When you live in a border town, and I imagine this applies to Texas border towns more than most, you get the best of both worlds. At least I get a kick out of it anyway. Car stereos don’t blare rap music, but instead go thumping down the street with mariachi-umpa music rocketing out of sub woofers. You can pick up more useful Spanish of the street variety than you ever learned in high school classes, and the tortillas are the REAL thing. Wacky fun. And then there’s the Saturday night stampede. You can’t miss it. Pretty much every Saturday night, every single breathing underage teenager in the tri-state region lines up at the port of entry to get into Juarez for one reason and one reason only: alcoholic beverages. You see, no one can PROVE they’re crossing simply for the booze--lots of people around here visit their families on the weekends and unless you round them all up and investigate (not feasible given the numbers) you can’t actually prevent them from jumping. At least, I think that’s the deal. Anyway, the population in droves hurls itself into old Mexico and winds up on the same street---the one with all the bars. Kind of like South Padre around spring break. Absolute chaos.

For a lot of you, this may sound like a pretty great thing. If you happen to be in the south Texas, southern New Mexico, southern Arizona area and think you might like to try it out, let me insert a disclaimer here.

I HEREBY OFFICIALLY STATE THAT I AM IN NO WAY ENDORSING THE CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES BY MINORS.

There, ass covered. And FYI, once you drag your liquored up ass back across the border, you’re fair game for every HP, ELPD, and border-patrol agent in the city who can’t wait to throw you into the back of their squad car and give you one call to Mommy and Daddy. Have you seen a border-patrol bust before? Not how I wanna spend Sunday morning.

If, however, you are one of those people who’s starting to feel your age more, this is probably having the opposite effect on you and the thought just makes you feel tired. If so, then you’re the fellow sharer I’m trying to address. You see, a few weeks ago, I got the wild hair itch. You know the one? The one that says “hey, I’m single, I’m not even 30, I need to PAR-TAY!” That one. Well, I had it in a bad way. I needed to go out, needed to do something crazy. Needed to reacquaint myself with my old buddy Mr. Cuervo. Or possibly Mr. Corona. Whatever. So, this new friend of mine (I’ll leave his name out of this for now) says something along the lines of “you haven’t been to any bars in Juarez yet? You’re kidding. Dude (yes, he called me Dude), we’ve got to go!”

So, being infected with the WHI virus I said something like “okay”. Wow. The word okay sounds harmless enough, but it can be deadly.

On his advice, which I took at face value, we left the driving up to someone commonly referred to as The Wheel Man. TWM never drinks. TWM doesn’t care much for carousing of any type. TWM rarely speaks. However, TWM is happy (we think that emotion manifests itself in him, but no one’s really sure) to ferry a few choice acquaintances back and forth across the Bridge Of The Americas on Saturday nights. Maybe he’s just doing a weekly good deed by keeping more drunks off the road, or maybe he‘s running a low-volume smuggling ring and the drunk-taxi gig is a good cover. Who knows? Personally, I think he just uses the time to hang out with buddies who live in quieter parts of Juarez. But what do I know?

See, the thing is, TWM is almost always dependable. To a fault, even. So something must have happened though I’ve never found out what. Anyway, we lost The Wheel Man. Lost him as in someone-who-shall-not-be-named got so friggin’ trashed that our pick-up location for rendezvous with TWH was completely and utterly erased from his brain. I shoulder no blame because I was never entrusted with the info in the first place. So, sometime around 3 a.m. after I’ve been dragging my ridiculously sloshed new friend up and down streets in the bar section of town calling out things like “TWM where ARE you? Why why why why why . Save us, oh GOD please!!” for at least an hour, any buzz I had going earlier had packed up and shuttled away. My ‘friend’ finally started to sober up (I think) and stopped making bad puns that involve the word wheelie. (My favorite was: “Man, when I find that S.O.B. I’m gonna pop a wheelie, al right. Pop one butt good.”). In his new, more clear-headed condition he sagely decided that we’d missed our ride for sure and the only thing to do was hitch with other drunks, find a border-crossing taxi, or hoof it back on foot. By this time of night, the streets had emptied and were looking decidedly less than friendly, and we couldn’t find a damn taxi anywhere. I flat-out refused to hitch with scary drunk people I didn’t know THROUGH A BORDER CROSSING (call me overly cautious), so we were forced to walk.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why is she whining? That doesn’t sound too bad. Good for you, you liar. Let me elaborate a bit. I don’t drink anymore. I drank WAY TOO much in college and one night almost died. My doctor kindly let me know afterwards that drinking too much ever again could literally kill me. That was somewhere around 98 and since then I limit my alcoholic intake to a couple of margaritas, a glass or two of wine, and the occasional beer. I no longer get anywhere close to drunk. Ever. So you can imagine how low my tolerance is these days--close to nil. Well, just about the time that my friend began to sober, I started to feel a little off balance. Not drunk or tipsy, just woozy and sick. I didn’t drink very much, but I drank more (Mexican) tequila and beer --yes, in the correct order, I’m not a total idiot--than I had in years. It made me ill. Nasty ill. At precisely the moment I needed to walk back into the good old U.S. without looking like I’d recently swallowed dime bags of powdery substances. My helpful friend who was learning how to walk again, informed me that we only need go a couple of miles until his cell phone would start working again, and he could call aid. He’s a dirty rotten low-down liar, may his blisters ooze for days. We walked somewhere in the vicinity of 6 miles (several of them in concentric circles) both approaching various degrees of inebriation, both turning this odd shade of green, suspicious characters eyeing us on every block.

   Then we get to the border itself. Armed agents of both nationalities. Drug-sniffing dogs. Vested authority with license to kill and all that. We ambled up as normally as we could, fingers crossed, breath held. (Okay, so that was just me. For some reason, I still seem to have an abnormal fear of the border patrol, even though I’ve never knowingly committed an act that violated international law when moving between countries. But then again, have you ever been involved in a random car search when passing through a check point? Neither have I, but I was in the car behind some poor bloke who was, and it looked awfully scary. ) Anyway, we ambled up.....and managed to re-enter the country without delay. They barely even glanced up. Now, you can say what you want about how this reflects on our national security and whatnot, but I for one was pretty okay with it that night.

The story ends simply. We kept walking. This was in a seedier part of town, but all sane criminals had long since turned in for the night. We kept walking. After more walking, the cell phones started working and a ride was arranged. I got home around 7, did my best to reach my bed before the nausea had its way with me, and slept until sundown the next day.

Yes, I know, anticlimactic ending. No one ended in up the Mexican hoosegow, there really was no orifice containing suspicious powdery substances. Hell, no one even ended up in an ambulance. Maybe not, but I think it proves my point beautifully.

I’m TOO OLD to go bar-hoppin’ across the border.

     I will be rotating different mp3s on this page every couple of weeks. All of the links will be directly from actual LEGAL sources (such as amazon.com and IUMA) so feel free to download. I won’t post anything that will get myself or others in trouble--only songs posted by the artists on various LEGAL sites. You know, just to be sure and all.

Check em out and enjoy!

     Well, I’ve done it now. Much to my ever-present chagrin I’ve given in to the overwhelming urge to share my hard-earned wisdom and more abundant insanity with thousands of people who couldn’t give the hind quarters of a rodent’s nether regions what I think, rather than just the handful of souls who do. Give a lab animal’s buttocks, I mean. Yup, I’ve jumped head first into this blog trend, even though I so dislike being ‘trendy.’ Ah well, a little hypocrisy now and again is probably healthy. It occurs to me that blogging is nothing more than public masturbation really. Now, don’t get offended, fellow sharers. Obviously, I too feel that my masturbation isn’t quite public enough, hence the writing. It comes from a need for validation, I think. We all look for some form of affirmation in our daily lives, whether it be friends, coworkers, teachers, family. We all need someone to tell us that we’re special in some way. I know I certainly do, even though I hate to admit it. And truthfully, doesn’t it start to ring hollow when the only people telling you the good stuff happen to be the VERY SAME people who’ve been repeating it by rote for decades? The solution? Post your most intimate thoughts for the world to see and bask in the praise of the masses. Tada! Of course, I realize that I run the risk of virtual flogging and the occasional death threat, but I won’t let that stop me. Bring it on--water off a duck man. Roll on roll on.