Minimally Exceptional

Today is August 16th. I am sitting in the passenger seat of my car, and Laura is driving. Where are we going? Indiana, for DMB. It’s 9:15 St. Louis time, although I don’t know if we’ve crossed into eastern daylight time yet. It’s taken a lot of work thus far to get to this point.

Let’s start from the beginning, I guess. The week of July 23rd sucked for me. Sucked a lot. In ten years of working where I work, it’s probably the worst straight week I’ve ever had. I’ve had bad days and bad runs of days, but something about this week in particular really was just shitty. Stuff so unimportant I don’t think I can remember all the details.

Well anyhow, for whatever reason I was working a little late on Friday the 27th. I got a phone call from someone in my office who was driving home – apparently, two other people from our office were pulled over to the side of the road with what looked like car troubles. The person who called me passed it too quick and wasn’t able to stop, so she called me to make sure that I pay attention when I’m leaving to see everything is OK.

A little bit later, I leave. I’m passing the area where they’re supposed to be pulled over, and I see a silver truck I don’t recognize. It looks like things are pretty much under control, so I just continue on. I go home, get Laura, and we leave to go get dinner.

We’re driving down Hampton, and it’s raining. Not a lot, but still raining. As we near the intersection where we’re going to be making a left, someone who isn’t paying any attention pulls out of a little side street and makes a left turn into the lane that I’m driving in. I see her coming and try to move, and it helps a little bit, but ultimately she hits the rear driver side corner of my car and sends me spinning into oncoming traffic. I saw her coming towards me, which was good, as I started to move out of the way, but I just didn’t make it in time. Had I not seen her coming, she would have hit my driver’s side door and put me in the hospital.

For the folks playing the home game, this is what we call ‘Karma.’ Had I stopped to check on Elaine, whose car was broken down, that gal would have hit some other chump when she wasn’t paying attention.

Anyway, my car seems drivable, so I pull into the parking lot of a nearby bank. She pulls in as well, and immediately comes up to exchange information. I start writing down my info, and Laura calls the police. It turns out that this driver is an out of state driver from Texas driving a rental car. On top of it, she was totally pushy and impatient trying to get away from the scene of the accident that she caused – hey, sorry if you’re inconvenienced by this, maybe next time you should watch what the fuck you’re doing.

Checking out the cars, I don’t seem to be in too bad of a condition. Wrecked but drivable. The bumper is totally screwed. It’s two thirds of the way ripped off the back of my car, and I have some visible body damage to the driver’s side rear quarter panel. Our friendly accident causing pain in the ass fully documented and detailed the damage to my vehicle by taking some cell phone camera pictures of my car from a bad angle at a distance of about 20 feet away. Just in case I try to screw her insurance company or something.

Turns out that she doesn’t have proof of insurance. According to her you don’t get insurance cards in texas, you get a window clingy that shows you are insured. She also didn’t have the contact information of her insurance agent, but left me her cell phone number that I could call if I have problems. Fucking sweet.

She bitched and bitched that she had to wait for the cops, because she was busy busy and didn’t have time for this. The cops finally got there (and pulled into the lot in such a way that it blocked both of our cars in.) Cop gets out, takes statements from both of us, and tells the lady that she’s free to go, and that she (the officer) will verify the accident was her fault if I need her to. Great. That’s at least promising. So then the gal gets back in her car and looks impatient waiting for the cop to move her car. What do I do? I walk over to the police car and start asking questions – after all, I’ve never been in a situation like this before and I have lots of questions about how all of this works. Naturally, our Texan friend looks visibly upset that we’re keeping her there, and makes mean mean faces at me. I think at one point she may have even honked, but I don’t remember.

That’s how we do it in Texas.

After a day of rest on Tuesday, Wednesday morning all of the ‘kids’ went to Xel-Ha for snorkeling. We left around 8:30 or so and took taxis to the park.

We genuinely lucked out on the weather. It was a little overcast, but stayed generally dry for most of the day. We snorkeled in the morning and took some neat underwater pictures using disposable waterproof cameras. Not everyone was having such a great time snorkeling – we kind of inadvertently split into two groups while we were in the water, and Steve got a little burned out on snorkeling, so he went back up to land and had a few beers while we wrapped up in the water.

After turning in all of the snorkeling gear, we went for a float down the freshwater river that is part of the park. Kind of like the ‘lazy river’ at waterparks, except in a really awesome natural setting. It was fresh, cold water, surrounded by jungle and forest on both sides. Probably the best part of the day for me, I think.

After that we ate lunch at one of the cafes. Right as we got there it started storming, and that afternoon was probably the heaviest it rained all week. We sat at a table on the second floor, and there was a mariachi band playing. As we sat there eating, a worker was taking another family to a table in the same area we were in. The woman in charge of this group of people, who could be best defined as tequila BOOM BOOM!’s angry, wrinkled, meth addicted mother, yelled at the person escorting them the entire time. “Don’t put us by that loud music there! I don’t want to have to listen to all that racket. Keep us away from that loud music!”

Steve’s guess is that the trailer park princess just didn’t want to be by the music so that her kids could hear her hollering at them.

The rest of the week was spent either at the resort, or in the nearby town of Playa del Carmen. Playa del Carmen, or at least the part we went to, was pretty much several city blocks of little merchant shops – the ‘merchant vultures’ that overprice everything and then haggle with you for 20 minutes about the price.

It seems like the bullshit inflation with the vultures has gone way up. When we were there in 2001, if something was $100 at one of these shops, you could usually talk them down to about $50. This time around, it was way worse. I bought some onyx turtles with mother of pearl shell decorations, and places were asking like $120, and we were able to talk them down to $35 to $40, depending on the size of the turtle. Chris’s husband Matt was especially good at talking people down. I bought a mexican opal necklace for Laura that the vulture asked $250 for – we talked him down to $70.

I guess that’s kind of a viscous circle. Tourists try to haggle with merchants. Merchants see tourists are trying to talk them down and jack up the price a little bit so that they can still get their ‘base’ price for something. As tourists realized that they’re getting screwed, they haggle even harder knowing that they can get the price down to that ‘base’ price. As merchants see this happening, they bump the prices even higher. So prices get higher and higher all the time, and people still talk them down to the base price. Seems like a lot of work for nothing – an ‘honest’ merchant could make a killing setting up a shop that sold things at the ‘base’ price with no haggling. Something just seems fishy about picking up an item in a shop and having the guy say ‘don’t look at price tag, I cut you nice deal.’

I could talk forever with different stories of fighting with the merchants, but you get the gist of it. The only other one that’s worth telling is about Steve. As you walk down the streets, merchants try to pull you into the stores. “More stuff, better prices!” Well Steve walked with a little 6-pack can cooler and drank as we shopped. There was one guy that was pretty honest with my ‘drunk’ brother – ‘You come in, I rip you off! Take your money! You like cuban cigars? No? Cuban girls?? Cuban boys???’

My last vacation tale: At the hotel, there was a painter who came and painted at the resort every few days. He painted with spray paint. He had 12 or so colors of paint, and could make really neat stuff just spray painting and texturing with a pallet knife or piece of newspaper. When he was done, he would get a can of the paint, and ‘dry’ the painting by spraying the spray paint over a lighter, shooting out a big flame to flash-dry the painting. I bought a bunch of these – when you hold them up over a light, you can see all of the different layers and coloring, and it’s almost iridescent at times.

Finally: Pictures of all of this – the painting, the snorkeling trip, the resort, the town, my dad’s bandaged head – are all available at my Flickr account for everyone to see. You can find them here:

flickr.com/photos/jenkinsbp/sets/