Tulum

First of all, if you can have a delightful person come visit you, that makes like a 300% difference in things and makes you say “oh yeah, I could do these contracts for another 6 years solid, no problem” and become calm and understand jokes and that things are beautiful and that food tastes good and that coworkers are not demons or any other dramatic and hysterical thing, etc. Mark came to visit which was fun times 1000. We went to the ancient Mayan city Tulum and Playa del Carmen. If you want to get excited about Mexico and think to yourself “oh, the West side of Mexico is just different!” and by that I mean “a dump!” go to Playa del Carmen on the East side. O it is beautiful.

Tulum is insane. The Mayans are insane. The Mayan calendar is insane and the Aztec calendar is insane. The Mayans have calendar priests because they have 5 different calendars, and they needed a professional person to figure out the day. On December 21, 2012, all of their calendars end and start over. This is the first time in 26,000 years that they will all do this at once. This feels like a sci-fi lie.

In my continuing obsession and deep and abiding love of manuscripts, here’s one! So the Spaniards came to Mexico in the 1500’s. All of the Mayan cities (6,000 of them—all interconnected) were abandoned and overgrown and the only remaining Mayan people were living in a stone age manner in the jungle with stone age tools. These are people from a culture with mathematicians and astronomers so complex, people’s explanation for them is “they were visited by aliens.” No one understands the regression.

There were still some books left by the Mayans (fig bark covered in lime and then gesso and painted with vegetable dye paint—I am restraining myself). The Spanish bishops looked at them and thought “well, these are from the devil” and burned them. But thankfully, since people like stealing, 3 survived. One in Dresden, one in Paris, and one in Madrid. In my fantasy life, someone will ask me to study and then give comedic presentations for the general public about this kind of thing. Or mainly, let me touch it.