If you manage to leave the waterfront and the main touristy strip, San Miguel de Cozumel drops its Hard Rock Café, cruise ships and expensive watches façade, and reverts to a real town. Nice and not so nice, clean and not so clean, but real, screw the amusement park.
For the first time in my life I am up in the air on the last day of the year, I certainly hope there will be many more, and so it is not without irony (for a founding member of the D&C no less), that I really hate flying. I’m sure there’s a metaphor or a fake Chinese cookie message in there somewhere, but I’m at a loss to interpret it. My spidey senses are a bit dullish this morning, 3 AM wake-up, Bloody Mary in the airport lounge and all that, plus the aforementioned “dislike” for aerial travel, which if you knew more of my background would bump the irony up to eleven. The complete Diving and Chillin’ clan is headed to Cozumel, meaning the island of the swallows in the Mayan language. Expected activities? Please cue the evident punch line: diving and chilling. For the first time kids, the second generation of the club, are joining us. Time moving on and all that.
I’m not going to bore you with a long talk about the origins of Christmas and why it is where it is on the calendar, though I really want to. Suffice it to say that it is extremely unlikely that Jesus was born in what is to us the end of December. The gospel of Luke tells us shepherds were out at night guarding their flock, and that is not a winter activity. Neither is it true, sorry my neo-pagan friends, that Christmas’s date was chosen to replace an older festival, in a sort of religious sleight of hand, as if people would not notice. No, according to some recent scholarship, it has to do with the winter solstice, thus the return of the Sun, and the equation of that Light (and Life I assume) with Christ, but this is not what this post is about. This post is about you guys, all eight of you, and wishing you, and yours, a festive, memorable and all around kick ass Christmas, I mean it. Merry Christmas.
As the news of Leonard Cohen’s passing washed over, familiar feelings came with it. The truth is that death comes. He passes away a few months after his muse Marianne and a few weeks after the release of his latest album. Shades of Bowie almost. We should be so lucky.
The octopus, a very smart and also very tasty animal. Sucks being you buddy.
I’m not a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but I like to think I can hold my own in a kitchen. Though instances of guests puking in their mouths have thankfully been nonexistent (or unreported), there have been a few resounding fails in my culinary cavalcade, twice with octopus. I’m talking results out of a lovecraftian nightmare, stuff that no one dared to put in their mouth. Not even the ravens would touch it.