rain

The rainy season has started here in Mexico. Last Monday it made the air smell sweet (a girl from the prairies once taught me to smell rain in the air through its sweetness). On Wednesday it turned Mexico City into a massive system of rivers and lakes (things in Mexico City have a tendency to be massive). On Thursday, the sky over the city of Morelia roared like a giant waking up from a century-long dream. Saturday, looking out the window on my way back to Mexico City, the landscape that used to be sun-coloured has exploded green. The sun set, and my eyes filled with green and golden shadows.

. . . and rain means birth, and with June rains, this my blog is being born.

Reasons why this blog was conceived (in freedom and love – “yo te quiero libre, libre y con amor”):

1. to comply with capitalism’s demand for efficiency. A blog saves time: you can excuse yourself for not writing proper e-mails to people from past lives and distant lands by directing them to your posts (hand-written letters and postcards were, of course, some of the first innocent victims of the unstoppable drive towards modernization);

2. to be part of a trend. My radicalism has led me to avoid social events carried out at Starsucks (missing out on everything from dates to secret and dreamy conspiracies to take over the country), and my uncertain standing among the petty bourgeoisie makes it economically hard to be fashionably hip. Blogging is a relatively cheap (I’m rich enough to own a computer and have Internet access) and intellectually justifiable way to be part of a trend (fostering the human right to free expression and claiming a piece of the Internet back from the evil rightwingcapitalistneoliberalfascistwrongdoers);

3. to have a one in a trillion chance of being spotted by some publishing agent who’ll pay me to write the rest of my life (we’re all allowed to daydream);

4. to provide surfers with an alternative destination when they’re killing time at work and have already read all their regular newspapers and gossip columns;

5. to make believe that there are people out there who are interested in what I’ve got to say: with e-mails you set yourself up for a disappointment if people don’t write back (no need to speak of hand-written letters or postcards – see reason no. 1), while with a blog you can always add a tag with some sort of sexual nuance and you’re bound to get hits (and then you fool yourself into thinking it’s your friends, past crushes and followers who’re checking out the blog);

6. to have a virtual platform all built and ready to go in case I get lured in by power and decide to run for some political post; and

7. to be like a girl who I might’ve once fallen in love with (she has yet to make up her mind).