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  • hardie karges 11:14 am on May 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Mexico   

    Losing Religion, Learning Language: Contagion of Kindness Needed ASAP, pls… 

    IMG_0387We become so inured to modern violence that we assume it’s natural, the general air of belligerence and the general lack of politeness.  And that’s right I reckon—it IS natural, or WAS, anyway—in the beginning.  Imagine what it would be like it we hadn’t been inoculated by religion at birth, that vaccination by cultural collusion and linguistic license, immigrant immersion and religious righteousness.

    We need a booster shot now, more than ever, we so far from God, and so close to Mexico, conveniently close to sacrificial lambs, artificial limbs and easy scapegoats for our worst trespasses and most hideous transgressions, things we should’ve said and things we should’ve done, too late now to start over, so must settle for walls and bridges, duct-tape solutions and anti-retroviral cocktails…

    If you’re American, then the degree to which you’re awash in violence is a serious impediment to (y)our spiritual well-being. I don’t mean that you yourself have done anything necessarily wrong, except maybe being born in the wrong place.  Jesus Christ once said that a camel could go through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man could find his way to Heaven. And he was right, I’d say, though modern-era capitalists try to quickly change the narrative, something about ‘trespasses’… (More …)

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    • k 11:27 am on May 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      interesting. my ideas may be simpler, may be more difficult, to get back to the garden. until then i will not let the city discourage me or anyone else from a community garden and am starting work on the third guerrilla garden, that’s all i know to do that is right, grow peace, grow flowers, grow herbs, maybe give someone besides myself happiness. enjoy the temple.

      • hardie karges 12:30 pm on May 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        I strongly believe in community gardens, hope to see one hanging off every skyscraper within my lifetime…

    • davekingsbury 1:22 pm on May 2, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Terrific, Hardie, spot on with the language analysis – we’re much deeper enmeshed than we like to think in our free societies. Stephen Pinker reckons humanity is less violent than it was but I suspect the violence is still there though mutated into political and economic aggression. Your antidotes drawn from Buddhist philosophy are perfect and shot through with nice touches of self-deprecation. I’m going to reblog this because I’d like it to be read. Only ever done that once before and that was yours too!

      • hardie karges 1:52 pm on May 2, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        Thank you thank you thank you, I’ve read ‘Language Instinct’ by Pinker, liked it, even if I don’t always agree with it…

    • davekingsbury 1:33 pm on May 2, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Reblogged this on a nomad in cyberspace and commented:
      This is the second post by this guy I’ve reblogged and I’ve only ever reblogged two posts! I love his directness and honesty and, well, I’m jealous because I didn’t write it. I couldn’t, of course, because I’m not American. What he says has resonance in the UK too. And as they say, what happens in the USA today happens here tomorrow!

    • hardie karges 7:52 pm on May 2, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      🙂

    • davekingsbury 3:25 am on May 5, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Hardie, the link on my reblog of this post leads to the title but not the full post. Wondered why this was. Regards, Dave.

    • hardie karges 6:31 am on May 5, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Had a problem yesterday, still don’t know why, especially since it’s both my blogs, but not on others, i.e. yours. Seems okay now. THX!

    • peaceof8 8:34 am on May 8, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Wow. I really like this. I will be coming back to this one…there are some phrases you use “another day and in another way, with cooler heads and makeshift beds” that are fantastic and filled with visuals. Really meaty. Thank you! I also like that you make a valid point without making it feel preachy. Following you!

    • RemedialEthics 11:02 pm on June 21, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      I am late to the party here, but I couldn’t have found this place you’ve created here at any better time. I was looking for an address in Sasabe, AZ but Google in its infinite wisdom led me to an older blog post of yours that brought tears to my eyes. I live off Sasabe Rd about 30 miles north of the town of Sasabe and we have all been feeling a tad well…hated is really the only word that works so… hated by the current ruling majority.
      This post in particular hit home with me. I am a freelance writer by trade. That is a good thing and I am thankful everyday that I insisted on signing up for every writing and literature course I could in college, despite the fact that I was earning my Veterinary medicine degree. The dubious innovation of AI or Bot writing critiques rather than peer reviewed submissions has been the fly in the ointment for me lately. The younger set is convinced that artificial intelligence is the only fair way to handle any sort of hard decision that could possibly offend someone or cause hurt feelings. I couldn’t disagree more. You see, I have a problem (that I was blissfully unaware was a problem til the blessing of AI) that AI and Bots can’t stand and that is the “passive voice”. I am admonished for my passive voice on nearly every submission now. I went 43 years thinking I was a confident, independent, woman and now thanks to the politically correct, non-offensive AI Bot, I am a meek, passive-aggressive weakling and I think I’m a little offended. All jokes aside though, I loved and share your sentiment on Sasabe and the Mexican people in general. I am even more pleased to find a real workable defense of the “passive voice”, I’m ready to go have a few (very polite) words with a certain critique bot.. Thank you for the much needed mental reset.

      • hardie karges 12:05 am on June 22, 2018 Permalink | Reply

        Thanks for your substantive comment. I’ve noticed that there’s a bias against passive voice, also, though I didn’t learn that in a course, just noticed that it was edited out, and totally skewed the meaning that I intended–interested that bots and AI are now involved. On the other hand Spanish seems to favor it, e.g. ‘si se puede’. I’d argue that Buddhism favors it also, with the emphasis on ‘non-self’, ‘anatta’. BTW I loved crossing the border the border at Sasabe, one of the few borders in AZ that didn’t detain me, presumably because I had an Afghanistan visa (San Luis is the worst). Thanks again for your comments…

  • hardie karges 5:02 pm on June 1, 2015 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Mexico, temperatures, , weather   

    Forget the bon temps, let the good temps roll… 

    Gila_monster_spitToday the temps touch 104f/40c in Tucson, right on schedule, just like clockwork, welcome to June, welcome to summer, four more months exactly like this, they say, but I wouldn’t know, to be sure, even the Gila monsters go looking for air conditioning, and I go looking for Prozac, or some suitable substitute, as this could be rough, not like a couple months ago when hopes were long and days were short, when nights were cool and the smell of honeysuckle signaled the end of winter, even though they probably don’t have honeysuckle here, so mesquite blossoms or something like that, desert flowers and spring showers, and all that rap, so far from God, so close to Mexico…

     

    • mary 6:01 pm on June 1, 2015 Permalink | Reply

      Forget the prozac, find you some sativa, it will lift you up out of those blues.

  • hardie karges 10:32 pm on March 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Jeopardy, Mexico   

    Mexican Jeopardy 

    On Mexican ‘Jeopardy’ the contestants always start at the bottom highest-priced end of a category and work their way upward toward the easy questions.  It’s as if the correct answer to a question ultimately comes from luck, not skill or knowledge, certainly not something that might be gained from thirty minutes of practice and familiarity with the subject.  People wonder why the Third World is the world of poverty and start pointing fingers of accusation at rich countries and rich corporations that ‘suck out’ the resources of the rest of the world while leaving nothing in return.  At the same time they ignore the reluctance of many of those same people to improve their individual and group situations by incremental steps and simple logic, the powers of two, double your money, then double it again, then so on to the limits of one’s ability.  This is the conservative approach to progress, conserving what already exists while moving forward one step at the time, best exemplified in reproduction.  Gene-splicing is a shortcut to nowhere.  The power of reproduction is the power of twos, in fractional terms, two unite and become one in the flesh, over and over to infinity.

     

  • hardie karges 3:38 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Mexico,   

    Milagros 

    Twice I was in Mexico City on the most polluted day in the history of the world.  Yes, it got worse.  One day somebody found a yard-long mutated rat.  Yeow!  I hope that’s not the future path of evolution.  Nobody wants to brag about that, of course.  It seems like every time I go to Mexico somebody’s just seen an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe shedding her tears in some new location.  They take that catholic shit seriously, miracles and all.  A common greeting in Mexico is, “Que milagro!”  That’s what I want to know, “What miracle?”

     

    • ecopreservationsociety 4:58 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Mexico City has some wonderful attributes, but the pollution there is nothing short of disgusting.

      Not sure you measured the “most polluted day in the history of the world”

    • ecointeractive 5:01 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Sorry, not for me. Mexico is possibly the least desirable place in all of Latin America

  • hardie karges 1:29 am on February 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Mexico, ,   

    Night Life 

    The girls of Ensenada will never make a Playboy shoot.  I know that there are a lot of lonely people in the world, but this is ridiculous!  Nightlife in Mexico is surreal.  With their bouffant hairdos and gaudily painted faces, it’s like something from a dream, or a circus, or maybe just the past.  Mexican women are to normal women as Mexican food and music are to their ‘normal’ counterparts, an acquired taste.  Ensenada comes awake all of a sudden when the love-boat lands.  It’s like night and day.  The only thing I’ve seen like it is in Songkhla, Thailand, where bar girls watch and wait behind counters deadly silent, counting I guess, as if something will surely happen if only they wait long enough.  It does.  The foreign off-shore oil-field support workers come in, somebody rings the bell hanging over the bar, and all of a sudden the place is an uproar, with dancing and drinking erupting as if from a long dormant volcano.  Of course, nothing beats the ‘wookie bar’ along Sukhumvit in Bangkok for surrealism.  If you turned Thailand up on edge to sort out the loose nuts, this is where you’d go to pick them up.  Is this where you end up after cruising the parking lot of Shoney’s Big Boy in Jackson, Mississippi, as a teenager?  It’s bumper-to-bumper on a Saturday night in Ensenada.

     

  • hardie karges 1:18 am on February 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Ensenada, Mexico, Oaxaca   

    Remembering Mexico 

    I miss Latin America.  I still use Ensenada as a base when I’m in North America much of the time but, well, those girls could use some Slim Fast.  Not that I’m looking for girls mind you, I’m happily married, but I like visually pleasing experiences.  I miss the old days.  Back then I’d disdain to even consider hanging in a border town, but back then ‘the interior’ was dirt-cheap.  Now they’re about the same, and I can use American services and be back in Mexico at will along the border.  But that’s a compromised situation.  Back in the old days southern Mexico was pristine.  Old women went bare-breasted in Pinotepa.  Puerto Escondido was a fishing village, with campsites for the American hippie-types filtering in to winter over in the sunshine.  You could get a licuado smoothie for the equivalent of an American quarter.  Usually those are milk or water-based.  These were orange-juice-based!  If you camped on the beach, a Frito bandito would even come by your campsite after you’ve turned in and hold you up at gunpoint, taking your cameras and otherwise lightening your load.  Now that’s service!  But Oaxaca was always good at that.  I can’t remember ever parking my truck on the city streets and not getting robbed.  I even got robbed with a screwdriver once.  Mix me a Molotov.  My Oaxacan friends swore that the thieves weren’t Oaxacans, or at least not ‘real’ ones.  Yeah, we never really had slaves in Mississippi, either.  A British friend swears that the British were reluctant colonizers.  

     

  • hardie karges 12:56 am on February 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Mexico   

    Mexican Food 

    Of course Mexican food in US restaurants differs from Mexican restaurants ‘in country’ also.  There, it gets even more bizarre.  On the bright side, there’s mole, red or black or shades of brown intermediate, blood and chocolate made to order.  On the down side, there’s menudo, like the Puerto Rican pop group, literally bits and pieces of this and that, mostly tripe.  Remember Ricky Martin?  It’s an acquired taste I guess.  Once, in Mexico, I helped kill chickens for a party.  Actually I just watched, not horrified, because I’ve seen it before, but not inspired, either.  I think there were twenty to thirty of the little squawkers, throats carefully slit and blood collected in a large copper #3 washtub.  The pile of mole paste eventually covered an entire table before being put to the fire and made liquid to be ladled over boiled chicken.  Then we paraded around town with a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe.  Chili pastes in Thailand and Mexico look very similar, actually.  The women don’t.  Both take on a fat content in Mexico that would put Thailand out of business.  That’s what happens when lard is one of your main ingredients, I guess.  That’s what makes those tortillas so creamy smooth.  North Thailand uses too much grease also, more than the central region, but what really bothers me is that the coconut milk in those curries seems to congeal at well above freezing temperature.  I don’t mean thick; I mean breakable.  Not as high as nitroglycerin freezing at 50 degrees F, but high enough that I see pictures of it in my mind blocking arteries.  Nevertheless, I still haven’t gotten used to internal body parts in my food.  If God had wanted me to see this stuff, he’d have put it out there in the open.       

     

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