Viewing Humanity

 Years ago I decided flying on commercial planes was too annoying and humiliating to be worth it. What destination was so important that I needed to get there quickly? None. This self-important fantasy is all a grotesque tradition that I no longer wanted to take part in. This delusion that my body needed to be flung across the lower atmosphere by burning 200,000 year old refined algae so I could tell jokes in some other part of the world more rapidly ? Insane. But I have unfortunately entered a realm where air travel makes a little sense so I investigated low fare airlines and discovered they managed to make the flight booking process even more agonizingly humiliating since I last flew in a plane. Amazing.  I believe these low fare airlines hired engineers to identify any shred of joy remaining in commercial flying and then they assigned that joy a dollar value that you can sell in order to save money but suffer more. I'm even more amazed that consumers have tolerated this madness

I recently read the description of the Palacio de Cortes in Spanish and then translated it to English because after all these years I can still barely understand Spanish...and the word "Cortes" was translated to Courteous. I never put those two together because Hernan Cortez, the conquistador who was the inspiration behind my name for the van I lived in for a decade, was spelled with a Z. But that letter is interchangeable with the letter S. So that means the genocidal lunatic Hernan Cortez was actually "Mr. Courteous."

 The yellow police caution tape told me a grave accident had happened near the corner of the muffler shop and the park where they sell street tacos. A policeman was guarding the area and writing, or pretending to write, in a little notebook. I'm not morbidly curious about vehicle accidents but I am heavily invested in avoiding them so I will stop and study an accident scene to try to learn how I can prevent my future problems. There were pieces of a motorcycle strewn about the area and the large remains of the chassis was near a cement light pole. The motorcycle was closer to a scooter because the large banana seat was dangling off the side of the frame. Then I saw a pool of dark red blood with flies hovering around it on a steel sewer manhole cover. Then I saw the chalk outline. The policeman paid no attention to me as I paused and examined the shape of the chalk line. The legs were facing the wrong direction of the flow of traffic and the head area was over the steel sewer manhol

An often overlooked dimension of the travel experience is profound sickness, be it food poisoning from Guatemalan goat meat, flu caught on a Shanghai barge, or dysentery caught in the open latrines of Ghana, nobody wants to write about such events and no one wants to read them and nobody wants to video themselves in such a condition. But it remains a travel staple, the ghastly delay between stomach spasms and that moment when MUST be on a toilet or have spare sheets nearby.