At times we do believe that there is, in fact, a collective unconscious  at work in the deep background of the universe.

We can’t be sure, but it seems that things around the world are getting weird. Have you felt it? Have you woken up in any of the recent days wondering if all hell is about to break loose in your little corner of the sphere? We have. And for the past few months, we’ve mentioned it to one another over a bottle of mezcal. But it wasn’t until we started receiving submissions from our writers that it became so crystal clear.

People have disaster on the brain.

Maybe it’s the earthquakes cropping up in the most unusual of places. Shit-poor Haiti expects to receive its daily quanta of boots to the head, but a terremoto that levels fucking everything, including the presidential mansion? That’s just not right.

Then, with far less drama or destruction, even the East Coast of the United States took a ride on the planetary rollercoaster. No one was killed, but you can be sure that several million heads peered out of high-rise windows over the horizon and wondered what hell is slouching towards Washington to be born.

Add to that the biblical floods and the brain-boggling hurricanes putting this hemisphere into the spin cycle. Mix in a measure of political irrationality not seen since Nero noodled his lute, and you get a very nervous, very dark Cogitatio Populi.

And don’t even get us started on the asshats running for high office in both Guatemala and parts further north, other than to say that we hope the cosmic wisdom sees fit to flatten their sorry egos long before it does ours. Or yours, for that matter!

It seems that we here at La Cuadra are just going to surf that wave. This issue starts with a thoughtful, possibly even profound, reflection on the tragedies of September 11, 2001  ten years later. That piece is followed up by some crack (and decidedly not crazy) reporting on a recent spate of violent crimes in our humble town of La Antigua. We then give you a brief break of pure beauty with an extended spread of our featured artist, Brielle DuFlon, before plunging you back into the belly of the beast with Joe Bageant’s last lonely ride into the misery of the permanent American underclass. Después de, there is a tale of misguided decisions in an attempt to help a friend drive a boat to El Salvador that almost ended with an extended stay in prison by the inimitable Logan Clark.

We round out the issue with some poetry from World War I, and (we are so happy to announce) the RETURN OF KEVIN PETRIE who once again takes readers on one of his stoned adventures — this time through civil-war- and tsunami- wracked Sri Lanka with his (possibly mythical) traveling partner, Uncle Money.

So, with all this shit coming down upon the world at once, we can think of nothing better to do than to invite you all down to Café No Sé where we might toast the beginning of the end the way any God or Goddess worth their salt would have intended: Half in the bag, and with one another. Frost opined that “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” We don’t bother with any of that kind of prognostication, and who knows, maybe we’re plain wrong. Maybe the world just has a bad case of gas. Whatever, we will still light your smoke and keep your drink chilly as we toast whatever the hell is coming down the pike.

Join us.

MJT and JPR

My first thought for this Letter From the Editors was go gather the five contributors to La Cuadra who have written the most for us over the years and take a group picture of them all holding up their middle fingers.

The headline was going to be: “Yayyyy! We’re This Many!”

But Anne Seymour is in Zambia and out in the bush. Kevin Petrie is out of rehab, but back in Seattle. Joe Bageant is on the wrong side of the grass. And Hannah Wallace Bowman is too busy to be bothered with us lunkheads most of the time, though we don’t hold that against her at all. It shows good judgment.

So that just left the two of us (lovingly, and with a sense of anti-establishment solidarity) to flip the bird to the world. Yet, even using both hands we’d still be one finger short because La Cuadra is now officially five years old! To the right, is a reproduction of the first page of Volume I, Issue One from June / July of 2006.

At that time, La Cuadra (or, The Block, as it was known for its first two issues) was 16 pages of smartassedness, published on newsprint and almost entirely satirical or scatological in content. And though we’ve grown into a full-on glossy, we’re proud of our editorial consistency over the years.

The idea to put out an English language magazine (that spoke more to our mindset than the other excellent publication in this burgh) arose después muchos mezcales at ass-o’clock in the morning, nearly 7 years ago. For both the image and the record: the conversation took place at an early-opening bar just past dawn in the market.

One of us was wearing a full-length black dress.

Aside from being drunk, we were frustrated trying to get well-written English language periodicals in Guatemala. And then, the more we drank about it, the more we realized that most of the magazines we’d once liked up north had gone all flabby around the editorial board, anyway. So one of us raised a glass to the other and with all due sincerity said, “Fuck it! Let’s make this baby!”

The bartender, noting the dress, and knowing just enough English to be concerned, made his way to the far end of the bar.

But, at the time we were also busy with other projects, including taking care of our hangovers the following afternoon, trying to design ever-smarter ways of bringing booze across the border from Mexico and how one might drive business to the then hinterlands of 1^st Avenue in Antigua.

So, the idea would fall through the cracks until we’d get drunk enough again to swear we were gonna “get that damned thing done tomorrow.”

Nothing happened until the summer of 2006 when your current Editor-in-Chief was half-way around the world — literally half-way around — in Darjeeling, India. With his bad influence removed, the copublisher and founder of La Cuadra finally pushed this baby out into the world. God bless his black, little heart.

Loads of things have changed in our lives over those years, as we’re sure they have for you, too. But where we’re extra fortunate is that we’ve had a forum to chronicle all that jazz in these pages. All the deaths, the loves, the passions, the arrests, the paroles and the stories that seem to grow in this odd little town like nuclear-radiated mutant raspberries, have made up much of this rag’s content. Just as it’s good to have a local bar — a metaphorical campfire if you will — to which one can retire at the end of the day and share what’s on your mind with friends, having this outlet has been great for our stress levels and our overall mental health. And we can’t tell you how good it feels to have loyal readers who actually give a damn about all of our ramblings.

But we can, humbly, say thanks.

One never has any idea, really, how the world is going to progress from a starting point. Some of the longest and best relationships in our lives have begun with the most awkward of mornings. And some of the best ideas we’ve ever had have come crashing down around us like so many paternity suits (it’s metaphorical, moms, don’t worry) from ideas we found auspicious only hours before. That’s all part of the game. New shit can wildly succeed or it can completely suck. You never really know.

But, every once in a while it just makes sense to abandon ship, dive into the darkness and swim in the direction of some imagined shore. One arm pulling against the current, one finger raised in salute to this beautiful, horribly confused world.

And so, we say again, we’re proud to be “this @@@@@ many.” And we hope to be many more still.

We couldn’t have done it without help from a league of friends and contributors and editors whom we love and thank very, very, very much . . . and we hope you’ll help us stick around for at least a few more years.

MJT / JPR

Joe Bageant is dead.

Photo by Konijn Marshall

It is with a heavy heart that we share that news. Cancer got him in the end. Regular readers will recognize his name as Joe was a steady contributor to La Cuadra over the years. Your editors had been fans of his for a long time, but when we first started this project we never imagined we’d actually land his great talents for our magazine. Then, one evening back in 2008, as we were necking beers with our good friend Earl The Retired Bank Robber, Joe’s name came up. I’d just stumbled upon Joe’s website and discovered a trove of essays I’d not seen before. When I asked Earl if he’d ever read Joe’s stuff, he grinned and said, “Been friends with that old bastard for years. You want me to call him up and see if he’d do something for the rag?”

A spit take and a “Hells, yeah!” was the immediate response.

The very next day I received an email from Joe saying “any friend of Earl’s is a friend of mine,” and that he’d be more than happy to contribute. Further, he hoped that maybe he and Earl could arrange to be in Antigua at the same time someday so we could all get drunk. In that email, Joe noted that his schedule was very busy in the coming months, but concluded, “. . . when I return, I’ll come down to Antigua and do anything you want. Or nothing in particular if you want. Nothing is as important to me as engaging good people in this life.”

In art and labor, Joe.

Sadly, life got in the way and we never had that boozy rendezvous, but we were able to keep up a healthy correspondence since then, culminating in an invite to his joint up in Virginia to talk about the world and see if he could do something about finding me a publisher up North. Missed that opportunity, too, goddammit. I coulda used some of his wisdom in those regards.

Joe gave me the most deeply appreciated professional compliment I’ve ever received, and no matter how long I write, I doubt that I’ll hear more meaningful accolades. He’d read a review I’d written of his first book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, and shot an email to Earl that read, in part: “Jesus H. Christ that Tallon can write! I don’t say that because of the favorable review of the book, but because he is a bona fide wordslinger of the first order. Clean, clear, punchy, intelligent.”

I was the happiest of monkeys brachiating through the highest of branches for weeks after Earl forwarded that letter. Sweet shit, Joe Bageant likes MY stuff. For me that was like having Kareem Abdul-Jabbar compliment my hook shot.

It wasn’t just his own skills at wordslingery that made him such a hero to those of us at La Cuadra. Joe had empathy out the ass for anyone who was getting the short end of the stick, and he noted, time and again, those were almost invariably the same people: poor folk; his folk.

Joe grew up a redneck and remained one his entire life. Bageant was a Second-Amendment-defending, whiskey-drinking farmer’s son of western Virginia. But intellectually and spiritually, he’d transcended the provincialism, the racism, the anti-intellectualism and the clan (if not The Klan) mentality of his shuttered volk. There’s a fetishism in our culture for white folk who “remember their roots,” or black folk who “keep it real.” Joe did both of those things, but unlike so many others, he was not limited by the horizons of his formation. He grew up hard, hungry and poor, spent the Vietnam years in the Navy, came home and moved out to the West Coast to be a hippie, took heroic doses of hallucinogens, partied with rock stars and wrote about holy men. He tended bar on an Indian reservation, edited a journal of military history, lived in Belize, Colorado, Idaho, Mexico and Oregon before deciding, in his words, “to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love ’em but they need a good ass kicking.” And so he moved back home.

Joe spent much of his life kicking the collective asses of the bigots, the prideful, the pompous, the blindly patriotic and the cruel. And in that life he also brought balm and his big love to the weaker-thans and the world-forgotten. He was an honorable man.

And Joe was a good man, a generous man, a loving man, and we’re sorry that we never got to share that beer in person. There aren’t enough hombres like him knocking heads together on this planet, and with his passing the world is a sadder, sillier place. So, we’re raising our glass to you, Joe. And our toast is a promise to keep faith with the cause of the just, and to maintain a weather-eye out for unexpected sources of kindness, sincerity and love.

Sleep lightly and haunt the bastards.

Joe Bageant lives on. Joe Bageant lives on. Now strike up a song,

Joe Bageant lives on. 

Even though we find ourselves on the outer shoals of a few fallen empires,

As our regular readers know, I used to be a history teacher in Brooklyn. At the end of most years I’d ask my students to consider a thought experiment by way of review. I’d ask them, knowing what they now knew, what side they’d choose to be on in the moral struggles that defined American history. I’d ask them directly: Would you have chosen to be on the side of resistance to brutality or the side that imposed brutal order? Would you prefer to have trudged alongside brother and sister on the Trail of Tears, or have been a paid centurion, hustling the old and infirm to uncertainty, depredation and death? Would you prefer to have received the lash or given it on the plantation? Would you prefer to have been a striking miner shot in the back protecting a neighbor in Ludlow, Colorado or the Pinkerton who pulled the trigger? Would you have marched with Dr. King and received the beatings, or would you have stood with Bull Connor and held the cudgel?

Or would you have sat on the fence, quiet as a mouse, not daring to offend?

To our minds, those ruminations are transferable to the history of any nation, and inevitably lead to a much larger question, one that I hope my students wrestled with over their summer breaks. Fundamentally, it is this: Does each human being have inherent value, or are some of them just parts to be removed, destroyed or otherwise disposed of when the larger machine demands greater efficiency, greater output, greater rewards for the strong?

To our minds, how someone answers that question goes a damn sight further to evince their true belief in a soul than could decades in a church, temple or mosque.

Do we matter?

Conventional wisdom up North says it is wrong to make comparisons between what is happening in Wisconsin, where public sector workers are fighting to maintain their rights to collectively bargain, with the Middle East, where people are fighting for the more existential issues of being allowed to live a life free of fear, oppression and unrestrained state brutality. We, at La Cuadra, agree — to a point.

These movements are each struggling towards social, political and economic justice. And in each unique situation, the solutions are being forged by turning away from leaders and towards one another. So, sure, the situations are vastly different, but whether it’s the Wisconsin State House or Tahrir Square, people are expressing a root truth about what is right and what is wrong. And it is wrong to stand by, silently, while your brothers and sisters are being harmed.

The protestors are showing those of us on the outer shoals of empire, again, that when someone comes to take from you, or from those you love, there are still individuals who will place their bodies in front of the lash, the tractor, the tommy-gun or the tank to defend our common humanity by laying themselves, in fear and solidarity, on the line. And they are doing it for one another. Because they believe that one another matter.

As for the governors and governments who sense it is in their interest to break the solidarity of their citizenry, we humbly suggest a Bible verse. Specifically, Genesis, 4:9. Way back then, while still in Eden, God asked a question and we seriously screwed up the answer. As a species, we’ve continued to screw it up time and time again over the past several thousand years.

But the universe never stops asking and we always have the chance to get it right — this time. Are we our brother’s keeper? Because if not us, then who?

So we send our love and our solidarity to those in the grand struggle tonight, because if we matter, then so does the side we choose. Always.

MJT and JPR

Sorry for the delay in getting around to posting new stories on the website

That’s a lesson we seem to learn and forget time after time, but as we’re in “learning mode,” we’d like to share some insight gathered long ago from one of our heroes, Karl Wallenda, the patriarch of the world’s most famous tightrope act, who once said, “Life is on the wire. Everything else is just waiting.” Truer words have never been spoken.

After living down here in Antigua, Guatemala  for the better part of the past decade, we’ve often felt a kinship with Karl and the rest of the Flying Wallendii. At a time in life when the vast majority of our 40-something cohort are enjoying their “prime earning years,” getting respectfully fat and dutifully packing away nuts for the long winter of retirement, we’re still hopping in the back of pickup trucks filled with booze, running a bar full of idealistic, beautiful bastards, publishing an English-language magazine in a Spanish-speaking country, and all the while plotting to take over the 21st Century liquor industry with a magic found in a 500-year-old process that distills, in equal measures, the awareness and the fury of a succulent beauty, aka: the agave.

Writ short: there is absolutely nothing secure about this life. It is terrifyingly “on the damn wire.” There are no 401-K’s offered through No Sé Industries, no La Cuadra pensioner’s fund. We both fully expect to be working long past whatever retirement age is supposed to be for our generation. But what’s easier to forget — and it is something that we still, on occasion, lose sight of — is that the big difference between this life and the ones we’ve left behind up north is that here we’ve dispensed with the illusion of security.

Bad shit happens everyday back up in New York, or London or Amsterdam. If we decided to move back north, we could probably drop a few more drachmae into the deposit column before our first heart attack. But  there still is no purchasing insurance against waking up one day and discovering that you’ve been playing it safe for so long that you’ve lost your nerve to step once more into the breach, dear friend, or to even recognize that this whole living thing is neither a sprint nor a marathon; it’s a dance.

It’s a beautiful, goddamned high-wire act.

And we’d like to make a deal: if you ever find us forgetting that central truth, kick us in the ass. We promise to do the same for you.

So, to all you beautiful bastards in town, all of you lovelies who are on the road, free-booting, free-lancing, free-loving or free-loading, here’s a glass raised to you and to the fresh new babies getting their wiggle-on in cribs around the world, and it’s also raised to our absent friends — all the more if they lived life on their own terms.

And here’s one special glass raised to Karl Wallenda, who, it should be noted, plummeted to his death in the middle of a performance. We’ve taken from him our lesson, you take your own. But while you consider what it should be, reflect on this: Karl was 73 years old when he died and while it sucks that riggers blew his guy-wires and the wind kicked up to 30 miles an hour when he hit the central span, it is undeniably cool that the old bastard was dancing on the edge of life with a wire between his legs at such an age. And it’s even cooler that the wire wasn’t a catheter and the thin line separating his existence from the abyss was an actual, high-tension carbon fiber, not a the ghostly beep, beep, beep of a EKG. Salud, amigo.

No looking down.

MJT / JPR

Holy Week in Antigua is like nothing else in the world, and when it is over, you will be certain of one thing.  The good people of Guatemala believe that Jesus suffered publicly and died publicly. Semana Santa, while beautiful, is dark and filled with spiritual silence and introspection.

As to the subsequent resurrection, well, in Antigua that kinda gets glossed over. There is a procession or two on Easter Sunday, and they are generally more spirited and uplifting, but also very sparsely attended.

Though we are both Collapsed Catholics, we honor the seriousness and solemnity of the brothers and sisters of our former faith – and we are left, ourselves, to recollect how differently Easter was celebrated in our home towns years ago.

Growing up Catholic, we performed ritual self-abnegation every Lent, prayed the Stations of the Cross and went to Church on Easter Sunday, but all that seemed just a prelude to the true celebration as it existed in Los Estados. By which, of course, we mean that after a gorging brunch, we’d go out to hunt for eggs in the back yard that had been steathfully hidden by a magical giant rabbit.

The more we reflect on the Easter Bunny, the more we think that whomever came up with the idea was brilliant. The Easter Bunny is, somehow, a beautiful link between the surreality of human existence and the surreality of the promised eternal life of Christianity. It is a very subconscious part of so many children’s spiritual and philosophical education. The Bunny is a grand icon that imprints upon the mind of the child that life is often utterly absurd and freakish, that it doles out rewards unjustly and unevenly, and that, maybe, you should get ready to be sold a smiling and artificially sweetened  bill of goods for the rest of your life. Yet, if you believe hard enough, then maybe you’ll be able to eke out a reward of unwarranted sweetness at least once a year, when the days turn magical.

We’ve long since found that the tasty treats of Easters past no longer bring joy. Chocolate is for children and for trying to paste over your indiscretions with your loving, and tolerant, partner in crimes of the flesh. These days we’re more given to spending the Holy Week in dark bars with sexy bartenders who bring us booze with a disinterested smile, and we encourage you all – whatever your faith – to come on down and join us at Café No Sé for some absolution in alcoholic ablution. While we can’t promise Peace on Earth or Good Will to Men, we do know that it is possible to drink enough to hallucinate into existence Giant Rabbits (one named Harvey keeps making the rounds) and maybe even find an night or two of salvation.

With that, we wish you all a spiritually purifying Semana Santa, an ecstatic Easter and a terrific transubstantiation with whichever libations you prefer. Make ours a mezcal.

JPR and MJT

Cobbling together La Cuadra has always been

We begin the process in hermetically sealed rooms, insulated from the outside world, with the loftiest ambitions dancing through our brains and egos. Think Marcel Proust searching for le mot juste, that absolutely perfect word placed elegantly in a sentence to create multiple levels of meaning, euphoria, assonance and alliteration. That is us at the outset.

But, of course, we complete every issue like college students writing an overdue thesis for which they have neither done the research, nor opened the books. Think gallons of coffee, liters of beer and NoDoz caps washed down with Jack and NyQuil chasers.

We moan, we wail. Meaningless and muddied sentences fly like errant gas from our fingers, we scratch at nonexistent wounds until they bleed. Pages are set afire, we doubt everything: our own pitiful existences, the futility of any and all action… The cigarettes in the ashtrays pile higher and inevitably we look longingly at the razor blade on the table, (why is that blade there in the first place?) and contemplate it drawing a crimson line on our pallid wrists.

Then, somehow, the Gods have mercy. One descends from the heavens at the moment of ultimate desperation, and while we are passed-out in heaps of hopelessness, She (our Gods are Goddesses) rearranges this mess in some semblance of coherence and puts a few of the commas and periods in the correct places. Viola, La Cuadra. Offensive, entertaining, scatological, illuminatingly brilliant with, of course, the occasional nipple shot.

Now take that image and multiply it by 666, divide by the square root of π and carry your answer out to the 10th decimal.  That’s what it was like getting out THIS issue.

Why? Well, the “brains” of the operation headed back north for some much needed low-rent rehab with the family after the accumulated stresses of life in the tropics and issues back home led him to temporarily relocate to a barstool on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for some R & R.

Meanwhile, yours truly was also spending his time in NY, drinking a mixture of absinthe and mezcal, passing out on blue couches (that miraculously materialized before his nightly collapse) dreaming of hippos, dwarves and magic crystals. That much, and little more, I remember.

The trip to NY was made to arrange the importation of Café No Sé’s favorite elixir, Ilegal-Mezcal. That mission has somehow been accomplished, and the end of October will see Ilegal-Mezcal on bar shelves throughout Manhattan. The task was not easy, but surely noble, and one giant step toward our goal of well lubricated reverse imperialism.  If you stop by the gray metropolis, be sure to hit Mayahuel Tequila and Mezcal Bar on East 6th Street.  Accomplished vixen (and No Sé veteran) Ivy Mix has a gig there serving our booze.

But back to La Cuadra. The goddesses have been extra generous due to our trying circumstances. La Cuadra, Issue 6 of Volume III, is another diamond, In this issue Kevin Petrie returns to again take us into his sordid life and make us glad that we are not him, nor any of his exes. If you like stories that turn out horribly wrong, you’ll love this one. Remember the song, One Night in Bangkok Makes A Hard Man Humble? It did something even worse to Kevin.

Mike Tallon also gives us a thoughtful analysis of the Honduran Coup, stripping away the normal blather of Left vs Right. He also covers La Tortilla, a collective of local musicians who have recently produced a brilliant CD.

Miles Afuera also returns with some sordid recollections of the old 42nd St., and Mike’s dad, Jim, once again bringing his wisdom to bear, this time on the current health care debate in Washington. This issue is a hit.

Mezcal, Absinthe, Magic Crystals   and a Blue Couch are calling my name. Hope you enjoy reading as much as we have enjoyed writing. Razor blades furnished upon request.                   JPR

It’s hard to take in this much bizarre news.  Really, if these event are just the teaser roll for what awaits us in 2012, we are thrilled that we have such good seats for the end of the world. We say, “Bring on the C.H.U.D.S. and the Zombies! May the dead rise from their graves and give us all a big belly laugh as the universe pitches further off its axis!” This is going to be fun. What’s next? Who knows, but we are heartily rooting for a Michele Obama / Michael J. Fox sex scandal – with hand held shaky-cam for that Reality TV, cinéma-vérité feel, or maybe an honest to God golpe estado here in Guatemala, conducted by members of the ultra-secretive Payaso Puro faction in the military. (Don’t worry, their guns only fire flowers and they’re easy to spot – just watch out for the giant orange boots and the big rubber noses.)

And as we face this wave of cresting insanity of our world, La Cuadra feels we can finally and officially announce our arrival on the world stage,  just in time to mock the final collapse into madness and absurdity that seems to be engulfing our fair blue planet.

We feel this for two reasons:

First, even as you read these words, they are being beamed around the world via the interwebs. Yes, www.lacaudraonline.com is finally up and running. Now all your friends back home can find out what the fuss is about by going online and accessing our fully archived and brilliantly presented webpage. We’re trying to figure out how to get La Cuadra to show up when someone types tranny crack whore into google. No success, yet.

Second, on a recent trip to Earth Lodge we discovered that La Cuadra had made it to the top of the magazine pile in their world famous outhouse! Yes! Forget all the Pulitzers we’ve won (zero), forget all the critical praise we’ve received in the pages of the New York Times (none), forget even the viral buzz we’ve created with our gorgeous on line presence (minimal).

We are now the choice reading material in Bri and Drew’s long drop toilet! That, friends, is what we’ve been aiming for all these years (see  photo above). Though, strangely, when we made this discovery we noticed that several pages were inexplicably torn out. But in a world of such waxing insanity, we didn’t bother trying to figure out what that meant. We’re assuming someone must have really liked our wit. In fact, we’re pretty sure we heard a guest saying something to that effect later that evening. It was whispered across the room in a hushed voice, but it sounded like, “Those guys who make La Cuadra are totally full of wit. “

And so, we invite all our readers to take a deep breath and enjoy yet another installation of “our wit.”

MJT and JPR

Excuse us while we cough. Kkkkka… We just got back from Tulum and have raging fevers.

Our sources tell us that the epidemic was funded by (and is part and pork-cel) of a larger, bipartisan conspiracy to divert the world’s attention from the widening and deepening financial crisis, the dire defects of Global Warming, and a little quagmire or two in the Muslim Majority parts of el Mapa del Mundo.

Really, what is more frightening? Dealing with terrorism or fighting a GLOBAL PANDEMIC? At the same time, we do expect that the epidemic, we mean PANDEMIC, will play into those snorting for stronger and crueler immigration laws (complete with a big-assed wall to keep the swiney beaners on their side of the Rio) and an asinine plan to gut whatever is left of the American public health system, because, hey, the government should just get out of the way and let free market biology kill all the poor folk, anyway!

Lovely… and now to all with those sentiments, go die on a spit.

The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have said that the best way to avoid contracting the disease is to not shake hands, kiss, or to engage in any carnal activity with pigs, the piglike creatures of Dr. Moreau’s Island, or anyone with a predilection for swine love.

In other words, you are being advised to avoid contact with folks who might recently have passed through the decadent doorway of Café No Sé, where over consumption has oft-times led to odd, though highly entertaining, inter-species couplings. On the downside, this means that our conchinita pibil is from dubious sources at best. On the upside, we’re pretty sure that a bottle of Ilegal Mezcal is worth its weight in Tamiflu doses. And the buzz is better, too.

Further, it is advised that if you do join us down at the bar, you should wear a surgeon’s mask to avoid airborne contagion, and as an extra precaution, you might want to consider strapping duct tape over your private parts, both fore and aft, as several of the No Sé bartenders have recently been jettisoned by their girlfriends and have been behaving indiscriminately and without gender bias. “We take all comers,” one of them recently, and lamely, joked.

Special warning, if one of them asks you to depart for the night to engage in the “double hogbacked growler,” your answer should be a firm “NO” unless he has bought you several shots, and you’ve had all of yours.

As if trouble with swine is not enough, you will find in this issue the theme of man vs. animal further explored in blood-poisoning depth by none other than The Surly Bartender, who gives us an interesting argument on why cats SUCK! And Kevin Petrie, the man behind our mezcal bar, who brings us the culinary secrets for cooking Squab de la Calle. Buen Provecho!

Lastly, on a serious note… Oink, cough, cough, cough, oink, arrrrrrrgggghhhhh…

Your Dearly Departed Editors

JPR and MJT

When most people say this they are talking both out of their own asses and in their own interests, but we mean it this time.

We remember hearing this line shouted from every television for months after September 2001. We lived in New York City then and took the thickest part of that bat to the backs of our heads, but Al Queda didn’t then, and doesn’t now, pose a threat to our “way of life.” They threaten our buildings, they threaten our peace of mind, they even threaten our lives – but not our “way of life.” The real threats to a “way of life” always come in silently and are coded in the language of beneficence.

Our way of life, well annunciated by philosophers like Locke, Jefferson, Galeano and Dylan, understands that freedom and liberty should trump fundamentalisms of any stripe. We tolerate any hairbrained mythologies and mad-hatted ideas that exist amongst our fellow travelers – so long as they don’t try and foist them upon others. That is, by definition, our “way of life” and it seems that every time it is threatened, it is threatened from within.

The threats generally come from folks who got religion of one sort or another and attained enough fiscal or electoral strength to decide that they can tell the philistines how to behave. They become so happy with their own self-deceptions, or terrified by their own boogymen, that they feel the need to force-feed us the “good news.” These are the true terrorists who must be pushed back into their caves. These are the lamebrains who threaten our civilization, and finally, those forces have found us here in Guatemala.

This time the evangelists are coming in the form of health zealots who have decided that, here too, smokers should be pilloried and spanked in the town square. Smokers, those evil creatures of the night, should be taught a lesson. Writ short, the powers that be have chosen to ban puffing in pubs.

That’s cool for gyms, office buildings, museums, even hospitals – but no smoking in bars? Come on!

When have you ever gone to a bar for your health? Going to a bar, getting soused and lighting up, is a personal decision to aid the spirit through mortification of the flesh. Bars exist as temples that allow us access to that primal, reptilian, irrational brain that knows certain truths – like, Hitler Bad / Gandhi Good. Like Closeness to Amigos, Good / Proximity to Douchebags, Bad. During the daytime, with our forebrains running the show rationality and good decisions allow us to abide idiots who say shit like, “Well, dogs liked Hitler.” Or, “Look, the guy’s a complete douchebag, but I’ve gotta work with him so I may as well learn to live with it.”

That stuff is fine for working hours, when sobriety and propriety are the rules by which we live, but at night – in a bar – with a smoke in one hand and a beer in the other – we can finally let all that right thinking fall away like unwanted pants in a brothel – and the last thing we need is some pious do-gooders invading our sacred space of debauchery.

And, really, all the arguments against smoking in bars are hollow. Sure, you’ll hear a fatuous non-smoker bellowing away with his fresh, pink lungs that this is all about protecting the workers and reducing the dangers of second hand smoke. But that’s bullshit, really. Any politician in this country who really gave a rat’s ass about worker safety or pollution could save more lives by regulating the chicken-bus industry. Just one of those crazy bastards driving a camioneta horks out more carbon monoxide and threatens more lives in a day that I could in a lifetime of non-stop, Olympic caliber, chain smoking in a nursery.

Be honest, you puritanical non-smokers, this has no more to do with saving lives than it does with flying to the moon on a broomstick. It’s really about you not liking smoke and not wanting your sweater to be stinky the next morning.

And, if you want to make the argument that the majority of us like it this way, then just once, find yourself in a bar when the secret smoking lamp is lit after the doors are closed. Watch with revelation as 90% of the customers spark up at the same time.

This is just dreadful. This creeping piety in the public sphere is, and I’ll say it again, a fundamental threat to our way of LIFE. And, once again, it’s coming from the inside and it’s wearing a grin. It’s coming from people who think they know how to live your life better than you do. They don’t. Light up and shine bright.

MJT and JPR