontent can be transferred from parent to child, think again.

It is from guilt, shame, separation and grief that I write and for liberation from the malignant assumption that it may never be any better than this that I long.

Words have become my current addiction.

Blogging, my rig.

Divine intervention may still be my best hope.

In the meantime, I write.

My wildly oversimplified notions of Reed are based on stories from a polyamorous, Utilikilt-wearing Seattleite I went out with once (before I knew he was polyamorous or owned a Utilikilt or that The Polyamorous Utilikilt-Wearer was yet another Pacific Northwest type) and from a guy I went to college with back East who had transferred to Swarthmore from Reed at the beginning of his junior year. “Jake Anderson”—a blond, Canadian hockey-player who I met in biology lab—had made the switch from the tiny West Coast college to the tiny East Coast one, he said, because his sartorial style—worn-out vintagey tweed blazers over worn-out old shapeless t-shirts—was “too preppy” by Pacific Northwest standards. This solidified my impression of the region as terrifyingly grungy. Jake didn’t feel like he fit in Portland, so he graced us with his soothing Northern vowels. He was good at biology and paid attention to me and could run really fast, and for the two years of college we overlapped, I suffered a massive crush on the guy.

I grew up in Iowa, and to my Midwestern eyes, Jake’s style seemed the exact right amount of preppy—which I figured made me the perfect match for him. Eventually we would fall (mutually) in love, get married, move to Toronto, and have two or three blond babies—one of which I would grudgingly allow to play hockey. The fact that Jake had a serious girlfriend didn’t phase me. He never introduced her to me, so how serious could she really be?

My deeply unrealistic sense of how the whole dating thing worked was mostly because I’d never done it. Even my attempts at flirtation were flimsy—angling to spend extra time with Jake working on our lab reports and inviting him to monthly dinners on “pasta bar night” at the college dining hall. In my mind, I was offering myself up as a clearly superior alternative to his current girlfriend. In his mind I was probably a mildly amusing younger-sister-type with a decent head for science. I would sneak frequent glances at him during class, and when he caught me he’d smile and give a little wave—all the encouragement I needed to start imagining how “Anderson” would sound as my last name.

I was by any measure a late bloomer—no sign of my period until 10th grade, no real signs of interest from the opposite sex until, oh, graduate school. While my peers were reading Sweet Valley High books and getting their first kisses at summer camp, I was busy becoming a certified Super Sitter and learning to sew hair scrunchies to sell at my Mennonite hairdresser’s salon. I read every book in the young adult section of the public library starring a misunderstood female protagonist and was especially fond of the stories in which the protagonist dies—but only after her family realizes that she was their greatest blessing and the popular kids come to visit her in the hospital and realize that she actually was super cool—they’d just never noticed.

Throughout middle- and high school and well into college I saw no action. I was—and am—an observer. From my corner vantage point I did, however, develop scores of crushes. In as much as someone who doesn’t date can have a “type,” Jake wasn’t actually mine. I gravitated—in the privacy of my own mind—towards skinny, brown-haired, atheist Jews. Jake was buff and blond and decidedly WASPy, but I loved him anyway.

He volunteered for the tiny local fire department, and seemingly every time the two of us dined together the alarm would sound from the station at the base of campus and Jake would run off mid-bite, leaving me to clear his tray and throw away his uneaten food and pine, pine, pine. The fact that he had a girlfriend wasn’t the problem—the volunteer firefighting was the problem.

Every guy who had ever expressed a lick of interest in me had been unavailable. The guy who cheered when we were paired as dance partners in chorus in 9th grade turned out to be gay. (Surprise!) The guy who occasionally held my hand in art class in 11th grade was practically married to a much older girl. The guy who taught me calculus in 12th grade would have been violating any number of social norms—and laws—had I gotten my way. I felt entirely unnoticed by boys, so when one wanted to hold my hand or write me a hall pass so I could stay after class or eat dinner with me for five minutes before being called off to wield a giant fire hose—obviously they were sort of interested, right? Otherwise, wouldn’t they ignore me like all the other boys?

For two years Jake and I met up for the occasional dinner and exchanged pleasantries whenever our paths crossed—which on a campus of 1,200 students happens at least once a day. After he graduated, I had two years of school left. I thought of him every time the town fire alarm sounded and wondered if something in his new, post-college life reminded him of me.

My expectations from boys remained exceptionally low until sometime after graduate school when I moved to Seattle (despite, not because of, the hippie stereotype) and finally realized I was a massively late bloomer. I invested in a pair of cat-eye glasses, started taking filmmaking classes, and suddenly I was getting actual dates. The cool boys of Seattle thought I was cool, and most of them weren’t even vegan. More importantly, some of them wanted to sleep with me—at least until their moms caught wind of the fact that their 23-year-old guitarist/bassist/composer/filmmaker sons were dating a 31-year-old woman with a quickly growing collection of newborn-sized hats and onesies.

Eventually I found a moderately skinny, brown-haired, atheist Jew who thought (and to the best of my knowledge still thinks) I’m sexy and was old enough to also want babies (and his mother was old enough to want grandbabies). Here I am at thirty-five, married to an emergency medicine doctor with a fondness for t-shirts advertising the firefighting companies of his search and rescue buddies. When I hear the wail of a siren these days, I do not think of Jake. Instead I wonder whether they’re taking burn victims to my husband’s hospital. He likes dealing with that sort of thing.

When I heard a dozen or so fire trucks coming down our street yesterday, though, my first thought was the same as anyone else’s: I hope our house doesn’t catch on fire. I grabbed the baby and went to survey the scene. Apparently a neighbor had left a pot on the stove a while she was away. By the time we arrived, the flames had been doused and the few firefighters left were giving neighborhood kids tours of the one lingering engine.

“Look,” I said to the baby, pointing to the big red truck. “That’s a fire engine—like in your book.” She started blowing at the truck because that’s what you do to a candle on a birthday cake and to a one-year-old birthday candle = fire = fire engine. “And that,” I said, pointing at one of the guys in full regalia, “is a firefighter. They’re our friends and help keep us safe.”

The baby started blowing at the firefighter, who glanced our way. I peered at his face under his helmet and found myself gazing once again into the eyes of Jake Anderson—and I don’t mean metaphorically.

Standing before me, two doors down from my house in Seattle was a slightly older, slightly beefier version of the blond, Canadian, hockey-playing object of my unrequited affection 3,000 miles away from where we’d last seen each other fifteen years ago.

“Holy shit,” I said. I stared at Jake Anderson. Jake Anderson stared at me.

The only thing different about our stares was that Jake Anderson’s could only be described as blank. He had no idea who I was. I gave a little wave and reminded him my name. Nothing registered on his face. “Swarthmore College?” I added. “Biology lab?”

“We went to college together,” I announced to the various neighbors and firemen who were beginning to stare at me instead of the recently burning house. “He was a volunteer firefighter and every time we had dinner together the alarm would go off and he’d have to leave me stranded,” I laughed—implying that if it had been up to Jake, he would have lingered over his baked ziti and over-steamed broccoli for hours, just to be with me.

“I thought of you the other day,” I told him, explaining about my brother-in-law and the Reed job and why I thought it wouldn’t be a good match.

“I went to Reed!” he said with surprise.

“Yeah,” I stammered… “I remember. That’s my point… The whole preppy thing…” I trailed off in defeat. Here I am, a published writer and award-winning filmmaker married to a cute doctor, raising a cute baby and looking pretty damn cute myself. I’d finally figured out how to forge my own kind of sexy and my own kind of flirty and NOW I was invisible to this guy? Not just “I’ll have dinner with you once a month because you’re good at biology and you’re my lab partner”–invisible but                         -invisible. One hundred percent nonexistent. No lab reports had ever been co-authored, no rudely interrupted five-minute dinners had ever been had, no ceaseless pining on my part had ever penetrated his consciousness. Jake Anderson had no memory of me whatsoever.

He stepped forward and extended his hand, polite Canadian that he is. “Jake Anderson,” he said, looking me in the eye. Like I wouldn’t know. Like I was some kind of forgetful pot-head or something.

“Coffee to start,” he said, and watched her for a moment. Brown hair with some kind of gilt streak through it, gathered in a neutral colored net at the nape of her neck. Smooth skin, even her hands, the nails clean if a little long; they curved gracefully over her fingertips, unpainted. She wore no rings, he noted automatically.

He shifted his bulk (gotta lose this gut, he thought) onto the stool and looked the rest of the place and its inhabitants over, like the cop he would always be.

He knew his city, but he couldn’t remember if the food here was good or not. It had all the characteristics of his favorite greasy spoons…not quite as clean as the health inspector would prefer (probably slipped the schmo a buck or two to look the other way, those guys were all on the take), which made the food that much better. Clean a griddle too enthusiastically, in his humble opinion, the food started tasting like metal.

He watched the guy cooking, with his broad back to the clientele. Gym rat, he thought contemptuously, enviously, but too old for it. The guy’s hair was in a braid down his back, hanging damn near to the knot in the butcher’s apron tied at his narrow waist, and it was silver gray. Biker? Vietnam? Who cared, he thought indifferently as something on the hot griddle smoked and sizzled in front of the cook.

There was a dark-haired woman in a booth next to the far wall, idly toying with a dish of some kind of fruit salad. Gah, he thought, Christ knows where that shit came from, and it had a truly unnatural sheen to it; he wouldn’t touch something allegedly fresh on the menu in his hand with a ten foot pole.

What a night, he sighed heavily to himself. He hated wet work; it sucked as loudly as it had when he was doing it at his government’s behest, much less now, when his orders came from Johnny D’Amico. But what was the damned difference, anyhow? More money to be made from D’Amico’s coffers, that was no shit. Tonight really was bad though.

How come it had to be a girl? And a young one…they hadn’t told him either thing. When they gave him the name it had been, literally, Greek to him. It looked Greek, with those weird combinations of vowels that always looked like more of a mouthful than they sounded like when somebody said them.

He knew Jimmy Mitsa was moving in on D’Amico’s turf, but this was ugly even for those two psychos. He had gone to the address, a bungalow on the north side, and had entered it with the key he had been given. The shower had been running, and he had taken his garrote out of his slacks and made his way through the little house towards the sound of water…it hadn’t sunk in until he had already made it through the bedroom.

The scent of her was everywhere; there was girly crap all over the place and no sign of a man. He had told himself that she must be Jimmy the Mitt’s whore, and gotten the job done. Just the job, too; he was no fucking pervert. He promised himself, though…a bonus fee next time, if there were women or kids involved. Kids especially – gave him a stomachache.

His stomach was rumbling now, and he looked up to find the waitress standing directly in front of him, looking at him with some amazing eyes…sea green, pupils like a cat, long lashes. Come to think of it, he thought dazedly, she was fucking perfect in every way, how had he not noticed how…how…he suddenly had a difficult time breathing. He looked at the name-tag on her perfectly shaped left breast, and saw Poena.

“Poena?” he asked. “That’s your name?”

“That’s right,” she smiled – her smile, the only thing that he had would have changed because her incisors seemed a little long. He heard a noise to his right and looked over to see that the woman who had been sitting in the booth was now at the counter, watching the cook, who still had his muscular back to the room. She was extremely tall, or maybe the ceiling was just low…

He glanced to his left and saw, outside the glass doors, a dense fog had rolled in; you could barely see the sidewalk… late in the year for that, he thought. Fucking climate change.

His stomach rumbled again, and he glanced at the menu in his hand and looked at the waitress. Poena? he thought again. Familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “What’s good, honey?” he winked at her.

She smiled again, a dimple appearing at the lower right corner of her mouth, and he kind of wished she wouldn’t smile so wide; it was the only flaw in her perfection. It made her look…hungry.

“Chef’s special,” she said. “It’s everybody’s favorite, right Nem?” she tossed aside to the woman still at the counter. He wasn’t interested enough to look closer at her, but he heard her say oh yes, it was certainly her favorite.

Christ, the names in this part of town, he thought. Nem? “All right,” he said, and winked at Poena again. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

“Special, Zee!” she hollered over her shoulder, and the cook grunted and started spatuling things onto a plate. Must have been lining things up before he ordered. He hoped it didn’t taste like shoe leather, whatever it was. And what the fuck was Zee short for?

A few minutes later (must have spaced out, Jesus I’m tired, he thought) he heard a bell ding, the same kind of bell every single short order cook in the city used to announce “Order up!”

Poena turned smartly and grabbed the plate the cook handed her. He checked out the cook’s face, just out of curiosity, and thought my god, there’s a guy that gets laid regularly, a face and a build like that. Guy looked like a God, for Cristsakes.

He thought again about losing some weight, maybe running again, but knew in his heart he’d never. He’d take a couple more jobs from D’Amico, maybe ten grand a pop, and then turn in his badge and gun and jump. Australia, he thought.

He stared at the counter-top in front of him, dreaming of blue blue ocean and golden brown skin, and Poena slid a plate with the terrified face of his latest victim on it just beneath him – blood an obscene sauce cradling her delicate features.

“Bon apetit,” Poena smiled, as Zeus, and Nemesis, watched.

Herbert makes a provocative argument in slightly less than 800 words. We find a lot of ink these days devoted to America’s sinking ranking as a first world producer of competitive, college-educated young adults. But what about the ones who do emerge in four or five years, degree in hand? How are they faring when pitted against the challenges of real life? Herbert’s assessment is damning: “Students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible.”

A good portion of the blame, according to the column’s argument, lies with the students themselves. According to statistics quoted by Herbert, American university students are studying a full 50% less than their counterparts in the 1960s once did. By extension, additional underlying causes must necessarily be grammar and high schools that fail to introduce academic rigor into their charges’ lives, or the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting” which has left a large segment of adults overly-dependent on Mom and Dad.

However, Herbert does not stop there. U.S. institutions of higher learning are themselves culpable in the inadequacy of our graduates, according to the columnist. He cites results from a study conducted by the Social Science Research Council, which conclude, “that in their first two years of college, 45 percent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication. After the full four years, 36 percent still had not substantially improved those skills.”

Even allowing for a few percentage points of inaccuracy, it is more than frightening to entertain the idea that nearly half of our nation’s college freshman and sophomores are no better off, from a cognitive standpoint, than they were when they first arrived on campus. And the implications for a productive life, given this mediocre outlook, are clear. Herbert writes, “The development of such skills is generally thought to be the core function of a college education. The students who don’t develop them may leave college with a degree and an expanded circle of friends, but little more. Many of these young men and women are unable to communicate effectively, solve simple intellectual tasks (such as distinguishing fact from opinion), or engage in effective problem-solving.”

As I digested Herbert’s arguments regarding our enfeebled, inadequate graduates, I thought of my own experience as a student at a Big Ten University from 1996 to 2000. My stint as a co-ed at one of the country’s most renowned party schools may pre-date Herbert’s area of concern (methinks he was confining his observations to Millennials, though I can’t be certain), but I felt the cold shame of recognition.

Over the course of the last decade I have said more than once that I “stole” a degree from my alma mater. This is because, with the notable exception of exactly two semesters, I rarely ever went to class. Besieged by depression caused by a PTSD reckoning with an unstable childhood, as well as dissatisfaction with rural life, I withdrew from the game. Instead of becoming engaged with campus activities or rushing a sorority, I worked at a number of part-time jobs whose sole purpose was to stock my liquor cabinet. I met with an advisor one time throughout my four year undergrad career – the first time I ever registered for class, then never again. A regular check-in with a professor, counselor, or even a grad student just wasn’t part of the picture at this social-security-numbers-as-identity institution.

With few resources to prop me up, and very few instructors who factored attendance into final grades, I treated each course as an independent study. I went to class when I felt like it (usually not), and invariably steered clear of the many large lecture-hall style settings which compromised the bulk of my underclass course selections. I showed up on test days, turned in papers when required and invariably coasted my way to a very unsatisfying 2.89 final GPA. But hey! It was enough to graduate and get out right?

Well yes and no. I am aware that my profoundly depressive experience isn’t exactly what Herbert is referring to, but years later, my unearned degree in English Literature didn’t sit right. I knew I hadn’t done the work and felt like a fraud when I traded schooling notes with a new office acquaintance. Though I never meant to manipulate the system, somehow I had, and given that it wasn’t very difficult, I wondered how many others had done the same, intentionally or otherwise.

In 2005, I returned to school to earn my Master’s in English Literature, finishing my studies in late 2007. For many reasons, this second degree was of paramount importance to me, a way of redeeming myself from the extremely lackluster performance I had turned in half a decade ago. I am proud to say that I worked very hard for the M.A., and even prouder to declare that my second institution of higher learning held me accountable. My professors knew me by sight (whereas nearly all of my undergrad tutors could not have picked me out of a lineup), and checked in with my academic progress on the regular. The second time around, from my side as well as my school’s, was everything a satisfying college experience ought to be.

But how many graduates, skating by with an easily won B.A. or B.S. force themselves to return and acquire the critical thinking skills they missed the first time around? An even better question might be to ask ourselves that with the world’s most expensive education system, tuition and fees rising astronomically even before the onset of the 2007 Great Recession, what exactly are we buying?

Maria was doing much better than she anticipated. Only sixteen, she was a mother, a partner, and now had survived six months at the camera store. She got the job two months before the baby came and Mr. Ramirez gave her time off when Nicky Jr. was born.

Her Spanish was improving. Nicky worked with her every minute that they were together. Mr. Ramirez and his wife coached her as well, and many of the customers spoke only Spanish.

Things were hard at home now with the baby, but the young couple was surviving. Nicky worked second shift as a mechanic in one of the city’s remaining factories. He was so lucky to get that job right out of high school. The factory was close enough to his parent’s house, where the little family shared a basement apartment, that he could ride his bike to work. He was a tough guy, and could handle anything on the street.

Maria met Nicky eighteen months ago. She was a waitress in a dive bar. Maria looked a lot older than she was. She told Nicky that she was eighteen, graduated from high school out east, and came to KC to live with her sister.

Of all the lies she told him, that she lived with her sister was the only one he knew. She told him that her sister moved back home, but she liked her job and wanted to stay.

In truth, Maria was fourteen and a half when she met Nicky. Her real name was Melissa, and she was called Missy at home. Maria was about as creative as she could be with her limited experience from the rural prairie.

What she didn’t want him to know was that she ran away from a farm in the middle of Illinois. Her father had been visiting her attic bedroom in the drafty old farmhouse at night for about four years.

She couldn’t take it anymore. She was certain her mother and siblings knew about the visits, but nothing was ever said or done. She didn’t have the courage to go against her father, even as she fought him off viciously sometimes.

Sometimes she thought about killing him with the knife her dad and brothers used for butchering hogs. Instead, she got on a bus to St. Louis, and then boarded another bus until she ran out of money that was in the next large city, across Missouri. She cut her long, brown hair short, and dyed it blonde. She had Nicky’s name tattooed in a heart on her ankle.

Initially, Maria only spoke a few words she learned in freshman Spanish, but she was good at counting so she headed for a Mexican neighborhood. That is where she met Nicky, who at eighteen had been a Boy Scout and just graduated from high school. His brother paid for a short course in mechanics and helped him get the factory job.

Out of the corner of her eye, Maria noticed a group of young people milling outside around the door. The store was closing in five minutes. “Damn,” she thought to herself. “They will probably want a stack of pictures.”

However, it was only 4:55 p.m. and they came inside. She looked closer at the group and realized it was her two brothers and another woman she didn’t know. The woman wore running clothes and number 2366 across her chest along with her marathon medal.

Fear swept over her like a spring rain across the prairie. What if they recognized her? She was still not an adult.

The woman stepped up to the counter and asked in English, “Do you have any digital camera bags?” Even though Maria didn’t know who the lady was, she was terrified as the woman was with her brothers.

“No habla Ingles,” said Maria, trying to mimic Nicky’s accent. Maria pointed to the back room, and quickly walked away.

“Mrs. Ramirez,” Maria said. “I’m not really feeling well. Do you think I could leave several minutes early?”

“Of course,” she said, and Maria walked out the back door.

After all, there’s no way anyone could take him at this point, right? Rahmbo has five times more campaign funds at his disposal than nearest fiscal competitor, Gery Chico. His slick print ads and television spots depict the handsome, well-dressed former ballet dancer as a family man who cares about the middle class, ready to make the “tough choices” that will put Chicago back on the fast track to claiming its status as an affordable, world class city. A few of his TV plugs contain public endorsements from not one but two U.S. Presidents, current POTUS Barack Obama, as well as immediate predecessor William Jefferson Clinton.

From the moment on October 1, 2010 when Rahm Emanuel formally announced the resignation of his big-time White House post to throw his hat in the ring for the Chicago mayoral race, his candidacy had an almost pre-ordained quality. His name would certainly be the biggest in the contest, and all too often in U.S. politics, bigger means more viable. Rahmbo is a bulldog by reputation, which fits very well with the Windy City’s blue collar, tough guy image, yet he knows how to construct a sentence. The current mayor, Richard M. Daley, speaks with the eloquence of a barely housebroken pitbull, and his constituents (and machine conspirators) love him for it. Emanuel seems positively refined by comparison, no matter how many “f” bombs he drops.

In terms of name recognition, Rahm Emanuel’s only real competition comes in the shape of political hasbeen, former U.S. Senator Carol Mosley Braun. Although ignorance is bliss where Braun’s legislative past is concerned, most Chicagoans over the age of 35 well recall her terrifically tone deaf response to Newsweek contributing editor George Will’s 1998 examination of the various corruption charges against her: “I think because he couldn’t say nigger, he said corrupt.” She went on to compare Will to a Ku Klux Klansman, stating “I mean this very sincerely from the bottom of my heart: He can take his hood and put it back on again, as far as I’m concerned.”

One might labor under the mistaken belief that Mosley Braun has since learned to police the crazy, having undone her career once already. But no, that’s incorrect. Open your web browser and log onto to Google. From there, enter the search term “carol moseley braun crackhead.” What do you see? All the links you can handle reporting a January 30, 2011 incident at a live debate where Senator Braun addressed opposing candidate Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins as follows: “Patricia, the reason you didn’t know where I was for the last 20 years is because you were strung out on crack…Now, you have admitted to that.”

Van Pelt-Watkins had of course, admitted to no such thing, but move over Whitney Houston. The legendary singer’s 2006 utterance to journalist Diane Sawyer that “crack is whack” was heretofore the most infamous commentary regarding the illegal substance.

So yeah, with opposition of this ilk, Rahm Emanuel’s path to the mayor’s office has been relatively smooth sailing. I do not mean to suggest, with this review of Carol Mosley’s Braun’s uninterrupted political gaffes, that Emanuel faces no serious challengers. He certainly does. It’s just that former Richard M. Daley Chief of Staff Gery Chico and City Clerk Miguel del Valle, both respected public servants, cannot complete with the sexy, baby kissing, cash flush spectacle of Emanuel.

The thing is though, I think many residents of Chicago have grown tired of being told who their leaders will be before having the chance to evaluate. Though the town has never done much to dispel it’s reputation as a one-party, corrupt patronage operation, much like the recent liberation of Egypt by its own democracy-staved citizens, I smell a similar passion for change in the Midwest air. Three ex-governors in the last 35 years have been sent to the clink, and a fourth, Rod Blagojevich, is surely on his way. Mayor Daley may have done great things in terms of beautifying the landscape and attracting new business but anyone who has lived in the city for the last 22 years knows how much damage his interminable term has done: skyrocketing property taxes, unaffordable homes, runway gang crime and terrible fiscal decisions.

Though change is in the air in one form or another, is there anyone naive enough to believe that Rahmbo will represent a clean break from The Machine? I am still having a hard time digesting the coincidental swap of Rahm Emanuel for Bill Daley, the outgoing mayor’s younger brother, as the President’s Chief of Staff. No, there’s nothing suspect about that at all.

With Rahm demonstrating a commanding lead in the polls, 49 percent of the popular vote to Chico’s 19, it seems pointless to consider an outcome other than his total domination at the polls this week. But wait! For those of us perversely hoping for a dark horse spoiler (and no, Carol Mosley Braun, before you even start, that is not racist), we do have the prospect of a runoff. In order to prevent a general election showdown between Rahmbo and the number two finisher, the foul mouthed one needs at least 51 percent of the vote. 49 just won’t do. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that some hard last minute campaigning by Chico and del Valle (who has my vote) will prevent Emanuel from sailing into City Hall on Wednesday. Run-offs are generally not the friend of front-runners because they allow time and opportunity for a once splintered opposition to develop a united front.

However unlikely, as a lover of democracy residing in a city that doesn’t see a lot of balanced elections, that’s what I’d like to see happen. I want Rahmbo, if he is indeed our mayor-to-be, to have to sweat it out at a bit more than he has. Those lame residency challenges, which Emanuel continued to swat away like pesky mosquitoes, do not satisfy the appetite for electoral combat. After 22 years of Daley hostage-taking, Chicago deserves a real fight for its future.

What you see from my patio is a profusion of potted plants. My wife is an obsessive gardener, and we made our own soil from compost and coffee grounds. My citrus orchard is its own ecosystem, probably unique for a fifteen mile radius. It is not natural to this area because of two things – soil and water. The water was relatively easy to obtain; just dig your line and connect it to the village’s water system, obtained by artesian well many miles away. Construct a big underground storage tank, and devise an intricate system of underground irrigation lines and pumps to feed the trees. The soil was much harder to obtain, as the only thing on my lot when I started digging was caliche, a white potassium/calcium salt that washes down from the mountains in flash floods, depositing itself over the millennia. As you dig deeper into the caliche, it becomes harder and harder. And at five feet (the required depth for orange trees) the caliche is so hard that a strong man with a pick can only dislodge a piece the size of a quarter. Once the hole is dug, it has to be filled with soil that is obtained in caches found in the desert when the hurricanes wash it down the mountains. That and equal trucks of aged goat or steer manure also obtained by hand filled the holes for the thirty or so trees that I dug.

Outside my house is the village. I call it Ejido Wonderful. It is a small collection of souls sitting at the edge of the desert mountains about a mile from the ocean. Most people speed by at 60 mph just giving my town a glance, and that’s all right with me. It has a single paved boulevard with lighting and street trees, and the rest of the town is small concrete block houses with descendants of the people the Jesuits brought in the 1700s and fishermen. The average annual income is only $1700 a year, which puts it at the 50th percentile of world income. From where I live, you can look up and see Bill Gates and the Sultan of Brunei. Look down, and you can see someone starving to death in the Sahel. When Americans see my village for the first time, they often are repelled at the poverty. “How can they live that way?” they say. I’ve heard this more than once. But to me, it’s a constant reminder that most Americans live in a bubble of consumption that the majority of world citizens are not privy to.

Because of what we’ve done and the relations that we’ve made, we’re on the inside as to the happenings in the place. Ejido Wonderful is a web filled with babies, illness, death, romance, jealousy and all the other things that make up the flow of a real community. Civic culture is big here, with recent elections hotly contested. Although it gives the appearance of being a timeless village baking in the Mexican sun, I’ve seen big changes since I first landed here twenty years ago. Once there were some stick and thatch huts with dirt floors. Now the tiny concrete houses have plumbing and electricity. The government has been very active in supplying low income housing. Twenty years ago, the average education for the village was at the third grade level. Now there are two schools that supply education locally up to the ninth grade, and high schools and universities exist down the road that were never there earlier. Unlike America, there’s been progress instead of regress, but progress has been a mixed blessing because of globalization. In the last ten years, the village has been introduced to television, telephone, and internet – in that order. Many of the traditional ways of doing things have been challenged. And it’s still a shock to me to see the local teenager adopt the fashions of the homies of Los Angeles, hanging out at the street corner where they can get the best cell phone coverage.

What the world sees of Mexico and what I know are two different things. The headlines refer every day to the drugs, the guns, the narcoviolence, and the corruption. To be sure, some of these things are here in Ejido Wonderful. But I’m very happy that we’re located nowhere near big cities, nor are we on major drug smuggling routes. Locally, there are few jobs and 30% of the total economy is lodged in the underworld of the drug trade. But the strength of a real community changes everything. Since everyone knows everyone else, all things exist on a human scale and not a scale mediated by film-at-eleven. There are very few real criminals in Ejido Wonderful, but in a small place they have to interact with everyone else. And mostly, those other people are law abiding family members and relatives.

The world economy shows itself everywhere here. In making my rounds this year, I noticed many houses vacant, and some of the military has been deployed to the mainland to fight the drug wars. The ocean’s been fished out, and the fishermen have gone somewhere else or have taken up different trades. Tourism is down. The vacancies are a reminder that Mexico is a very junior partner to the US – it’s a trite but true statement that when America catches cold, Mexico catches pneumonia. Ejido Wonderful’s quaintness is an advertisement for colonialism and Third World underdevelopment. If you didn’t know any better, you’d be afraid that the village was in danger of turning into a ghost town, but in two years’ time the copper mine will come online, feeding the electronics factories of China and India. The population and real estate values will explode.

And if you live here long enough, you begin to see the effects of global warming. The hurricane tracks that once hit La Paz and spared our part of the world appear to have moved up north to where we are. There have been three major hurricanes in the last five years, where before there might have been one every five to ten years. In Mulege, rich gringos built their dream homes along the river. It’s a beautiful place, a palm oasis in the middle of the desert, fed by springs that come from the mountain. The first hurricane struck washing out most of the homes along the river, and the norteamericanos that were foolish enough and rich enough rebuilt their homes. Two years later, another stronger hurricane threw a 36 foot high wall of water from the mountain down, destroying the houses again. Before it looked like the aftermath of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. The third hurricane ended any riverfront development, and the municipo wisely allowed the formerly paved road to degenerate into an almost impassible goat path. The empty lots house the broken dreams of American retirees and real estate developers.

On the journey from Ejido Wonderful to Mulege, we go through land that is so gorgeous that every inch of it would be a national park in the United States. The Bahia Concepcion is a large inlet surrounded by rugged mountain wilderness both on the highway side and the peninsula, and the shore is defined by encampments, mangrove estuaries, and magnificent beaches. We see how large the sky is as we catch up with the clouds, and finally we come down the hill, land on the flats, and Mulege is waiting for us. Mulege itself is a Spanish mission town with many buildings hundreds of years old, and the sign says that 3,111 Mexican souls live here. But its popularity as a tourist destination has given it an ambiance of something like a summer camp for retired white people. Touristic shops sell serapes and sombreros that are not used around here, along with coffee mugs made in China with the town’s name on them. These will serve as reminders to people in San Diego or Stockholm of those fabulous two weeks they spent exploring Baja, breaking the tedium of the rest of their lives at work.

The reason for our visit here is the 26th Annual Pig Race, sponsored by the Rotarians. The suckers are parted from their few pesos with the promise of bloody marys, hot dogs, and betting on the heats of three pigs each, racing on a small dirt strip next to the covered basketball court by the town square. Here the contrast between the Mexican and American way of doing things couldn’t be any clearer. The Mexicans are much like Ginger Rogers to the American Fred Astaire. What the Americans want, they get – and the Mexicans are only too happy to comply. Once long ago, some all night session with too much booze led to the idiotic idea of racing piglets, an animal totally unsuited to the task. And thus the tradition was born. The retirees come from every gated community and reservation they can for miles around. Most of the time, they’re protected from any actual interaction with the natives, but a phony, hokey event like this brings out the suckers. And the Mexicans supply the racing pigs, eventually getting the money that is raised for the good deeds to the community. None of this makes any sense, but everyone’s happy. Except me.

Aged baby boomers schmooze, booze, and bet. I prepared for this event the night before by getting royally stoned. And I sit with my back to the social whirlwind and the goings on by looking at the palm trees, writing this essay, often in time with the country music that’s blaring over the public address system. I ignore this convocation of retired contractors from Southern California and Alberta to write to you, telling you the difference between Mexico and the Great White North. I’m the designated driver, and I take my revenge with pen in hand. Afterward, most retire to the local cantina for real grub and real margaritas, except for me. Remember I’m the designated driver. You know you’re in a bad part of Mexico when you’re surrounded by loud, fat, red faced Republicans in a sports bar where Fox News is blaring.

One wishes that only more people could experience the reality of life in a foreign country instead of the veneer, but then perhaps Mexico wouldn’t be Mexico but someplace else.

I bring you fast news of this single, endless moment we share. The man himself—the Self-Contained One, the Unobjectifiable Object, the Unprovoked Entity—came among us of his own free will when we desired him most voraciously. The hunger inside us called to him, though he did not believe in hunger or its tyrannies, and he fed us the balm of his mind wrapped in the caress of his voice.

Eight questions he allowed; eight questions that would rise spontaneously from a single chosen mouth, each with its own perfect place in the eternal order. On this day of love he showered love upon us, asked us to shower love upon each other and become clean. Become the ones who scrubbed the world clean with the words trapped against our tongues.

He entered the hall. The silence descended, distended, apprehended. And the questions flew from my mouth, though from no mind I had ever known before.

Q1. Master Habsah, would you tell me about metaphor?

A: Metaphor is like a knife. It stabbed me once, and the wound has never healed. Blood flooded out of it at first, but now only trickles. It will continue to trickle forever.

Q2. Are there eggs inside the soul?

A: Yes, there are eggs inside the soul. Luminescent, multicolored, spinning. They start out malformed, but over the course of their revolutions¾note that I am using that word¾they attain a perfection that not even the holiest hen could give them.

Q3. What is the thing of substance?

A: The thing of substance is something that weighs more than it appears to weigh. For instance, the jade pug I have caused to materialize at your feet is a thing of substance. Pick it up, and you will see.

Q4. How can we find our way back to the heaven of our ancestors?

A: By careful prayer, and the adoration of your descendants.

Q5. What is meant by “the soothing void of the eternal?”

A: It is the knowledge that the answer to all your questions is a smile from a source you will never know.

Q6. Is there a meaning to hunger?

A: Hunger is the ultimate lack. It indicates a spiritual paucity, as well as a physical one. Once this hunger is overcome, a new level of paucity must be reached, or the body will become flacid. So will the mind. You have all seen this for yourselves.

Q7. What is the nature of the disgusting thing?

A: The disgusting thing appeals to the bowels and intestines. It is in opposition to the thing of beauty, which appeals to the mouth. The disgusting thing has been consumed and used up, and has no further value. Whereas the thing of beauty has yet to have its value diminished by human use.

Q8. Does beauty consist of what we see, or of what we wish to see?

A: Beauty consists of action that is perfect for its moment. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what is visible.

Then Master Habsah stood. A yellow silk glove had stuck to the folds of his robe behind him, and one of us—the most naive among us—called out “Master, your glove!” But the Radiant One gave concern neither to the shout nor to the offending glove, which cast itself immediately to the floor. He gave no rebuke to the one who had called out, for the young man acted out of ignorance and blind love. We believed we understood the Master finally, and as we fell to our knees in thanks we felt golden crowns slowly descending onto our skulls from heaven.

The first of the crowns, he would later tell us. The base crown, the most self-deceiving. But we were starving for crowns, starving for what he had promised us. For what we could only achieve with his lack of care, his bedazzling insouciance.

The first crown. We would have chewed the earth to pulp for that first crown. Then begged and hungered for every other crown, until we could beg no more.