Sunday morning I woke up and Saturday's nagging muscle pain in my back had metastasized into what felt like somebody twisting a meat fork under my scapula. I hobbled over to Juárez and bought muscle relaxers at a pharmacy, then went next door to the Kentucky Club just as it opened. The bartender still wore his clean-up t-shirt. I ordered a tequila Bloody Mary and took two pills and then another Bloody Mary and sat with my back to the wall waiting to jellify.

I didn't waltz back over the bridge, but I wasn't trudging either. I told the Customs guy I had muscle relaxers and he wanted to know how many, so I showed him and he let me go.

Since then I've been eating muscle relaxers if not like candy, then at least like muscle relaxers. So if this week's column is any better or worse, we know where to lay the credit or the blame.

El Paso lies at the mouth of a weird geopolitical wormhole. Capricious and arbitrary legalities can be circumvented through adroit spatiotemporal relocation. If it's Sunday and you want a bottle of booze, make the short hop to Billy Crew's in Santa Teresa. If you want pills, or steroids, or Human Growth Hormone, the friendly pharmacists in Juarez are happy to help.

Pharmacists in Mexico have broader powers than the people in the white lab coats at the local Walgreen's. They don't need no stinkin' 'scriptions. Not for your common drugs, the ones people aren't likely to abuse. I bought antibiotics in Creel from a 14-year-old girl behind the counter. The U.S. has its advantages, too. Wealthy Mexicans leave their bodyguards at the U.S. border. The clubs on the U.S. side are full of young Mexicans, here, in part, for a less potentially violent nightlife, while bars in Juárez are populated with Americanos enjoying the younger drinking age in Mexico.

Cuban rum and Cuban cigars are available in Juarez. The duty-free stores north of the border sell Irish whiskey for export for half of what it costs in the states. They hand it to you at the foot of the bridge as you head south.

When I was younger, and less compliant, I'd remove my front license plate and scrape my expired inspection sticker off my windshield, so the front of my car looked New Mexican, and the back kept the Texas plate.

El Paso lies in a weird cross-cultural vortex. Korean Mexican restaurants are common downtown. Korean merchants make boo-koo bucks selling Chinese goods to Mexican shoppers in the U.S. In El Paso the landlords are Semites. Managers are Anglos and Anglicized Mexicans. Workers are Mexicans.

Thursday I went to an art show at the Rubin Gallery at UTEP. The wind was blowing hard enough to strip ions from auras and scour enamel from teeth. I like openings at the Rubin Gallery because the food's always so good, but Thursday the food service coincided with the release of a class in the building, so the food was devoured by students maximizing their tuition value like army ants on the march.

The show's theme was knitting or weaving or textiles, with some arbitrary photo montages thrown in. Maybe thread was the common thread, or maybe the display was only related by physical proximity. I'm not sure.

An element of the show was Bhutanese textiles. UTEP is built in an incongruous Bhutanesque architectural style, so they have an affected affinity for things Bhutanese. The clothes looked like Mexican clothing. There was an horongo, what Americans call a poncho. And blankets, like serapes. And there was a gentleman there whom I took to be Bhutanese, but maybe I'm just stereotyping. He looked Asian, and he was wearing some kind of a dress thing, and black Western style shoes, and knee socks.

Another individual sat knitting, wearing a head-to-toe knit outfit. More of the same outfits hung from the ceiling, like the skins of eviscerated animals.

I went to the show looking for, besides the food, the easy imagery, allegories to the social fabric, or rents in the time-space continuum. Instead, I found allusions to identity.

And that's probably what El Paso has more of than most other cities, identity options. El Pasoans can adopt identities from a smörgåsbord of class, and lifestyle, and ethnicity and acculturation. We don't need no stinkin' badges.