the valley of sherbert cathedrals

I am in Oakland, on the second floor. I have two new bedroom windows and one is over a pupuseria parking lot and the other is above a payphone. My room is over a barber shop and the carpet is red like wine stain.

My things were in the car for a couple of months. My Line Six pedal cooked next to a peanut butter jar of Oaxacan chocolate and the amps sat and steamed while we drove our car through jungles and deserts. I drove all of my things over a thousand cement topes and my violin strings lost their tune. I am looking at all of things that came home with me. Pine sap incense and birds of paradise and a clay pot and illumina mi camino candles and a garlic braid from Pochutla and a hand-made cotton dress from Oaxaca.

I wanted to buy a dress in Mexico and Oaxaca had the prettiest dresses. The market in Oaxaca City was a gallery of beautiful things you need, they had numchucks and copper pots and grasshoppers to eat in chocolate and hot-pink horchata and paper mache masks. I went to the dress section and found one dress I loved but it was a kid's dress and the lady would not let me try it on. She said it was not for me. All the dress ladies wanted to put me in drapes, but finally one lady at the Indian market outside of Oaxaca City let me try on a teenage dress. It has butterflies and little flowers embroidered and a sash to tie in the back.

I wanted to have a dress like the little girls in Mexico, many have long hair and cotton dresses and prance and sing. I was eating pizza in Zipolite, at the dream beach, I was pinkish and hot from a very bad sunburn and in day 6 of a sun coma and I saw a group of girls singing and dancing a song and dance they all knew, even though some girls were 11 and some were toddling. One of the older girls would get excited and bump a little girl, who would fall and cry and interrupt the song, which was an insistent song and if I could have understood, I would know the story. I was entranced, it was the best music, and then at that moment, a group of boys butted in front of us and sang the Buena Vista Social Club song with bad and not charming skill and then asked us for money to support the musicians of Mexico. They tried to sell us bootlegs of the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack.

For 10 days, the ocean always stood near me, whispering and breathing into my ear, announcing the huge waves with gasps. I sacrificed papayas to the sea, I sat on the porch of the shacky cabana and split them in half, scraping out all of the black seeds and saving a few for me, and eating the papaya with the juice of a lime and the company of bees. The new moon rose before me in a curl of champagne as I laid on the toasted sand. The sun gave me a licking with its most firey noon tongue and I suffered for two days, shivering and hallucinating in bed. The pain was such a journey that my imagination developed a more vivid idea of mortality.

Those days at the beach were an envelope of sweet dream, so far away that it might be heaven. But then the mosquitos dine on your calf while you sleep. I woke up every night itching with dime sized mosquito bites. I would become so cross with annoyance when I woke up itching that I would curse that place, but then I would wake and eat papaya in the hammock. After a while, I had to meditate and realize that heaven is like nothing I know. Because I did become restless at the beach, and itchy.

I have a lot to say about Mexico. I was lost in Mexico City and that whole story is desperate. I cried in a gas station and got caught in a parade of paper-mache bulls huffing firecrackers and buses; a motocycle cop pried us for $50 because I was so scared looking and he tried to talk to Michael about boxing; it started to rain and I almost slammed into a barrier to avoid a furious bus driver; I tried to drive around an undisclosed 10 foot ditch in the middle of the road as the electricity flickered and died; Michael asked 50 people how to get where we were going and we were still lost in the black lung out outer Mexico City. I was rescued by a cab driver during a police search in an extremely busy intersection, he saw faces reduced into our skulls by nervous uncertainty, and he guided us. We found a nice cheap motel. In Mexico, the nice cheap motels on the outside of the cities are pretty classy and they are for adulterers. A man behind a mirror takes your money, no speaking, and a number flashes. You find that room number and a boy with downcast eyes unlocks your door and closes a curtain so your parked car is invisible. We cooked rice and lentils in those rooms and made messes feasting on papayas, which are the nirvana of everything orange.

We lived in one place for a while, Morelia, and made friends there. We played music with beer bottles and plastic water jugs and our feet and our harmonicas and we played on the radio, and before our phone in our apartment, and in Norma's mom's restaurant while the next day's mole began its first mingling.

A week ago I crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, and then Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and LA. I have no more of the Michoacan mangoes, I gave the last one to my grandma in Phoenix and it was pink and sappy and perfumed. Now I am in my new home in Oakland, beginning to record again. I will put all of Mexico into a little book and offer it on this page.