Nolan McSchmolan

Queridxs transglobalistas—

Forget The Odyssey. Forget IMAX. Forget all the groundbreaking achievements in cinematography, production, and technology. Forget Nolan.

Today I’d like to take you on a guided, behind-the-scenes tour of The Oddity, filmed in glorious CDMX, starring Yours Truly as Transglobeus, Flixbus (née Greyhound) as Polyphemus (the cyclops), a spoiled hard-boiled egg as the Lotus in The Lotus Eater, and the Spanish National football team as The Laestrygonians. (The Argentine club makes a cameo appearance, skewered on Laestrygonian spears, then tidily devoured onscreen to the delight of the vast majority of CDMXicans.)

Polyphemus aka The Cyclops

Let’s start with Polyphemus. Also known as Flixbus—the purveyor of my bus ticket from Houston to Mexico City. In the first act, during a particularly Texan-sized thunderstorm, our driver manages to run out of diesel halfway between Houston and San Antonio. The bus stalls on the service road <= 200 meters from a gas station, and the driver tries for more than one hour to restart the bus. Failure. Police cars show up to direct traffic around us. A tow-truck is called, ETA 1 hour. The driver sends us packing, with luggage in tow, to the convenience store. Two hours later, we are back on the bus, headed for San Antonio. Total delay, three hours.

Obviously, I miss my connecting bus in Laredo. Although the Flixbus schedule says another bus will arrive at 7:25pm (2 hours from real-time, and 5 hours after the original connecting bus), the Flixbus Customer Service operator tells me their system won’t let them book me on that leg unless I want to terminate my ride in Monterrey and pay for a new ticket from Monterrey to CDMX. The only leg he can book me on leaves Laredo at 3:35am—ten hours from real-time and two hours after the Laredo station closes. Suffice to say we had words. I spoke with the supervisor, and the supervisor’s supervisor. Their mistake, and they can’t either (a) override the system and book me on the 7:25pm bus or (b) book me on the 7:25pm bus and issue me a complimentary new ticket from Monterrey to CDMX to cover their mistakes. You know: the kind of thing every travel agency in the world does on a daily basis due to the vagaries of travel by land, sea, and air?

[NOTE: this 3:35am ticket would delay my departure to CDMX from Monterrey until almost 8am the next morning, and get me to CDMX at nearly 11pm, 14 hours after my scheduled arrival.]

I allowed him to book the obscene 3:35am bus, so I’d have a valid ticket in hand, then hung up. The station manager in Laredo (really just a gate attendant) pulled me aside and solved the problem in typical analog fashion. He told me he’d talk to the driver and get me on the 7:25pm bus to Monterrey, which—with a little luck—would get me there in time for the 11:25pm bus to CDMX. Not entirely legal, since I’d be crossing the border with the wrong (though valid) ticket, but an easy solution. Suffice it to say, it worked. The bus driver let me ride with the wrong ticket, I reached Monterrey with 35 minutes to spare—time to officially change my ticket for the final leg and grab some snacks from OXXO. I settled in to my seat for yet another 17 hours’ ride.

[NOTE: the station manager’s plan would have failed if I didn’t speak passable Spanish. When I first approached the driver to board, he scanned my (incorrect) ticket, which wasn’t accepted. I started to explain, in English, and he said “sorry! No English!” I started over in Spanish and he was as helpful as could be. It was a small moment of pride and accomplishment in this beatdown of a day.]

There are a couple of morals to be drawn from the Cyclops episode of our story. First, screw the European/US incarnation of Flixbus. DO NOT USE THEM. If you’re booking a Greyhound bus, use the Greyhound site because then Greyhound is liable for delays, refunds, rebookings, and whatever else is required to make you whole. Flixbus openly told me they weren’t responsible for breakdown-related issues because it was a Greyhound bus. Flixbus Mexico is a different, kinder, easier-to-navigate beast however. I got prompt, friendly, unquestioning assistance from the drivers and station associates alike. Second: no matter how modern, clean, and well-maintained the bus, sitting in the row directly in front of the lavatory is not for the olfactorily oversensitive. <cough>

The Lotus Eater

Once upon a time, Transglobeus assembled provisions for his transcontinental journey, including seven lotus flowers—known colloquially as hard-boiled eggs. Four of these flowers were newly blossomed, but three were old blooms nearing the end of their lifespan. His long journey was sustained by the fresh blossoms, but on the second morning after his arrival in CDMX, he imbibed an older blooms. Its odor was not foul, and it had been consistently refrigerated, so he took a chance.

Bad idea.

A few hours later, the nausea began. The churning intestines. The chills presaging a mild fever. His appetite vanished and—rather than a Friday night spent dancing tango—Transglobeus huddled in his berth, alternating between sweats and shivers, gobbling antacids, guzzling water, drifting in and out of fever dreams, lethargic, his body aching. He binge-watched a Spanish telenovela on Netflix, and a sad new Amazon series, all whilst pining for better fortunes.

The next day (Saturday) was spent in recovery. Still with little appetite but improving markedly. Fever not completely gone, but some energy returning. This day, the most active of CDMX’s weekly tango calendar and the ostensible reason for his visit, lost to lingering illness and the concomitant lack of motivation and desire.

No one to blame but himself.

The Laestrygonians

The effects of the Lotus now dissipated, Transglobeus awakens to a brand new day, beneath the sun of Helios. As a practitioner of Argentine Tango—though otherwise devoid, utterly, of interest in the World Cup—our hero’s crew has briefly been augmented by the Argentine football team. And this day, Sunday, was the day in which the Argentines face off against the brutal, cannibalistic aggression of Spain’s Laestrygonians. Mostly disinterested, Transglobeus sailed the CDMX harbor, taking photos and enjoying his renewing health. As the appointed hour approached, the clientele of every restaurant and bar and cafe in the city spilled out onto the wharfs and piers to watch the match. For almost 60 minutes, our hero ignored the encounter, but…the tide was too strong. The current pulled him out to sea; to a comfortable vantage point from which to observe the Laestrygonian spears and boulders flying through the air, skewering hapless Argentines and pulling their (truly) lifeless bodies limb from limb before devouring them in their entirety. Not a single scrap of a single Argentine remained. Not a morsel for the ravenous carrion birds circling the massacre. Not a drop of blood left for the circling sharks. In CDMX, the citizenry rejoiced: ¡Messi murió! ¡Por fin! ¡Viva España!

Epilogue

After these several trials and tribulations of Transglobalian magnitude, Transglobeus did, at last, find survivors. A small group of Argentine sympathizers—some still in their (metaphorically) blood-soaked blue and white jerseys—waiting to dance tango in a park near his hostel. Parque Mexico. It was there he finally found his moveable Ithaca—at a well-attended open-air milonga. For the next few hours he was introduced to, danced with, and otherwise enjoyed the company of a coterie of local tangueros, in an event hopefully to be repeated frequently over the remaining two weeks of his adventure.

And so on, and so forth.

With that, I release you from my long-overstayed welcome and point you toward the actual cinematic Odyssey of Nolan provenance, currently setting the box office, and an IMAX theater near you, ablaze.

With warmest regards from Mexico City,
I remain,
Your friendly, neighborhood Transglobalist fellow,
—jim

PS

Lest it go without saying: be kind to yourselves, and to one another.
Also: pause to smell the flowers (provided they aren’t poorly disguised, spoiled, hard-boiled eggs).

PPS

For those of you with an interest, here’s the prompt I fed to Adobe Firefly for the thumbnail image:

Epic digital illustration, cinematic fantasy style. A storm-battered wooden sailing ship crests a massive white-capped ocean swell beneath a turbulent sky of dark storm clouds and jagged lightning bolts. In the foreground, a weathered, long-bearded man grips the ship’s helm — the wheel is a vintage bicycle wheel, spokes intact. His expression is exhausted but resolute. On the deck behind him, lashed down with rope: seven hard-boiled eggs stamped with lotus flower designs, a pair of black-and-white checkered tango dance shoes, and a deflated, punctured soccer ball.

In the distant background, a rocky island rises from the churning sea. On it stands an enormous anthropomorphized bus — light green and white, upright, with two thick legs and two arms. A single large circular headlight serves as its one central eye, from which a theatrical spotlight beam cuts through the storm and falls directly on the ship’s captain. The bus looms menacingly, one arm raised.

Mood: mythic, dramatic, slightly absurdist. Rich color palette — deep navy sea, green-white bus, warm amber lamplight on the captain’s face. Painterly texture, high detail. Horizontal/landscape format.