180° view out of my office roof

Just wanted to share a quick panoramic sweep I took with my phone, I love this kinds of angles from places one doesn't always see here in Cuautla most buildings are 2 stories high, well, my office building is 3 stories high and haves high ceilings between floors, so it's quite tall in comparison.

I'll keep posting small interesting tidbits when I think they are post worthy.

Mexican holiday is just around the corner.

Day of the death.

If you have ever known anything about the Mexican culture you are probably familiar with the day of the death, from October 31st to November 2nd, 3 days of remembering our ancestors, it's being said that to know where you are going you have to know where you came from, and nothing beats looking at your past relatives and learn about the struggle they lived to get you where you are right now.

We as Mexicans have a very intertwined belief on the unity of family, and most would agree that we do what we do to provide our descendants with a better economical and sociological standing, this little celebration is as much a way of remembering as it is a way of teaching our kids about the value and importance of those before us, which can be seen on the way they lived and what they did to move forward in life, be it right, or wrong, it's because of what they did that we are where we are right now.

But there is more to the celebration than just looking back to the ones that came before us, it's also an acknowledgment on the nature of life itself, how everyone, in the end, is going to die some day and will be left as nothing more than bones, "Dia de los muertos" is a love letter to death itself, also known as "La Catrina" since we fashion her as a dressy female skeleton, we are proudly standing next to the people that haves already passed away saying "we do not fear you, come spend some time with us" we open our doors, and our minds at the same time to the notion that life is not eternal, and all of us must die some day.

Trying to understand our ideals.

The religious nature of my country leaves nothing short of having everyone want to be remembered as good people, as such, no one remembers the death as bad persons, they just look at the good they did to try and reason that, even if they were some bad they were worthy of going to heaven, yes he might have being an abusive father or a wife beater, but once he's passed away all is forgiven least they deny him entry to heaven, and more often than not, they do it as a way of showing that "we forgave the one that just died so that he may enter heaven, if I ever did anything to you, you'll forgive me too least you keep me from getting into heaven", restless spirits are the ones that their family cant forgive, this translates to a colloquial saying "No death person has ever done anything bad in life", which I personally find very interesting to think about because they are not really saying he was "perfect" but that whatever he did was not bad enough to be sent to "hell" so he was not a "bad" person when he died, everyone forgave him, kind of a circular thinking if you ask me, but since I never was a very religious person it's meaning just washes down to "he did what he could to maintain his family" which is a way of letting go of things.

As such, it's a given that whatever we do to the people around us, as long as we don't "break" the family ties we won't be remembered as bad people, "betrayal of family" such an ingrained concept on the Mexican psyche, you are nothing without your family, if a man kills another man trying to rob him he is a delinquent, if he does it because his family needed the money, society would look at him with kinder eyes, not the law of course, just society in general.

It reminds me of the Netflix series "Narcos" most people saw Pablo Escobar as a monster, except his family and the people that got to know him personally, it all comes down to "he did it for his family" and it shows in how the people around him, the poor people, treated him, they all wanted to be part of his family in that same series, we are shown the life of the investigator Steve Murphy and his wife Connie Murphy, she leaves him at one point in the series fearing for her and her baby, for most of us that would be seen as a betrayal of family, I know most people in the USA and some European countries would see it as a normal thing to do, but you never abandon a member of your family, even less in such dire circumstances, and what some might consider the right thing to do, Latin american people would see it as being a selfish condemnable act.

Celebrating with the family.

What better way to celebrate than with a gathering for dinner?, we all love our food, even more in Mexico where the cuisine varies greatly from one area to the next, and we all bring dishes from all our family members into a cacophony of flavors that go from spicy to sweet and everything in between, if you have never being to a Mexican feast I would highly recommend it, in America I've noticed that the "party food" is sometimes monotone, in Mexico we set up a buffet with such disjointed themes and ingredients that you are sure to find something you'll like, but what celebration of the death could be without the people you are celebrating, we arrange altars to those we loved, not unlike the Japanese altars, picture of the departed in the middle, but we are much more colorful, orange and purple are the colors of the death, and we arrange the flowers of the death around them, it's an art in itself that we teach to our kids from a very young age.

I remember burning my self jumping this
when I was a little kid

A path of flowers and candles is set outside the house all the way into the altar, the door is left open and the food is set in the altar so that our dearly departed may come and go as they please, most of the time there is a bottle of the liquor they enjoyed in life, tequila most of the time, with a shot set, and a pack of their favorite brand of cigarettes, of course we lit one up for them to smoke when they arrive, the altar is set in the morning, the food is brought early evening and is left thorough the day, for the celebration most people make their dinner arrangements the night of the 31st, it's not always a party mind you, most people would gather on their mothers house but if they can't they will have a private feast for themselves.

After dinner, people will then get into the custom that is most common to the world, kids will dress up as the death or the devil or even a monster and go out from house to house asking for candy, teens will gather on organized parties with their classmates and have a party of their own with music and booze, and the adults will most of the time get drunk remembering the ones that are not there, it's not uncommon for the 1st to be received with a hang over.

It's not uncommon for people to stay until after midnight

Then comes the 1st of November, swarms of people will go to the pantheons to visit their family members, some bring the "comal" and eat lunch there, in my town it's common to eat cecina with home made tortillas and have a few beers next to the gravestones of our family members, we decorate their graves with all kinds of flowers and then go home in the late evening, not all people liked to go at the same time so it was recognized that the 2nd should be taken too to be able to visit your family whichever of the 3 days you would like, and all 3 days are fair game for kids to ask for candy.

I can hardly wait to take my kids to ask for candy.

Who doesn't want to be famous?

Reasoning why I want to start a blog.

"Dad was such a drag.

Everyday he'd eat the same kind of food,

dress the same,

sit in front of the same kind of games.."

My life so far.

Everyday, after work, I get home, eat with the family, chat a bit, go upstairs and get online

Every day for the pasts two years my life has being slipping past me.

I'm 30 and call it "the crisis" if you want, I became so self aware of dying that sometimes in the night I would lay awake breathing heavily, dying a little inside every night it happened.

It doesn't help that the woman that I wished to be with me for the rest of my life decided to leave me after a few nasty words that came from pure frustration with our relationship, somehow, I just lost it, lost her, and lost my path...

Now I find my self feeling lonely every day, I get home, eat, go online...

I know I'm not alone, I have my father and my mother, my son and two daughters that I see every weekend, 3 friends that I love as if they were brothers, a brother that I don't see very often, I'm surrounded by people that I care and that care about me.

I am economically stable, I just feel like I've given up on life, like nothing even matters anymore, like all that I've done for the past 10 years is just NOTHING.

I know that's not the case, I lost a business, started another one, married twice, got 3 kids out of the deal, drank every weekend with my friends, partied very hard for quite a while after my first divorce, lost a friend that chose her side when I didn't even ask him to choose a side.

And now I find myself wishing to make something out of me, the path I've traveled has brought me here, into a den of self loathing and disgust, of self doubt and apathy of life, into feeling that if I died nothing of importance would be lost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal, I don't want to kill my self, in my darkest hours all I could think about is that I don't want to die alone and without fulfilling my dream.

The dream.

I have being a writer since I can hold memory, when I was a little boy my mom and dad bought me a book, the "365 bedtime stories" book, one short story for every day of the year, I still remember the first story and the story of my birthday as if I had just read it, and even more remarkable I remember writing in a little diary my dad bought me pieces of the stories with me inserted as the Mary Sue.

I left the diary stuff when I was a little boy and moved on to poetry in my teen years, oh how I loved poetry, it was the joy of life to read them and write them, even remember giving some to a few girls and after being rejected or laughed at, I kept writing them, but now I had a challenge, I got it into my head that writing was meant to be seen, not saved, I had always watched shows where "the writer is so shy about it's work" well I was not going to do that!, so it became my duty to "publish" my works, I would copy and staple around 15 poems at a time and give them to whoever wanted a copy quite a few girls were interested and liked my poetry, I even remember one of them sending a poem of mine in her name to a contest and winning, I was super happy but didn't care about the prize, I just wanted my words to be read by people I wanted people to "see me" even if they didn't knew it was "me" they were seeing.

That evolved into an obsession of becoming a writer...

Life won't just buckle over and give you what you want.

And so I decided to become a writer, I would read every day, I would write every day, I would study every day about writing, it was my calling, what I wanted, what I wished for, I wanted to study "Philosophy" to get a better preparation on writing...

And then life happened.

I won't go into details, but I ended up getting enrolled into a business school, a miserable business school, quite obviously I flunked out and decided to get working, opened a business and had it for around 3 years, got married to my first wife to which I had my first son, that didn't last and got a divorce, 3 years later re married and had 2 daughters, my business busted, started something else and that relationship didn't last again...

All the while I kept writing small pieces every other week, some where for my self, others for the people that I love and for my family, all the while wishing I could write a book, I tried and tried and tried, but stress and work and life wouldn't let me do it, I wrote like 5 different books in my head but never had the chance of putting those things into words, I just lost the habit, I just lost the way, I just didn't  have it in me anymore to put what I wanted into words.

Substituting the dream with the trendy.

As I explained before, I thought I could be happy by just getting people to "see me", so I started a YouTube "experiment", I had already uploaded some videos of me very drunkenly singing songs without music, you can still find them online in my YouTube channel if you care for that, I loved watching people playing video games and loved video games myself, as such, I said "what the hell I'll do that! that way people will see me" and did some game play videos for my channel.

"How's it going bros my name is Pewdiepie"

It's not the same... it doesn't feel the same, there is a huge disconnection about what I am doing and what I am saying and what I want to make for people to be entertained, I wasn't saying anything of what I wanted to say and a very diluted sense of what I am trickled down into trying to be funny.

I hated that feeling.

I still try to twitch from time to time and will probably try to do more videos without the obvious copying of big YouTubers but I don't feel like I should fake my reactions, and I don't particularly like scripted sequences, so I'll most likely do more stuff in the vein of just playing and reacting to the game on what I think than trying to be funny and hope people like me, maybe that's why I enjoyed doing a bit of twitch from time to time, too bad my internet and current PC can't handle it.

And we are back to having no outlet for my creativity and my voyeuristic need to be "seen"

¿What better way to regain the habit of writing than doing blogs?

I noticed that one single outlet I had was writing stuff on forums online to people, discussing topics, giving my two cents, all that stuff, and I noticed that I usually wrote more than who was writing to me, that got me thinking "I may still be more literate than the people that I read on this places" I mean I know I'm wrong, but still it just showed that I loved writing, and that I should do that more.

In comes blogger, an outlet of the past, present and future, I have spent so many hours reading stuff in here that I have lost track, such a great space of like minded people, writing and sharing our thoughts, reading on peoples opinions, learning with them, getting in arguments, understanding people, who doesn't like to have their small little space on the web to publish whatever they want?, who doesn't want to be acknowledged by others?, have their views countered, engaging on discussions, saying what you want and learning what others want to say, such a beautiful solution to my thirst for writing.

and here is where I start, with an introductory post, about why I'm doing this and where I come from, hoping for people that get to read this to get to know me a bit more, what better way to introduce my self into the blogging community than by doing a blog about why I want to blog?

I'll keep on posting, I'll try to post daily, some will be short, some will be long, some will be about nothing, some will have such an in deep meaning behind that will hurt, but at least now you know in a broad sense where I come from, let us find out where I'll go!.

Next up... what I like to talk about and why I don't talk about it with anyone.