1/27/08 12:32 AM The strangest night. A cricket in the fireplace. Outside, howling chanting singing bellowing all over the neighborhood and the town. Beyond: the city, the parochial, the castles and churches lit up, glittering. Across to the hills: the same. Am I the only person that thought that 10 pm Saturday isn’t the middle of the day? The man on the street again is droning some kind of incantation. Dogs wailing. Yakking. Taxis maneuvering. A police car rocketing around the corner of my tiny cobblestone street. Trumpets in the distance. All over is the uproar of rejoicing and celebration exulting Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody…. ouside my window: a cat or a baby crying It’s 12:10 and at 10 pm it was like the energy of a Saturday afternoon. They were finishing dinner in the courtyards across the way. I went out in my slippers, just to try to see, to understand what all the racket was and almost slipped on the cobblestones. On the streets: congregations of people. All the doorways and shops lit up. Behind a wooden partition in the strange restaurant across the street, (barely more than a garage): men smoking and drinking. A woman and man flirting in the dimmer part of Orizaba street. Dogs; horns; itching in my hands from the paint; will it not stop? I masturbated and thought that would put me to sleep. I awoke after maybe 20 minutes of peace, to the multitude of festivities across this town and pulled the blankets up over my head. Then inside my head. A thousand candles burning. Reds and yellows and all I want to do is return to Keith’s studio and paint. I'm working fantasy into the realism of still life. Modern Magic. Keith said that three of us should start a new school of painting: he and I and another person who also does surrealism but not as well integrated with realism as I do he said. Realism and magic is Mexico. Is me. I have never felt this way. Itchy and dry and bursting with life and creativity and potential and so often solitary and spacious and time enough to think things through, what I am doing. Why I am stressing, when no one hurries in Mexico. Except maybe for the gringos. I don’t understand where I am but I know I don’t want to ever leave here for good. My body is different. The food is different. Everything is completely different. I really did get away this time. My skin is threatening to break out in a rash. My hands look strangely granular, my fingers, swollen. My nails have tiny calcium deposits. What is happening to me? Suddenly everything is quiet. Everything is strange. These rhythms and sounds and textures and flavors are all so un-American. Halleluja. f I wear a red headband across my forehead and feel the nativity of my cells that go so far back, and the astecs are alive and well in Mexico and I am willing to put up with all this strangeness because I am learning and more importantly the richness within is finding fruition in this strange and beautiful faint mariachi music in the jardin. Huge families gathered across the hills lit up and beyond it all, the enormous mountains. 12:48: Total silence!?