Iron Fist

In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of the Mexicans smoking the French in the Battle of Puebla, and not actually Mexican Independence Day, as a lot of people seem to think. Every year on this day, the people of Mexico…eat beans and tortillas, which actually makes it not too much different than other days in Mexico. There’s some dancing and playing ranchero music, but again, nothing unusual. Cinco de Mayo is really only kind of a big deal in Mexico, as opposed to being an actual big deal.

In the United States, however, we go completely freakin’ insane for Cinco de Mayo. Maybe it’s because we like to make a big deal about beating the French, but again, not that many people know that’s what Cinco de Mayo is really about. Or maybe it’s because people just like to get sauced.

This year, we had albóndigas and homemade salsa as a nod to tradition. We also consumed completely ridiculous amounts of tequila, in a manner that was neither especially safe nor very intelligent. The pleasantly buzzed stage probably lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, but as our bravado increased, so did the peer pressure we applied to one another to take yet another shot. This had the effect of catapulting the lot of us right over the drunk stage, right into the “acutely poisoned” range.

But when we finally conceded that we’d all had entirely too much and were probably on the verge of death (or at least lasting brain damage), did we go down quietly? Did we bail out, weeping like a bunch of culeros?

Fuck no. We went down punk rock style, stickin’ it to the Man.

Hell yeah.

(Note: there’s notes for this picture on my Flickr page, click on the photo to check them out.)

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Note: this post has been sitting in my drafts queue since…well, since the actual Wordstock took place in late April. I keep meaning to get around to it, but I never seem to quite have the requisite energy needed to write about this awesome event when I sit down in front of my laptop to write out posts. Today is also one of those days, as I sit here in the TeaZone drinking my Irish Breakfast Tea, but you know what? Screw it. Sometimes a dude just has to suck it up and pound one out. Please, you dirty bastards, try not to read too much into that last sentence.

Also, the astute reader will note that I backdated this post to show up in May, rather than June, so that way it’s only one month late instead of two.

I’d been looking forward to going to Wordstock, Portland’s “Festival of the Book”, for a while, ever since I figured out what those ubiquitous red-silhouette ads were all about. After all, where better for an aspiring writer (or at least, someone who aspires to write really well) to go? Plus, it was only $3 to get in, and I’m cheap economically-conscious.

I went on Saturday afternoon, not because I am clever and planned it that way so I could maximize my enjoyment of the event and see a lot of great speakers, but because it was my day off and that’s when I actually got around to going. Still, I seemed to luck out and do pretty well for myself for the two and a half hours that I was there. I wandered around the various booths, picking up free copies of literary magazines and sample chapters from books soon-to-be-independently-published, fliers for different writing and/or publishing organizations, and got plenty of leads on cool books that I might otherwise ever heard about.

I stopped and listened by the Border’s Stage for a while, while an author who’s name I don’t remember talked about veterans coming home from the war in Iraq. I wandered on down, finally ending up at the Powell’s Stage. I arrived in time to grab a seat and listen to Jessica Abel speak about her latest graphic novel, La Perdida. I also discovered that the Oregon Convention Center’s much-hyped Wi-Fi costs $3 for five minutes to access, which barred me from the real-time blogging I had intended to do.

I shuffled around the Powell’s Books area for a while after Jessica Abel finishes, mentally flagging some books that looked interesting, before grabbing a seat again (inadvertently sitting next to former Portland mayoral-hopeful and Mercury editor Phil Busse) to listen to Dave Eggers speak.

I can’t say that I’ve ever read anything by Dave Eggers before, but for his allotted time he read an article he’d had published in the Guardian which I found to be completely hilarious (read it here: parts one, two, and three). He also read a bit from a book he’s been working on for the last five years (I think), a biographical piece on one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I was impressed enough by his work to go ahead and buy his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 (which he didn’t actually write but compiled and edited) from the Powell’s booth, and if you ask nicely, I may let you borrow one or both of them once I get done reading them.

Anyway, that’s Wordstock. If you’ve checked out their site already, you can see that they’ve already got next year’s convention in the works. I’ll definitely be there, and I’ll probably be a little more organized that I was this last time.

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