Insanely, we actually have a place to live. We found a few on craigslist, and had a realtor/friend check them out. One of the four was outstanding, the clear winner, and we signed a lease from here and faxed it back while I was still on Isla Mujeres. I’ve looked at all the photos a dozen times, I’ve studied the neighborhood on googlemaps and used walkscore to plot my course to grocery stores and Nia class. It seems right for us but it’s a little weird to move in to an apartment you’ve never laid eyes on. Then again, I moved to mexico without ever having been. We were eager to get settled, to have a place to go to. We’re not over adventures, but craving stability. And after ten days in hotels it will be so amazing to sleep in our new, if temporary home.

We are lucky enough to get to raid my mother-in-law’s storage space and expect to inherit some cool family pieces as well as a big kid bed (larger than our Mexican matrimonial from Mega), Oriental rugs and Lord knows what else. We’ll still have to restock on everything for the household, but that’s what Target and Costco are for. I’ve heard from friends who returned to the US after living abroad that the sheer amount of choices is offensive, overwhelming, and gauche. I still plan to wheel through the happy aisles blithely adding goods to my basket. It’s going to be consumerific.

I know we’re not going back to the same country. A lot has gone down while we were fulfilling our fantasies in Yucatan. I would be stupid if I weren’t a little nervous. But I feel prepared, much more so than when I graduated from college and was pushed by tragedy from the nest into the cruel world. I haven’t lived in a brand new city in four years. We’re changing country, expecting seasons and risking a much cooler clime. We’re going back to being renters, living in a shared building. We’ll have new responsibilities and self-imposed expectations. It’s all going to be different again. I can’t wait.

On July 2 we won’t have a truck. We won’t live at the beach. We will be Americans in America, which is admittedly less interesting, but I hope will be lovely and stimulating and good. Perched in our new apartment, likely unsettled, but hopefully home.

Hacienda Xcanatun is a lovely place for a decent meal, but it’s the surrounding grounds that truly invite escape. The endorsement of Urbano Rentals I cannot condone, as I found the proprietors surly and strange, though their houses certainly are magnificent. And now more than before I am curious to get inside the suites at Rosas y Xocolate; I’ve seen the handsome lobby and sunny luncheon patio and the location on the Paseo de Montejo is obviously unparalleled. (To think I used to live one block back from there!) Of the dining options I can only comment on La Pigua, which was less than impressive when we ate there last month. I wish they’d taken it up to Los Taquitos de PM. I love that they’ve included Cuzama in things to do. We heart this little cenote pueblo and have been seven times, with every group of visitors. And their comparison of La68 to Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, while somewhat ridiculous, is not entirely inaccurate. It is a soothing, artsy space and tonight they are showing Woody Allen’s Bananas, which I should totally go and see. So glad NYM agrees that a day on the Ruta Puuc, culminating in Uxmal, is insanely great.

Since the winter of last year I have said to anyone who will listen, without agenda or compensation, that Camden, Maine is the cutest little town in America. And I had harbored hopes of moving there one day. While we’ve decided to set up shop in Portland for the next year, which is forty-five minutes south of the mid coast, I hope to visit this magical setting often and throughout the seasons. Since I’ve only been there in January I cannot speak to all the farmers fares, farms and and festivals remarked upon in the article, but they do recommend Cappy’s Chowder House, where Malcolm and I enjoyed a very cozy meal. And the thing they don’t say is that when you drive down into the village, past French and Brawn market and The Owl and Turtle bookshop and you catch your first glimpse of the library on a hill overlooking the ocean you will literally lose your breath and experience in a flash your own idyllic life of old books and brisk walks and babies in little red wagons. At least, if you’re anything like me.

There are many amazing places I have yet to go, in fact I haven’t seen most; but it is quite cool that two towns I know well or would like to, and will always go back to, are on the New York Mag map.

an imagined NAFTA total phone conversation:

US: Hey Mexico, we totally love your beaches and tacos!
Mexico: Thanks dude, we were feeling a little bullied…
US: Don’t you hate Canada, just a tiny bit for being so smug about their health care and mild summers…?
Mexico: Well, they do…
Canada: Psych! It’s me, Canada. Smooth move, Bean Boy
Mexico: You guys got me again. Good one. See you tomorrow

and scene.

Sneaky foreigners stealing citizens’ jobs is as old as Lady Liberty herself and blaming Latin America for our NOB drug problem is as cool today as it was in the 80’s. If only Boy George had fared as well! Mexico is a perfect foil for our precarious situation and so desperate for approval from us that we can always win back any lost affection should we no longer need it in this capacity. So while the sky continues to fall, the economy fails and your children end up attending a state university, make youself feel better by tuning into the US news media and getting good and bitter about the failed narco-nation to the south. ‘Cause what’s bad for them has got to be good for us…but keep those tacos and burritos coming, we love those! Arriba!

The Andrews Memorial Town Hall is a marvelous place with government offices, terrible acoustics and a cat who has stalked the halls since I was 3, maybe longer. I spent every summer of my early adolescence practicing choreography in the basement green room, in the baroque foyer, in the grass on the banks of the Indian River. I went with my mom to vote in the rose room and she wouldn’t let me in the booth, because she said it was a private act, like in the bathroom. Needless to say I had odd ideas about both democratic processes for quite some time.

I spent a day as an intern in the office of the First Selectman and filed my marriage license with the women who issued my first passport.

There you will find the greatest golden scalloped water fountain this side of Versailles and a seven foot tall stuffed moose that is still very startling. In summer the ladies of the Shoreline exhibit their best watercolors and the good townspeople gather for wonderfully off pitch productions of Gypsy and The Music Man. I fell in love with Mercutio instead of Romeo when I was 12 and learned every line of A Midsummer Night’s Dream the summer before. I ate caviar and drank champagne after La Traviata and pretended to swoon with consumption on the divan in the anteroom to the bathroom. I watched August meteor showers from the stage right balcony and cried my eyes out in the costume room when the opera had ended, because I felt like everything was over and would never quite happen that way again. Maybe that’s why the blithe old soul still waits behind velvet curtains.

* sorry

Too much to drink yesterday calls for omelets today. My delicate condition reminds me of diners, another great American institution inexorably linked to immigrants, teenagers, the open road and late night cheese and gravy-covered fries. My first experiences at diners were with my grandparents, great fans of split pea soup and other culinary mysteries. They liked the depression-friendly prices, the familiarity of weekday specials and I would like to think, the small pleasures of squeaky pleather booths and mesmerizing pie carousels. We even went to a diner after my grandfather’s funeral and toasted Jack’s memory with dirty cup and saucer coffee. To this day if my grandmother and I are out on the town having a browse she will inevitably ask if we can stop at the Saybrook, where I always take pleasure in paying the bill before she notices but then later find that she tucked $5 in my purse when I was in the bathroom. We all have our routines.

In high school the neon and chrome diner loomed large over our suburban nights. It certainly didn’t explain the entire 6.5 hours spent outside the familial home which also included getting a little stoned on a beach/wooded area and driving up and down Rt 1 but it was a suitable enough alibi. We always ended up there eventually. The atmosphere was different depending on who you were with. If it was a theater kid honors group you could count on my ordering milky tea and cinnamon toast, if it was with a later crowd I might have even dared smoking a cigarette in public just to see how it looked (awesome). There were rules: you flirted with boys from neighboring towns but never gave your phone number; someone would try to order an alcoholic drink but since that area was presiding over by the mustachioed owner he was always unceremoniously denied; you drank as many refills as you were allowed and thought about rain and Nirvana while you made an ironic selection from the tableside jukebox. The waitresses were varicose-veined, crows footed cliches but never made us quiet down or sit down as 12 of us hovered around one table. Those women are saints.

In college there was nothing illicit about staying up to all hours boozing with the boys form the first floor. But a trip off campus felt deliciously like cheating. In this incarnation the diner was a cozy refuge for conspirational conversation and a dose of reality. It was in the unfashionable end of town. You didn’t have to furrow your brow and contemplate Feuerbach while you enjoyed your Tom Soyer on multigrain. There were actual perverts and marginal characters, hunched over their hot open faced turkey sandwich. At this point I must mentioned that despite my confessed family conventions I do not trust anyone who orders a full dinner at a diner. It is not the place for overcooked veggies; it is the hour for egg and cheese on a hard roll. You know this. There were many episodes of truth telling, sobering up and deep exhalations during this formative time. It was after graduation that we took to frequenting the place on hungover Sundays. We were already nostalgic for those innocent days, I suppose. Which is, to be sure the entire point of the diner. It’s kitch without snicker and unscripted reality. It’s less than perfection and just getting by, it’s a promising business for men and women who work hard and believe that you can serve an egg at any time of day or night and it will provide nourishment both physical and spiritual and minister to lost souls from every walk of life.

* a made up but very excellent name

In most aspects of my life, there are a ton of areas that I consider too personal to discuss, and too heavy to engage others in. Politics definitely falls into this category. As I tried to indicate to one of our more rabid commenters a few weeks ago, the discussion of politics is futile. Everyone enters the discussion with their own set of ideas, and, often times, memorized talking points from their favorite radio stations, and there is very little actual intellectual back-and-forth. These discussions can turn into nasty arguments, that neither party has any hope of winning, simply because these discussions are not opportunities to educate or enlighten the other on a particular point of view, but instead boil down to who has the most counterarguments to a particular perspective.

In this vein, I have never identified myself with the “left,” or liberal school of political thinking. I’m certainly by no means right-leaning, either. I find both parties, as they are painted with the hard line drawn between them, to be utterly despicable. I learned a long time ago that one’s only hope of finding the actual truth in a given issue is through drinking in as much media as humanly possible from both the right and left, with the hope that, by hearing each side’s unique spin, one can hope to divine some semblance of what is actually going on.

This leads me to spend a lot of time on many, many different media outlets. You are as likely to find me browsing the fawning sycophants and celebutards over at the Huffington Post as you are to catch me watching clips of The Factor, and that lunatic Bill O’Reilly, over on YouTube. In my old life, I would read the Daily news in the morning, and the NY Post in the evening during my commute. Both trash newspapers, sure…but by combining the coverage of the same event from both papers, you could begin to find the middle.

So why, then, does everyone think I’m such a dirty liberal? Any political statement from my dad starts with either, “I know you hate the right,” (which, when he says it, sounds more like, “I know you love kissing men,”) or, “I know you don’t follow politics.” Now, in my dad’s case, I just add this to the list of things that he BELIEVES to be true, without a lot of hard data. Things like, “You drive 50 MPH over potholes,” or, “Your sink faucet handles are dirty.”

Actually, while I am in the middle of this radical digression, I’ll point something else out that’s kind of weird.

Ever since my early 20s, many of the people I’ve met, even near total strangers, have always made all sorts of weird pro-marijuana comments at me. Things like, “y’know, guys like you and I need to smoke a little weed once in a while,” or, winknudge, “I don’t do anything but puff a little of the cheeb now and again, but you know what that’s like.”

Here’s the thing: I really kind of hate pot and pot smoking. Oh, sure, I went to college, I had a spell. But it’s certainly not something I have engaged much in as an adult. I find it kind of distasteful, honestly. But yet, here it is! I’m Johnny Potguy! Now, granted, it may have a lot do do with the fact that I looked like this for some reason in my early 20s:

…but I certainly don’t, anymore. What is it about my face that says, “stoned?” Okay, so it made sense, then, (even though, I must add, I didn’t smoke pot then, either…god knows where the hairdo and sideburns came from), but now? I guess there is just something, to this day, about me that says, if not, “pot-smoker,” then, “pot-sympathetic.”

So, I guess I come off as, “liberal-sympathetic,” as well. So here it is…in an effort to, once and for all, make my allegiances clear, I will outline my feelings on every issue I can think of. If there are any I missed, please, ask me in the comments, and I will tell you where I stand. If you want, you can also use this as your outline to start a new country:

Healthcare: Socialized medicine doesn’t work. Obama’s plan junk, McCain’s plan possibly worse.

Immigration: The United States is built on the backs of its immigrant population, and could not continue to function without them. Work visas and limited rights for illegals are scary; building a giant wall is scarier. Embrace Mexico, fast.

Family: Let ‘mos get married, ASAP. Look, the argument that marriage continues to be some kind of “holy union before god, between a MAN and a WOMAN, goddamit” is ridiculous. It’s a legal agreement, that gives rights and tax breaks, as well as an opportunity for a committed couple to say to each other, their friends, family, and the world: “I’ve found my person. This is it, and we are going to work together to get through this crazy life together.” The gender of the person you choose to enter into that commitment with is irrelevant to the process.

Iraq: A distracting war started on false pretenses. Withdraw. Cut and run. Bring Sadaam back to life and reinstate him in power; he was the only person capable of maintaining order in that part of the world. Russia’s nothing for now. Ditto India. Give Uzbekitstan some very careful consideration. Maybe spank Iran, while you’re at it.

Energy and environment: Drilling in Alaska is stupid, as it won’t produce oil for years and will not begin to cover our needs and consumption. Hybrids and biodiesel are a ridiculous hip/yuppie stopgap. Stop pussyfooting around; get serious about not just reducing oil needs, but eliminating them. Develop infrastructure for electric and hydrogen. “Clean” coal doesn’t exist; go nuclear, now.

Abortions: I love ‘em. I’m CRAZY about ‘em! I believe in abortion, in fact, up to and including the 9th month. Here’s why. Because I believe that life is a function of biology, being pregnant, then, is a medical condition. And, being a medical condition, the mother in that situation gets to make the decisions, similar to how you get to decide your own course of treatment when you have cancer. Did the father date rape you? You don’t have to have that baby. Are you 14? You don’t have to have that baby. Are there genetic problems that will make the child endure an insanely difficult life, and you aren’t up to the job? You don’t have to have that baby! Now, don’t misunderstand…I don’t believe in abortion as birth-control, but I don’t think anyone is actually doing that in real life. Abortions are TOUGH…I don’t think any couples are putting themselves through that because they don’t feel like wearing a hat. And best of all, it doesn’t matter if you agree with me…because it’s not your decision, and it never, ever should be.

God: Probably not. While it would be great to hang the responsibility for my own life’s challenges on someone else, I resent the idea that I lack the ability to control things myself. Life is biological; it will be a bummer to be in the ground and miss the future. I understand not wanting to believe that will happen. However, what a blessing that I am in full control of the events and my reactions to them leading up to that point.

Economy: Seek greener pastures. Build a new future. Move abroad.