I'd been in LA for less than a year when an old friend came to town. The city was foreign and we were a little unmoored. He picked up a dead frog flattened and dehydrated, a fossil of the present. We drove to Mexico. His marriage was collapsing, I was in love but it was hard to hang on. Time and distance dominated my thoughts, it all seemed so impossible. I haggled with the Mexican vendor for twenty minutes; my girlfriend was mortified.