Yesterday a family of Mapuche Indians stopped me in the street (addressing me, damnit, as Usted Señor) and asked me if I lived here. I realized that as of 3 days (long enough for me to stop pulling in on the front gate to go out) this was technically true.

I didn’t know the address they were looking for, but for a few seconds I was somehow both in the scene and watching it from somewhere else (that future place you go in your mind when you think ‘I’ll write about this?’) as the old man pointed through the rain and said he’d heard it was más p’allá.

Of course this scene shouldn’t ‘stand for’ anything more than itself, as this way of thinking has led people to do weird and evil shit (like decimate the very people who helped them survive their first seasons after arriving in the Americas, then set up a national holiday “giving thanks”) since the beginning of time. This was just one man asking another for directions as has happened and will continue to happened in stadiums and forests and bus terminals and above rapids and in muddy streets everywhere in the world forever.

Try to ‘draw out’ this direction-giving into a spiritual thing or a religion or anything else and you’ve gone from pro to amateur. Keep it at ground level and just give the man directions or smile and tell him you don’t know but you’re sure he’ll find it up there más p’allá.

–excerpt from “Notes on Going Pro for Thanksgiving” at Matador