Dharma Curious (he/him)

Holy shit! I do remember those now that I see em. Haha

I don’t know those! Link?

Yeah, it makes for a great story, but in the moment it was fucking terrifying. Especially considering that’s not the sort of environment I’ve ever been comfortable in. I don’t do drugs or party like that

Kind of. The only TV’s that had it were the living room and my parents bedroom, so we had to make sure no one was home haha

I’m actually currently writing my mom’s! My life has been positively mundane compared to hers!

Copy paste from another time I told the story: Placeholder comment because I need to go back to sleep. Someone remind me and I’ll tell y’all about rescuing my brother from a maybe kidnapping in Mexico.

Okay, so, me and my brother visited Mexico. It was a fairly small town, not a major place like Cancun. Had an amazing time. Ended up meeting these two bartenders that we became friends with. Their boss, who legit made everyone he met call him El Jefe, would come by and steal their tips and get drunk. We were there for a week. On the last night, I’m on the other side of the town (10 minute walk away) trying to seal the deal with this dude I’d met, and my brother was at the little bar hanging with our bartender friends. I get a call from him, panicked, as he whisper yells that El Jefe asked him to come with him to another bar he owns. He’s in the car, El Jefe is flying down the street, he’s doing cocaine off the dash. Please come get him at this other bar. He sends me one of those location pins that update in real time.

I tell dude that I’ll help him finish later, and take off to rescue my brother. He’s only like 5 minutes away, and has stopped moving. I go into the club, and start looking for him, but he’s not there. I’m asking folks if they’ve seen him, and trying to get closer to his pin. Finally, I find his phone, there’s some random ass dude who has it, and when I tell him I’m gonna need that phone, he tries to act like it’s his. I explain to him it’s my brother’s. He acts like he’s gonna swing at me, so I drop El Jefe’s name. That, combined with the fact that he’s 5’nothing and I’m 6’3 and near 300 pounds convinced him of the error of his ways. He gave me the phone, and I moved on in my search. I talked to the bartender, who explained that El Jefe had been there a few minutes ago, and had left some coke for me because my brother told him I was meeting them there (neither I nor my brother do coke). I asked could he tell me where they were headed. He gave me an address about a mile away. I took off.

I arrive at the house, by this point it is nearly 2 in the morning. It looks like just a house, but the lights are on so I knock on the door. I am greeted by a woman with the largest breasts I have ever seen in real life. They’re enormous. And she’s topless. Now, I don’t speak Spanish. I know enough to ask where the bathrooms are, and (I smokes at the time) where I could smoke at. Other than that, it was Google translate and gesturing for me.

However, I did not need Spanish to understand that this woman was a prostitute, and was very keen on the young American in front of her (or, at least his wallet). I tried to explain I’m trying to find my brother, but she wasn’t having it. Grabbing at my crotch, trying to pull me into one of the bedrooms off the (very nicely decorated for a brothel) living room. As my actions at this moment were less Liam Neeson and more Jerry Stiller, I decided to just come clean with her with one of the only Spanish words I knew “yo soy Mariposa!”

Now, I know that’s a slur, and I’m sorry if it upsets anyone. But at the time, it was the only thing I could think of. An hour before hand, the phrase had been… Relevant.

It was like a magic spell. Her entire attitude changed, and she was finally able to listen to my words. Once we cobbled together enough Spanglish to understand each other, I gave her the coke from the club as a thanks, and headed off to find my brother where she told me El Jefe had taken him next.

I arrive back at the night club I’d gotten the coke from, and I see El Jefe’s car this time. It’s parked in an alley behind the club, against an outdoor stair case. I go up the stairs and open the door to a private little fucking rave on the top floor of the club. They’ve got their own bar up here, and if I remember correctly, you can’t get from one floor to the other from within the club.

I see them at last! My brother looks mortified, trying to get to the entrance, and keeps getting pulled back by El jefe, and El jefe dancing with fucking scar face levels of coke on his face. It’s insane. I go up to them, and El jefe is all excited to see me, asks if I want some more coke, do I wanna party, he has a pretty boy all picked out for me if I want.

I tell him no thanks, we’ve gotta go. He gets pissy and says I’m being rude, stay and party. I tell him we’re leaving, and before I can react, he swings at me in all hiscoke fueled glory, completely missing me by a country mile. I stand up and tower over this man and explain we have a plane to catch in the morning. He finally let us go, and we head out.

Our plane the next day was delayed, so we ended up spending two more days there. In that time, El Jefe apologized for swinging at me, and gave us a tour of some of the apartments he rents.

We still keep in touch on Whatsapp, and he invites us to his enormous birthday party every year. He also says he’ll rent me an apartment there if I want to do private security for him. He talks to my brother more than me, though. He really liked him, and he calls me El Gigante. He really, really wants us both to come work for him. From what I gather, he basically runs the entire town we were in.

My dad was “that dad” back in the 90s and 00s. You know the one. He always knew some guy with some stuff that maybe fell off a truck. He was a tree climber at the time (tree surgeon, really. To this day in his late 60s, for all his faults, the man is an artist with a chainsaw), and he would use his climbing gear to climb the poles and hook up cable for people he knew, for free. One day during the late Clinton administration, he came home from the flea market with about 30 black market cable boxes. We, and everyone we knew, had free everything from then on. Got every channel, including the porn channel. You could lock it out with a pin code, but in my parents used the same code for everything, so we knew it. I watched so much fucking porn it was insane. I think I was the only kid around that wasn’t super impressed by the quantity of internet porn when that became a thing.

I was impressed with the existence of gay porn, though. Haha. Stupid porn channel had no gay porn, I had to settle for the 1/3 of a second of dick before it went into her mouth

That whole trip was pretty incredible, tbh. My brother actually got kidnapped briefly on our last night there

When we went to Cancun (Isla Mujeres, actually) all the food was Americanized or just seafood. Our bartender at this little beach hut bar thingy became a good friend (still in touch, nearly 10 years later) and he heard my brother and I complaining that all the food was super Americanized.

He told us to rent a car and he would take us to the most authentic Mexican food in the world… So we rented a car, and dude drove us over an hour away to his abuelas, and she cooked us food, and it was the best food I had ever had. Incredible.

I can’t really speak for 41 million people

Of course you can! Just say it louder than other people, it works for politics in the US…

Yeah, I was familiar with, like, the nuts and bolts part. It was the emotional reaction, I guess, I was looking for. So most people just don’t have a problem with it?

In the us, we used to not be able to vote for senators. We elected the house, and the house elected the senators, and that shit didn’t fly. Lol. One thing about Americans, we want to have opinions on shit. Even when we shouldn’t, we gotta voice ourselves. If we tried to switch to a Westminster system here, people would be up in arms about not being able to vote directly for the PM, like we were about senators. Even if it’s a better system. It’s not the greatest trait our country has.

Question from the American here. Does it ever bother folks that you don’t get a direct say in who the prime minister is? It’s a superior system to the bullshit we’ve got going on down here, and clearly, being able to directly vote for the head of state/government doesn’t guarantee shit, I’ve always felt like it not being able to choose the PM was kind of shitty

Obligatory it’s bullshit, will never happen, et cetera preface…

The problem with splitting it into multiple states is that each new state would get 2 senators. Our house is capped, the amount of reps we have is how many have, which means they can fuck around with the numbers a bit and potentially take democratic seats away to give to state of Canada, but with the Senate, if it were to split it into 10 new states, we’d have to add 20 additional senators, all of whom would be Democrats (or, at least, most of them). Some of the Canadian parties might last for a bit, but eventually the two party would take over, and they’d all become Democrats, and it would fuck the Republicans. Better to keep it as a single state, do some fuckery on who loses seats to add Canadian reps to the house, and only add 2 senators. Much easier to buy 2 senators than 20.

But honestly, the smartest route would be to make Canada a territory. No senators, no reps, no voting for president. But still citizens. Give it the Puerto Rico treatment.

Could also be a business you owned for a year after getting a business license. Owned my own for a while from 2012 to 2014, and it’s been my employer on all my resumes since. I never include any shit I did after, just keep that one as if I worked there as a supervisor from 2012 to present day. Works wonders.