This is quite a bit to read, so if you make it through, I’ll be quite impressed, and rather grateful, to be honest.
I’m sitting in my completely cluttered apartment, listening to Malvinda Reynolds’ self-righteous yet piercing folk song “Little Boxes,” and contemplating what exactly to write. The first two weeks after high school teaching have ended have been interesting, to say the least. I spent June 22-June 28 in Ensenada, Mexico, in a yearly house building trip. Rather than respond politely or most likely, flippantly, when asked how that was, I thought I’d also try to answer that here. So let’s begin, shall we?
Mexico- how was it?
hard. good. nothing. everything. clever. overwhelming. anticlimactic.
First of all, I suck at building things. My mind is clever, agile in fit shape. Mentally–I’m an athlete at the height of his game, in peak form. Physically, I’ve spent so much of my life rejecting physical strength and external masculinity that I feel my keen, graceful mind is entombed in a prison of solid doughy flesh, self conscious in the vet en beenderen of my body. My hands are clumsy and unsure.
On some levels I feel like I’m seven again, running windsprints in a parking lot for my coach-father, who looked longingly at the physical prowess of other men’s sons in order to push back the weight of his own mortality. I don’t know if he ever realized that every whistle blow, exasperated sigh, open-handed slap to the face, unsolicited comparison taught me to hate my body and shy away from the halting efforts of my flesh in favor of the consistent victories my mind afforded.
This week I cut rebar, nail-gunned plywood, shinnied up ladders, and–most significantly–made concrete.
No trip to Mexico for me is complete without some mothereffing digging. This time, I spent two days in front of a wheelbarrow, shoveling contents into its greedy innards, the rusted and flaky red paint stretching like the aged skin of some infirm dragon. The golden proportions were all that mattered in my mind: ten scoops of sand/gravel, three scoops of CEMEX cement (seriously, what company DOESN’T end in ‘-Mex’ in this country?), and copious amounts of water, literally obtained from a ten gallon drum in front of the half-built homestead.
Scrape. Scrape. Shovel. Pour. Slop. Repeat.
Once in the wheelbarrow, pull the sand-ment-agua mixture toward you with a shovel while a partner does the same opposite you. Eventually, you’ll make a circle, mixing and churning and scraping and pulling and mulling and making. There is nothing else to do.
My racing mind, already disgusted by the slow pace of my sweaty, gelatinous flesh, races ahead, arching far above the baking Baja dust roads and soaring, phoenix-like in the rush of clear azure spaces above. It soon, however, runs out of words to say, puns to make, bills to remember to pay, defenses to maintain, and crashes, Icarus-style, to earth, having burnt through all the mental chatter within the first sixty minutes.
Then the fun begins. Then the darkness, the obscuridad, seeps to the surface like an oil spell. Long buried shame. Remembered mistakes. Continued self-doubt and self-loathing. The voice rise around me, like silent snakes, and stealthily whispered perfumed poisons into my ears.
You are fat and ugly and disgusting, they hiss, silkily.
You are defective. No one will ever love one such as you. There is nothing masculine, nothing beautiful, nothing of value about you. Give up now, you stupid, fat fool.
These barbed words, filled with the venom of doubt and loathing, are obscenely attractive. Somewhere far away, I stop shoveling. My breath stops in my chest as I allow for a second the poison to sink in. I feel strangely cold under the baking, oppressive Mexican heat of midday.
“Are you alright?” Tiffany asks, noting my shovel paused in mid-concrete pull, ending our circular motion.
“Of course not. I’m against the war,” I joke back weakly, and resume working.
The serpents still circle my ears, hissing, “You’re the reason she tried to kill herself, you’ll never find peace, vote for John McCain this fall,” and other equally ridiculous, foolish statements.
Concrete was the major moment for me in Mexico this week; two days of mixing, pulling, digging, searching for sand grains, checking fo rmoisture, hoping that the correct shade of ugly olive green emerges in my cracked dragon basket of a wheelbarrow.
Concrete is where my mind was silenced and the shit floated to the top. I thought today, maybe, just maybe, that’s what Jesus felt during his forty days in the desert.
If so, How did you stand it?
What did you see?
How good did it feel to reach that solemn, transcendent calm post-experience?
Construction is hard for me as it is such a very masculine activity and I am so terrified of my own masculinity, of the power of my maleness.
I reject it, often burying it like the wretched servant did with the talent his owner gave him, leaving the unsolicited burden under layers of moist earth far from light and air and truth. Every nail, hammer, plank, Cemex© bag, wrench, skillsaw, tar paper, ladder, wheelbarrow dug into the dark parts of the garden, through loam and silt and even scratching through sticky, indifferent clay to the masculinity cloistered within.
And I did not like this digging, unasked and undesired, into the soil of my heart. But it happened anyway.
Each day in Mexico we woke up at 7 am, got to work a little after 8 am, built things until 4:30pm, then headed back to the church to hold a Vacation Bible School (VBS), an entertaining, instructional, and outreach program to the children of the dusty streets.
The VBS part is always easier. It’s entertaining, human, simple, relational, easy.
I gambol, trip, fall, slip, grimace, and grin. The children laugh. They are entertained.
Children are almost as easy to fool as adults, if you’re a born performer and have two and a half decades of smoke and mirrors under your belt.
In a rare self-righteous moment, I try desperately to see Christ in the faces of those children. Especially in the eyes of those who haven’t yet learned to lie, bluff, or be ‘okay.’ I love seeing those who aren’t yet faking normalcy, as we must, to be come adults and not suicides or husks. So I scrape the tattered walls of my ‘empty heart cup‘ (as Ms. Brooks would put it) for love for these children and find mainly pottery flakes and chipped paint.
I pray, haltingly, cynically for the means and hope to love them, myself, Jesus, you. I mouth, help me overcome my unbelief, my cynical exoskeleton, my broken soul, my ‘intelligent’ indifference, and learn to see with new eyes.
Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. Luke 11:34-35.
Um, right, I’ll get on that, Jesus.
Matrimony
What else has happened these past few weeks? Every freaking one is getting matrimonial!
On 6/17, my fellow teacher, Paul, married his longtime partner, Pete, in one of the first same-sex ceremonies in San Diego. After nearly twenty years together, they wanted to b e recognized by the state. It was tender, loving, and beautiful. On 6/19, I helped my friend Ryan get an engagement ring for his (now) fiancee. They so deeply love each other, it’s amazing, and beautiful and challenging. I was mildly envious.
On 6/21, two of my favourite friends, Rob and Jimiliz, got married.
I was the best man. Let me preface by saying that I hate weddings. (I did tell Rob this when he asked me, and he didn’t back down, weirdo). Ik haat hen.
That was what came to mind when Mario, pastor of the local church that we worked for in Ensenada, asked me while driving his dusty truck through the winding, gutted dirt roads of Ensenada hillside slums, ¿Está casado ya? ¿Por qué no?
I found I had hours of reasons and stories and examples and cynicism, and bitterness, starting with my parents own spectacular failure in the marital department to my most recent experience in dating in a girl who tried to use me as her life preserver to keep from sinking into the back depths of her own soul. Instead, I just looked at him and said, Hay mucho que puedo decir, pero yo sé que tengo que esperar algún tipo de respuesta.
There’s been a lot to learn.
I leave for Illinois in a little over a month. God help me.
How am I feeling?:: 
contemplative
What’s playing?:: Malvina Reynolds – Little Boxes
grateful