This post is also available in: English (Inglés)

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character…Would you slow down? Or speed up?”

—Chuck Palahniuk—

Date: September 2 -2020

Time: 2:33 pm

Location: Holiday Inn in Reynosa Mexico. (Sitting in the Hotel’s restaurant (Agave) with my laptop)

Max here, I first started writing this blog post as I was sitting in the Agave restaurant, but when my guide from Reynosa came and sat with me to take me to the border,  I saved my writings….. Only to find out later that it never got saved to the cloud. This is a really frustrating moment for me. But I must still move forward and reclaim my thoughts.

It’s now Sunday September 7 -2020, the Time is 1:43 am and I am here at the club in the ATX…….

Song playing as I do some of this writing….. Dababy – Rockstar

Concerning the quote….

Death really is a curious thing… if life is cyclical then is there really death?

Some of my thoughts will be as if I am in Mexico sitting there at the restaurant with my laptop. While other thoughts will be written as I sit here in in the club…. A semi Mexico, semi club writing.

I remember sitting there in the restaurant…. It was my last moments of Reynosa before my guide taxied me to the border. The last 48 hours flew by faster than my thoughts could truly comprehend. My reasons for Mexico? Well, they were 2 fold…. One was for a visit to the cosmetic doctor, and the other was to hopefully nip my loneliness in the butt.

I sat there at the same table/booth that I used the day before. Its a booth where the actual table top is about 6 inches to high for what I feel is comfortable, but I liked the location of the booth, it was located at the far end of the entrance door and in front of the cashier.

Today’s menu as I sat down was a breakfast/lunch buffet. the waiter informed me that we also had the regular menu items available but that the buffet is current worth doing. He asked me what I wanted to drink and I said a tea without sugar. He later brought me a hot tea…. For a moment I forgot that I am in Mexico and not in San Antonio. Where I live in San Antonio, we drink iced tea, either with sugar or without sugar. And we don’t typically drink hot tea.

Moments later the waiter brought me my cup of hot tea and I informed him that I was going to want a salad from the menu and that I was also going to be eating food from the buffet…. All in all it was a pretty delicious meal for $20 American money. (I’ll attach some photos of the food)

As I sat there having breakfast, I thought about the recent events of my life. So much emotions in such a small amount of time. About 24 hours before I drove to Mexico a friend/co-worker pretty much died in front of my eyes. As I think about it, it is so surreal to think about those moments, I have a quote/saying that I once heard TD Jakes say when he talked about death. I say this quote to anyone whenever I talk about death and how profound our mortality really is. The quote is really very simple but yet so deep in its ability to conceptualize life. the quote is this…….

“You never know who is going to give you your last glass of water”.

I swear this quote is so true and so deep. Each of you that read this will truly never know who is the one person that will give you your last meal, last glass of water or even the last moments of their time here on this current planet. and this past Sunday, almost to the hour of me writing these words… I gave my friend David his last glass of water. I watched him barely be able to sip from the cup before he laid his head down on his belongings. So tragically, I even watched him take his last few gasps of air. I don’t want to go into details of the event. This is not the place or purpose of this blog, or even this post. but rather it’s the irony in life that I speak of. Life in itself has so many moving parts and it becomes so easy for us to just get caught up into being one of the cogs of the machine rather than entity that is driving the cogs.

As I sit here in Mexico thinking about my friend David, I am mixed with the events of my last 48 hours in Mexico. Not only did thoughts of my visit with the cosmetic doctor flutter thru my mind, but also the very reason for staying in Reynosa sit as an unwanted guest my mind. The reason I stayed in Reynosa was to hopefully cure this loneliness that is haunting me like a reoccurring horror movie. But now all these days later, I find that my stay in Reynosa, (nice as it was), it was only a temporary band aid to this loneliness that I feel. This feeling of it being a band aid is that it is temporary to the point that as long as I am immersed in doing something out of the norm, that it is then that I could easily not notice how empty I feel. But yet at the same time as I sit here with the look and taste of authentic Mexican food in front of me, I think about my friend David and how he died. And I think about David and the type of person that he was. My friend David was a very private person. I’ve known David for the better part of 17 years. And oddly enough it took me almost 17 years just to get David to be a little open about his life. David did not have many friends. Or at least David never mentioned about hanging out with many people. David was a news hound, (or news hawk as he would say) and he was always talking about politics or maybe even space or science. But primarily politics. David was a staunch democrat. (although he wouldn’t call himself a staunch democrat, rather he would say that he is just left of center. LMAO. Dave I miss you my friend.)

So yea, my last 48 hours…. meant to cure my loneliness, and within that same visual breathe, my friend David dies before my eyes. I learn later that David was having a heart attack in front of my eyes and that after they took him to the hospital, they were able to put him on life support, but that in the end, painfully, after the heart attack, there was not enough neurological activity in his brain and so…. just so fucking sadly, he was left as a vegetable. His sister told me the night before (while I was waking up in Mexico) that David’s pulse would get better when she and her daughter was holding his hand, but that the moment that they left the room that his pulse would drop to barely alive. I found this deeply emotionally impacting. I find it impacting because of my own personal troubles in life. My own personal demons that haunt me. Those same reasons that still have me in Mexico at this very moment. As I sit here at the restaurant eating my food and thinking, I couldn’t help but to think that maybe, just maybe the reason that David did not make it out of his situation was because he didn’t have a reason to live. There are some people that go thru the same situation that David had and are still able to come out of things and have a better outcome than what happened to David.

I kept thinking about it because of my own life…. Just recently (if you read my blogs) you know that recently I literally almost died.  To this day as I write this post, my second to last rib on the right side of my body still restricts me from taking a deep breath. They say it takes about 8 weeks to heal a broken rib. And so as odd as it sounds, Not only did I almost die, not only am I going thru a difficult spell of loneliness, then I go to visit Mexico to see a doctor and cling to hopes of looking for some retreat from the haunting spells of the voids in my life, and at the same time my friend David dies right before my eyes. Now obviously he didn’t “technically” die in front of me, but the David I knew literally took his last breath in front of me, then compound that with the fact that David was such a private person that if …… that just if he would have had more friends and deep meaningful relationships in life, then maybe he might have been able to come back from certain death….. For me I think about my own life… In my own life, I currently don’t have many friends. I don’t go many places, and when I get home, the only noise in the house are my own footsteps and nothing more. It saddens me because this is probably the same exact life that my friend David was living when he got home.

I have realized that the reason that I am so opposed to not being ok with this loneliness is because I expect to have an amazing life. I expect to do amazing things, I expect to help an amazing amount of people, and I expect to have an amazing wife and children. And currently my life is everything but amazing in the way that I envision it to be.

Now luckily my time on this planet is not yet over… ( or at least I “choose” to believe that my time is not over)  Remember the goal is to live to 200. Anything less than that and I will and must fight with my very last breath. And even after my last breath I must still not give up. I must achieve my goals….Remember…. get rich or die trying (that’s the saying and one of the major goals). Funny as it sounds, my sister on the island says that I am stubborn… I tell her that I am not stubborn…. I am just determined.

I’ll be honest, I am not looking forward to death, but at the same time, I am not afraid to play in the same playground as death. Death in itself is a friend…… Just not a friend that I need to hang out with yet. I have a belief that the moment we are born, that we are working on borrowed time. As Wayne Dyer says…. in the construct of life …Open quotes, you are born, close quotes, you are dead. We only exist for a moment in time. We MUST make it count.

So let’s bring things back around…..David’s dead, my life is far from tangibly being able to touch my goals, and I am sitting in Mexico enjoying a great meal for just $20. As odd as it sounds, and as much as my current senses can’t realize it…… Life if good. Life is really good. I just can’t realize it yet. I am alive. I am in another country and in a city that is labeled as dangerous and not recommended for any American to visit, and I am sitting here eating a great meal in a nice restaurant. As some would say…. It’s good to be the king…… But even a king is still human.

Funny part about this life of mine. In terms of all the things that have happened to me and around me, I truly believe that God is always talking to us. I love what Wayne Dyer says about God and his ability to talk to us…. Wayne said…. “If Prayer is you talking to god, then intuition is God talking to you”. Personally I believe that when God talks to us, that he whispers, he doesn’t talk, he doesn’t initially yell, instead he whispers ever so softly. It’s a gentle whisper that requires you to always be open to your surroundings. Then if you don’t listen to his whisper, he begins to nudge, then after a nudge, he will push, and after a push he will then shove, and after all those attempts to get your attention, if you still don’t want to notice or acknowledge him, he will take the final step of taking your life. I have seen this happen to people more times than I ever wanted to notice.

I have come close to death many times in my life. My very first real touch with death was when I was about 5 or 7 years old. My appendix had ruptured and by the grace of God they were able to save my life. There is nothing like the toxins from your appendix rupturing and spreading thru your body. It’s a great way to fuck up my time of being able to watch cartoons on a Saturday morning. As I got older about the age of 15, I decided to cross the street near my house and I did not properly look both ways and got hit by a vehicle. Luckily I noticed the vehicle at truly the very last moment….. But even though I noticed the vehicle at the last moment, the vehicle still hit my left elbow and left knee and spun me in circles and knocked me to the ground. To this day I still have some small damage on my knee and elbow from this. Then as I got older, in my 20 and 30s, there were random fights and a car crash or two. On one of the car crashes, my friend and I were drunk and I was driving back home from a party. And on the drive the sun had already set and it was just a street lights and the stars to guide my way home, and needless to say it was also raining and my windshield wipers were not working. Just imagine the mix of driving at night, while drunk, rain, and no windshield wipers. It made for a very bad mix on the drive home. That night my friend and I halfway crashed into a wall but walked away from the accident, but not without my friend’s head first slamming into the windshield leaving more than a bit of blood on his face and my body slamming into the steering wheel causing me to have my own internal injuries for several weeks. My friends head cracked my windshield and as for my own body….well, I survived.  I could go on with more near death experiences from skydiving to the motorcycle but I think you get the point. I could have easily died at any of those points in my life, but yet I still live. I am still here to write these words. I am still here to bitch and complain about how life has not yet given me what I deserve. And I am still here to uncover every precious moment that is hidden along this journey that I call life. Someway and somehow, I must “choose” to believe that there is a reason, a reason that says that there is something that I must accomplish or maybe even someone that I must help in life. What other reason could it be why is survived all those events?

Overall in spite of all my emotions, I must somehow believe that I am a lucky mother fucker!!! Why would god save me during any of those events? Am I just lucky or is there a purpose to my life? But then again, my life begs the questions……If I was truly lucky would I be a single lonely man? Would I still be on this journey to my first million? Would I have been born poor if I was truly lucky? Would I have ever needed to work at a strip club if I was really lucky? Would I have lived a life without a father if I was truly lucky? Would I have had many days and nights where the refrigerator was empty and food was not available? Would I have had so many bad events in my life if I was truly a lucky person…. Somehow the question still remains am I really a lucky mother fucker?

Odd as it sounds, I sit here now watching beautiful women strip down to nothing but high heel shoes and a smile. Yep, that’s right, no shirt, no bra, no underwear, nope…. nothing….just high heels and a smile. Some men would say that I am the luckiest man on this planet. But then again, my friend David also had the same visual view from where he used to sit at the bar….. But as for those men that would consider me to have the best job in the world, those are the same men that can’t see that all I want is to go home to a woman (of my choice) that will love me and tell me that she has missed me when I arrive home. They can’t see that I want to go home to a house that is not cold and empty and reverberates with only the sounds of my own footsteps. I sit here in the DJ booth lucky enough to write this post and still make enough money to pay my bills and have enough left over to have at least one person work for me at least one day a week. It’s not much, but its at least a start. Small beginnings, big dreams. It’s one way I try to put a positive spin on everything contrary to what my life feels like…..And all the while, as you already know, there are many people that work 8 hours of labor and never have the opportunity to work on their personal goals. In so many ways I am a lucky man, but yet at the same time, I have worked for every damn opportunity of luck that has come my way, Nothing in life is fucking free. Everything has a price to pay, even if its just one penny. And many times I had opportunity pass me by simply because I was not yet prepared, because I had not yet worked hard enough either physically, mentally, or emotionally. And most of all if I am really some lucky person…….. then why has my most cherished blessing not yet come to fruition?

Some of my friends say that I just need to be patient. Patient with the things that I want. But what they don’t see from my eyes, is that life was not patient in kicking me in the ass with all my near death experiences, life was not patient with giving me many days of hunger, life was not patient with taking my father from my life, life was not patient with giving me a mother that deeply loves me and will truly die for me, but at the same time, has always had a difficult time in saying the simple words…. “I Love You”. At what point should I be patient with life, when life has not been patient with me?

But am I lucky? Yes I am, I have built a house that is 75% complete, I make more money than most of the people I work with, I literally physically look better than 90% of the men my age. I am lucky enough to have women half my age find me attractive and worthy of their intimate time…… And all of this is nice, and in many aspects a beautiful thing…. But you have got to know… you have got to remember, I am not just looking for a nice life, a beautiful life…. No bitch! I am looking for a truly fucking AMAZING outstanding, fucking phenomenal, and damn fucking memorable life where I experience all that God created on this planet. And at the same time I help more people than I will ever meet in my life time……. Now that life, that specific life requires a shit ton more than something that is just “nice” and “beautiful”.

So as I sit here on a Sunday night in the club and reminisce about my friend David and his life and my time in Mexico, and how I have chosen to paint the reality of my own surroundings… I don’t know if all in my life has truly been a blessing, but this is for sure…. God is not done with me yet.

I just pray that he allow my goals and dreams to come true. I pray that he gives me strength. I pray that if he ever needs to nudge me, push me, or shove me, I pray that he does it with love.

Dear God, I will always listen for your whisper. I know somehow, as hard as the times might get, I know that you won’t give me anything that I can’t handle or endure, all I ask is to please make my moments of beauty to be more than just beautiful…. please make them magical, make them memorable, make them so deep and loving that no matter what pain I confront in life or what pain or challenges confront me, please make the good times so deeply loving that the whole world will be able to see you thru not just the challenging times but through the way in which the good times outshine anything that I thought was unbearable.

Loving you deeply. Max.

As for my friend David. I will miss you dearly my friend. The club is so much quieter with you not here. As for my trip to Mexico… I can only hope that my time at the doctors office pays off. And as for the rest of my time in Mexico… I got a chance to go to a couple of restaurants and see a small amount of  Reynosa, even visited a rescue organization that houses people that were deported from the USA. People from Africa, Cuba, Mexico and all places in between. this place called “Casa Migrantes de Reynosa” They do a lot of good. They help to feed, house, and better peoples lives. I was blessed to have talked to the nun and donate some money to their cause. As for the city of Reynosa Mexico,  I’m sure that Reynosa is as dangerous as many people say, but luckily for now and because of my guide, Reynosa Mexico felt no more dangerous than the hood where my childhood years began. As for my loneliness…. It’s still fucking there, but….I must stay pushing forward on the belief that I can and WILL WIN in life. I must not give up. I must believe that things will get better. And if you have never heard of a navy seal named David Goggins, then its worth looking him up. He has a book named “Can’t hurt me”…. And so in the end, no matter what happens to me….. I must always go David Goggins on life.

Wish me luck,

Max.