The MRI machine is imposing. It resides in its own building where it hums ominously, attended by smocked technicians poised before multiple flat-panel displays.

After removing various metallic objects, I lie on a narrow platform poised before the glowing aperture. Straps are fastened across my chest to monitor breathing, and an IV is started in a vein in my left arm. Breathing must be synchronized with the imaging triggers, and contrast material that resonates a particular way in the intense magnetic field will be introduced into the IV at the appropriate moment.

Before the attendants step away, one places plugs in my ears - the kind I used to wear while piloting loud airplanes. She tells me to close my eyes - and think pleasant thoughts. This kind of advice is not usually the prelude to something welcome, but I comply as I feel the narrow platform begin to slowly insert me into the glowing core of the device. I do close my eyes, and think of lying on the bed in the old house in Merida where I stay, with the fan spinning slightly off-balance twelve feet above me... whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh... The actual sound I hear is more like the deep throated pulsing of some sort of hyper-stellar drive, as the machine prepares to resonate my aqueous molecules in a way that can somehow be imaged in paper-thin slices. It pulses and throbs, but I try to think of the fan... whooshwhooshwhooshwoosh... I feel the breeze, as the machine circulates cool air to match my mental image. I briefly open my eyes and see the faintly luminous interior of the core, inches from my eyes. I close them again, and think of that twenty foot ceiling in the room in the hundred and fifty year old colonial house in Mexico. A house made of ancient limestone, and as much the opposite of this dense collection of electonics and metal and plastic as is possible.

Now the system begins to calibrate itself, testing my density and composition with a series of intense clacks and buzzes - TOC TOC TOC...cli-TOC cli-TOC cli-TOC...BZNNNTTTTT...BZNNNTTT. Then nothing but that throbbing, pulsing hyperdrive backdrop.

A disembodied tinney voice enters my ears, with that peculiar monaural headphone effect of being in the center of your head. "This will be a series of four - you'll need to hold your breath for thirty seconds on my cue". In keeping with the space travel ambience, she sounds like Sygorney Weaver, who she also resembled. Maybe if the MRI results indicate something truly ominous, it will free itself abruptly from my torso and scurry away, ending my ordeal here and now. Would this shock Sygorney? She has the world-weary manner of one who has seen it all, so probably not.

The series begins, with a deafening BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. "Ok breathe...and out, breathe...and out, breathe...and HOLD it..." BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. This continues, interspersed with slight movement in or out of the narrow confines of the device core as I am virtually sliced like lunchmeat on the old circular blade appliance I remember my Mom using.

"I'm going to inject the dye now", Sygorney advises from that central space between my plugged ears. "You'll feel a coolness in your arm". I do. I'm lying twelve feet under the ceiling fan, feeling the coolness...whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh.....

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Want some insight into your relationship with possessions? With your history of consumption and hoarding of clutter?

Plan a move to another country, where the most you can practically take is a small stack of cartons.

Look around your house. Your garage. The attic. Look in every drawer, closet, kitchen cabinet, bookshelf. Now imagine yourself touching and deciding the disposition of every item, large and small. Lots of stuff in that junk drawer? Gotta decide - dump the entire contents in a yard sale or thrift store box, or sort through trying to apply some criteria for saving or...or....or what?

Attached to that couch you nap on? That big leather armchair you longed for so many years? Get over it. Everything must go.

With a yard sale staged for the purpose of seeing things go away quickly, it's best not to give any thought at all to what was paid for stuff. It doesn't matter. Everything must go.

At first, it's very tough to sort, to sell, to (gasp) throw away perfectly good stuff. But it gets easier. And easier. You start out tentatively, giving a lot of thought to every little item. Before long, you can gather up arms full of stuff, and dump it unceremoniously into boxes. It becomes less painful, and you actually start to get an endorphin high from the prospect that it will all finally just...go away.

You find yourself thinking, as you wade through the endless drifts of stuff - Let this be a lesson to me. I never needed all this crap to begin with. I thought I did, but I didn't. I worked a lot for the money to blow on a mountain of swill, and then it owned me. For a long time. I moved it, looked at it, occasionally dusted it, but rarely used most of it. Never again.

The best model for consuming was revealed in a scene from George Lucas' first theatrical release - the futuristic THX1138. In the grim opressive overcrowded underground Orwellian world that the hero inhabits, he ducks into a shop and purchases an orange cube of some sort. When he arrives at his dwelling, just inside the door he deposits the cube into a receptacle, where it vanishes with sort of a sucking flushing noise. Perfect consumption. No clutter. Everything must go.




Text © 2003-2004 Stanley J. Wolf

Almost three months since my last update, and it's time to bring this up to date and move forward with ongoing status.



After the New Year kidney stone incident, a CT scan done to have a look at that situation revealed another area of interest. A subsequent study of that area revealed ANOTHER thing to investigate. I won't bore with the details, but the past several months have been used up by long delays between appointments with various HMO (which I believe now means Hysterical Medical Overindulgence) people and for being scanned now and then with Xrays, soundwaves, and magnetic fields. The net result of all this is that the original kidney stone episode has resolved with minimal unpleasantness, but some uncertainty still remains with the other incidental items. Hopefully, that uncertainty will be removed in the next few weeks.

With any luck at all, I will then be able to travel to Merida by mid to late April. Pat is there right now, beginning a ten-day visit to scout the neighborhoods most likely to yield appropriate houses and ambience now that we have expanded the scope of our search beyond centro. He will take one more look at the current inventory of casas for sale, and if there is no good opportunity we'll shift to looking for a rental in one of the neighborhoods he's checking out.

Here's a place to check out local Merida listings for venta de casas (houses for sale) and renta de casas (rentals). Note that although the $ sign is used, unless USD is stated this is for mexican pesos - currently you divide by eleven to arrive at a dollar amount. Here's another site for current house inventory targeted more to gringo buyers.

There really is a lot of catching up to do, and (hopefully) the pace of preparation and action will be picking up soon - I'll commit to no less than three entries a week.

Stay tuned...

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"Quick Lunch La Terraza" - neighborhood eatery in barrio Vicente Solis

¡ay! Dios mio - more suspense. Pat checked in for a response from the sellers of la casa amarilla today and was told that they needed until next Tuesday to mull it over. He wrote up an account of this and posted some new photos of the barrio Vincente Solis where it is located.

So Pat will come home and we'll wait until next week to see if we go into contract on the place. ¡Esperamos que si! If we do, the papers should be drawn up and ready to sign around the third week of February - just in time for - Carnavál! Since Pat did all the hard work to find the place and set up the offer he should go and close and have the satisfaction of taking possesion of the keys. Then I will pospone my trip and try to use part of my sabbatical to get a few things set up there for residency when we visit. That would put me there in late March.

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Poor Pat! He got a little caught up in the on and off deal for the old colonial we originally had our eye on and made an offer only to find himself hoping it wouldn't be accepted (it wasn't). Quite a stressfully way to learn the ropes for property purchasing in Merida. When he called for reassurance the morning after, I had just crawled out of bed and was pretty dubious and couldn't generate much pre-coffee enthusiasm to offset that. We were BOTH relieved when the offer expired unaccepted.

Ah, but now we have an offer in on a sensible comfortable little house, which seems to have assumed the label casa amarilla (see below for obvious reason).

Standing by right now to confirm that an offer is in, awaiting reply from the seller.....

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Click the panuchos in this photo to read a worshipful review of a local eatery in Merida.

One of the wonders of visiting Mexico is the food one finds there. Since we only really know Merida, it is the yucatecan regional food that has captured our imagination. It is not very similar to the California mexican food we have enjoyed here.


What a great pleasure it is to find a local panucheria (a place where panuchos are served of course) or cocina economica - a generic name for a cheap place to eat that literally means inexpensive kitchen. In the cocina economica there will be two or three cheery ladies chatting and cooking in big pots and frypans in the back. If you want to see what's available for the day just step in back and they will pull up a ladle or spatula to display their work and describe it in whatever words you can understand. Pointing will work here if necessary.

Everything is fantastic as a rule, accompanied by a stack of small-diameter fresh corn tortillas and costing maybe $1.60 for a big lunch. This is the main meal of the day for most people, and in the early afternoon hours a steady stream of people come in with empty tupperware of various sizes for takeaway (back to work? home to share with family before a siesta?). They leave with bags loaded with heavy containers and foil covered stacks of hot tortillas.

Here I am in a neighborhood cocina economica with a museum guide I invited to lunch.

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Pat had an interesting idea I hadn't considered before about how to earn some income in Mexico. It seems very few people in Merida are catering to the gringo crowd who might want to learn Spanish, and it occured to him that we could operate such classes using a combination of my teaching skills (eight years as a flight instructor)
and local native speakers. The way gringos are snapping up all the property there the community must be growing exponentially. We could devote part of our house space for a classroom if we get a big enough place. Need to check out the legalities of self-employment but I think this can be done.

Taking this a step further, I wonder if we couldn't also teach English to local Spanish speakers - although I suspect they have more options. I know some people in Merida teach English with no knowledge of Spanish, although I don't see how they could be as effective without insight into why Spanish speakers make the common errors they do. Since I have been studying Spanish I am increasingly understanding how and why they make the mistakes they do.

After Wednesday's big disappointment over the sale of the unrestored colonial we had our eye on, we regrouped and now Pat will spend Friday looking at the remaining inventory of the realtor for that place, then Saturday will check out a place that was highly recommended as being 'right' for us by a friend who has bought and renovated an old colonial in Merida.

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