drunks and drug dealers

I was feeling paradisically bitchy. I'm in Mexico, working on my margarita-making skills, blowing out flip-flops (I shit you not while listening to a guy doing Jimmy Buffet songs), dodging advances from Mexican guys half my age, trying to learn a phrase or two in Spanish, in general having a swell time fucking off. But then I was at a gringo-gathering and I didn't have enough booze and as I looked around I started to get cranky:

1) Everyone's coupled up except for people with dead spouses (and me).
2) Everyone's got money - at least enough so's they don't have to work - except for me.
3) Most of these ex-pats live in Mexico but don't like Mexico or Mexicans. I can't bear listening to them talk about "those people". Listen, you can focus on the good or you can focus on the bad. It's like living amongst trailer trash people and trailer trash trash - trash can be interesting or it can be annoying; you can ignore it or pick it up or let its presence eat away at you. I think of my trailer trash life as full-time dumpster-diving - mostly for people - and I try to block out the rest. I'm trying to develop this same attitude with the ex-pats but I'm having a difficult time.

I was writing these thoughts in emails to a friend of mine who happens to be male, a smart one, and you know what he writes back? "You need to get laid." That did not help my cranky mood. Stupid male answer for everything. I wrote back that I can get laid any time I want; I need to get loved.

And now this Wreckers' song won't leave my mind:

Only crazy people
Fall in love with me
They come from all over
To be with me
Bank robbers and killers
Drunks and drug dealers
Only crazy people
Fall in love with me

Today I found my most recent lover's mugshot on the internets. He looks good; his hair is long and he's lost that wonky meth eye. Never before have I had a lover in jail but all kinds of things change when you move into a trailer park and I now know that for a lot of people jail is just another stopping-off place like an apartment or a trailer or a sleeping bag under the Burnside Bridge. In my last trailer park - the one in the States - I met addicts and crack ho's and Navajos and Apaches and belly dancers and wife abusers and karaoke singers and bigots and haters and toothless Texans, most of them people living on the edge, struggling to get by, struggling to buy beer and weed, struggling to pay the rent, struggling to get up in the morning to go to work. Strangely, I have an affection for most of them. To me these ex-pat gringos living in Mexico seem spoiled and self-absorbed and not nearly as interesting as the trailer people I've met over the past few years.

I think there was a point to this post but I've lost it. Back to my margarita recipe, I guess...