While I am so digging the third world vibe of remote Mexico, I can’t fucking wait to get home!

Here I am in Mexico City. So far, nothing scary, even if I fear work and work functions.

I’m in the hotel room. Hotel rooms are always such a weird combo of oasis, like, yeah, time enough to think, read, whatever and enjoy myself, and horrible, horrible alienation. I whiplash back and forth from peace to loneliness to peace to loneliness. Like in the internal head soundtrack (made famous by Allie McBeal), one minute it’s Aretha (all R&B anthemy) and the next Bessie Smith (feeling all the shit that done bring you the fuck down).

Part of me is just getting used to the old domestic routine. I don’t know how to use the hotel phone and call Cali, and I am too tired to figure it out. No boyo, reassuring me it’ll be fine and probably this job is OK, and the evil is likely behind me (and I guess, um, not curing cancer).

Must sleep, big exciting day just jampacked with meetings tomorrow. (The other thing that kind of sucks about work travel, apart from say hotel-room alienation, is they fucking make you work.)

On vacation, I swell with the pleasure of a hotel room and room service and foreign lands and exciting adventures. At work, I just get exhausted.

And, GODDAMN IT, someone explain the water to me. I’m deathly afraid of the water.

If I’m not too lazy when M. goes to run 20 miles, I might upload my set from last night. It wasn’t a bad set. No notes, a few new things and overall I was gladly lowkey and relaxed.

Apart from getting laughs in the right places and playing for a pretty good-sized audience, I was gratified by my favorite schaudenfraude-ish comedy experience. Right before the show there was one comic with whom I had worked before (and who M. fucking hates, partially for her leaning heavy on the Asian thing, of which she’s half, and partially for her “edgy” yelling), and she was chatting with another dude. She was asking if he was performing, apparently he was a comic, but his name wasn’t on the night’s show flyer.

His reply, “Yeah, well, I’m up, but, you know, I’m like the best kept secret in SF comedy. They don’t always put my name on the sign, but I do them a favor and perform.” Or something to that affect. Your basic poor me, I’m misunderstood, but watch me blow the doors off this dump, comedy braggadacio that always, always, always is a portent of nothing pretty.

I made a mental note to watch this guy’s set, because clearly he was going to play like a rockstar.

I was fully and thoroughly rewarded for my judgmental cynicism. He blew the doors off alright, in the sense that he totally blew. He sucked so hard, you could feel the pressure change in the room. My personal favorite two moments were (1) his homeless rap with the big punch of seeing a guy with a sign “Will work for drugs,” rim shot, which he presented in classic, vaudevillian “Ta Da” outstretched arms to chilling silence and (2) his big closer with a 20-year-old street joke (personalized, though, which was nice).

The street joke is the one about walking up to a punk with multi-colored hair and something about thinking it was your son, because once you got drunk and fucked a parrot. Ha ha ha ha, like in 1979, when crayon-colored hair technology was new and punks were unusual and life was fresh and pure and clean.

But, a wacky punk reference in late 2005? By a guy with shoulder-length a straggly, aging biker/hippie ‘do, beard and mustache? In fucking San Francisco? Yeah, right, ’cause in the fabled streets of SF, where people go way the fuck out the way to appear creatively bohemian, a punk is noticeable?

I get way too much pleasure hating on that kind of comic and their irrepressible arrogance. M. spent the whole of this guy’s set watching me wince and laughing his ass off.

My other favorite bit was the poor guy’s opener about his appearance and, “Yeah, I know, you’re wondering if I ride with the Hell’s Angels.” Actually I wasn’t thinking that because, um, you look about as edgy as a triangle of pumpkin pie, and anyway, when was the last time anyone ever worried about the Angels? Altamont Speedway, maybe?

Honestly, though, I swear, I actually reserve my comedy bitterness and excessive bile for the jokers who you overhear bragging on their badass comedy selves. For any potential audience members, there is always an inverse relation to funny, if you overhear someone touting his greatness before a show.

Other than that, it was a fun show with a lot of interesting, funny and original folks. I wish I had talked with Sherry Sirof, if only because she had the best abortion reference I have ever heard.

So if I were hip and young and focused on enjoying life, thrills would be rattling my spine and anticipation would be firing my imagination. Instead, I’m imagining fear and loathing, Mexico style.

When at first I obtained gainful employ, I was treated with a lunch among the “team.” Yay, team. Whilst enjoying a French-like ham and cheese sandwich in the Croque Monsieur or Madam tradition, I heard about “the retreat.” As in, our team is retreating to build team spirit and strategically plan and otherwise focus on all sorts of work-y, grinding fun. Only that wasn’t the lunch-time chatter, not the working, strategically planning shit, nope it was about it’s being a trip to Mexico.

In other words, next week I’ll be slipping south of the border, first to Mexico City, then to a mountain artsy, spiritual, resort-ish town called Tepoztlan. From what I can gather on-line, Tepotzlan has a lot of the same groovilicious art colony vibe and market quality of maybe Provincetown off season. Tucked away from the mainstream, but still able to get clogged with visitors on the weekends.

Oh, it’s also home to a pretty good amount of UFO activity, if you were to believe in such things. Probably, that activity is due to it being adjacent to the alleged birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god, who, of course, came from the sky ad brought technology and all sorts of shit, if you were to believe in such things. You know, like them aliens do.

It’s also where there’s the Pyramid of Tepozteco that honors Ometochtli-Tepoztécatl, Aztec god of pulque, which apprently was a key Aztec psychedelic booze and some kind of fermented cactus juice that is still around. He’s also the god of fecundity and harvest and bunnies, ‘cuz you like get all drunk and shit and that leads to making stuff, like babies and bunnies and I guess whatever crops come from fucking.

In theory, I should be excited by this little trip. New on the job and getting my expenses paid to an exotic locale and all. Only, I started looking for portents, and right now I’m not feeling good about the address of the Mexico City hotel where we all will be staying at first. It’s on Edgar Allen Poe street (only it probably ain’t “street,” because they wouldn’t use that word). Fucking POE. Scary.

Then there is my out and out phobic fear of work-related travel. Awhile back, in the hell job that preceded my last hell job, the one that made me leave Boston. Well in that olden job, we all use to march right off to an annual Washington, DC-based professional development junket, wait I mean meeting. Right, a meeting, one in which my director annually packed a giant bottle of Cuervo 1800 or convinced whoever was running the “hospitality suite,” aka free booze room, to stock up on various Jose flavors.

Believe me, nothing puts the fear in ya for work travel like seeing your overly coiffed, awkwardly aging, Italian Stallion, twice married, slime-coated, height-challenged, hirsute, philandering boss, doing body shots of tequila off of some chick you just met and accidentally pimped out to him, just by bringing her around.

One meeting hurt or stands out for me, or maybe it was two that have melded in that weird way in which trauma just piles up on you and becomes one giant memory. At a meeting, or maybe two, I had to share a room with a co-worker. One night, she didn’t come back to her bed, choosing instead to wake me up at dawn in a classic, horrible, college dorm scenario of hysterical “guess who I just fucked last night?” Suave director man got a bit beyond the body shots that night, and I spent the next few months dreading what my co-worker might tell me on any given day, when the occasional bumping ugly continued.

The possible same meeting, or maybe the next, brought more tequila and another female contemporary to myself (therefore a good decade or two younger than the director Lothario) falling for his charms (ones thankfully to which I was impervious). This time I had the misfortune of bumping into the fun-loving meeting attendees as he carried/dragged her legless chubbiness off the elevator in the direction of his room.

A month later, she had moved to Boston from Chicago and was declared our new boss.

I have it on excellent authority he tagged team the chicks around me for several months, while his wife gave birth to their youngest child, and, eventually, the native Chicagoan returned to the Midwest a sadder and wiser woman.

After that, I stopped traveling on business. My professional self just wasn’t developing, and my personal self was a tad stressed.

Piled on that is my last year’s lesson in never, ever, ever, ever, fucking ever, ever trust people at work ever again.

Yay me! I’m going to a remote village, where I can’t speak the language, spending hours and hours with co-workers I barely know and want to keep that way, and can expect at least wine at dinner in play, not to mention it’s being the land where fucking tequila was born. Holy shit, I’m quaking in my boots.