The Psychologist

I am seeing a psychologist here in Tepic to try to get some help working through the grief I am feeling over the death of my girlfriend. Today was my third visit. It seems to be helping me a great deal. Today we laughed together for the first time.

This psychologist is a quite young and very attractive woman, with all of the confidence of untried youth. She speaks Spanish only.

It is sometimes difficult for me to express my thoughts and feelings in Spanish, because my grasp of this language is so poor, but we make progress nonetheless. I told her today that I am trilingual. Perfect in English and Espanglish, but my worst language is Spanish. She seemed to appreciate that.

She tested me today with some kind of formal verbal examination, I think to see if I am approaching senility. She assured me afterward that I am not. Nice to have that officially recognized.

She is encouraging me to interact more with people, but I am finding this difficult. I shudder at the thought of doing this, but tomorrow, for lack of any other resource, I am going to participate at this senior's centre in something called Zuma, which is apparently a form of exercise geared toward us ancianos. So we shall see.

Breakfast

It has been my habit of late to delay having breakfast until late in the morning. This has not been working out for me. I usually find myself downtown, at about 10 am looking for the first decent place to eat because I am ravenously hungry. Today I decided to change that and cooked myself a big breakfast on getting up. We shall see how this develops.

My aim is to try to get the most out of the cool pleasant mornings here, and not be rushing about in the heat of the day, but use the mornings for whatever business I have to do outside, then retreat to the cool of my apartment, to read or write.

Bicycling in Tepic

Bicycling in Tepic can be a difficult proposition. The main arterial roads are insanely busy here, and the motorists, especially the taxi drivers, have absolutely no regard for cyclists. Because of this, I stick to the back streets, and always cycle with the premise that each and every driver on the road would kill me if they felt it would go unnoticed.

The back streets are a big problem too, for a different reason. They are sometimes littered with glass and little bits of metal, too much to avoid.

Soooo...after countless flat tires I took the plunge and bought some airless tires. I felt somewhat like Wile E. Coyote, ordering airless tires from the Nu-Teck tire company in Colorado. Eventually they came, neatly packaged, coiled up in a cardboard box.

The guy at the bicycle shop that I use gave up after a frustrating hour of trying to get them on the rims. When I came to pick up my bicycle at the appointed time, he told me it was an impossible job. I managed to persuade him that the tires would stretch enough, and after reassuring him that I would not hold him responsible if he wrecked anything, we sat down together and managed to install one by experimenting with various techniques. I came back next day and my bike was ready because he installed the other one next morning.

Today I tried them for the first time. The ride is a little harsher, and I have to work a little harder, but overall I am pleased. I really love the no-flat-tires scenario. That works for me.

Now I am wondering if Wile E's Acme company sells somehing like a homicidal motorist's repellant.

Byelections in Canada

I was told today that there were four federal byelections in Canada. It is very difficult for me to get passionate about Canadian politics. There just isn't the same level of pure insanity there that exists in so many other countries. I must say that for me this is a wonderful thing. Our political scandals for instance, when we can summon enough energy to have one are so subdued, tempest-in-a-teapottish, kind of unimportant, that they drop quickly beneath even the Canadian radar

We really are reasonable moderate people, who have every right to be envied for that. And I believe we are.

cc

What Better Place Than Here

I am alone again. What better place than here, the internet, this place of millions and millions of anonymous blogs, to be truly alone. This is a unique place. It is the only place I know where you can make your private thoughts available to untold millions of people and be absolutely certain that nobody reads or understands them.

This medium is far better than shouting at clouds, or mumbling darkly to yourself in other public venues, and in a strange way, more socially acceptable.

I have had the pathetic impulse to whore this blog to family and friends, and did in fact point out my memorial to my girlfriend upstairs to several, but then the impulse died. I did that only because I know that memorials of any kind are for the living, not the dead, and that it gives us who continue to live on awhile, comfort to share our thoughts, to close ranks and fight the fight of life together in a symbolic way, like shipwreck survivors.

It is amazing to me that I can wander, vagabond that I am, down this great highway that is the internet, shouting, cursing, screaming my rage at the sky, and be still completely anonymous.

Is this blog entry a plea for some kind of company? Of course it is. Of course it is.

It is that, but at the same time it satisfies a kind of ironic impulse to immortalize myself, I suppose. The internet is a strange place. A place to be anonymously instantly immortalized forever.

Yes I am depressed. But I am not suicidal. I just think this is a great place to journalize my thoughts. To realize how incredibly juvenile my thoughts are right now. To wonder whether this kind of thinking is a product of grief, or whether I really am an aging child.

On the death of my girlfriend, Cuavia Carrillo Peraza

My girlfriend died on Thursday, November 5th, at 7:20 pm local time in Tepic, Nayarit Mexico. She was 37 years old. I had been her boyfriend for a scant seven months. She died in hospital, and was surrounded by those who loved her most .. me, her mother Sofia and her 10 year old daughter Cecy.

Those are the bare facts of the situation. I am writing this about her in an effort to mark her passing, more for mself than anyone else. Another bare fact.

I am posting this on the internet, on this blog, because I cannot think of any other way to immortalize her. I know that this must sound ridiculous to any anonymous reader who chances to pass by, but nothing published on the internet ever disappears, so here we go:

She was a beautiful woman, but quite sick with what was supposed was asthma when I met her.

She did not have the money for doctors, so I began taking her to doctor after doctor to try to get a decent course of treatment for her. We finally found a doctor whom we felt might be the one to help. He started her on an aggressive course of treatment not only for her asthma, but for the Cushing's Syndrome she had developed over the years when, due to lack of money, she had used excessive amounts of prednizone to treat her symptoms.


During the course of this "treatment" she went into a deep crisis from which she never recovered.

I loved her very much. Everyone she knew loved her. She lived in Tepic for six years prior to her death, working as an English teacher in various schools. The last one she worked in was Universidad Viscaya.

I persuaded her to quit working so we could concentrate on improving her health.

Irony at this point ran out into the street and got crushed beneath the wheels of a bus.

She died much as she had lived; gently, slowly, and with little complaint. It is impossible for me, a Canadian, to express the level of sorrow I am feeling at having discovered this great treasure in Mexico, and then to have watched it slip through my fingers due to the years of medical maltreatment she had received from others, inflicted on herself and that I caused through my bungling enthusiasm.

The only consolation I can rescue from this tragic experience is the knowledge that for the seven months that I knew her, she was a happier person, according to her family. This is a very small comfort to me, for having lost a great, too-short love in my misbegotten life.

I shall try to keep in my memory always her optimism, her love of laughter, her gentleness, her keen intelligence, and most especially her love and empathy.

"That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang......:

...This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long"

Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

The Old Curmudgeon