Social life in Puerto Vallarta

Staying on in Vallarta due to feeling codependent with a cheap, almost ideal hotel room, as well as the need to reinforce superficial social ties here for the future. I've been doubting my ability to get this room back at the same price in the future if I let it go. That worry is anxiety.

Went to sit under shady umbrellas with old gringo gay men, my peers, at the beach last 2 weekend afternoons. It's interesting the vetting one necessarily is subject to in order to become "part of the club". A club which no members seem to have long historical ties. Maybe two or three years. Sort of like hazing for a restrictive society, in this case by normal people for a gay country club if there was such a thing. So be it, as there is no other way. Feeling favored, or unfavored, in the conversation, are signs to be paid attention to if the goal is acceptance. And adjust my behavior accordingly.

I know some back stories about people in the club after a month of this, but more to be revealed.

There is a conflicting feeling on my part to go up to Phoenix for a change, or elsewhere.

Last Friday, I went out to coffee for the first time with a Mexican acquaintance over the last few years. I was struggling to relax, in the risk to know each other better we were taking, but glad for the opportunity. I know his back story, which he doesn't know I know. That's useful intelligence and strange when he shares about an "anonymous partner" ( who is not to me) he's separated from. The partner, an even less well known acquaintance of mine, also has no idea what I know about him. I was given hints by his disillusioned lover I could replace or at least supplement him!

i do miss enough contact with more developed and trusted members of my support system. Being the new  old gringo gay man, or the familiar outsider from years of occasional visits, has limits of consolation.

Scent of smoked ham south past Juarez way.

Sometimes living in the third world is like not cleaning your ass for a while, the funky odor nice as smoked ham until it starts to itch.

Definitely wouldnt pay 350k or 1 million dollars for an apartment in Puerto Vallarta. Unless I had 10 million plus. It seems a questionable idea after I leave my carefully scrubbed and bleached hideout (except for the occasional sewer gas) and get on a former US school bus, now operating as a municipal bus, I could have ridden as a boy in Oklahoma over 50 years ago. We passengers bang around like rocks in an old garbage can to the grocery store, due to stiff suspension and rustic paving stones, arriving sweaty and a little dazed, after just 3 miles. 

This is what first world xenophobes are worried about. That the USA and Europe are to evolve into unsafe and uncomfortable Johannesburgs on the Mississippi, Missouri and Rhine Rivers.

I am an optimist, so choose not to imagine bad outcomes; better to imagine how to avoid them and get busy helping the less well off out of poverty.

At this point, the USA might annex Mexico, if they agree. We get poorer in the north and they get richer down here. Our infrastructure deteriorates for a while as theirs improves as the two find balance. And then maybe the new border creates something better for all 500 million of us.