The similarities between Mexico and the US are becoming more and more apparent day by day. Sure there are differences. But I would like to think think that when I leave this world I will be seen as a unifier and not a divider, even if its a lie. I won't care. Ill be dead and waiting for someone to get a street named after my ballskies.
In one instance of cross cultural homogeneity, it seems that mexican youth have taken to a timeless tradition of american youth, albeit with a little mexican twist that just so happens to make it safer for all those concerned. When I was but a wee lad, 15 perhaps, and all my friends were turning 16 and getting their driver's licenses issued, if not reluctantly, by the state of California. We discovered that we had a distinct advantage over pedestrians and other public thorughfare users not encased in automobiles. That advantage was our superior velocity. I was a timid adolescent. But I couldn't help but snicker as my friends screamed valuable information to runners like that they weren't going to burn enough calories at that pace. They would frequently question the sexuality of the runner if he was male, a cross dresser, or a pre or post-op tranny. If the runner was a female they would scream awkward, crackle voiced cat calls and then giggle, ironically, like schoolgirls. And if projectile resources allowed, they always jumped at the opportunity to hurl In & Out Burger at the hapless jogger. Some of them did dress rather ridiculously and maybe deserved at least a small percentage of the ridicule. Luckily for all of the intended targets none of my friends were very smart, as evidenced by their choice of afternoon entertainment, and as such, in every single instance, they failed to account for any of Newton's well proven laws of motion (Newton is also the scientist' testicles after whom a street was named in Mexico City and began a nationwide frenzy in the US to get a street named after a scientists balls. Yet another shared characteristic betweenn the two nations) and so no one was ever hurt except perhaps an ego or two. A few runners were struck by a wayward sauteed onion (my friends often preferred animal style preparation) but no one ever suffered a compound tibia fracture or a coma inducing head injury as the sauteeing rendered the onions 70% softer than a raw ones.
The Mexican teenager's version of the American Hurl Insults and Food Out Your Window Game is the Mexican Drive by the Gringos and Yell How Are You Out the Window Game. Calen and I were the victims of one such session of the favored Mexican pastime. And in the end were left with little more than feelings of confusion and uncertainty. Because there is one little detail in the Mexican version of the game that is contrary to a successful American Burgering. Often times, as was the case in this instance, pedestrian foot traffic in Mexico is substantially faster than automobile traffic. So they drove by and screamed a common American pleasantry, in our own language, because a secondary goal of the Mexican version of the game is to practice one's English. And then, because they were travelling at a speed well below 5 mph, we caught up with them at the corner 10 m ahead (being a cultured world traveller I can switch between standard and metric units of measurement with ease) where we witnessed them laughing at their own clever little act of youthful mischeif making as if they had just made a pun in a second language. We didn't know what if we were supposed to retaliate or what the next step was in this saucy little dance, so we just did what came naturally. We screamed back, "bien, y Uds. ¿como estan?" Then Calen threw a live grenade in the car and I stabbed two kids in the face and kicked a puppy on the corner just for good (metric) measure.
Now normally, this would seem like a gruesome act of violence. But it was actually a gruesomely noble act of crime fighting. And since the grenade was manufactured by Halliburton, we were also spreading peace, freedom, and democracy. Three of the kids in the bocho (this is what they call volkswagen beetles, but we've appropriated the term and are going to try to use it to replace douche bag in the States. As in look at this f***ing bocho and his stupid shirt. Tell your friends) were drug kingpins trafficking in cocaine, heroin, and tampered dramamine and the other was the daughter of the guy who invented food poisoning. Which brings us to the scoreboard.
Drug Cartels and Food Poisoning: 2
Calen and Colten: 116, 429
Another similarity can be found in the gleaming eyes and innocent hearts of the children of our neighboring countries. Children who have been brainwashed into a standardized fashion of thinking that only alightly allows for expression of differences in cultural heritage. At the free Mexican zoo with three Mexican McDonald's (if you're not yet picking out the pattern, everything in Mexico is the same as in the US just with the word Mexican in front of it. This can also be flip flopped, indicating the same relationship by adding the word American in front of a word) we heard the gleeful, high pitched cries of children screaming out, "Martine, Martine!" Assuming that Martine must be some sort of sensational figure, perhaps the real singer of the fictional band Tacomatadietas in which Calen sings backup vocals and plays guitar, we rushed to catch a glimpse. When we got there we were greeted only by the striped asses of zebras as they enjoyed their evening meals. Still not sure why the children were screaming Martine, we looked at the sign on the zebra enclosure to discover that there was no reference to a Martine. It was at this point during the confusion that Calen began to remove the pin from a live grenade he had in his pocket specificallyt to rectify moments of confusion. It was then that he remembered that in the cartoon films Madagascar and the aptly titled sequel Madagascar 2, there was a zebra named Marty and that Martine was the Spanish translation for the name Marty. He re-pinned the grenade and we moved on to the giraffe enclosure where all the children were screamingl "Hi Ross from Friends." Oh that's one other thing, all the children would, in vain, attempt to get the animals attention by yelling hola at them. It turns out that its not only naive American children who think that animals presumably brought from the depths of the forests of exotic and far away places speak speak their language. I thought it was only Americans who assumed everyone spoke English. But apparently Spanish speaking children are the Mexican American kids at the zoo... only they're at the Mexican zoo. But the Mexican McDonalds still has a Mc Flurry. Some things spell delicious in any language.
The other thing that they have here is neighbors who play their music too loud at inappropriate times. While in the US its usually suburban middle class white kids playing their rap music out of their trunks in their driveway at 2 AM. In Mexico it's a 12 piece band wearing cowboy hats with a full brass section playing rodeo music in El Plaza de Santa Domingo right smack in the middle of siesta time. Its all these tiny differences that serve to illustrate just how much were all the same.
And that explains why, deep down, we all want the same things. Like a roadway named after a certain piece of male crotchal anatomy perhaps belonging to scientific thinker of sorts. A name like Real do Galileos Massive Heavenly Bodies. The guy was burnt at the stake for telling us something we all eventually decided to agree with anyway. Its not like he tried to sell us a bunch of recalled and defective cornballers just because we have lower safety standards. He was trying to help reveal the order of the universe. Think of this as reparations.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment