Monday, June 19, 2006

Sand in my shoes

Welcome to my virtual scrapbook!

This would have been a fun hotel to stay at—or perhaps too spooky? Those ghosts certainly look like they're having a good time.

On vacation, I read some more of Jonathan Strange, finished Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means, and imbibed relevant chunks of Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. I also started Scott Smith's The Ruins once I returned, but it's freaking me out and I have to put it away. I also read some of the interviews in the new Believer—Dizzyhead Brandon's interview with Stephen O'Malley is not to be missed, nor is the Greil Marcus/Don DeLillo conversation (talking about Dylan—fascinating!). Unfortunately, the rental car's radio/CD player didn't work at all, so I had to just imagine what this year's Believer CD sounded like.


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I randomly stumbled on this quote: "Do not mistake the scaffolding for the building." —Freud

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Bugs devoured my legs.

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On TV: Alexander Payne's Election, or as it's called in Mexico, La Trampa. We watched about half an hour of the Nicholas Cage/Téa Leoni movie The Family Man, trying to figure out what was going on. Did he have amnesia or something?

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Driving in Mexico is interesting. One becomes intimately familiar with speed bumps, known as topes. There are four varieties:

1. A wide, rubberized reddish ramplet–yellow platform–reddish ramplet
2. Two rows of half-buried metal bocce balls, aligned so that the wheels can't pass through the gaps
3. A raised mound of pavement, extending across the road like a big baguette
4. A thick rope

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I didn't take any pictures of topes, but I took some pictures of various Mayan ruins. At Tulum, located on the coast, some red handprints were visible on one structure. This brought to mind The Blair Witch Project.









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At Coba we started to climb the most impressive of the pyramids but the steps were too narrow, the structure too high. Even the non-dizzy-prone couldn't help but feel dizzy. Here's what it looked like from a very low angle:















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Back in Playa del Carmen: Was I paranoid, or did the locals not like me? Alas, the evidence became all too clear:


(Someone call Georges Perec!)

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I also visited the nation's capital for a day, where I spent some time with friend James, who's running for office this fall—very exciting. (More information here.) Relevant Marylandic Dizzyheads, you know what to do!

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Final photograph—get ready for it . . .

1 Comments:

Blogger Jenny Davidson said...

Great photos--but Ed, don't you think that's not the "Caspar the friendly ghost" hotel but instead the "cute molar icon hotel that encourages you to floss properly or else to get cheapish dental work done overseas"?

1:06 AM  

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