Made it to Phoenix and have already downed two huge Iced Teas and as much of my wife's Pina Colada as I dare. That was a long, dusty, hot drive but our hooptie made it with only one semi-incident. Basically I made the mistake of shutting it off while my passengers availed themselves of facilities at the Cochella Arco station. Do you know what a freak show Cochella is this weekend? The heat soak after shutdown plus the undersized motorcycle/lawn mower battery (paint-pen labeled "?") that was provided with the Mirada was showing some weakness in CA. By this afternoon, it was kaput for cranking a hot engine. My plan was basically no better than "let's sit in this hot car and watch stoned teenagers w/o underware dance to the imaginary music in their heads and wait for the engine to cool". However, some guy who pulled in next to us heard our battery in distress and offered up a jump box!?!? I'd sooner expected an offer of X or an ounce of weed. But unlike the useless bratty rich white kids surrounding us, this dude was a Mexican with actual tools. When his jump box didn't cut it (I suspect it was suspect), he just started pulling the battery out of his own car, barrio-style. With this the mighty-Mirada fired up and we swapped our batteries. I shoved a fitty in his shirt pocket as he was leaned over replacing his battery.
Thank you for posting that incident. Your experience matches what I continually see out here in terms of Mexicans who go out of their way to be responsible, capable and decent individuals while many of the white guys are useless and couldn't care less. That is why I really find all this trash talk of Mexians in general disgusting and just plain wrong. Maybe things in other states such as Florida are different, but I don't see it out here much. I am fine with responsible immigration laws that are enforced as they should be, but to trash talk Mexicans in general doesn't help and just stirs up unnecessary hatred and anger and tears us apart.
I recently had a lot of tree work done on my 2 houses next to each other out here and the workers involved turned out to be Mexicans, and I was astonished at how hard they worked and how much they enjoyed doing a really nice job. One guy was working on the 80+ foot high palm tree in front of the house I live in and I couldn't believe the guts/courage and expert capability of watching him scale the tree with some boots with spikes and a safety chain and work at trimming the branches at the top (I thought they were going to bring in one of those trucks with an extended bucket lift instead). He was up there for over an hour and had the stamina of a workhorse, and when he came down I told him how impressed I was with the great job he had done. He was a little embarrassed at my compliment and all of these workers were humble and hard working as a real team. I enjoyed shaking all their hands and gave them a big tip well above the asking price of the job. Their appreciation was refreshing and sincere.
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