Cabo- First Impressionist
I Am an AmeriCAN, Not an AmeriCAN’T
Cozumel, Cabo, money, language, guacamole, jazz, and the recurring discovery that life gets better when you stop treating the border as the edge of the map.
The Geography of Hotel @nyware
A Second Chance to Make a First Impressionist Painting
I like writing about Mexico. I just do not like the paperwork. So I painted Cabo instead.
The Last Thing a Fish Notices Is Water
Environment becomes invisible when you live inside it long enough.
Self-employment is sometimes made harder by a difficult boss. “I am not a businessman. I am a business, man.” That is what the locals are doing here: selling everything. Cabo San Lucas speaks English as a second language. Money is the first.
I live in the geography of Hotel @nyware: the three-pound YOUniverse between my ears. The brain is the address I carry everywhere.
There is no bad address on the Internet, and there is no bad address inside this state of mind. The personal operating system each of us inherits, creates, and imposes on the world is a form of virtual reality—location-neutral and user-friendly.
Environment still creates mood. I would rather shovel sunshine in paradise than New York snow. Yet while tendering across the Sea of Cortez—watching the sun, water, mountains, and everything in flow—I could say, “Yes, all this belongs to me.” More than that, I played a role in its appearance.
The deeper insight was not old-school selfishness—I am the centre of the world. It was the New Wor(l)d Order: I create the world I experience.
Space and time are not objects handed to the brain. They are tools the brain uses to assemble experience. Without the observer, the grid disappears. Father Time does not march forward so much as reboot.
The brain is the most powerful computer we own. When it is on tilt, it becomes the most powerful broken computer. Tilt makes us suboptimal at evaluating rewards, sizing risks, and calculating probabilities.
Hotel @nyware asks the recurring question: does it matter where I am anymore? Cruise ships may be marketed to the newly wed and nearly dead, but the real attraction is predictable surprise. Sometimes the excitement comes from winning. Sometimes it comes from avoiding disaster.
Cabo: Marlin Alley — Day 85
A continuation of the Cabo meditation on perception, environment, movement, and the importance of noticing the water before it becomes invisible.
Read Marlin AlleyAnd You Are MexiCANS
It is reassuring to know that I can still pay for things in a currency that sometimes feels as though it no longer exists: the U.S. dollar.
Cozumel is not as dramatic as Cabo San Lucas on the Pacific side of the Sea of Cortez, but it has its own Caribbean–Los Angeles rhythm. At moments it feels like passing through one of the barrios off the Harbor Freeway—without the traffic and without the Los Angry Cars.
Forget the expat mythology. Locals fill the tourism jobs here. The playing field feels more level, and the first language of the island is not English or Spanish. It is money.
Money may not be the key to happiness, but the happy-go-locals have figured out that with enough of it, somebody can make a key.
English comes second, and they understand the absurdity of the language: no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger, no pine or apple in pineapple. We park on driveways and drive on parkways. Double negatives are a no-no.
An endangered species: the expat.
Cabo: Afternoon Cowboy, Midnight Sailor
Life Is Good
I had gone native in a Colonel Kurtz sort of way: tequila, a Hecho en México straw cowboy hat, and complete surrender to the afternoon.
Food Is the New Adventure
If fifty is the youth of old age, food may be the romance of it. The guacamole-cheese-quesadilla was less lunch than a legally binding relationship.
Many Hats
If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed. A Brazilian flag and a straw hat were sufficient wardrobe for the day.
Open Deck Rules
Joe Bjornson, an Icelandic jazz musician and self-described Vincent van Gogh of trombone, was welcome company—provided the tobacco stayed beneath the salt-water air.
Cozumel and Cabo
Cozumel
An endangered species: the expat.
Cabo San Lucas
Afternoon cowboy, midnight sailor.
Boating Under the Influence
The Sea of Cortez changes the definition of a commute.
Man of Many Hats
If you are wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed.
The Vincent van Gogh of Trombone
Jazz, Iceland, and second-hand smoke on the open deck.
Continue Through Cabo
Cabo: A Suburb of Los Angeles
Another dispatch from the Mexican–Californian overlap, where geography, traffic, language, and familiarity begin to blur.
Read Cabo AgainMidnight Cabo
The happy-go-local version of Cabo after dark: less postcard, more lived-in rhythm, and proof that midnight has its own geography.
Read Midnight CaboCabo: Marlin Alley — Day 85
The importance of noticing the environment that surrounds you before it becomes as invisible as water to a fish.
Read Marlin AlleyIn Mexico, the answer was yes. The currency still worked, the food improved the economy of the soul, and the border turned out to be less a barrier than an invitation to reconsider what counted as home.