Old Gringo

     This old gringo was living far south on Mexico's Pacific side, in a surfing town world famous for its gargantuan, beach-breaking rollers. Puerto Escondido hosted absolutely zero giant resorts, so my favorite beach, a roughly two-mile stretch of wide, white sand, still remained mostly uncrowded.

     Often times throughout the day I found myself alone on the shore and preferred it that way. I liked it even more with no one else around at all, because it gave me a feeling of being by myself on a deserted island.

     Then my only companions were endless vistas and pelagic birds, giant, jutting volcanic rock outcroppings, and the stupendous sound of waves rolling in to violently die upon the shallow ends of a sloping sea.

     I loved the local inhabitants, but not the other gringos or Mexican tourists. The probability of a foreigner greeting me with a friendly first smile soared as high and distant as the puffy, white cumulus clouds daily cluttering the far-reaching edges of Puerto Escondido's oceanic horizon. Like the borders of a postcard the view left nothing in-between but tropical blue skies.

     The other gringos usually brought only their narcissistic, self-serving egos to the bread-breaking tables of my unknown existence. Mexican tourists, meanwhile, barely bode better as first-time acquaintances, offering mostly paltry side dishes of uncaring strangers' doubt.

     Hungry for human connection, I especially adored the children I encountered on my daily shoreline walks. They grinned from ear to ear whenever I got up close and glanced in their direction. Some hid their happiness shyly behind their guardians' legs or torsos; while others, bursting forward, raised and waved a cute poco hand, then shouted out a joyful word or two in Spanish.

     "Ooh, tu hijo es muy hermoso!" I lavishly told the parents. And each time the parents beamed with pride, and their niños and niñas cried out with exuberant joy or exhibited other forms of giddy glee.

     On darker days, when I felt utter mental starvation and exhaustion, my positive mind would sink to the breaking point, and I'd see everyone as misguided humans, and miserably start hating them all.

     "Fucking losers," I said out loud to himself. "Fucking goddamned, delusional morons. Where the fuck do you think you're going? Who in the hell do you think you are? Quién carajo eres tú?!

     And each time, my suffering thoughts would drag my alcoholic mind back into an ice-cold Oxxo beer cooler, to the same sleazy barroom fantasy of getting sloshed with pie-eyed women as equally desperate and lonely as I was.

     Thankfully, such knee-jerk impulses to kill my tormented soul with bottles of beer or wine never ripened to fruition. I always returned soberly to what I believed to be the truth: that the only wise men and women of this world are humble, scientifically minded people who know that the Homo-sapient emotions of love, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness are the most important words in the human language.

     During these bouts of depression I'd rest, drink some water, have some food, and soon feel brighter, filled again with much hope and kindness for all people and the evolving earth upon which I lived.

     I suffer from mild hallucinations, brief panic attacks of demoralizing regret. My phantasmagoric world contains many misplaced memories of my younger years, lost dialogues of a thousand conversations I may or may not have ever had.

     When gripped by these bittersweet, melancholic thoughts—the constipated remembering's of all I've lost and everyone and everything I've left behind—I often, dig myself out of this pitiful, self-loathing state by playing chess. 

     Modern day computer chess has served me well. No longer does a computerized game mean challenging an electronic opponent only. Modern day computer chess now means going head-to-head against a real earthly inhabitant, someone else sitting at a table or desk, or just about anyplace else, with a laptop pinned between their knees.

     Being lost in it is what this old gringo likes most about chess, when my worrisome thoughts about what chores need doing or what problems require solving are for a short while totally rubbed out.

     Surfers talk a lot about disappearing on a wave, the instant all else in and of the world fade away, leaving only a shockingly fast, oncoming stream of exhilarating moments, one's complete melding into the perfectly thrilling now. In this way both surfing and chess are meditative, and this old gringo, who began playing chess in his mid-forties, is grateful for it.