We were in the middle of an old town.
Everything was dismal and full of dirt.
The wind blew fiercely.
The sun was burning horribly.
It seemed a western movie.
I felt the dust cutting my throat.
We had to cross a dried river.
There was no bridge to cross it, but some local people offered to help us.
They were selling a service, standing on the dried river.
They had long wooden sticks and they employed them to avoid drowning.
It seemed a silly business.
The river was dried out.
My wife smiled to me.
She had found it silly, too.
She started to cross the dried river by herself.
Local people looked at her with astonishment and worry.
I was so confident about the situation that for a moment I looked to the landscape.
It was so impressive.
The old dirty town had turned into a beautiful forest.
I sighed and smelled the perfume of the trees.
My throat was so clean and my lungs were so open.
I felt so alive.
When I looked where my wife was, I saw a small and violent water stream running out from East to West.
It was too late to warn her.
It happened as it does in movies.
My wife dissapeared in a few seconds.
The water stream had covered her up.
Immediately, I jumped into the river and snatched a wooden stick from one of the local people. I started to use the wooden stick to avoid drowning, as I had seen the local people did.
Though the level of water was so low and I could stand easily, there was no sign of my wife.
Soon I became frightened and worried.
Suddenly, the water stream disappeared.
The river was dried out again, but still there was no sign of my wife.
I started to dig desperately into the dirt with my bare hands.
I thought my wife was buried and that she was about to stop breathing.
I envisioned a terrible scene of my wife dying.
My hands started to bleed.
I wanted to dig so fast but I was so weak.
I picked up the wooden stick to employ it as a shovel.
It was heavy as an axe.
I felt so useless and hopeless.
I didn't want to think, but I just thought how my wife was suffering.
I woke up sweating and I saw my wife beside me.
I held her hand tightly.
Down By The River By Neil Young & Crazy Horse
I would like to write, but I feel so tired.
I'm on my new house.
It's weird 'cause we had always lived in apartments.
My wife and cats are sleeping.
They're so happy.
A week ago we moved from Mexico City.
Lerma is a nice place, but cold.
I'm still sick, though not as I sick as I was a week ago.
The moving was so exhausting.
Excluding the furnishing, we moved 120 boxes!
I had a lot of stuff.
Tons of books, tons of CDs, tons of DVDs, tons of BRs and tons of clothes, five guitars, five guitar pedals, microphones, personal computers, a couple of amplifiers for the guitars...
My new studio isn't bad at all, but currently it looks like a warehouse.
We lived in a small apartment the last five years.
It was a nice apartment, but our neighbors were so disrespectful.
Usually they put loud music -always the same song- and they kept the building so dirty.
They made loud parties almost once per month.
They usually threw trash to the streets and behaved as if having kids and cars were the most ambitious goals humankind could ever have.
Some of them even murdered dogs and cats.
Nevertheless, I feel nostalgic.
Last Sunday of the previous year, we went to the old apartment.
It was so weird to look at it so empty and cold.
We lived many things there.
Before we lived in this small apartment, we lived in another one.
It was located in a better neighborhood than the later one.
It was so well located and people was so polite.
We had a nice park, coffee shops and restaurants so close.
Sadly, then I was so focused on my PhD that I didn't enjoy it at all.
Before I got this job in Lerma, I was a postdoc at UAM Iztapalapa for four years.
It was a nice period of my life.
I was free to do whatever I wanted to.
My boss was an awesome man.
He helped me out to find a new job.
The last six months I wanted to speak with him.
For a year I had been some sort of consultant and I wanted to have a better academic position. I wasn't enjoying at all to be some sort of consultant.
Money was running out.
For a year, almost everything I had was from SNI.
I met my most recent boss when I was about to have my admission interview to the PhD.
It must be the autumn of 2008. I needed that he signed me a document.
He was in the middle of a Science Fair.
Though he didn't know me, he was so polite.
A year ago or so, he came to the Dissemination of Science's Office in which I had been working for the last year -the team in which I was working, had been working in an enormous building who had to be abandoned after the September 19th Mexico City' earthquake- and he stayed with me for a couple of hours.
For a reason I ignore, he knew that I play guitar.
(Maybe someone told him so, or he looked at one of my youtube videos.)
He told me that, at some point -maybe when he was a postdoc-, he wanted to play guitar, too. He told me that he was a terrible guitarist. He spoke me about a Beatles' song.
Dunno remember exactly what he said, but the point was that according to him, this song has been considered to have one of the best bass lines in the history of rock n' roll.
For the ten years I have been meeting him, this has been the most personal moment we ever had.
I was speechless. It was so weird. What a jerk I was.
The first night I slept in my new house, I had a dream about my recent boss and one of his friends who also was my boss when I was a postgraduate student.
Once I recover I will write about it.
Hey Bulldog
