First some important news... For about 4 or 5 weeks I have been frantically worried about my dear friend Angel, with whom many of you are acquainted. Well, chalk this one up to the Psychic Awareness Network, because it turns out Angel was very ill, and in fact had a medical condition that was at one point life threatening. I will not dwell on the particulars, for the sake of her privacy, and have probably gone too far as it is. Why don't you send her email, angel@fringeware.com and tell her how glad you are that she is alright. For those of you not acquainted with Angel, be assured that she is not only a star, as Aleister Crowley assured us we all are, but one of the very bright lights that shines in my life. Our world would be so very much dimmer without her.

Happier thoughts ahead.

My mother sent me email with this request:

"Be sure to write everything in a clean manner so it does not embarress Carissa - she likes to share you with her friends and I do as well."

Forgive my mother's spelling error, she is German, after all, and her English is pretty much self-taught. Carissa is my sister. She is a Sophomore at Kent School, in Kent, Connecticut, a boarding school. She is just finished with her exams, so hopefully I won't be embarrassing her again until September. Naturally I sent my mother back a message explaining that as an adult, I will get into adult situations. I am writing this journal to share with my friends, and nothing in here is anything that I wouldn't tell them. If a stranger reads it, I won't know about it... Unless they send me email, but as I said, if I can tell my friends, who cares what strangers know. I dedicate Chapter Four, to you, the random websurfer, who is pulled in by who knows what reason, and decides to read on, no matter how embarrassed my mother gets. I thank you.

One of the funny things about Mexico is the type of conversations Americans have with one another here. A favorite topic of conversation is shit. Read it again, yes, everyone talks about shit.

• "Oh this or that restaurant gave me diarrhea."
• "I can't go today, I have viaje. (Spanish for 'travel', a euphemism for diarrhea)
• "I have to go to the lab and get checked for amoebas, it's been 6 months." (most of the long-term residents bring a stool sample to be checked every 6 months or so)
• etc, etc, etc.

Yes, no matter who I meet here, the subject eventually turns to the trials and tribulations of their digestive tract. One of the most common misconceptions is that Mexican food is contaminated, or dirty. The truth is that the food in the US is just as 'contaminated', the difference is the type of bacterial flora that reside here. They're different, and it takes a while to become acclimated to them. Even my housemate Sam, who has lived here for 20 years has problems sometimes. He says that you just get used to an occasional bout of viaje. Most of my Mexican friends have visited the US at least once. All of them said that they got, hmm, here it's called "Montezuma's Revenge", so let's call it "Davy Crockett's Revenge". Remember the Alamo next time you get diarrhea. Not much comfort, for non-Texans, I guess.

I remember the first time I read Kurt Brecht's (lead singer of Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) The Thirty Day Diarrhea Diet Plan, a punk travelogue of a month-long visit to Mexico, I thought Brecht was fecally obsessed. No, there's just something about Mexico makes people talk about their shit, or even publish a book about it. (Or write a web page, haha.)

One of the funniest examples of the openness in which this situation is discussed occurred when my friend Sandra's mother came to visit. I had been having allergy problems the previous week, and mentioned something like, "I couldn't go that day because I was sick."
Sandra's mother tut-tutted and said knowingly, "Ahh, diarrhea..."
I was of course embarrassed by this, being as it is that I am not actually comfortable talking about my digestive problems. Anyhow it wasn't even true, so I said "No, no... I have allergies."
Sandra's mother looked at me in confusion and asked her daughter in Spanish, "His allergies gave him diarrhea ?".
Of course at that moment, I would have liked to melt into the floor.

Here's a fun fact to ponder. I heard that in Mexico City, the world's most populous city, by the way, the dust consists of up to 60% human fecal matter during certain times of the year. This is because raw sewage is pumped into Lake Texcoco, the lake that Mexico City is built around, and during the dry season, the sewage dries into dust. Alot of people get sick there, just because of the dust. Wash your fruits and vegetables, and your hands while you're there. Actually, just wash everything. Twice.

Actually San Miguel is very dusty, most of the streets are the traditional cobblestone, and of course we're surrounded by desert. I keep my computer covered with a blanket, and even during maybe an hour of use, the static attraction of the monitor screen accumulates enough dust to clearly write your name. I wash my hands alot here.

I have a sort of hang-up I guess, about excretion. I have never been able to feel comfortable enough to use the toilet, for example, while my lover is in the bathroom with me. Girls are different, in that manner, their bladders being what they are. Public architecture rarely accounts for the female bladder, and so I guess that women learn early on to share the bathroom experience as necessity dictates.

Actually Angel's cottage in Austin is sort of a private hell for my digestive tract in the sense that her entire house consists of one 20' by 18' room, kitchen, bathtub and toilet included. If you have to use the toilet, there it is, right next to the front door, in front of God and everyone else. I think one time, when just Angel and I were there, I peed, but I made her turn away. Is this what Prozac was invented for?

Actually since my housemate Sam's wife is a psychoanalyst, perhaps I'll ask her about the nature of my hang up next time I see her. Of course she's a Freudian, so she'll probably say that I am anal retentive and that this is all a result of my mother's desire for me not to embarrass her during my childhood. I'll get back to you in Chapter Five with her assessment.

The dollar is really strong right now- the exchange rate a week ago was N$8.30 pesos to the dollar. Today it was N$8.80. That's five more dollars of spending power for every $100 I change. I had considered buying extra pesos right now, but I since I'm not a multi-millionaire, I can't really make a killing on it. Also If I bought say an extra $200 worth of pesos, and it the dollar continued to increase in value, well that would suck. Then again, if it goes back down to N$8.30 in a week, that would suck too. Basically, since I'm a little fish, there's really no way to make a killing in currency speculation. When they buy dollars at N$8.80, they are buying pesos at N$9.00, so to make any profit the dollar would have to weaken considerably, and again the margin would literally be cents on the dollar.

So, I just content myself with the knowledge that most of the Americans here pay their rent in dollars, where as my rent is in pesos, so when I pay it, this month I will have saved $6 whole dollars. I get one extra dinner out in my budget this month. Or maybe 5 beers... Or a light lunch and two beers... well you get the idea.

Other big news is that my friend Joyce, an ex-girlfriend of mine from, how many years ago was it Joyce? Could it be 6... or even 7? Anyhow, my friend Joyce is probably coming to visit me here in Mexico, around the 15th of June. Some of my longtime friends might recall the time, about 5 years ago, when I nearly shot her as a burglar for climbing up the balcony to my second floor apartment at three o'clock in the morning unannounced. She is currently serving her fourth year in the Armed Forces as a newscaster. She was stationed in Serbia, for I think 2 years, and most currently they had her in Kuwait. After her month of vacation, she is going to be stationed in Frankfurt, actually the city of my birth. My father was stationed in Germany during the Vietnam War, and that's where he got my mother pregnant, and well, one "shotgun wedding" later, you can guess the rest. Anyhow, I haven't seen her in a long time. She assures me that she has been fully trained at rappelling thanks to your tax dollar and mine, and also has had extensive weapons and combat training since our little misidentification in Austin way back when. Besides I sold my pistol before I moved to Mexico. Here's a picture she sent me via AOL, her service provider, even in Kuwait! I should embarrass her and scan in some of her photos I have from her modeling days. I actually had forgotten I had them, 'til I was boxing up, giving away or throwing away everything I owned.

So I imported them to Mexico.

Actually I imported a lot of stupid stuff to Mexico, accidentally. For instance in Chapter One, I make mention of my Kodak Brownie collection, which is in storage at my friend Paco's house. Well actually I mislabelled one of my boxes, and carted 5 of my cameras to Mexico, along with a collection of photos and some riding crops that I had purchased, err, in anticipation of owning a horse. Anyhow, a box full of stuff that I had intended to put into storage. I think that Paco must have a box with all my vitamin supplements in his garage. Oh well. Another funny thing I brought was a mexican blanket that I purchased 14 years ago, while on vacation in San Antonio when I was a high school junior at Tabor Academy (Marion, Massachusetts). Our family also visited Austin and we looked around the campus of the University of Texas, though I wasn't even vaguely interested in attending UT. At the time my concept of Texas was very vague and highly stereotypical, i.e., everyone had a horse and chewed tobacco. Of course now I know that only half of Texas is like that, the rest of them drive around in Cadillacs with cow skulls bolted on the radiator grille. Funny how things turn out. It was the only the second time I'd ever been to Texas, the first being when I was in third grade, when my father went to Houston for a recruiting seminar for ARAMCO, the Arabian American Oil Company, now known as Saudi ARAMCO. Yeah, so I brought a mexican blanket to Mexico. Because I have collected books for a long time, I often buy any older editions of books of authors I collect. That's how I ended up, in bringing all my books, with three copies of Philip K. Dick's The Man In the High Castle.

Speaking of books, I have been reading a great deal since I got here. In fact as of this evening I just finished my 54th book. I have been reading predominately novels. In conjunction with the telecommuting work I do for FringeWare, I have also been reading biographies of Philip K. Dick and Jim Thompson in order to write online biographies for the FringeWare Subcult pages. Basically the subcult project is an effort to cut down the signal to noise ratio on the net vis ‡ vis important subcultural icons, such as William S. Burroughs, J.D. Salinger, Aleister Crowley, and my personal favorite, Iceberg Slim. I wrote the Iceberg Slim page, and personally transcribed and HTMLized 4 interviews and articles about him, over 7000 words in all, if I remember correctly. Anyhow it's a worthwhile project. Far too often when you are looking for information on the web about a particular celebrity all you can find are "fan pages" that have no informational value, like this real example (spelling preserved): "Alesiter Crowley Rocks --- 666 !". I won't bore you with citations of bad webpages, because I don't think fringeware.com has enough storage capacity to list even A through C, but anyone who uses search engines has encountered it, ad nauseam. Also, it increases the information value of our website. Too many sites are what I call "business card" sites - the information contained in them could have been printed on a business card.

Lots of people who browse the biographies end up ordering books out of the FringeWare catalogue, which means the pages pay for themselves. I think in the first 3 or 4 months that we had posted the Iceberg Slim subculture page we sold about 8 or 10 of his books over the net. Those maybe aren't giant numbers, but for a small bookstore, it's a boost. I think there are maybe 25 subculture biographies now, so you can see the difference it can make. (by the way, there is no carlsribshack.com, that's a joke.)

I have been working pretty hard all of May. I spent about 40 hours researching for the Philip K. Dick subcult page (so go buy one of his novels through it, haha), also I read 2 of his novels I had never read before ( VALIS and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), and re-read another ( The Man in the High Castle). I also wrote several book reviews for the FringeWare catalogue, and 5 short stories, which I am mailing out this week to a variety of different venues, including OMNI, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. I also nearly have a submission ready for an anthology that Circlet Press is putting out next summer. It is quite good, I think, and maybe one of the better pieces I have written to date. Circlet is a small publisher that specializes in erotica with a science fiction or fantasy theme. The interesting thing is that I found writing erotica incredibly easy (of course, I haven't even sent it to them yet, so who knows how good it is). I wonder what makes a good erotica writer... Do you have to have a lot of sex? (check) Do you have to have a good imagination. (check) Do you imagine that you have a lot of sex. (check)

Well, we'll see... I won't buy personalized license plates that say "PRNRTR" just yet.

Ironically for the nth year since the Austin Chronicle has had a short story contest, I missed the deadline once again. This year I was determined to send them a story, but not actually having the Chronicle, I had to rely on their website for information about the contest. Well, there was no information on it there that I could find. Finally I emailed them on May 25th. They responded on the 26th, explaining the deadline had been the 18th. Haha. Maybe the 7th year's the charm. (Or will it be the 8th year of the contest?) The piece I was working on to submit to them is online as "untitled work in progress" in the creative writing index. Just as well, now I don't have to change the names of the characters, since right now I am using Chronicle staff names as a joke. Generally I never have anything prepared that I think they will like (judging from the previous years' winners). I am not too worried about it though. An author I admire greatly, William Browning Spencer, an Austinite, wrote a bit about the Austin Chronicle short story contest in the introduction to his collection of short stories The Return of Count Electric. I recommend that anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation (and understood what that actually means) read his novel ResumŽ With Monsters. Once you've read that, you will be unable to resist the urge to read all of his books. (All of his books are available through the FringeWare Catalogue, by the way.)

As of today (June 1st, 1998), I am one week short of my third month here. I have to say to all of my friends, I really, really do miss you all. I had an epiphany the other day while I was moping about the fact that of the 16+ letters I have sent out since getting here, only 5 people have written me back. (Not even my grandmother has written me back!) The realization was that I have lost 30 friends, but each of them has lost only one, me. I have always been rather lax at keeping in touch with people who have moved away over the years, now I'm am being paid back in spades. C'mon Grandma, just a card would do! I want to go ahead and thank Tori (who has written twice!!, and sent pictures), Angel (who's mystery envelope I am still entranced with), Frances (who not only wrote a lovely letter, but enclosed a beautiful color photocopy collage of pictures of herself), Paco (he actually tucked in a short note along with the computer disk that enabled me to get on the goddam internet), Michelle and Luiza, the beautiful Bohemian Wrap City twins, and of course, the indomitable Robert Michael, who has the onerous task of forwarding my mail sent to my US PO Box to Mexico for me. Also my mom, who sent me soft bristle toothbrushes because I couldn't find any here during my first few weeks, and also because if she hadn't allowed my dad to talk her out of her virginity thirty years ago, how the hell could I embarrass her today.... (uhh... you were a virgin before dad, weren't you mom?)

Hasta Luego!

Patrick

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