Excelsior- "Ever Higher." Truddie Reif in New York

New York is a feeling and a place but when you say "I love New York" it's not a feeling, it's a verb-you have to do it!

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Baja--Fortunate Sun

Black Elk Speaks

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Rome Sweet Rome and Monte Carlo

A year ago in Italy and Monaco.

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Hotel California-Aye, Calypso, the place you've been to...

Sunshine On My Shoulders, Makes Me Happy- John Denver

I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane. Rocky Mountain High, Thank God I'm a Country Boy!

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Mexico Baja California Sur

So A Blogger walks into a bar...

 ¿Hay alguien que hable ingles?

Cabo San Lucas locals speak English as a second language. Money is their first one.

None of this "Starting Saturday, we will be closed Friday" No Spanglish. No pain in the English. Cabo is very "American".

Not too long ago,(1980) going to anywhere else but the USA  meant disappearing from the world. With the cell phone, laptop, and a wireless connection, or ISDN, modem, depending on how wired or tired the particular place I have been in is, the locals are good to go and  so I am.

Mexico on the Pacific side reminds me of Los Angeles a lot---the Valley, South Central,  even the South Bay. Just another neighborhood.

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Mexico-Cinderella Liberty

It's fun to watch my fellow crewmates making the right mistakes--  Think Pretty Woman meets Cinderella Liberty

FADE IN: She's 32. She drinks too much. She hustles pool. She's got a 10-year old mulatto son. She's got a different boyfriend every night. She's in trouble. And he's in love.

A lonely  sailor falls in love with a hooker, with a heart of gold,  and becomes a surrogate father figure for her  son during an extended liberty due to his passport being lost.

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Mexico-Is It Safe? Marathon Man

Drilling For Facts
Creepy Nazi Dentist: Is it safe?
Ed: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.
Creepy Nazi Dentist: Is it safe?

Ed: Tell me what the "it" refers to.

Creepy Nazi Dentist: Is it safe?

Ed: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

Generation RX

I took a bite out of the Apple, the forbidden fruit for so long and bought an iPhone. Is that PC?
I remember in Starbucks back in Third World America USA , some barista in Santa Monica freaked out when he saw me using a G1 google android in 2OO8. He rolled his eyes and  called me a Republican,( the Daddy Party).  Is that a bad thing?

 My English teacher from Comsewogue High School, GW Stroud wrote on my facebook page,  after I went public with my endorsement for ¨Today I voted for Mac¨, advising me to go all the way, buy a Hybrid, get a perscription for medical marajuana and join the Mommy Party, the Democrats.

¨¨I know both sides because I am both sides¨¨
---Thus Spake  FriEDrich REIF Nietzsche

Android users are mostly guys. iPod touch owners are overwhelmingly young. And people who carry iPhones are way more likely to lust after an iPad.

After all,  landlines are places, and cell phones people. In fact, my phone is not so phoney anymore- It does just about everything else but make a simple  phone call-- at least  here in foreign ports of call.

 In the shootout at the I´m ok, you´re ok corral- the iPhone verses Google Showdown, Google, I have decided to see other people, but like >Arnold, I´ll be back.

Well, here is the police caution tape that I am about to break. WWSS? What would Sade say---Is it a crime?

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Mexico Sking Powder

Snow Patrol

The mills of  God grind slowly and fine- It's all powder now.

Skiing in powder, say many skiers, is the ultimate ski experience. The feeling of lightness, ease, and grace is incomparable.

No this is not Mexico  but Norway.

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Cabo-Afternoon Cowboy

LG- LIfe is Good in Cabo. I've gone native in  a Col Kurtz sort of way, drinking tequila, and sporting a Hecho in Mexico Straw Cowboy hat---The Horror. The Horror. If 50 is the youth of old age, and Steffi was right-Food is the sex of old age! Analyse this: I had a guacamole-cheese-quesadilla-gasm. In some parts of Mexico I would be married  to that  tortilla already.

Man Of Many Hats Ed If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed- Actually, just wrapped up  in a Brazilian Flag(left)Joe Bjornson is a chain smoker from Iceland. He plays in a Jazz band. He describes himself as the Vincent Van Gough of Trombone- WTF? Then , I am the Rosa Parks of second-hand smokers. I refuse to hang out with my tobacco-stained-finger-tipped-nicotine juiced friends who smoke, unless I am on an open deck, breathing salt-water air.

Paying for things in a currency that no longer exist$-the US Dollar, I ask myself, "am I better off than I was 4 Trillion dollars ago? " In Mexico, the answer is, Yes!

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Oh, Mexico--- Bright and Breezy,Free and Easy

Happy Go Local

First, there was island sitting in Hawaii. Now it´s a beach watching---a visual metaphor for the life aquatic, which I can sum up in three words---it goes on. I am on stay-cation since three weeks, keeping the sun off my skin, the saltwater out of my eyes, and the sand out of my shoes.

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Free Man In Paris-In Review

What a difference a year makes--Here now on the Pacific Ocean in Mexican waters , and then-September 2009 in France on The Seine.

To take a photograph of yourself is to participate in your own  mortality, vulnerability, and mutability. This one was taken 360 days ago.

I was born in America, but my hometown is Paris..

...walk through those doors

And wander Down the champs elysees

Going cafe to cabaret

Bean and Nothingness in a Parisian Coffee House

Channeling Novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, the biggest post WW2 noise in France,, as I passed the Cafe de Flore, on The Left Bank.

Once a hangout for Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, JP would meet "The Family" and evolve existentialist philosophies over drinks.

Sartre asserted that "during 4 years, the road to the Café was for me the Road to Freedom."

You shall know the truth, but first it will piss you off- And to Sartre it was the truth as well as the fact that for France the road to freedom led through the abyss of defeat and despair.

JP's pontifications were a spiritual disinfectant—or at least deodorant for his peers. He offered the red pill and the blue one:Communism and suicide.

Who could forget his definition of man--condemned to be free.

Math is Hard-

FADE IN: I sit down for a coffee and a croissant. ..I ask for the check. It's 5.50 Euro. I give her 10 Euro and she gives me back 10 Euro 50. I made half a Euro on the deal--of course I leave her the balance as a tip, but WTF?

L8R,From The Abyss

I start thinking about The anniversary of Woodstock and Joni Mitchell, one of the GR8st songwriters. Think "Free Man In Paris" meets "Help Me" Verses "From the Abyss"and"No Exit".

Let's put Suite Judy Blue Eyes and JP Sartre in a Steel Cage to fight it out: Because what is freedom. It's not being alone. It's being in a relationship with someone that let's you do your own thing. More than that, as much as traveling alone--The swiftest one is the that goes alone, is cool; it's not where you go but who you go with. There is no Existential "nausée" and Romantic "ennui". Yet, Paris is for lovers.

I'll post some videos to the trip in a few days. Still in "Post" production LOL. La Cathedrale Notre-Dame, La Tour Eiffell, etc.

Here's Le Louvre:

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Mexico-Information Please

While most people typically lose their shirt in the stock market or a messy breakup- I lost my shirt in Mexico hiking this moutain in Mazatlan.

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Mexico- Hail Mary -The Statue Is The Saint

Football Atheists A Pain in the English

It´s Tourist season in Mazatlan,  The locals are  fishing, waiting to catch the big one.Yet, most everyone has a hunting license-eating what they kill, living on the small ones.

Everybody  is busy vending something, from Mexican gummy bears to lead-painted-made-in -china dry wall pet food-very entrepreneurial. Too bad they don´t sell NFL stuff....even the knock-offs.These Jesus' are the Derek Jeters Of Christianity--They are good at what they do, but they only believe in God and Soccer!

Still no one can quite compare to Bob Marley´s beloved Jamaica, those Ocho Rios In-your-face shake down crews are the A-Rods of snake oil salesmen. They kick the entire black market weeler dealer vibe up a notch. They are the LeBron James of  ¨What do you want. What do you need¨.

Here is the Catedral de la Inmaculada Concepción. I can´t help thinking of American football, and the USA version, the Church of Franco, er, I mean, Catedral de la Inmaculada Recepción- a Statue in Pittsburgh Airport dedicated to Franco Harris. He was  the Burt Reynolds of   defensive linemen, and had the mustache and  male pattern madness bald spots to prove it.

His Immaculate reception  is the nickname given to one of the most famous plays in the history of American football. It occurred in the AFC divisional playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Let It Be Mother Mary Comes To Me

Then there´s Hail Flutie,a college football game that took place between the Boston College Eagles and the University of Miami Hurricanes in1984.It is one of the most memorable moments in sports.

Show Me The Movie @PV

So basically for $4 US Dollars I can see Eat Pray And Love at the Puerto Vallarta Mall. You know, the Hugh Heffner of Divoce Porn, Elizabeth Gilbert´s story of a milf´s yearlong 'search for everything' Or I could re-read Eat Pray and Reif , a year-long search to go everwhere, written by the Rosa Parks of DILFS, Ed Reif.

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