Lyn Fuchs's Blog, page 6

Time to Hit the Road Again

Enough hibernation already!Humanity is doomed to vacillate between distress and boredom, as the German philosopher Schopenhauer said. My poor Mexican friends scoff at invitations to go camping, because they've spent nearly all their lives trying to stop camping. My rich American friends constantly search for more extreme sports, because they need a thrill in their vaccinated, seat-belted, health-insured lives. I also hunger for tranquility when stressed and for stimulation when stuck in routi...

Homo Killers Rock and Homemakers Suck

A big greedy insurance company very recently conspired to find out what career makes people the happiest, so they could provide more insurance to long-living happy folks rather than short-lived sad folks. (Money-grubbing and number-crunching bastards!) Because of the intensely-evil capitalist motivations behind this research study, they failed to approach their subject with the proper PC bias of a sophisticated peer-reviewed/censured university professor. (Trigger alert: rude myth-busting rea...

Life Is Cooler Than Fiction

The prestigious Eclectica Magazine is publishing dual anthologies of what they consider the best fiction and nonfiction writing from the last twenty years. I'm honored to be included. Since my life makes vampires and zombies seem a mundane snoozefest, I only write stuff that's absolutely true, so the chosen story "Dying With Dignity Mexican Style" from my debut work Sacred Ground & Holy Water will be featured in their nonfiction collection. You can buy it soon. I must concur that thi...

Strippers, Cactus, & Other Edibles III

Goat milk caramel and strawberries with whipped cream are common confections in Guanajuato. Yet, I’m introduced to these ordinary sweet things by an extraordinary sweet thing: a brown sugar and exotic dancer named Clementine. This girl doesn’t spend much time in the kitchen, but she could teach your grandmother some luscious ways to serve up desert. Here is how I get myself into an extremely sticky situation.
I meet her in a cantina just across the state line from my Queretaro ranch. The joint...

Strippers, Cactus, & Other Edibles II

After dreams of making beautiful music with Lila Downs, I awake under a desert sunrise. Hit the road home to my ranch. Just outside the remote little village called Bravo, I turn off the highway onto a dirt road at the Corregidora Tech University. Here is where I work as a professor. The long and low sand-colored and rock-studded buildings meld into the landscape of desert scrub valley with distant blue mountains. The only sound is the wind. I savor the silence.
Not only do I spend my workday...

Strippers, Cactus, & Other Edibles

While moving this week into a new house in the verdant rainforest that encircles my university above the Oaxacan coast, your author stumbled upon notes scribbled at the desert ranch I inhabited for two years before coming here. I think you'll find them quite interesting. The notes explain how I came to devour scrumptious desert delicacies that include much prickly-skinned cactus and one smooth-skinned stripper. Here we go with what I might call the nonfiction hunger games.

Readers who are more...

Why America Embraces A Trump/Clinton Circus

This magazine has already provided snapshots of the tiny tip of the huge iceberg that is the lifelong ideological and moral bancruptcy of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A word to the wise is sufficient. It's now time for wise people to come to grips with why so many Americans have enthusiastically embraced a knuckle-dragging guy with a fascist strong-man aura and a scandal-laden hag with a socialist mother-superior attitude.
Americans are a relatively moral people - as long as scruples...

Trekking the Birthplace of Food IV

The next morning, I’m driven to the small town of Coxcatlan by a new friend named Lily. She’s not exactly hard on the eyes. Our road traverses agricultural fields with multiple mountain ranges on both sides. The top ridges are stark and knobby. Heat and humidity increase until we reach the town turnoff at a fountain inscribed “Coxcatlan: Cradle of Maize.”
Getting permission to visit the cave of the oldest corn fossils means following the 5-step process required for most authorizations in Mexic...

Trekking the Birthplace of Food III

I spend all morning at the Museum of the Tehuacan Valley. This shrine to the history of corn is located in the former Convent of Carmen, where I stroll happily from exhibit to exhibit in a geek’s paradise. Today, the Tehuacan Valley is a dusty nook between the states of Puebla, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. Yet, people have camped here for 12,000 years. When ice-age chill dominated North America, this cave-dotted hot spot was a migrant tribe magnet and seasonal tourist destination. The museum do...

Trekking the Birthplace of Food II

Outside the bus window is a deceitful desert. Hot dry air and dusty bone-colored land totally conceal a vast subterranean river network draining the ice melt from Mount Pico de Orizaba. Bald moonscape mountains surround this Tehuacan Valley. Verdant springs pierce the dead crust in myriad hidden locations known only to odd species of cactus with swollen tree-like bases and weird species of trees with thorny cactus-like trunks. Many such plants exist only here.
Cutting through the hills up clos...