No Dhimmitude

Paraguay Links

2012-02-12T11:45:00.001-08:00

Below are links to posts on Paraguay so far. I haven't had a chance to finish typing, so more will follow, and will include some photos, as I get a better connection and some time to put into the typing.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-at-no-dhimmitude.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-pts-4-10.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-pts-11-12.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-pts-14-16.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-pts-17-21.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/02/paraguay-21-23.html

Paraguay at No Dhimmitude (pts. 1-3)

2012-02-11T13:05:00.003-08:00

Life after Ibibobo

[Photos to come]

Life at Villamontes, Bolivia was slow for the folks, like the river that dries up in the rainy season, leaving old soda bottles in the rut to turn brittle in the baking sun, or an old greying tyre resting among parched weeds. Nothing much to do but wait it out and whistle a bit, something more than a sigh. It had been hard for me to get there, all things in the Modern world considered. I had a time finding a room in Tarija, the stop that would let me go on to Villamontes; and then the lack of a bus seat to the village itself, forcing me to blow a bundle on the only available hotel room in the city, a luxury room but a luxury I can't do often. And all that to get a room behind the bus station in a ghost town with electricity and some nice Japanese made vehicles parked in dusty patches by adobe houses and roaming chickens. My hotel room, which I got at 3:00 am was plain, as we say of unattractive girls, as I write of Villamontes. My room was way overpriced, and missed all the advantages of – anything. A bed, a broken door, four walls, a ceiling, a floor, none of which kept out the sound of a cement mixer and a re-bar cutter from grinding into my deepest slumbers. I did sleep, though, even when after the first ten minutes the fan sparked up and died in a burst of smoke. I woke at noon and looked through the bugs on the screen across my window to the bus terminal parking lot, bare of buses, abandoned by people, home to a million screeching birds I couldn't see. So, to face the reality that is Villamontes, I stood in a cold shower and woke to my own life, the toilet beside the shower coming clean, my feet doing a little fat guy dance, which I now think of as cheerful.

Day time in the city, lunch time for me, and my world opening up to a grand adventure, the lost land of Paraguay, of El Chaco, awaiting me later. I walked for two blocks in the dust of Villamontes in search of somewhere to eat, a few signs suggesting that food could be available if only one knew the occult secrets of eating there. I am a stranger and I know no such mysteries. In the cool of the evening people do venture out of doors, and they do eat. But at high noon, no, they remain indoors, maybe feasting on steak dinners with fancy French red wine, asparagus spears in butter, fresh rolls, red cabbage in cream sauce and herbs.... I was starving. On the main street I found a tienda behind a mound of litter where a lady sat chatting with two old men at a plastic table, they looking up at me like I would look up at space monsters arriving in my living-room, if only I had one. I was at The Intersection. I think it is an important place in the city, it dividing the streets there, one from the other. I could call it the high point of my visit. I write this sincerely because at The Intersection there is a 15 foot high fish statue in a round spot in the centre of the street. It's not a well-executed work of sculpture, but then I'm not really an art critic, so my judgment could well be based on philistine ignorance. The point of the fish, I believe, and this in a way atheists believe in science, is to remind people and to suggest to outsiders passing through that there is a river somewhat beyond The Intersection that probably has fish in it. I deeply fear that any fish able to live in such water would eat man as well as cattle; but nevermind, he says. Those living in Villamontes have a famous fish statue, and that, in the end, is all that really matters in an existential fashion.

So, returning to my surprised hosts at the tienda sitting in the shade of an overhanging tin roof, looking up from the plastic table, they allowed me to join them and ask directions to La Victoria, Bolivia, the last dot on the photocopied map I carried with me, as important and detailed as the treasure map I had as a child. O marked the spot. Had I but known I would instead have carried a map of Gondor to help me reach Mordor. According to my gracious hosts, who puzzled mightily to understand my Spanish, there is no “La Victoria.” I showed them the map, as proof of their ignorance, and they, like others before them addressing this question, insisted that there really is nothing there, no people, no nobody nowhere. Ibibobo is the last place on earth for people in Bolivia. I drank a bottle of orange soda and watched a pair of flies copulating on my arm. I was sure the heat would kill them faster than me trying to swat them. I was wrong. I am wrong often, as it turns out. The flies stayed, and I sat, too hot to move. Ibibobo beckoned but I just wilted. Over and over I heard that there is nothing beyond Ibibobo, and I was incapable of resisting this further. So I took such good advice as I could manage to understand and walked across the road to the cafe of sorts where I was under the impression that a bus would stop in front of at some undisclosed time and day and that this bus might take me to Ibibobo. My dream was to ride a horse across El Gran Chaco, living off the land, making my way through the world like a man on his own; but this is not the 19^th century, and I don't have a horse. I had accepted my fate of bus travel, if only I could manage to find a ticket. But the lady who sat in the cafe was having none of that. One word from me in imperfect Spanish was enough to set her into a rage equal only to that of a Westerner hearing a hint of imagined sexism or racism. In a barren world of heat and dust, there was a sudden storm of hatred of all things Dag. My bus? It looked like a long walk to Ibibobo ahead.

I returned to the tienda across The Intersection and inquired about my reception at the bus stop. I had misunderstood. I was supposed to go to The Place Next Door. That, as I could see, was a matter of some boards over a wall, perhaps resembling a door if one tried to see with deep imagination. Having no options, I approached and knocked, waited, shuffled my toe in the dust and sat on a log. 'There are no people there, senor,' I kept hearing. I gazed at the clear white sky. The door opened.

After having gone from place to place in the heat and the dust for two hours in search of anything useful, and having found a bottle of orange soda, I welcomed the sight of the half-naked crippled and obese dwarf who greeted me like a lost brother. I would have liked him anywhere. He was happy to see me, full of fun and joy and smiled like sunrise over Arcadia. I soon found out why. There is a bus, my new host said, and though it contradicts the story of there being no people, I accepted this as gospel. I would have to return at 11:00 in the evening to board a bus straight through to Asunción, missing the adventures of lone Gran Chaco travel hitch-hiking with passing ranchers. “There are no people there, senor.” The last stop is Ibibobo. Then my heart stopped:

My host had the pleasure of the company of a young lady, perhaps not the brightest intellect in Villamonte but certainly built for the discerning male, she being his daughter, I assumed, who took a great interest in me, singing a Michael Jackson song in words of no known language, and then, tiring of that, charming as it was, she fell to playing with a puppet on strings and sticks, a metaphorical sight so right it should have been wrong.

I bought my straight-through to Asuncion ticket, a ways more money that I have paid for any single thing on this trip so far other than the visa to Paraguay itself, and I made my way back to my hotel to wait out the remaining hours till my departure from Villamontes. As the day waned people emerged from their homes, giving me energy to explore the city I had mostly ignored, me passing by the cement factory; seeing the main river at the far end of town; passing by a long section of fruit and vegetable vendors on the road side far beyond The Intersection. I had given up too easily earlier in the day. There must have been close to 100 people milling about the city when I actually took a closer look. One lady at a now-open tienda took time out to go into the back room of her place to fetch me a litre of milk. Commerce often knows no nationality. And to finish my beautiful day at Villamontes I made my way to a table beside an adobe place where through a cloud of flies I saw a lovely fat lady making hamburgers on an open grill by the dog. Hunger, too, knows no nationality. My burger-- medium rare. My tastes, as we say in Spanish, are rara.

At 10:00, me being consistently neurotic, I sat out front of the bus stop waiting for the 11:00 o'clock bus. Over the course of the hour a small group of locals joined me, all of them remarking that there are no people in the Chaco. My feelings became less mixed about having given up on hitch-hiking. So many locals saying the same thing so often made me think they might know more than I about the land. A bus trip is something of a defeat for me, but in this case it looked like the only possible victory to be had at all. There is no life after Ibibobo.

I've been to cities in Asia and Africa where the sidewalks are so crowded that people have to brave walking on the streets amidst the traffic, risking death, making their ways regardless, cars swerving and dodging like monkeys through jungle trees, cars bouncing off each other, into others, controlled chaos reigning until there is a mangle of cars and bodies and blood. And other places are less crowded, some in Europe still devastated by the Nazi attempts to exterminate populations of people they disliked the idea of. Even my own homeland of Scotland has wastelands and clearance lands where one can go for miles without a person in sight, peat bogs and dead land discouraging the sensible. And there are other places now or soon to be obliterated by abortion and hedonisms of other sorts, places not exactly desolate of people but often filled with hostile migrant invaders from savage lands who take no part in the new, excluding the original people, those who are dying. But our trip in the night toward Ibibobo was a different sort of emptiness in the land. It is not a dead land, nor a land vacated by those seeking better lands elsewhere. There is simply no one there within sight of the road.

The Chaco in the night is beautiful, and even moreso in the light of day, a green land of trees and bushes and small ponds here and there betraying some small hidden family, a herd of cattle in the distance, the land inviting to the likes of me as our bus rolled over deep pits in the hardpack road, stretching the abilities of our driver as he managed to pull us through hairpin turns in the mountains, crashing over rocks fallen on the roadway. Hour upon hour in the moonless night and the heat we rode on to Ibibobo, not another vehicle in sight, no lights in the distance.

I dozed off for a matter of minutes between crashing bumps on the road and awoke because our bus had come to a stop in the night, that darkness punctuated by the glare of six bare light bulbs hanging on a cord across a field, six tables attended to by fat ladies covered in moths and beetles, the fat ladies bellowing to change currencies, this being Ibibobo, last chance to make good on ones promises. I swapped my hundred bolis for a zillion iguanas and then stood in line to have my passport stamped out of Bolivia. An unshaven version of the son of Al Capone accosted me for my being out of line, and I made a mistake of assuming that a dirty and ugly fellow in a Donald Duck tee-shirt and purple nylon shorts should mind his own business. A Cuban, who must know about such things, told me the man is important at Customs. I smiled and apologized. There are people at Ibibobo. One is Senor Duck. He just happened to be the man who examined my passport, seeing my visa expired, puzzling over the undated extension, and, not having quite enough authority to have me shot, motioned me on, back to the bus out of Ibibobo, he still quacking unhappily as I left him. This story, I am happy to note, doesn't end with the duck in a bad mood. The last quack was on me.

From Ibibobo in the night till noon the following day I searched the landscape for signs of human life, seeing only the occasional hawk and scattered cattle in the distance. Here and there, sometimes hours apart, I did see a dwelling of some sort, but no people about. Land, land everywhere, and not a person to see but those of us on the bus.

By noon we had come to the Paraguayan immigration outpost where the police were as thick on the ground as the flies and the dust. I stood silently as some of my fellow passengers were interrogated and sent off to small rooms in the concrete compound by the trees. No screams, no gunshots, no sight of fleeing peasants chased by barking dogs; but the paranoia was dense. The official who searched my bag, a huge young man with pistols on each hip and glittering brass cartridges in little pockets all across his vest, was pleasant with me, in contrast to others who bullied and harassed the passengers around me. Taking out a bag of cocoa leaves in my pack he suddenly stared at me, “Cocaine!” he yelled. And then he laughed. And I laughed. And those on either side of us laughed. And then we waited.

“We don't deport drug smugglers in Paraguay,” he said. “We leave them in prison.” And then he laughed. I didn't know if I should laugh, so I smiled. My guard said he would like to practice his English on me, but that he knows only two words: “Death” and “Murder.” I smiled a lot, praising his pronunciation. He was, when the whip comes down, a very funny fellow. Not so those who dealt with the girl nearby to me who is, I suspect, a registered prostitute.

In our crossing El Chaco over the next few hours we were stopped six times by police who boarded our bus, took the girl outside for questioning, and when she returned to her seat it was to open her purse and take out money which she handed over to those outside waiting. Each time she would smile that smile that covers the close-to-tears humiliation girls get sometimes. Our last stop was by a white car, into which the girl disappeared, leaving us one person fewer on the road beyond Ibibobo. I have found out since that such a car is also one of the National Police. I know not what it means.

Welcome to Paraguay.

Asunción, Paraguay. Day One.

When I was 15 years old I tied my sleeping bag to the Army surplus gas-mask bag I used for fishing tackle, and knowing no better, I called it a backpack. With that, I began a long walk, with occasional pick-ups from passers by, to the Canadian border to make my way to a rock festival in Brunswick, a place somewhere north of New York State. In spite of my most imaginative lies about the glories of Canada, that, for example, it was legal to smoke marijuana there, I could not entice a friend to join me on this trip to a foreign land to see sights unseen by Modern man, to explore a place no one knew about, and to know the world in its larger and stranger aspects. No one but I was curious enough to go, or even to consider going. For my friends, our little town was world enough. For me, home was home, but the world beckoned and I heeded the toll, alone, like today, over 40 years later, this night in Asunción, Paraguay, as lost and alone tonight as I was as a 15 year old boy.

On that first trip I got to Canada by lying about crossing over to by exotic cigarettes to show off to my friends camping with me at a nearby river. Things were simpler then, and though they aren't too complicated now, they were almost pure in their simplicity then, a world we seem destined to forget

and perhaps recalling, to hate. Or maybe it's just me. I crossed the border, promising the border guard I'd be back in the afternoon, and returned via Detroit and west five months later. I didn't know at the time, and perhaps others didn't know either, that there was no home to return to. I haven't had a home since, though I have tried, and others have tried to make a home for me. I think now there will never be a home. I live in the world.

I crossed out of the providence of Alberta, Canada, that nation having providences like Rhode Island, into the next providence, one I couldn't pronounce, and, one fine summer afternoon, had sex with Sue from Toronto. We thrashed on the river bank as a school bus came by, the boys laughing and cheering as they gawked while Sue and I groped and grunted. She was a beautiful girl and I promised to see her in her home town if I ever passed through. And I did pass through, many months later, amazed and disappointed to find that Toronto, a town I had never previously heard of, was huge, and that Sue was not so easy to find there as she would have been to find in my little town. Other surprised came, like the girl in Ottawa, a city I also had never heard of, her ultimate surprise for me being that she didn't speak English, being from Quebec, being a French speaker, and speaking sounds the likes of which I had never before heard or imagined. Luckily, young love sometimes has a language of its own. I became then a life-long Francophile.

But my goal lay ahead of me, in the providence of Brunswick, an open-air rock festival there, some tourist in my little town having left a hippie newspaper in the park, the ad. For it having set me on my journey. So on I went in search of Brunswick.

I arrived in Montreal, Quebec, and after having ridden with a truck driver all night I stopped in a park to sleep a bit, waking to a shock I had never experienced the likes of nor heard of: I woke to the sound of a man singing a song in French, strange enough for me, but worse, his hand was in my pants. I opened my eyes to see-- as strange as anything ever-- that the man was Chinese. Strange as all that was, I was destined to see stranger still: that terrorists had kidnapped a couple of dignitaries and, after bombings and ruckus of various sorts, the government responded just in time for my arrival, with a state of martial law, soldiers and tanks in the streets, civilians arrested on a whim, and the city brought to a halt by the military. I loved it. Terrorists bombing and kidnapping, the military controlling the streets, excitement and fear and wonder everywhere, it was my kind of place, one where the people didn't speak a language I could understand, where the girls were open and loving and fun, where life might end with a misplaced bullet fired by a nervous soldier on the street, a very foreign place, wild and dangerous.

But as I stayed and savored the action of a city under siege by a hostile government I became concerned that the school year had begun without me back home, that I was falling behind in grade ten, and that the longer I stayed away the harder it would be to catch up to my friends back home. High-school beckoned. As well, I had come to the end of what little money I had, having worked odd jobs along the way to buy food and do laundry and survive. In Montreal I had nothing and no hope of making money to live. Winter was approaching and the call to return to my home and school turned my mind from the phantasy life I was living to my real home. I thus wrote to my parents asking for money. My father wrote that he would send me cash to the main post office in Montreal. I waited anxiously and when the money came I tore open the envelope and gasped. The $10.00 he sent, a week's allowance, was not meant to bring me home again. It had a different meaning.

This all comes to mind because this evening I met a lovely French lad, beautiful blond hair and clear blue eyes, an open and generous fellow traveling the world for a year at his parents' expense, his friend doing the same. I chatted with the lad for a while, much about Bolivia, and we sat among Paraguayans busy with family and community affairs, business as usual here. And then the boys left to catch a bus, leaving me to thank the gods I can be among such happy people. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will see more of Asunción.

Asucuncion: Day Two.

I woke late today, somewhat sick and very much depressed due to the rain of last evening and my thought that it had continued into the day, keeping me bed-bound and disgusted by the world and myself for being disgusted about a rainy day. I did, at noon or so, get up and shower. I'd been up earlier to use the washroom, the Latin sickness having hit me in the dark hours. So it was late when I got out of bed and cleaned up for the day. It was actually nice out once I looked, and thus, being who and what I am, I decided to walk downtown to see the sights, the locals all telling me not to walk in this heat. Take a bus, they all said. That is excellent advice for summer time in Asuncion. I walked. I paid for it.

I probably didn't make a mile before I was so dehydrated I had to stop for water, finding a department store along the street where the water is dispensed from a large cooler, a cup tied to the stand for customers and staff to use at will. I didn't have my own cup to use, so, considering that if I don't have any tolerance for the local diseases I might get by sharing a public cup, the locals are as much as risk of my diseases as I of theirs, a fair trade in my estimation, if not a matter of hospitality on my part. I drank deep of local waters. And then I walked again.

I stopped soon after and had a bottle of orange soda, not something I would normally do, but now something of a fetish for me, orange being the one thing that seems to satisfy my thirst at least briefly. I stood in the doorway of a supermarket under the cold blower and drank my soda and blocked customers and I don't care. I was sweating so badly I thought I'd fall over if I had to move from the chilled air. But it all did come to an end, my soda finished, the wine and liquor section holding no charms for me, and the idea of more orange being not too much to tempt me further. I walked another short distance and stopped, to hot to go on, and there I saw a motorcycle shop, a place I could feign interest in, and I asked there about leather gloves, one item I truly do have an interest in. I didn't stop for a drink only because the owner of the shop was so charming and friendly that I spent an hour of his time conversing about travel and roads. I was, as it were, thirsty for conversation. My host was a fountain. I have been to other nations and many cities therein, but only here, in Peru, Bolivia, and now Paraguay do I feel at home with the people. I'm no more used to the friendliness and decency of the people than I am with the weather, now too hot for me, though I used to love such heat. I love the charm of the people here instead. I can always take another draught. But that too had to end, my conversation having an end as surely as a bottle is drained. I walked again.

I was unsure of my route to the centre of the city but my worthless map was better than nothing at all so I continued in hope of finding a hotel more suitable than the semi-broom closet I have now. I walked for miles, at one point encountering a German couple, asking directions, only to be ordered to get on ze trai-- told to take a bus. I walked, and I walked, and I looked at homes and automobiles that show me the people here can succeed in the Modern world as well as people in any other nation, though here be bums as bad as any in Europe or America. I hadn't seen many of the worst in Bolivia or Peru, but here they are, noticeably so, and yet so few compared to Canada that I am still pleased with life, even in this early stage of my visit to Paraguay. I kept walking till a giant raindrop made me look at the sky, a darkening grey that demanded my immediate attention, just in time, as it happened, to reveal a coffee shop across the street, which I made a mad dash for just in time to escape a tropical downpour to shame the weather in Canada, some of the worst in the world. And thus, for the first time in some days, I had coffee, not much to my liking and too expensive as well. For an hour or two or so I watched the rain, men on motorcycles, pedestrians running from buses, children howling in pretend horror, everyone caught fleeing for shelter as well as they could. The owner of the coffee bar, the place mostly empty, looked at me and looked at his watch, over and over. I don't care. But I did care eventually, and thus I paid and left in the lighter rain. I made my way toward the city centre.

I had taken on a longer walk than I had assumed, leaving at 2:00 p.m. I got to the city centre around 9:00 in the evening, looking for a hotel that I can rent tomorrow to escape from the little place I crawl into now. Little did I realise at first as I entered a nice looking hotel lobby that my walk in the rain had soaked my shirt completely and that my walk further had kept my shirt soaked, this time in sweat. I said to the clerk how funny it was that I was soaked from the rainstorm earlier; and he looked at my sweat-drenched self and said he had no rooms for me, not this week but perhaps in a week or so or later. I left and hunted a dark side street where I took off my shirt and hung it on a chain-link fence to dry it out, my hair hanging down in clumps, all of me sweating and awful. Such is enough, but with my hair hanging down and this all being in the dark I attracted a discrete audience who wondered what the half-naked person, man or woman they couldn't really tell in the gloom, was doing there. Finally a courageous and curious group of six just happened to cross the street and pass me by, an elderly German woman stopping to inquire. I told her my shirt was so wet no hotelier would have me till I could present myself dry and at least partly respectable. It suited her sense of order, though she told me to flap my shirt in the breeze. I said I'd tried, but it attracted too much attention. Toros, I said. She might have laughed. I don't know how Germans do that. I dried for an hour or so, eventually walking around government buildings by the river, waiting for my shirt to lighten, the sweat drying slowly, ever so slowly, stiffening with salt. Then off to find a hotel. There were none till late in the night, one available perhaps tomorrow, though the woman in charge speaks a Spanish I cannot really comprehend. I might try again tomorrow to see if she said yes to renting me a room. If so, then I will be closer to the city than here in the far reaches by the bus terminal. If not, then I could well lose my room here and be stuck carrying my backpack from place to place in the heat. This is what I call adventure. In time I will tell this tale and make it funny and interesting, but for now it's merely tiring and uncomfortable. I'm lost and tired and at odds with myself. This is travel in a foreign nation for me.

Having perhaps or not found a new place to sleep for some days to come I found, to my delight, a McDonald's where I spent more than half a night's rent for dinner. By chance I had dire need twenty minutes later of the sanitario, me and three young women lined up for the same broken facility at a gas station, two men joining the line-up as I waited. It was after I had my turn that I realized I had forgotten my hat somewhere, probably at the hotel. The hat, if not the hotel, is filthy and sweaty, and I am now wondering if I should return for either. This is travel for me. It's not yet amusing. That takes some years to occur.

I walked back toward my hotel room, it coming on close to 1 am, my legs still strong buy my mind wandering, and me wandering, being lost, unfortunately. I was still an hour on foot from my hotel when I gave up and got a taxi, expecting this to be similar to Peru or Bolivia, and being shocked to find a greedy cab driver who demanded thousands more local dollars than his flashing meter had read. It cost me an extra real dollar, but the demanding turned me off all Paraguayan taxis for the duration of this visit. From now on, I walk or take a bus. That will never be funny. I took a ride, and I paid for it. Tomorrow will be a new day, and I can sort things out as they happen. For this night I am done for.

Paraguay (pts. 4-10)

2012-02-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

2,000 iguanas in the toilet.

I broke the number one cardinal Dag-rule numero uno recently when I changed my pants and forgot to fill the new pockets with toilet paper. I often forget to take out the paper from the old pants, and I am guilty of gumbing up a lot of washing machines, but it's only when I forget to swap that I feel any pangs of remorse. I felt those pangs and more when I took a walk from the Asunción bus terminal up the back way for a few miles to see something new of the city, my marathon walk in the opposite direction some day or so before whetting my thistles for more fancy Paraguayan sights. Having fortified myself with a quart of soda and another of orange juice, off I went, chipper after a sleepless night of sweating and groaning in the heat of my broom closet till an hour that has a foreign number in my world. In that night I'd had an urge to use the bathroom, that being down a hallway and around some corners; thus, being a man of science, I decided to do an experiment, i.e. I peed in a cardboard container to see the difference between input and output, about a cupful to two liters. In the morning my teeth were stuck to my lips, sending me first to the supermarket for a litre of chocolate milk and another of peach juice, with which I washed down a tiny banana. I spent some time writing the compelling story of my life in Paraguay, and freshly dressed, showered, shaved, and so on, off I went, full of youthful vigor and bouncy steps at least two miles before I realised too late that I had forgotten to bring toilet paper.

Not to worry, I screamed, I can use a facility at the cafe across the street, the place with an outdoor deck that caved in and sent me knee deep into the sub-floor as the planks gave way. The stench got me out of that spot in a pronto big hurry, my leg scratched but not broken, the owner looking impassively at the hole in his floor, customers drinking quarts of beer, not bothering to laugh. I bought a litre of soda and asked for the men's room, which is generic at this particular establishment, around the corner and up the steps and around back on the hill, an outhouse, as it happens, that sort of eventually meanders under the cafe and the floorboards I caved in, scientifically explaining the odor I encountered earlier. These are things one finds in the life of avid world travel. As well, one finds resourcefulness in a life such as this, one suddenly lacking toilet paper in an outhouse in Paraguay, for example. Fishing in my pockets for anything at all in the pinches, I suddenly discovered a great use for the local money, hauling out a 2,000 iguana note, which I parted with more profitably than I had any other before or since. My day was saved, and perhaps the day of some terrible poor bum will be saved too if he ever finds those iguanas in a time of need. Two thousand iguanas? I laugh. I went to the bank and got a gazillion more just for fun. I thought about buying dinner with it, but I hate to waste money. Iguanas or no, it pays to be thrifty. It pays to pay attention too to rules. I will remember this from now on.

Later that same lifetime:

One has to have traveled from the Modern world to the less than modern and to have done so for a long while in less than middle-class comfort, like, say, Club Med, to know what it means to live a life without toilets of the genuinely functional kind we all know and never give a second thought. I have been and for long periods, to places where there just aren't any toilet. Hence, my seeming obsession with such. By chance I wasn't thinking about toilets at all the 100+ Fahrenheit afternoon in Asunción on F. de la Mora street where I was mauled by a drunk so happy to see me he had peed himself. I might have been happy to see him too, if I could have thought of a reason. As it was, I just wanted to get away fast, so I reached into my pocket and pretended to take a picture of something, being anything at all, to distract him. Right in front of me, like a sign from above, was a sign above. I say, “Give it up for Jesus.” The drunk stumbled away, which is a miracle in itself, but the whole scene makes me wonder if this, if not life itself, isn't some kind of notice to me about reforming my evil ways and telling me to sit down and reconsider all that I am and do. This is so far my deepest thought about toilets.

Asunción (3:1)

Life for a Paraguayan is family: husband, wife, and children; his way of making a living; his belonging to a group of related people who share a language and customs and a past that stretches beyond his knowledge and imagination. Life is about man and his eating and sleeping and sitting around drinking beer and chatting with his mates; shopping with his wife and kids; going to work and making money; having a sense that his football team can win the big game; that the nation itself is where his life is right, even if it's wrong. This is so simple it should not have to occur to me. This normal does occur to me because I see it in people around me and hear it when I converse with them. I don't chat up political figures at the National Assembly, don't deal with multi-national businessmen, and have no contact with intellectuals here. I meet people like myself, working-class men and women who have private lives and small extensions into the world of work and neighbours. Like many other places I've visited, however briefly in this part of South America, this too is Sarah Palin world, i.e. a simple working-class land of men and women and children who do not obsess over the latest fashions of ideology with which to supplant underdeveloped character with alien identity. Here, folks just live.

My own 'area' is much different, and my life and the lives of those I know best reflect the sad time we live in, one of reckless pursuit of privacy as publicity, of career over family, of ideology over sense and sensibility. Here in Paraguay is the remains of the 19^th century I so like. In the north my life is measured by my work, my identity tied to my public place in the social world, my private life being of little importance in comparison to who I am in the sphere of the General Will. Rather than who, I am what. So it is with those I know, mostly childless careerists who are something rather than someone. Those with children have something children, not someone children. Thus it goes (the pursuit of Modernity) to a dusty tomb prepaid. I am, as it were, a writer of fine books. Those books are about me and my time in some places. I'm an artist rather than a father and husband. In Paraguay I am not merely a foreigner, I am an alien. I have no one and do not belong even in the world, a writer of not much importance dwelling on fleeting pubic affairs of private others in flux. Few seem to notice.

I find it difficult to like Asunción, the city in these brief days of my visit being painfully hot and humid, making my life uncomfortable, to say little; and compounded with the general untidiness of an underdeveloped economy, a city unusually dingy even for a place of little wealth, it wears on me, even though the people here are often smiling and friendly and willing to engage in a chat about their personal affairs into which I am allowed as a man who is one man among men, an individual regardless of my social standing, sometimes treated affectionately, like a lost child, the maternal rising from women half my age, the paternal flowing from a calloused man on the street. In spite of my profession I am to most of those I meet, just a man, if one somewhat confused about the language, out of place for now but one who in the next moment or so will suddenly be like all others, a man of equal standing. Yet, I resist. I don't like looking at the people here, generally, the majority being obese and slightly off in features that make the smile beautiful. I am too equal in this way. When the locals smile and greet me and ask about my state of emotional well-being, when they shake my hand and look expectantly at me for happiness and well-wishes, I wish I were alone rather than surrounded by men and women all lumpy and sagging in faded stretch-pants and printed tee-shirts, beer drinkers slightly goofy and sort of grinning, toothless mouths full of starch, sugar, and fat, like a summer evening picnic by the railroad tracks at a trailer park on the outskirts of a small California town in the foot hills. My kind of people; and I wish often I were among others, slightly more sophisticated, those who would know about Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth and her Nazi commune in the jungle. I see instead whole families waddling together hand in hand down the rotting cement sidewalks, leather covered barrel jugs in hand, dripping soda and beer down their shirts, people laughing, mothers caressing and fathers adoring, children hugging and shiny-eyed with love. I'm uncomfortable here. I wonder where is beauty; why is a family so happy with such fat people as theirs? Where is that critical aesthetic sense that would allow such people to reject their families for higher forms of being?

Asunción (3:2)

In Asunción it is usual for me to consider life here as opposed to the Freak-Show Identity Performance Rage in the U.S. I don't see anything remotely like the Freak-Show here, or anywhere in South America that I've been, possible exceptions being the odd Argentine backpacker dressed up in ersatz “native” pajamas and toting an embroidered bag from the local craft market. Locally there is no “Gay Pride Day” parade of old men having oral sex with each other daytime weekdays on public streets in San Francisco, as the writer/photographer Zombie chronicles on the Internet. There are no racially motivated rampages through commercial areas, looting, burning, and killing, as one sees in London, England or many cities in America. There are no semi-retarded demagogic politicians such as Shirley Jackson Lee inciting hatred in public. Nor does one witness outbreaks of mass hysteria over passing politicians such as George Bush, Jr. No mass campaigns of public sentimentality and sanctimonious preening to show the world that one is “sorry” that ones fellows have elected a popular politician rather than an unpopular one. Screaming women frothing like dogs do not march en masse demanding “the right” to access to abortion for children without the consent or knowledge of the child's parents. And nowhere in the Andean nations so far as I have seen do masses of people camp out in public parks demanding money to pay off student loans for Masters Degrees in Puppeteering. I would have noticed such things had they happened. They do not. There is no Freak-Show here.

Paraguay is just about everything the Freak-Show hates about America, only moreso. People here eat poorly, salt, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, fat, and endangered species, as well as the usual meat and poultry. There is little attention paid to environmental concerned such as littering. Building regulations are about zero, and union membership is about non-existent outside Communist hold-over groups. Racism is rampant in that everyone considers himself a normal person, oblivious to the privileged “systemic” racism implanted in the Whiteness of the ruling class. Nobody gives a shit. There are no spotted owls or delta smelts to destroy an economy over, and building dams here is a fine thing that provides money and electricity to this something of a back-water place of fairly contented people who love their country and think Americans are people much like themselves. No one I have met here thinks Paraguay is the worst nation in history, more destructive than any and all combined, the one nation that has taken over from the worst of the Nazi era, second only in evil to the Jooos. I have yet to meet an anti-Semite in this very Catholic nation. I meet mostly fat people who live quiet lives, people who like to go on short trips around the country to see things and have a bit of enjoyment of the scenery with family and friends. Not yet have I met anyone obsessed with the evils of Israel, no one yet who lauds suicide bombers in the Middle East, no one who thinks Shari'a is a good thing for this nation or that those who oppose such are fascists. Just ordinary fat people getting along.

In many ways I am an ordinary fat guy getting along. Before I became a fat guy with a limp I was a bicycle racer, moving like a strong wind across the land, up hills jeeps and motorcycles couldn't begin to make, that would wind most hikers, across miles of country that only a dedicated athlete could endure, and day after day for years. I was, as were my mates, a sight to cheer at as I rode my bike with them in perfect cadence and fluidity, marvels of the human body, elegant figures in shiny yellow Spandex jersey, Lycra tights, and muscle, man sleek and glistening and strong. Spectators cheered just from looking at me and my mates. We were a glory to behold. But that was then. A decade of sickness and injury and a sedentary life have wasted that state and left me sick of myself, old, fat, and ugly.

I used to despise fat people and those who could not, for whatever reason, compete with me and mine in attaining perfection in our sport. Those whose skill and equipment fell short of ours were contemptible in my eyes. I made it a point to humiliate each and every one, if only they knew, by being superiour as I passed them and showed it can and must be done. They were meant to see themselves in comparison to me and to be ashamed, to dismount their bikes and walk or take a bus.

I was also a well-educated book-reader then, having wasted perhaps a million dollars of the tax-payers' money on the study of poetry and world literature. And a world traveler, too, always having some fascinating and funny anecdote to tell at any given moment. More, I was dangerous. Filled with fears and hatreds then as now, I fought hard to keep my hellish nature from spewing onto the lives of others, destroying them emotionally as well as physically, sickening my self in the aftermath, seeing what I had done to those, even if deserving, not deserving of that. But it is that very madness that made me a winner in so many impossible races against younger and stronger men: no pain is worse than not winning. There was no pain I could not endure for the sake of victory, no matter how trivial the win. Such Berserker determination is frightening to others, as well as to me. Less obvious, my curiousity, even more dangerous than most can know.

We often play to our strengths, even if such strengths are destructive. Today a fat old man with limp and battle scars from too many scraps with desperate men, failing eyesight from an old wound, and sickness from a life of want and neglect, awful pains recurring from strange illnesses in exotic lands, a limp from one too many crashes into immovable objects, I look at those around me who, though often rulers of the status quo in our time and queens of the social scene, like the woman roughly my age, her grey-black hair chopped to the scalp, the mole on her chin sporting three braided black hairs hanging down to her open necked shirtfront, her black denim jeans and black motorcycle boots completing her “professional political lesbian” look. She stared at me, back then, enraged that I was so silently contemptuous of her but wouldn't make eye contact where we stood side by each at the second-hand store where she clutched a pile of kitch, didn't give her the opportunity she so pleaded for to vent her rage against me in public. I avoided her stare because I am cruel, knowing that she was desperate to be known as a woman despised by the likes of me; that she is a victim of my male oppression of females. The more I ignored her, the more enraged she was, wanting more than life itself to scream that she is someone to be noticed and feared and brought low before. Her companion joined her and they kissed deep and drooly in the line-up by the cashier, daring me or anyone at all to visibly recoil. This is the Freak-Show, and these actors have their hour upon the stage. I've had my hour too. In Asunción today it is the hour of the family, the hour of fat people laughing and eating, drinking beer and strolling together as families in the heat, sweating and smoking and smiling. They triumph in spite of it all, feeling only the glow of each other in mutual admiration and love.

Asunción (3:3)

On the sidewalk in front of my hotel there are from corner to corner at any given minute probably a thousand people doing something of personal interest, waiting for a bus, standing in line for a sausage from a street vendor, chatting with a friend, waiting for a phone call, and so on. Dostoyevsky might have written terrifying novels about these people if he'd met them and had a lifetime to write about them, and so too might have Faulkner, those specific thousand at one moment on this street. Shakespeare might have found in them universal passions and follies that could have kept his career going for eternity in a thousand people on this sidewalk in Asunción, and so too could Tolstoy have written grand scenes of their lives in the war and peace of the nation. But as the hour passes, so too do those standing by my window. A different thousand come and go, and so it goes through the night and into the next day forever, so far as I can guess. A great novelist can tell a few stories about a few people in the short time of his life, but the people keep coming and going, changing in some deep ways, remaining universal through the ages nonetheless. Here the people are Paraguayan, a meaningful thing at this time, on this day, on this street. The universal Paraguayan will be as universal and any man anywhere, but the Paraguayan will be today a man not at all the same as his counterpart next hour, next day, or next year. He will be as different in time to come as he is different from the woman standing next to him now. The pieces have value, the rules remain, but the game is always different, and far more complex than chess can ever be, the patterns not exiting in the human world. Basically, at least to me, men are as ultimately unknowable as the movement of Hume's billiard ball.

Today I speak to Paraguayans on the street, and tomorrow I will meet others, all of them similar in their Paraguayanness, all of them as different as snowflakes. What I don't know about the people today is profound, and what they won't understand about those to come is equally so, I think. These windows are closed, though we might imagine well what lies behind the shutters of another man's life. Having done so, there is the next man, and many are too strange to anticipate or grasp even in the best of clinics. How does one account, for example, for Stroessner or Mengele? And how does one account for the mass of men here who have heard of neither? How do we deal with those not having yet been born? We do not, even so much less as we do with those by our shoulders on the sidewalk. All is flux, and we can only know some small realities if we search hard.

I look for reality in the works of Sophocles, and sometimes I see the Sophoclean truth in a man standing on the street in Asunción at a bus stop. But I don't see the truth of a Paraguayan on a motorcycle seeing his grandfather pulling a plough across the scrub land of El Chaco, stooping in the sun to plant corn for the family who will not know motorcycles for a hundred years to come. The Paraguay I see today is a Paraguay that will not be here tomorrow. Some old bones will remain hidden in the depths of the body of men, but the flesh will disappear and be reborn as something other. I know so little, and yet, even those alive and Paraguayan today will know little more in time to come.

So, knowing so little of Paraguayans today and expecting to know nothing of those who will change the fabric of life to come I have to look for the basics, those things that will never change, here or there, ever.

Asuncion (3:4)

I have no idea whether this is a work-day or the weekend here in Asunción, Paraguay, it all looking pretty much the same to me everyday so far, which is to say scenes of lethargy, all too hot to move around. I got up this morning and began my day with a quart of hard stuff from the supermarket up the street, a box of chocolate milk to put my body in hyper-drive for the frantic pace I think I should have on a trip like this, seeing everything possible, doing daring deeds only a tourist on a tear can live with himself, having done it all beyond the view of his own who could be judgmental about such things; like being in Las Vegas only on a budget that includes such things as ice-cream on a stick and window-shopping at tourist places that sell leather covered water-melon size containers for drinks. But I feel I should tell the truth on these pages, no matter how poorly it reflects on me, so I confess that I also got with my chocolate milk a huge bottle of diet soda to mix it with. I like to think of myself as a happening kind of guy, and I am mostly very surprised that young women don't notice me, at least in a good way; but I sometimes see some geezer huffing up the street, and I see that he might well be ten years younger than I and looks, hate to say, probably as old as I do. I don't feel old. I feel pretty young. I miss the part that should tell me I don't have a clue about the rest of the world's vision of me. The world doesn't see me the way I see myself, nor do I see the world the way it so often is once I get a closer look at it. I live and learn some. Today, though, I haven't figured out so far what day it is. The chocolate milk didn't help at all. I am as in tune as today will allow for.

Whatever day it is, this is the day the landlady changed the sheets in my broom closet. I knew that when I saw her scowling at me. She was wringing out two sheets, and they happened to be mine. She hadn't yet washed them. I lose a lot of pounds in the night, and the mattress is maybe sort of ruined by now. The lazy fan above my bed is not going to help the situation. The good news is that few tourists actually come to Asunción. That's good news because... I forget why. We can skip that part too. If not for the heat here, the dust and the diesel fumes, the ubiquitous fat ladies in stretch pants and tight tee-shirts, and the beer-drinkers on the sidewalk making me nervous about a street fight I would likely lose these days even if I won, I still think it's a good idea to move if only to get away from the landlady. It might be different if me losing all this weight in the night added up to me losing some weight during the day, but I'm still a fat guy and the landlady isn't giving me the eye in a good way. That much I do know.

I did some typing in the morning to justify my existence, and while I was doing that and running off to the bathroom between times, the cleaning lady, she who likes me and gives me Spanish lessons, sat me down at the table in the courtyard and gave me a giant mango, bless her soul. I can hardly keep down chocolate milk and diet soda, so I played around the edges of the mango till the lady cut deep and wide, showing me how a man goes at a mango. I explained that I never had a mother. Sometimes a joke is not as funny as it is meant to be. Great mango, and much of it. I had to eat it or I was not allowed to have any vegetables.

Some urgent trips to the bathroom later I was able to stay at the bus terminal long enough to find the ticket office selling my passage to Nuevo Germania. I couldn't stay so long as to make a real inquiry, having to run across the street to use the bathroom again. But being a Man of Steel-- Stalinesque in my touristic mind-- I returned to the bus terminal and found that for a mere 60,000 million iguanas I can go the 300 or so kilometers on a dirt road to the jungle to visit the old proto-Nazi colony of Nuevo Germania founded by Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and her suicidal husband, Homer. Or Gomer. Or Fritz of some sort. The point is that he was German. The settlement, of whatever sort I might find, is, importantly, $10.00 north of here. That much I can say with some certainty. The rest is as hazy as a day in the rain here in Asunción. The word on the Internet is, like a Monty Python review of Australian wine, “Beware.” Or was that about mangoes on a sick stomach? One becomes the other in my mind, a trip to the jungle to see a Nazi utopian commune/home to Dr. Mengele and a trip to the bathroom.

I have no idea what day it is, no solid idea where I'm going in Paraguay, or what I'll do in Nueva Germania if the bus actually goes there rather than to some spot miles away from which I will have to walk in the hope of finding something like a fetid Valhalla in the jungle. Knowing not much of anything at all, I still think I'll find a village at Nueva Germania populated by drooling and blind German retards selling air-brushed “I Heart Mengele” tee-shirts at palm covered road side stands, old blond guys in sunglasses listening to Stevie Wonder tunes on ghetto-blasters, geezers in flip-flops selling beer in coconut shells, little plastic umbrellas to take home as souvenirs. Maybe some black and white “Hitler conquers Poland” postcards. Just a guess on my part. I'm so wrong about so many things that I won't even be surprised if I'm wrong about Nueva Germania. It could well be (and probably likely is) populated by strapping young German milk-maid babes in traditional Swiss farm-girl dresses that show off their boobs in delightful ways. Giving this some clear and rational thought I won't be surprised if the old Nazis had it right, and I'll find alpine yodeling uber-mensch in leiderhosen stomping their jackbooted feet in time to the flogging of the local peasant slave population. That's what I think is more likely than finding a group of degenerates descended from a group of Nazi utopianists. I'll survive that just fine.

What would kill me is losing my wallet, the only thing that keeps me from either prompt and efficient suicide or life sitting between the two corpulent but garrulous ladies on the sidewalk down the street from my hotel, those two who see me for the stud I really am, they calling me handsome and beckoning me to join them, which I might have to do if I were to lose my wallet, being reduced to becoming a male prostitute or otherwise to face death. It's the money I have that spares me from the worse of this life. Unlike Mengele, no one in Nueva Germania cares if I live or die. I'm an outsider there, one way or the other. I am under no illusions that the folks of Nueva Germania will feed me mangoes or drink me milk choco-la-tay. Some things I just do know. Life is hard, and dreamers die in bad ways, on Mondays as well as Sundays, even if I don't know which day it is.

Paraguay (pts. 11-12)

2012-02-10T08:23:00.000-08:00

Paraguay: Livin' Latina NoKo

When I was a boy in the 1950s and 60s tabloid papers often ran bold headlines announcing that Hitler is Alive and Living in Paraguay. Maybe not as dramatic, but certainly as creepy and definitely true as well, Dr. Joseph Mengele was alive and living there, in fact, at Nueva Germania, a little village in the San Pedro district about 300 kilometers from Asunción. In those early years of my life he might as well have been living on the moon, it being as remote to me. In fact, it was remote for almost everyone, no doubt even to those living in Asunción at the time. The reputation of a hellish backwater stuck, Nazis being somewhat at home in Paraguay, what with the German dictator Straussner in charge of a Latino fascist state, the military being as brutal as they wanted to be, and bananas being the currency of the land, well watered with peasant blood. We in my little town took it as the nature of things in such a place, shrugging it off as the life of those not blessed with being alive in America. Nazis lived in the jungle of South America, and they belonged there, living like animals, hunted and killed if possible, but if out of sight, out of our minds. Paraguay, though, was definitely the last stop for such creatures, it being the equivalent of today's North Korea, a hermit autocracy of no account at all. And now, here in Asuncion, I am on the edge of visiting the very place of Nazis in the Jungle. I am going to Nuevo Germania soon.

In the early 1970s Rolling Stone magazine ran a headline I will never forget: “Paraguay: the last place on earth for the worst people in the world.” My imagination has run wild since when I thought about Paraguay, which is, admittedly, not often. And now I am there, there being here. It's not what I had expected. It's not hell in the jungle. It reminds me in many ways of Vancouver, Canada, and moreso of Sophia, Bulgaria. Large areas of each country are empty of people, and in those places people are collected they are ordered by the state in petty ways to the point there is little free activity by choice. Not all, but many people sit all day drinking beer, chatting, wasting time and money in stale pursuits of passing the time. Others, being involved in a system the rest can't comprehend, make vast amounts of money dealing with foreign commercial figures, banking, exports, and so on, that allows enough cash to flow downward to keep people at a level of contentment short of suicide and murderous revolution. It's a stagnant place in the sweltering heat, a place of not much going on outside the realm of the internationalist hustler. It's not hell, it's just hot and tired. Living Latina NoKo is wearing. Yes, there are too many police for what there is to do here, but the police don't murder anyone in the streets with the impunity they do elsewhere. It's a grubby kind of police state, like Canada and Bulgaria.

I'm off to be disillusioned soon by the would-be utopia of Nueva Germania, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche's lost jungle commune of exiled Nazi war criminals. There is, as the tourist information office downtown informed me, a restaurant there, and the bus does-- yes-- stop at The Intersection. There is a hotel in the next village, about 20 kilometers away. It will be a fine trip, I'm sure.

Much of what I do in life is attempt to make up for the lost years of my youth, that loss coming from a lack of parents who could have saved me with some basic information about living in the world. I had little to no parenting, and my life was then and ever since a matter of finding out what others know and I to this day do not. I don't know what others know about living, and thus I go off to places in the jungle to see what they know so I too can know, and maybe so I can find out some way of belonging, as they do, in a place with others like themselves. I know my place is not in a grubby police-state like Canada or a defeated little rural backwater like Bulgaria. But I know these things because I have lived in those places and seen with my own life that there is more to life and more to know about success than they offer. I know that I don't know, and in knowing that, I seek to know more. In the coming days I might at last discover that one thing that will make all other knowledge sensible. If it worked for Mengele, it might work for me.

Raw Hide. Yee-Hah.

I was sitting at a diner outside on the patio some years ago, a lady on a cell phone at the table in front of me, all of us around minding our private lives in quiet contentment, when a bum showed up and went from table to table demanding we each give him money. My favorite brush-off is to slightly raise my hand and wave a couple of fingers slightly, just enough to catch the corner of his eye and acknowledge his ugly presence, enough to make it clear I don't want to be bothered. No eye contact, no hard words, no real nothing. It works most times. Once it didn't, and that might be due to me also telling a bum to … well, I can't recall what I told him. Whatever it was he became enraged and from his pocket somewhere he took out a metal pipe and swung it at my elbow. As it turned out, it was fortunate for me that this occurred in front of a large pharmacy during a busy period on a major street. It was lucky for me because two blocks away I was pulling a tooth out of the sole of my shoe when the police pulled up and started being hostile toward me. “You were just at the drug store! You knocked a man to the ground and stomped on his face. Do you know where he is now? He's in the hospital with a broken jaw.” I said something like: “He hit me with a lead pipe.” A second police car pulled up and the police had a chat with each other. There had been about a hundred witnesses, and one at least had allowed that the man attacked me. No, I shouldn't have put my foot on his face, I agreed. That was an over-reaction. One cop sniggered, and that blew the whole game for the lot of them. They lost the edge. They all walked away, knowing that they didn't care if I had stomped the guy who hit me, and that the crowd had seen him do it. Sometimes the law, even for the police, is an ass, and they just let it go braying. Not always.

Sometimes, such as the time I worked as a bodyguard for a lady taking large sums of cash to the bank frequently, the police play a greater role in things, like the guy working for my client's neighbor who caught a moron in an attempted robbery. He tossed the thief into a street post, headfirst, splitting the man's scalp in a dramatic and bloody but not serious way. This attracted the attention of two others in my business, and the three of them (me standing aside watching) beat the thief as he crawled down the sidewalk and around the corner. The three bodyguards beat the thief till he was incapable of moving, and then they dragged him back to the proprietor's establishment and called the police, the latter showing up quickly for a change. The police interrogated the thief on the sidewalk where he slumped against the bloody street post, handcuffed to it, dazed and bleeding. The police tore off his shirt to search for tattoos and identifiable scars. Seeing him beaten well enough, and the owner having recovered all that might have been taken, they didn't care to make a further issue of it. The policeman in charge leaned down and spoke loudly enough for all of us to hear that in many such cases they tell the thief he is now free to go, but, darn it anyway, they have to keep him there because they forgot to bring keys for the handcuffs. “You are having a really bad day. We usually make this joke, and then let the guy go free. But in your case, we don't have any keys. You have to stay locked to the street post till a squad car comes by and lends us keys.” We all— except the thief-- had a good laugh, and half an hour later a squad car did come by and let the thief loose.

But it doesn't always have a happy ending for me. The bum at the diner was abusive when I waved him off, and in a sulk he went to the lady at the next table as she spoke to someone on her phone. He demanded she give him money. She waved him away, thinking that would be it, but he began screaming at her. She, waving more and more frantically and shouting into her cell phone to be heard above his racket, was becoming hysterical. I moved into action just about then, charging at the bum who backed off and started running. The unhappy ending is that my knee gave out on me and I couldn't chase him and beat him up. I had to stand still and get over the nausea from the pain in my knee. It is a curse.

Next day I went to a tack-shop and asked the owner if he sold horse whips. He said no, but a friend in a small farm town not so far away sold bull whips. They are as long as 18 feet, he said. I can get a hand-braided 16 strand kangaroo hide whip used by lion-tamers at Las Vegas showrooms. But why, he asked, would I want one? I told him about the bum and my bad knee, how an 18 foot whip would give me just the advantage I need. Today at a tienda for rancheros in Asunción I got my wish at last. It's a farm implement, basically, and I am a farm boy, in spite of much about me. Nothing fancy, like Hitler or Indiana Jones, just your basic rawhide whip that will tear a chunk out of a bum at ten feet. Heaven.

And now, some days after my purchase of a beautiful and functional farm tool meant to dissuade a charging bull from goring his owner and then trampling his jelly to juice, I, having whacked all the leaves off the tree in the courtyard of my hotel, have terrified the resident cat into semi-permanent hiding in the laurel bushes. Oh man, I got this, and now I want to whip ever' f***ing thang!

Paraguay (pts 13-15)

2012-02-10T07:28:00.000-08:00

Nueva Germania, Paraguay: Introduction

There was a young man once who joined me and my comrades at our table in the public library for one of our famous weekly meetings in Vancouver, Canada, a table we sat at for four years or so weekly to meet with people from around the world to discuss the nature of things, particularly our developing struggle against Islamic supremacy and Left dhimmi fascism, the latter being the totalitarian Gnostic political religion of modern socialism. One such visitor to our table and discussion was a nasty little creature who was obsesses with a minor political figure in the George Bush presidential administration, Karl Rove. The young man was furious about Rove's supposed machinations against democracy and human rights in the Third World, particularly against so-called Palestinians, and Rove's sympathies toward the Jooos! It was clear the young man had little information about Rove as a person, his only grasp of the man being that of a devil of some sort. That sort of devil is common to the world in the Middle Ages. So too is the young man's presentation of the Jooos. All of it is magical. I insisted that Rove could well sit at the table with us and be as normal a man as any, and the young man would know that by speaking with him. I kept at this point till, as one could see on his face, he understood that Rove is, indeed, just a man. The awareness of my point was devastating to the young man. It was as if he had suddenly lost his faith in God. He knew no longer what his world was about. He was lost and alone in a way that I might have some slight sympathy for. His belief had been destroyed.

If there is one thing I love in life, it is destroying my illusions. I can be as dense as any peasant witch-burning lunatic in the Dark Ages, and pleased with my understanding of the universe in being so. But there are times when I do ask myself if the witches I might burn are really what they seem and what others say they are. It's not that I'm skeptical by nature, and far from it. I am as eager to believe the worse of others as many a nasty fellow. Worse, I often have no chance to actually find out if those I would burn are as bad as I think they must be. I instead allow my imagination to sink into the fever swamps of solitude, making my enemies ever worse than reality could allow for. My imagination is an awful place, and those who live there are terrible creatures of my own making. If I didn't know, for example, too may leftards, they would occupy the seventh level of Hell in my mind. But I do know too many, and I know they are not daemons from the depths of Hell, they are mostly just conformists and most not particularly intelligent. Most live in fear of original thought, clinging to conformity to save themselves from the torment of aloneness. I don't like such people, and I would cast most of them into Hell if I had a chance, being a nasty guy sometimes, but I can't see such people as anything more than weak-minded and cowardly. Those very few who are uniquely evil are very few indeed. But of those I do not know, those in remote places and times, they I can reduce to parody, such as the young man reduced Karl Rove to parody as daemonic.

To be fair, I had no such illusions of the people of Nueva Gemania, Paraguay.

Nietzsche, Mengele, and Me: Reversion to the Mean. (A Day in the Life of Aryan Utopia.)

Most thinking people in the Modern world think of Nazis as the most evil people in the 20^th Century. But there are other thinking people, intelligent, articulate, and rational, those who write and comment at, for example, the web site Stormfront, a neo-Nazi organisation of great sophistication, who find in the Nazi attempt at utopia a highly sympathetic world-view, one which they cling to as an attempt at perfection in this world. To a great degree, and a degree most today will find abhorrent, the neo-Nazis are indistinguishable from the neo-Communists and leftards of all persuasions. The truth, dismissed uncritically and unthinkingly in total, is that there is little difference between the values of Nazi and other socialist, collectivist, utopian anti-Modernists. Nazi, old and new, are not people who see themselves as the world's most evil people. On the contrary, and clearly obvious to those who think it through, Nazis see themselves as the best of people with the best of intentions for people, if not for all people. Nazis see themselves as wanting the good for the greater people, much as do Muslims who want the world to be totally Islamic for the good of all; Communists who wish only to slaughter those who would impede the progress of Communism for the sake of all future generations, and so on. Yes, they will and do small many eggs of the sake of a perfect omelet, but this Utilitarian view of reality is what makes it possible to kill in the first place without much qualm about the morality, if one can call it that, of mass murder. If the purpose and the goal are so superiour to the continued degradation of man, then everything is permitted in the pursuit of a future perfection. Nazis, in short, are the best of people doing the best for mankind, in their opinion, not the worst of people doing the worst against mankind.

Nazis are in favour of, among many other things we all seem to think we like, a natural environment in which man is but one part of a greater unity, written of at great lengths by ecologists today, indistinguishable from earlier Nazi ecologists mostly ignored, not only Heidegger but the lowly civil servants of official Nazi Germany. [C.f. my forthcoming A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, vol iii: Oikos I, Earth and Man.] In the Nazi state, one finds today's echo of the vegan, the tree-hugger, the anti-smoking lobby, holistic medicine promoters, hemp-wearing back-to-nature pagans, and so forth, along with guitar-strumming youth adoring hippie nudist hikers and communalist drum circle bangers, the Wandervogel of the early years of the Nazi movement. Nazis were the prime ecologists of their time, dedicated to the preservation of the Earth as a living being of its own self, the pre-Gaia worshippers so much alike to today's followers of an only slightly more sophisticated movement. Yes, there were the runists, the tarot-card readers, the wildlife preservationists, the whole of today's ecology movement, all of them as decent as ever, though Nazis to the core. They meant well.

That the Nazis are blamed for so many ills in our past is ironic in that the Nazis were doing what they saw as the Good, for example, eliminating the unfit from the earth, much the same as eugenicists today attempt to do in providing abortion in Black neighbourhoods in America, in women having abortions in preparation for that one special “designer baby” who will, when one is financially secure and established in a proper career, rise to be one of the elite in charge of engineering society for its perfection in the future.

The Nazis, in spite of what most think of them, were the Good people in an evil world. They did their work for the betterment of mankind and the earth itself. Today, under a different name, good people follow most of the same lines, without acknowledging or perhaps even being aware of their deep ties to Nazi-ism. How can yesteryear's Nazis be so evil when many today believe and act in the same ways for the same reasons? Today's Left is yesteryear's Right, as it were. The name has changed, but the plans are too similar to pretend they are not the same. The average Leftist is simply an old Nazi in new clothing. He is a good person who cares about the nature of the Good. He derives his understanding of the good from ideology, received from geniuses, just like days gone by. Nazis, good people doing good.

Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth went to Nueva Germania not to destroy the good but to create a better world, a dozen or so families from Germany, all good Aryans, intending to create a perfect home for themselves and their children. Her husband killed himself in a hotel room, she returned to Germany and befriended Hitler, and many of the descendants, through an accident of birth, were congenitally blind. One might fault the founders of this Aryan commune for playing at being God, taking it upon themselves to create a better world than the one in which the rest of us make do as well as nature allows. But such will to power in the world is not different in tone and theme from any utopian communalist movement, regardless of the Aryan nature of the hopes. The American thrust today to create a multi-cultural paradise through social engineering and publicising privacy is just one more attempt to do exactly what others have continuously failed to do since at least the time of Plato. [C.f. A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol. V.: Gnosis: Intellectuals, Nazi Intellecuals, and Plato.]

Knowing something of the attempt to found a perfect society in Paraguay's jungle at Nueva Germania, and knowing a little about its failure, I was also bound by imagination, trapped in my own thinking about what should be, that all Nazis must be evil, and thus, the settlement, what there is of it over 100 years later, must be the evidence of the worst people on earth in their final moments, evil so gross it could not live any longer than the day I witnessed it in person.

But really, I didn't expect any such thing, in spite of my mocking tones in earlier segments of this essay, and I did not go to Nueva Germania to hate its inhabitants of the tiny roadside village I found in the wilds of Paraguay. I came to see for myself the end of ideology and the reversion to the mean, the contraction of reality back to the norm, the stretching of the possible returning to nature, as it were. The extremes of ideology can only last so long before it kills its adherents or those remaining just sicken of the whole parodic extreme of living a false life. In Nueva Germania, Paraguay I found, I think, in some small way the future of 250 years of ideology, of life at the end of the era of Rousseau and the gnostic rule of intellectuals. In Nueva Germania I think I see a cleansing and a rejuvenation of the life of man, an end to the evil of murder as path to perfection. In Nueva Germania I think I see the future of America, a land rid of the plague of killer visionaries, no reversion to the meanness of man as demigod but a restoration of the norm of ordinary humanness.

Aftermath

In America today there are echoes of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, its freak-show decadence and ours, if not exact, not too dissimilar. The spitting nihilism of the pseudo-intellectual elitists; the confusion and despair of the devastated middle-class longing for order; the strident conformist youth movement, then Wandervogel, today ecologists of the same sort; the Jew-haters; and the occultist cliques of hyper-rich would-be aristocrats financing private armies of storm-trooping thugs who terrorize the masses in the streets, in our case well-shown in Madison, Wisconsin, among other cities; the parallels are numerous, and if it doesn't repeat history, and maybe if it doesn't even rhyme, it's still pretty close to the same ugly scenes we see in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis. This time, we are the bad guys, the leader-princip state-worshiping conformists who cannot stand the thought of an original thought or perceived deviance from the politically correct norms of the ruling clique. Book-burners, witch-burners, heretic-burners, arsonists burning ecologically unfriendly buildings, they abound in our Modernity today. They are the “progressive Left.” Like the progressive Nazis, they do it for the good of all mankind. If the innocent suffer, it is all for a good cause-- the future perfection of life.

Perfection is an idea of a sort, one broad and undefinable but defined nonetheless by theorists and engineers of the utopian future of social justice and the clerks who work with enthusiasm if not any genuine sense of more than the rules; the rules, yes, in myopic detail, but the game itself mostly escaping them. Perfection, the new man, the future. It all makes so much sense if only only. So some must die and some must be killed and most must suffer so that all will someday be happy. There must be order, there must be rules, there must be more regulation, all in the name of social justice and equality for all who are worthy of it. The masses. They are why the clerks of death do such work, sacrificing themselves for us all. For us, the mass-men. It is a religious calling, the work of the Moral. Those who resist, they are Satanic. They must be destroyed. Those sinners must burn.

America, known to the ignorant as the most evil nation in history, responsible for the annihilation of Native Indians, for colonialism in the Third World, for the bombing of Dresden, for the terror of 9-11, it is-- to the leftard of our time-- the worst of places in the worst of times, the authentic alternative being the purity of the Middle Ages, a time of genuine authenticity and true living for the communal man whose time is yet to come in the Post-Modern utopia of a Green World. That this is the same programme the Nazis attempted is lost on the Left today-- for the most part. That this is easily known is indicative of the aggressive idiocy of the intelligentsia and the innate fascist longings of conformity hippies who allow such anti-humanism to become and to remain the ruling-class ethos in the Modern world today. We've seen it all before, the philobarbarism of the Nazis and their adulation of the “Man of Action” who cares not for life itself but for the immediacy of the now in a grand gesture of death worship, in our case the Muslim homicide bomber who “uses his own body as a weapon”; the polishing of the fruits of decadence, the hedonism of the aborting classes, the wealthy designer-baby mothers; the privilege of the freak-show itself, its outcasts pretending to freakness in order to find a place within the norm, the metro-sexual who cries for acceptance, character being an unknown, and if known an unliked quality. The hierarchy of the freak-show too is set in stones one on the other as if building anew the Tower of Babel, light to dark, male to female, straight to queer, rich to poor, and so on. But to complete the freak-show one must acknowledge the elite themselves and their eugenic programme of superior man atop all others, a cleansing of the idiots from the earth, the purity of the human race forever rid of the Jooos, Christians, the rich, “traditional males,” the sexist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and rightwing conservative neo-colonialist “one percent.” That is only three millions, a mere half the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Then life will again be perfect, man living in harmony with nature, communal, sharing, caring, and governed by “wise Latina women.” Rule by philosopher kings. Rule by those, and he, “A sort of god.” Imagine.

In the Paraguayan jungle distritio of San Pedro, north of Asunción by 300 kilometers, there stands on the roadside a tienda made of stone aggregate and aluminum and sparkling glass, cold soda for sale to thirsty travelers, candy bars for the hungry, all of this Modernity feet from a four lane concrete highway that leads to anywhere on earth a man chooses to venture onward into. This is Nueva Germania.

I could have accepted slack-jawed and rickety-limbed farm boys in blue denim coveralls patched with red on white polka-dot cloth; boys absently sticking a pitchfork into a rotting carcass of a dog hanging from a peg on an unpainted barn door; straw-haired, buck-toothed idiots in the shade of a weathered 30 foot high imperial German eagle carved generations ago by master craftsmen from wood from the surrounding jungle; faint music from a tattered accordion playing polka tunes in the distance; the stench of human flesh wafting its way across the fields from the smoke of a cottage stove. Yes, I averted my eyes from the sign seen earlier of the local dentist. And yes, I would have called the police had I witnessed anything like anything above. But no, such things are not possible outside my imagination. Not in Paraguay. Not now. Even then, not so much.

What I did not expect was the six foot tall 30ish beauty who greeted me at the modern tienda at the edge of the highway, her beauty being remarkable in the nation, rich brown hair and blue-grey eyes filled with warmth and delight at seeing a strange with whom to pass a few moments in friendly conversation. Thus was my welcome to Nazi-ville, Paraguay.

I had bused 300 kilometers to the interior of Paraguay to see for myself the remains of Neitzsche's sister's failed proto-Nazi Aryan commune in the jungle; past home of world-historic mass murderer Dr. Joseph Mengele; rest-stop of Dag Walker, traveler. I wanted to see for myself, to touch the ground and smell the air and know the land and the sky and the people there, however superficially, however briefly, if only for a day, to see what my imagination had created in contrast to what the world of the living actually made.

Religious fanatics, maniac visionaries, life-haters, Gnostic demi-god ideologues, fugitive murderers, wandering exiles, I had come to see for myself what kind of people would live in such a place and who they would be now that time has ground them into reality.

Mengele would be at home today in San Francisco, California. He could be a doctor practicing exotic experiments on rich patients who want blue eyes and twins. He could remove and preserve tattooed skin made into designer lampshades, and he could easily stand on the sidewalk selecting those who receive abortions and those who are allowed to have children, the modern eugenicist at work and play. He could rise to the top of his profession and conduct research into the nature of the Jooos and their noses and their natural inferiority that compels them to oppress The! Palestinian! People!, and he could organise boycotts of Israeli medical professionals world-wide. He could even join a death panel to announce that this and that person are life unworthy of life, euthanasia panels, limiting the sick and disgusting to those among his friends, killing the others, being rewarded for his efforts, lauded as a savior of socialised medicine, a scare resource meant only for the fit and super. One might go so far as to claim that today in San Francisco that Mengele could be a serial murderer and more or less get away with it, legally, by practicing Islam, sending young Muslim men to foreign nations to wage jihad against the Jooos. He could go himself, and the leftards might well cheer his internationalism and commitment to human rights. With minor adjustments of style, Mengele could well be a happy man in San Francisco today.

But he would not be at home today in Nueva Germania. How could he cope with dozens of boys and girls on Japanese-made motorcycles, an unshaven man on a scooter, two girls and a poodle behind him, all of them with their tongues hanging out, a cooler of beer hanging from the back, off to sit with friends in the heat of the night and the smell of cow dung thick in the air? Mengele could not easily torture the burnt-black town drunk passed out on the roadside by a litter of puppies as their mother forages for food down the track, a four-lane road used by farmers in Korean flatbed trucks bringing fodder to their cattle lazing by the lagoon, soaring bent birch trees filled with long-tailed birds chirping as the stars emerge in the purple-black sky? Someone would shoot him. Modernity cannot stand such a man, and would not allow him to emerge among men. Only in the realm of the post-modern could such a creature today flourish, hidden behind curtains of obfuscation and occult babble. He could not remain hidden in a world of international cattle markets and credit and loans payable at American-owned banks in debt to Saudi Arabians. In the jungles of post-modernism, yes, there he could survive and do nicely. Among working-class people, not at all.

In spite of the efforts of some of Europe's finest minds to destroy Modernity in favor of a neo-feudalist Order of philosopher kings ruling the masses for apanage, in a small town in the jungles of Paraguay there is no place for a philosopher king. Here, all the Nazis dies out or wandered off, hunted and killed by people who preferred a world of work and fair exchange, people tiring of the over-heated phantasies of Paradise, of the bloody visions and slaughter by religious fanatics. Once that fever had died, people re-emerged and worked again for a living, reverting to the normal routines of daily doings, unconcerned by the harangues of lunatics and the perfect world to come, the intellectuals and their visions falling on the ground under the feet of cattle and imported trucks on the way to the marketplace.

Nietzsche's Aryan utopia of blind retards? Gone. In its place I met a family, three generations, happy, obese, friendly, curious about me, skeptical about my intentions in visiting their little village, accusatory, hostile, angry, and relieved that I had not come to hate them, to accuse them of evils they have no part of, only distant memories handed down mostly by the likes of travelers such as myself. I didn't come to hate the people, I came to see for myself the reality of others I might have hated had I not met some of them and found them all too human, much like myself but settled and decent.

“Ideas” died in Nueva Germania generations ago, and now fat ladies make dinner and sit smoking cigarettes in the evening while men drink beer and talk about cattle. Boys chase girls who pretend coyly to be uninterested. Babies wake up from sleep in the hammock hanging under the awning, look around, and cry at the sight of a stranger sipping coffee at a rough wooden table on the veranda.

Having come to such a place in search of reality I left behind the swamps of my imagination for the bovine air of the jungle, a sweet smell to back-woods boys such as myself. Though my own town is larger, its people are much the same here as there. I was as at home as I will ever be, unknown, unloved, alien and adrift among people who work and live in homes with families among friends, private lives lived in quiet isolation from the hurly-burly of the personal as the political, the state as God.

It could be that Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Mengele have actually left their visions intact and flourishing in spite of all the normal small town scenes one sees at Nueva Germania. For every hard won pasture and carefully tended field where cattle graze and men toil for their living one sees two and three foot high, for as far as the eye can see, unmistakably successful and thriving, the perfection of the utopian collectivist order: ant hills.

Paraguay (pts. 16- 20)

2012-02-10T06:31:00.000-08:00

A Life of Crime: When Man is Dog to Man

I dread that line in chirpy travel books, “But the best part of the county is the people.” I know right then that the county is a dump where there is little or nothing of interest do see or do, that it will be difficult to find necessary supplies for my travels, and that I will very likely be accosted by local police for a shake-down, returning at night fro a miserable day to a dirty and smelly hotel room with noisy prostitutes working in the next room. If it is the people who are the best thing about the place, my visit should be short. People are usually the best part of every place, and to note that they are is to say only that the rest of the place and all about it is hell. Of course people are good. Unless they aren't. Good people aren't a bonus. They are essential and common. It should go without saying.

I had my first solid food in over a week last day, chicken dinner with chips and salad and soda. The cafe owner, a lady about my age, hobbled around with a swollen foot, me pitching in to serve myself, she being flustered that I would do such things, all of us eventually sitting in and chatting about her accident and how her daughter has been doing extra work to make life a bit easier, how it will take up to four months to heal and allow her back to work properly but life goes on and things are pretty grand. Nice dinner, too. I had my fill. I might well go back and do it again.

As good as all my dinner was, who would go to a fly-blown dump in a city like Asunción for chicken and chips? Those people I know who travel do so for a few weeks each year, going to some up-scale resort where the waiters dress in tuxedos, serve colourful cocktails in spotless glasses, smile like movie stars, and are polite to the point of making me mental. My friends go to resorts and modern cities and rich places because they have limited time between working again and the next vacation. They want ease and comfort, the best life can offer at whatever price they can afford, even if they must go slightly in debt to pay for it. They want, if only for a few weeks per year, to maximize their enjoyment, going beyond the usual comforts of home and routine. It's a vacation. It's supposed to be fun. No one that I have seen has come to Asunción to frolic in the heated pool by the hotel lounge. Of course the people here are nice. Otherwise, someone would shoot them. There are such places one can go for such. It's a vacation only in the broadest sense. Most prefer leisure of a less intense sort. They want a holiday. They are happy to pay a lot of money for such time and pleasures. It is not a matter of the people being nice or even especially nice: it is a matter of paying a lot of money for a happy time.

I paid close to a gazillion iguanas in local bucks for my lunch last day, and I had a good meal whilst chatting with the family who own the place. It's cheap, all things considered. My bill was agonizingly calculated on a fancy receipt and handed to me with some formality through the cloud of flies buzzing my chicken bones. I took out my wallet and handed over a mega-gazillion iguana note, far in excess of the actual total required, and we all felt good that I would receive mucho cambio in return, I having the means to buy half of Paraguay with the iguanas in my wallet.

The friendliness of the staff and owners is genuine, especially because I have so much money to pass around. But had I been an iguana short and had I told them all that they are greedy and selfish and that social justice demands that I should eat and not concern myself with paying exactly what the bill announced, then I would have lost that good will so clearly shown to me when I paid rightly. Had I told them all that it is a moral issue, that I deserve to be treated like a human being of equal worth whether I have iguanas in my pocket or no, then I would have destroyed any pretences I might have of being a human being in a world of others. It's the money that makes us all decent and equal. Money makes me a man among men, and my morality, or lack thereof, has nothing to do with my payment of the bill. The people treated me well because I paid my bill. Had I not, then I might have been beaten. I would have violated all trust and decency expected of a reasonable man.

Social justice is all about the money one pays to respect the reciprocity of man giving and getting. No man is unequal when he can pay another for services rendered. The exchange is an act of beauty and love between men and women who understand the equality of giving and taking for giving. Anything less than full payment is an act of aggressive hostility.

Money allows strangers to meet in peace and to become friendly and happy in each other's company. Competition allows one to choose who will be loved and who will fail and be miserable till such time, if ever, that he learns to love others as well. With money, man becomes dog to man, his best friend, one who rolls over on his back to have his belly rubbed, who wags his tail and whoofs. Without the doggy-treats of cash man becomes dog to dog, ripping and tearing and barking blood. If I were to lose my wallet, I would be a beast among the best people in the world and they would hate me. I would have to die by my own hand unless they killed me first. Such is the right and the good. The alternative is a life of crime. Poverty is a crime. Money is love of others. One must be wealthy or live a dog's life.

Horniman: Breakfast of Paraguayan Champions

I will never forget, much as I would like to, my short and unhappy adventure at a roadside diner in South Carolina wherein I met the world's most beautiful waitress, a girl whose voice and accent I recall vividly to this moment, her voice ringing in my mind, her face shining bright before my mind's eye. She was one of those rare women who is beautiful beyond measure, and I, having slid into a booth by the window just for the sake of watching women passing by, perhaps to hit on some passing beauty in the diner itself, saw her!

She came to my table and bent over and asked, in that voice so sweet, what I would like? My mind rolled around like a cement mixer in high gear, and I said, full of fun and imagined delights with this honey from the South, that I would like coffee.

“How do you like it?” she asked, and perhaps here read more into it than I should. I didn't want to put her off by being a sexually predatory kind of guy, so I figured I'd slide into that later. I made a very funny joke instead, something light-hearted and silly to put her at ease. I said: “I like it strong and black-- the way I like my men.”

That was the wrong approach to take with this particular girl. Being 18 at the time I can write that I was inexperienced with girls. She straightened up and yelled to the kitchen window, “Hey, Elmo. We got us a ho-mo here!”

I am just guessing that Elmo had never seen a “ho-mo,” given that he came out from the kitchen to take a look at me. I stood up and explained that I had been making a joke with the waitress, but neither of them from that moment on spoke English any more, some kind of local patois that escaped me as I made my escape from the diner, taking with me a painful memory of the beauty who not only got away but left me lucky to get away with my self intact. Once they'd reached in their discussion my personal quality of Yankee-ness there is some certainty they would have concluded I am not a likeable person. Such is life on the road, then as well as now.

Today at the supermarket buying coffee I had a great opportunity to make a funny remark to the check-out girl about tea “Horniman Chinese Tea” to be exact. As luck would have it, she's not my type. However, with the couple of stiff drinks under my belt, maybe the Dag life of letch could change for the better.

I've never been a tea drinker, but I accept that life is dangerous and strange. Maybe it's tea time after all. Paraguay can do things to a man that might not happen to him elsewhere.

Horniman Tea (2): Cheery Guano Coffee

I was wandering through the market in central Santa Cruz, Bolivia later looking for some relief from the heat, a place to sit with a nice cup of coffee, and time to scribble a bit more of my travel tales in the Andes. As a side venture I was looking for a rubber tip for a wooden stick I had picked up the previous day and was using as a cane to take some of the weight off my sore knee, the pain perhaps stemming from the irregular paving stones and broken concrete side-walks that cause me to twist and stumble and further hurt an already bad joint. To make my life especially interesting I was also looking for a handle to complete this work-in-progress cane, a broom handle to anyone else. I could see the end result, a Celtic carved beauty of intricate design, a silver knob, a trick twist that would allow me to pull of a titanium sword to impale my enemies. Later on it broke, but that's probably not too important at this time. Of importance is that I was on the scout-out for coffee. Art is brief; the need for coffee is eternal. There, daydreaming in somewhat Latin, the gods found me and smiled. Raising my eyes to the heavens due to a nasty jolt of pain in my knee as I tried to mount a kerb I saw a decal on a bright red awning advertising Chiriguano Cafe. Can life get any better?

I like to think that I am like most people hobbling around in pain in the high heat of southern Bolivia on a shoestring budget with no real point in life; and so like them I found myself delighted at the thought of a nice cup of cheery guano coffee served by a 300 pound girl with no teeth, she smiling as if I don't have problems or something. Cheery. And like most others I do not get excited in a good way by Poutiguano coffee or, especially, by a big steaming bowl of Bitchiguano. I like mine cheery. Forget Horniman Tea, I'm, like, Guano-Guy! Alas, the gods were joking me, and the beans were unground. The gods had led me on. No cheery. No guano. I limped away, a sadder but, well, sadder man.

Clean, Well-Lighted Sheets

When I was recently arrived in Asunción and first got my little broom closet off the side-walk room at the hasty-stop across the street from the bus terminal I was one evening sick in bed, fouling the sheets and the mattress in the night. I cleaned up as well as I could, rolling up and tossing the sheets in a lump in a farther corner of the room, by my feet. It was too hot for sheets anyway, and the lack was no loss to me. I laid on my bare mattress and sweat and rose and readied my pack each day for my departure to some other place, somehow each day ending with me still in living in my room and next day paying for the coming night. A few days or so of this found the cleaning lady in my room while I was away. Upon my return I met The Stares from the desk. I shrugged it off, thinking I would soon be gone from their sight and memories, forgotten as the dirtiness of one old man on the road; and that anyway, the life of women is a matter of babies and geriatrics and it is the function of women to clean up after those who can't do such for themselves. And then I stayed a while longer, “the sheets” hanging in the background of every look I got.

I'm not, according to my own superficial self-survey, a filthy guy as a rule, and I tend toward the finicky for the most part under normal circumstances. But the initial impression on the hotel staff belied that idea, leaving all with the impression otherwise of me as a literal dirty old man, and impression that lingered long. But eventually I found myself in conversations with the pretty little cleaning lady who would stop in the patio to chat me up about the weather, who one morning as I sat typing in the courtyard offered me pills for upset stomach. She saw me, I suspect, as a sick traveller who was one night too ill in the broom closet with a broken ceiling fan by the side-walk.

During this inordinately long sojourn at the broom closet by the side-walk hotel that I stay at I have come to like the folks who run the place, and to particularly like the cleaning lady who feeds me mangoes and who turns on the overhead fan I forget about in the heat of the day as I type in the courtyard as she comes round to brush crumbs off my table from some earlier arrival's breakfast, who encourages me in improving my accent so she has a hope of grasping what my Spanish is trying to desperately to say. She smiles when I strain to pronounce the words just so, each one painfully and slowly coming from my mouth like a pearl that takes an age to make. She sits sometimes and shares her lunch with me, talking as if I understand her.

Today I sit sipping mate as I watch goldfish feeding in the aquarium in the back patio where the staff do chores, where the high-priced rooms are hidden from the rest of us. There are pictures hanging on the courtyard walls, a quiet overhead fan, jungle plants in barrel-size terracotta pots, brightly coloured knick-knacks to make it all homey, and an elaborate swing set for children. By small stages I have moved from the broom closet and dirty sheets into the semi-private lives of the hotel staff. With time I could continue this move further into local society, at some point becoming fully accepted as one of the people, once from somewhere else, and now from here. I could belong among friends, having a place among them as me myself. Now that my bull-whacking enthusiasm has waned due to lack of leaves left on the inner courtyard trees the cat has emerged from the bushes and finds a place near my feet to lay down on the cool glazed red floor tiles, finding a bit of comfort there. In time I think even the goldfish would feel the welcome vibrations of my coming to feed them, they rising to greet their dinner and me, like me rising to greet the hobbling lady at the diner down the block, she bringing me dinner and me cleaning up my dishes so to save her a trip across the room, her daughter standing quietly waiting for me to finish gazing into space so she can take my table outside to sit customers in the night where they will sit for hours drinking beer, chatting about stuff, shared interests and squabbles over trivia, they being together one kind of people from a specific place, boring, not very clean, too hot, too poor, and they can feel good about the local football team returned from a neighbouring nation where they won a victory on this road trip, returning home in triumph to cheers, laying in their beds at night feeling the surge of youth and health and the delights of home between clean, well-lighted sheets.

Once there was away.

It's just over four months now that I have been this time on the road, having gone from Lima to Asunción. This is probably as far south as I will go in South America this time round, assuming I ever come this way again. I haven't gone far in terms of miles, nothing to compare to those who travel the world in the usual manner, packing up and moving on every few days or so to some other place and activity, having seen a city or a nation, moving on to the next having been there for time sufficient to have been there. And what, really, is there in Asunción to hold the world traveller's attention for more than a day or two? Last day I spent some hours washing my clothes in a stone basin on the patio, and then I took out my sewing kit and stitched a bag and a pair of pants torn in the ruckus of moving, ending it all by reorganising the contents of my pack so all things barely fit again. To make my day complete I spent what was seemingly a suspiciously long time in the dairy section of the local supermarket, drawing the attention of armed security guards who watched me through dark sunglasses as they stood as motionless as I, like animals in the jungle, each waiting for that right moment to spring. Then, the the remorseless sun awaiting me, both of us blistering hot, I made my way back to my hotel room, my litre of milk warming nicely as I walked the block back home where I sat in the shade of the patio and typed for an hour, a slight spill of milk turning thick on the floor before I noticed it. Yes, I could do such mundane things anywhere, not needing to travel so far away as Paraguay at some expense to indulge in laundry and sewing and milk drinking and other boring activities of a dull life. But bay-by-day, life is still life, and life goes on dully. My life hardly changes just because of where I might be this day, and four months from now I could be sitting, sewing, washing my clothes and watching them drip dry in the skin-baking sun where there might be bombs falling freely on a broken city, wild-eyed clots of ragged men firing shiny new sub-machine guns into the cloudless sky, red hot bullets falling randomly from the dust-white air killing the dazed and innocent shuffling home from the market with an armful of bananas and pita bread, no one bothering to look at them crumple to the ground and die. I will still have laundry to do and clothes to mend, a button to stitch, myself attended by unwelcome scrutiny of gun-carrying men watching me through dark sunglasses, me returning from a supermarket with warm milk in a plastic sack, another day in the life of a world-travelling man on the road.

Paraguay (21-23 )

2012-02-10T04:55:00.000-08:00

A turn of the screwed

I had finally made it back to the main street with lights and traffic and the looming idea of a cold shower and not too lumpy bed before I fell down hard on the sidewalk, the kerb, and into the pile of litter on the roadside, having misjudged the height of the step I missed by a long way. After all the miles of walking in the dark, I was a block from home when I stumbled and fell down. Of course I can believe it. The miracle is that I hadn't fallen earlier and broken all of my legs.

I often go out into the city and explore for no good reason other than curiousity. Like a duck, I sometimes take the hard way going and the easy way back, swimming upstream, as it were, and floating back, by walking as far as I can in a day and taking a taxi home. Or sometimes I take a bus as far as I think I can walk back from. But sometimes, like today, I just walk as far as I can and then suffer till I arrive where I began, exhausted and sometimes sick. So, this evening, it being dark on an unlit series of side streets in the centre of suburban Asunción I found a metal bench someone had driven a car into and buckled mostly, and I sat down for a rest, rubbing my eyes and in taking off my glasses and laying them on the seat beside me hearing the tinkle of the lens as it popped out of the frame and fell onto the concrete below. No damage done in this age of plastic lenses, I laughed aloud. I picked up the lens, my glasses being necessary due to a time in my youth when I lost much of the use of one eye, the other being a close relative shutting down in sympathy, and put the lens back in the frame, feeling for the screw to tighten the whole thing into working order. That's the part that has me. The screw was gone. I got on my hands and knees and looked under the bench in the dirt for my screw, finding there a white lollipop stick covered with ants, each one being the size, shape, and color of the missing screw. There was one significant difference, though, and that is that the screw didn't move. I tried to look for the one ant that remained suspiciously in one place. For some reason my devious plan failed to reveal the missing link. I had to move on, slowly, uphill, in the darkness, all of which is lucky for me in that I was going so slowly the two kids on motorbikes rounding the corner were able to veer around me as they turned the corner. I thought how lucky I was that hours of walking on rough paving stones had made my knee hurt so badly that when I had to go uphill in the dark without my glasses that I was going slow enough not to be creamed by kids on scooters. Yup, that's what I thought alright. I also thought that someday I will spend three weeks on a luxury cruise ship laying by the pool drinking alcohol till I get sunstroke and have to see the doctor who will tell the naked nurse to beat me silly with her bare hands while I'm tied to the bed and can't resist her. I've heard stories. Travel has to be about more than me being half-blind in Asunción's suburbs in the night. It has to be about more than a lady burning small piles of rubbish on the street, she smiling and saying hello as I passed by commenting on how beautiful is her neighborhood, blackened ash splotches in front of every home, the smell of woodsmoke thick in the air, food cooking on stoves on tile patios in back yards, dogs barking and children squealing, mothers and fathers sitting out and chatting with friends under the front yard trees. It has to be about drunken binges after the shuffle board championship on the top deck where the events organiser hands out trophies to the women with the most expensive boob job. It has to be about seeing things and doing things far better than the goof shit I get into. And then, almost back to the broom closet I call home, I missed the kerb by a long distance and fell down sideways, the banana vendor coming over to sell me a netfull bag of blackened, tiny, rotten fruits for cheap. Why did I decline? It was such a deal! I must have let pain get the better of my good sense.

I've left behind all hopes of home and family and nation for the sake of seeing the world for myself so I can know some little bits about things I might otherwise not understand at all. I could be using this time to go on three day white-water rafting trips with 20 year old European kids with way more money than I have. But no, I go walking around in people's neighborhoods instead, half-blind, lost and tired, and then I fall down and hurt myself. Some people would call this fun. Some would say I have a screw loose. I just keep walking and hope for the best.

The most dangerous man in Ciudad del Este

A mere 24 hours earlier I had been an old man stumbling and falling down hard on the broken cement streets of Asunción, half-blind or worse due to a pair of broken eye-glasses and a youthful injury that leaves me dependent on the wonders of wire rimmed spectacles and the science of optics. I can see the world, but only with my glasses on. Without, I had fallen down on the street in front of hundreds of people, and I hurt myself. Later that night I couldn't bend my leg, having twisted an already arthritic knee, crashing it into the concrete and the garbage thereon. I'm nearing 60, incredible as it is to me, and falls like that, though I have yet to break a hip, leave me in pain for days, also incredible to me. Still, I carry on, pain being part of my life, part of any long journey, part of the experience of travelling. Fall down one day, move on the next.

I left Asunción by bus to cut across Paraguay, hopeful in the morning of finding all good things by afternoon in Ciudad del Este, reputedly the most corrupt and dangerous city in the nation that is by strange coincidence shaped like a dollar sign. Upon arrival I found corruption as soon as I stepped off the bus and made my way out of the terminal to the taxi stand, preferring that to risking myself by crossing the sprawling and well-established homeless encampment across the street where one might hope to find a bus to town. The taxi driver, having decades of experience as a lying, thieving, cheating scum-bag quoted me a lofty price for my fare, which I agreed to, some 20 gazillion iguanas (more than I should have accepted) and we went the few small and short blocks to the town proper that I could have walked to if only my map had been worth anything at all and if I had paid attention to my surroundings. Then, having arrived at a bank machine where I got some cash, the cabbie loudly demanded more than our original price, I politely reminding him of who his mother is and what his fathers would be if he knew them. There were some other things we can pass over. We must not pass over the cabbie calling for a police man standing near by. The cabbie yelled that I owed almost a dollar on the fare I had given him, and me not being much Paraguayan in looks or temperament or anything else the locals would identify with, the man in uniform holding a shotgun, I recalled an episode similar in which a soldier in Jugoslavia smashed my skull with a rifle butt for some trivial disagreement over a small issue. Cracked skull.... One dollar.... I paid. As I have noted previously, life is pain. A dollar, well, it adds up to less pain.

I'd eaten a sausage on a bun the previous day, and in spite of the heat and the lack of exercise I was feeling hungry again. I had a hotel room with cable offering 20 channels of highly instructive Japanese talk-shows, and I took a cold shower, the water splashing all over the waste basket used for toilet paper disposal, and called myself clean enough for Paraguay. Having a ton of iguanas in my pocket and some pain in my stomach I began looking for a place to sit and indulge in something tasty if not nutritious. Some people are funny about food, like the vegetarian in the desert in Jordan on a three day hike with me whose food went bad within hours, who woke in the night at the sound of me opening a can of peaches, who said not a word, and who was nearly hysterical when I offered him the bottom half, the next day, 12 hours later, asking me if I'd help him steal and slaughter a Bedouin goat he spotted in the distance, I having had the idea he would be starving on our trip if I didn't haul a second load of food for us both. Nice guy, really, but fussy when he had the chance. Thus, I wandered for two or three hours around and through the filthy streets of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay looking for something to fill me up for the day. I got a bottle of orange soda to ensure an adequate input of vitamin C, and explored further, wending my way through the remains of the day's street commerce, boxes, plastic wrap, papers, and rotting food on the streets, men drinking beer and lounging in plastic chairs in front of run-down buildings they probably call home, the streets often lined down the middle with three foot high piles of trash, dividing lanes, garbage piled up on kerbsides like ploughed snow in deepest winter in the north. In the darkness I saw an electric light shining over a push-cart in the midst of mounds of garbage, and there stood a man selling cheeseburgers, just the treat I longed for. He offered to change any of six kinds of currencies and was somewhat disappointed when I merely ordered dinner for iguanas, stupidly handing him seven gazillion and expecting my change. I tried to punish him by using two gazillion iguanas worth of ketchup and mayonnaise, though it made me slightly vomitish to eat what I did to those burgers.

Fed, and fed-up, I hopped a bus and rode around till I was totally lost, finding myself at the crossing into Brazil; and being a world-travelling lost guy I went across the street and called it a success. Determined to keep up my winning streak, I found the bridge to Argentina and scored big time, adding yet another nation to my card. If I had a private plane and lots of money I might well be able to stop in every country on earth in a week, finally satisfying my need to see the world, never again feeling the urge to leave home. If this is two o'clock, it must be Belgium. But no plane and not so much money I instead find myself doing other interesting things, like adroitly dodging an unexpected on-coming car while I was running across the high-way in the dark, the driver somehow not noticing my shiny bright black denim pants and blue shirt. I laugh at death, of course. I don't get such a kick out of spending a lot of money for nothing, money being limited and hard to replace. Death is not nearly as bad as being broke. So, having been to three countries in a few hours I had to decide what else I could do with my cash and my time, death being my constant companion, poverty always looking over my shoulder, and me getting nervous when the money flows like rain in the Chaco, flowing like ideas pouring out of my mind and flooding the philistine desert world around me. What to do?

Some things are so obvious I never give them any thought at all, they being too obvious to think about. But I should have thought that through as a child. I didn't; and then I did years later. I'd done some reading about Ciudad del Este before I got there, knew some things about the place, such as the murder rate [**********] and other crime details. I knew that Hizb'allah organise terrorist attacks and involve themselves in other jihadi activities there, and I knew I could find a mosque full of Moslem terrorists who would, if they knew about me, kill me on the spot. My great idea was to find them, announce myself as an ally in the “Clash of Civilizations” and then to let them know that we should work together in making things so bad that war would not only be inevitable but soon. Together we could make things terrible for the whole damned world, thus bringing about the end of Islamic terrorism in one fell smash-up. Ciudad del Este is one place where such a meeting between the jihadis and me is likely. But I hadn't paid attention to the obvious. Good ideas are a dollar a basket, and my good ideas might not be worth even that much to others. Even if they were, I still need more than ideas to make the world work for me in ways I want it too. I need, as I began to understand deeply soon after, more than me and my great thoughts. I was suddenly not face to face with death, laughing as I chuckled, I was staring at my own idiocy. I had come to a city full of people I could actually work with to make a clever idea come to reality; but I had come alone, thinking my mere presence would be enough to change the course of history-- for the better, of course. This is why I laugh at death. He'd be stuck with me. Free rent, no more worries; yes, of course I laugh. It's living that's so hard to deal with.

Every good idea I have looks extremely simple to accomplish when I see it written on the paper of my mind. Once I arrive at the real, things are often written there in invisible ink, where I soon discover the hidden message, it being: 'Damn! I didn't think about that.' There I was, world-travelling guy who had been in three countries in three hours, and I knew, standing on the street corner beside a hip-high pile of empty Japanese-made electronic goods boxes and rotting fruit rinds and tinted cellophane wrappers in one of the most dangerous cities in the world that I didn't have any plan at all. “Death be not proud.” He'll take anyone. But not me just then. I was stuck with the realisation, maybe for the first time in a long life, that I didn't have a clue about the obvious. This is the kind of insight I gain from travelling the world. Otherwise I might be staring down the nurse's blouse as she snugs a blanket around my legs and spoon-feeds me pudding. That might be cool for a day, but I do hope for a little more from life.

Sometimes I think, 'Dag, bang thy head.' But then I recall that there seem to be no shortage of guys willing to do that for me, so I just shuffle away and hope no one has noticed and that I don't have a group of teen-aged girls sniggering as I walk past, some kid with pimples flicking a cigarette butt at me when my back is turned, a parent clutching a young child, saying, “For God's sake, don't ever become like that man there.” This is what experts in the field would call not a very good day. But I changed that.

I considered my dwindling mound of iguanas and pondered my success at penetrating Jihad Central in Ciuday del Este by taking a taxi to a mosque, entering therein, and telling the Ummah my fabulous plan for destroying the known world. What an idea! What I call Reason prevailed. I had stood staring into space for quiet some time when I noticed I was next to a group of young men on motorbikes, all of them revving their engines and laughing and calling out to girls passing by. I said to one that I have a bike, a Kawasaki 650. Magic words. All the bikes around me ranged from the low 100ccs to mid-200s. My bike could leave them all in the dust immediately. They could only dream of a life beyond tiny bikes and nights otherwise spent sitting on plastic chairs outside the house, drinking quarts of beer with layers of dead flies floating in the foam. 'Varoom! I say.'

I read and hear that Ciudad del Este is a dangerous place, and I went there looking for trouble, failing to find even a hint of it because I seem to lack the intelligence to plan properly for it. But, all those bikes and not a lot going on. I said I would like to try one out, and made some jokes and became an old guy the kids sort of liked. I offered to rent one of the bikes, asking if another would come along beside me as I rode around a bit. I haggled till I was satisfied I couldn't do better, and with a young fellow I took off into the mean streets of Ciudad del Este; me rounding corners on my no-name 150cc bike; almost dragging my knee on the pavement as I hung low over the side, counter-steering like a pro, and giving it the juice like a maniac on the straight-aways; going air-born when I met a hidden speed-bump, landing with such force that next day I could barely walk from the pain in my hips; no helmet, no gloves, no licence, and me whizzing between cars and through intersections without a thought; me-- the most dangerous man in Ciudad del Este.

Can't even get killed. One of these times that might not be so funny.

CSI As A One Man Show

Ciudad del Este was one time the setting for an episode of the popular television show, Crime Scene Investigations, (CSI) [********] and now that I have my own experience in the city to compare to theirs, the cast and crew of the show, I see too clearly that I have failed on a cosmic scale by being alone in the city where they were many; by being basically poor while they are wealthy; by being an outsider where they are the centre of all attraction and attention. I can't complain that I'm not a rich and famous t.v. person making the world happy in my professional capacity as an entertainer. I didn't try that and for now obvious reason other than a conspiracy among jealous colleagues fail. This failure was all mine, and totally predictable and preventable. Even by my own low standards I could have done something rather than nothing, and I could have failed with some panache had I really tried at all to win. Even an independent traveller, i.e. a backpacking old guy with not too much money, could have done a better job than I had I only tried a bit of sense and a thousand dollars into my stay. And if I had had a determined and and rational plan to meet jihadis there my visit, even if it had been of short duration, would have been at least an honest attempt at furthering my desire to wage war against the world order as we know it, an order that brings so much unnecessary ill-treatment to the innocent. But I didn't spend my money on that. Fear of future hunger and homelessness prevented me from trying to do one thing I dearly want to win at: bringing about a war between the thugs of Islam and their leftard allies and folks like me, maybe not so pure ourselves-- speaking for myself, of course. My one-man dog and pony show lacked the animals, leaving me kind of nekked on an empty stage with no audience to boo me. I shuffled off the stage of my own vanities and rode a motorcycle, my own Kawasaki 650 making the local bikes look like clown toys at the circus, and still me having a better time than any in Paraguay to this point and beyond. Fun aside, in failure is sometimes learning to do better next time.

My idiot breeze through Ciudad del Este showed my clearly something I had missed to date: That the actors don't star alone, shining of their own brilliance; they are the faces of the corporation behind them, the many men and women who toil to make the few look stellar. There is no one-man show of the natural genius. Millions of dollars daily pour into the corporation to make magic real. It's the people in the background, the accountants and the carpenters and insurance men and typing filers and janitors who in combination make the stars shine. My one-man show on the road was a flop. Now I get it.

[More to come as I complete the typing.]

These Boots are Made for Standing

Hey! Hey! It's the Mormons!

Hey! Hey! It's the Mennonites!

A Yellow Leather Hat

A New Idea in Concepción

Leaving Paraguay

Official Duck

The Wild Adventures of a Japanese Dentist and His Charming Wife Who Hated Me and My Shoes

Born in the You Sez Ess Yes

At the feet of Gumby Death Angel

2012-01-16T19:04:00.000-08:00

I saw from the centre of the city of Tarija, Bolivia a church on a bluff that looked impossible to climb without real gear, so I decided to try it without anyway. I found a road that made it possible to walk. It's not, as I had thought, a church but a cemetery.

A couple of things interested me, the first being the road itself, all hand-laid stones.

It's pretty, of course, but if one thinks of roads before we had the layered marvels that came about in the 19th century, then we are grateful that there are now roads leading through the Andes that can and do take the likes of me to wonders unimaginable without having ridden there. I love roads. Read an account of Defoe or Dr. Johnson travelling, or try African roads and see what I mean. But this road up to the cemetery is pretty, and it led me to a garden worth the visit.

[Garden walls at the cemetery]

I got caught in a rainstorm at the cemetary, which prompted me to write a short piece to come when I have another good connection, "Raindrops Keep Falling on the Dead." It has to wait. Butch Cassidy, Sundance Kid, and Che are all dead and won't mind.

Hope you can return for it later.

Meanwhiles, I sat out the rain and checked out the statue that first prompted me to make the climb.
I called it Gumby Death Angel. If I can't think of anything better at least I had a good climb up and down the hill. I considered Klaatu, but I think I should quit while I'm winning.

More on this later.
...\

Upward and Paraguard

2012-01-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Paraguay in the next few days, assuming I can get a bus out of Tarija, Bolivia. It was so hard to find a hotel room when I first got here that I seriously considered getting back on a bus and leaving. I am lucky that I found a place at last, and that I really like this town.

Today I tried leaving, and I couldn't get a bus ticket. Not one of the three companies going to Villamonte, Bolivia had a seat for sale. That place is the last bus stop before the frontier, which is a few hundred miles further. I don't know how I will find a hotel room there. I went back to the hotel I had checked out of earlier today and was told there were no rooms left. It was the same all over town. I can't understand this place. I finally ended up in a luxury place with super wifi, and hence, if one looks, there are a dozen posts this evening alone and nothing much for most of a month in Bolivia. Money does wonders for this old boy.

Soon it's Paraguay. I have my visa long ago from the embassy in La Paz.

Neat building, great-looking fancy visa befitting a Third World country that impresses people with paper stuff like visas. Nicer the visa, worse the country, in my experience. But life is for learning.

Raul Shaw Boutier Moreno, La Paz

2012-01-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

Raul Shaw Moreno, Bolivian music's hitman brings tears of love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7YamosE6IE

I haven't had a chance to listen to his music yet, so if one shops around and finds anything particularly nice, let me know so I can post a link here.

I found a parkette on a hilltop in La Paz where Moreno's friends and fans have made a lovely monument to him. I think anyone who inspires that is worth a listen to. I am really taken by the simplest thing: that the wrought iron fence that keeps folks like me from falling off the cliff is designed to look like musical notes. What a neat piece of thoughtfulness.

In all, this shows me that Bolivia and life in general can be grand if only one has a bit of money, a bit of time, and a desire to love living. It doesn't take too much beyond attitude and a few dollars in a clean, well-lighted place.

It's a riot.

2012-01-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

I single-handedly captured the riot police squad in downtown La Paz a month ago, but they cost a lot to feed so I let them go.

I can't say these are nice guys, they being the riot squad, but the two who hung around were damned good sports to pose with me while the other dozen menaced the crowd who wanted to get in on this famous shot.

Thanks UTOP La Paz.

Many new post and photos.

2012-01-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

I have a great internet connection for the evening, and thus I've posted as many pieces as I can, most with photos. Feel free to revisit old posts to see some of the photos I haven't been able to get up for a month.

New posts as of today are out of order but I have limited time for now to deal with that. Will sort things out when I return to some really nice hotel with high-speed wifi.

Meanwhiles, I hope to make the second-last leg of my trip to the Paraguayan border tomorrow. Will be with us as often as the Internet connections allow.

For now,
Yalla, Dag.

Lake Titicaca, Peru.

2012-01-16T16:58:00.000-08:00

Lake Titicaca: Introduction

[This is not yet finished, a section in the middle to come. Will up-date as I can.]

Some people cannot stand to be alone, themselves as they are. They need “identity.” They have to have the 'right ideas.' Some people cannot be satisfied with themselves as they are, which is not to say people don't effectively improve their person by effort and diligence; for those who cannot manage the genuine attempt as often as not some adopt a persona to make themselves at least appear to be someone far greater than accomplishment allows for, to appear to be greater than the normal if mediocre person one most usually is, even among those accomplished. Some people who have little and want greatness join organizations to lend themselves their otherwise lacking charms; they might wear uniforms to lend themselves authority, prestige, or valued identity as a member of a larger and important group; they might, for example, join the military, the police force, or they might become anarchists in conformity with their chosen peers. Some go for flamboyance, and others might go for striking ugliness, male homosexuals in the first instance, female homosexuals in the latter. Such is one way of saying to the world, “I am no longer the pitiful me that I was; I am now part of some greater thing that exceeds all mediocrities.” This puts the poseur in a position of, if not strength at least of protection from harm, protection from judgment for ones otherwise lack of being interesting to the masses. One can dress up to attempt elevation, and those who scorn such are then deemed to be inferior to the greater identity. The latter's criticism, voiced or not, is proof of their inferiority and thus proves the rightness of the poseur.

Some cast themselves out by outrageous dress, while others don the wardrobes of intellectual fashion every bit as outrageous as that of transvestites. One is not the thing one is, one is a pose. The accomplishment is false, but it is ones own against a judgmental world. Pose is shield. Pose is weapon. Some don the garb of “ideas” in the same way transvestites don the garb of women that they are not, in ideas as in dress, one fad following another, the continuity among “ideas” being (usually) that of collectivism and victimhood. “You are not criticizing my person, you are criticizing my kind, over which I have no control. I am therefore innocent, and you are guilty of oppression.” The suit of identity covers the mediocrity of the bare self, ideas protective and concealing, enhancing and demonstrative, all of it false and injurious to the pitiful mediocrities beneath the skirts of Eros. One is great because one belongs to greatness. Others make one great, all failures together being grand in opposition to the mediocre. Join in and be one.

One current form of ideological garb is philobarbarism, the pose of the love of barbarians by those who are otherwise effete, i.e. the relatively well off Modernist. Today, the philobarbarist attaches himself to the “noble savage” as fellow victim and object of affection for whom one might feel sympathy due to ones own hated self as past part of an oppressive system, i.e. the system of Modernity, a system that seldom rewards failure. In terms of Modernity, barbarism is such a failure, and to be a barbarian is to be outside the mediocre norm, as with the poseur who has fled it too. In a search for status, to adopt as a pet some barbarian one can “save” from ones rejected norm is a rise beyond all other possibilities. The more exotic the barbarian, the more outrageous the barbarian's norms, the higher the status for the philobarbarist poseur. The barbarian? He who is outside the Modern. The Modern? The capitalist system the failed man flees in order to find a shelter from his mediocrity in the first place. The barbarian becomes a mascot for such a failed being, a banner to raise, a flag to wave at the mediocre bull of the norm. To abandon Modernity in favor of a Romantic pseudo-life of the mind as if there were or could be a Golden Age utopia to recreate, placing oneself at the top of such an imaginary world where one would rule the rejected and where one would at last be powerful and respected not as the mediocrity one is but as the demi-god one wishes to be, is to don the apparel of mystic seer, one who sees beyond, who knows the Truth, who is the rejected genius the mediocre masses are too stupid to understand the greatness of. The rejected system today is that of free and competitive markets in which one is rewarded according to ones performance in competition with ones peers. To reject the system of competition itself and to place oneself above it is to automatically rise to the top, though one will be a rejected genius suffering from the stupidity of the masses. A noble suffering among noble savages one would rule. The genius who cannot succeed in the competitive market can succeed in his imaginary world, and he rejects his failure in the world as it is, a world he must in turn hate and wish to destroy so he can pretend to greatness in his own mind. Rejection today is the rejection of the Modern, that competitive race against other mediocrities. Rather, one does not compete but embraces the world's most outrageous losers in this race, the worse the better, the most renegade the lovelier. The first will be last and last will be first in this day dream of the rejected rejector. That it will never come to be is the whole charm of it, never putting to the test the wishes of the fantasist, he who can forever be victim of evil powers bent on destroying all the failure's good wishes. The greater the failure, the more moral the suffering in it. It cannot be the fault of the great moralist to fail when the world is filled with so much evil. In trying, and in failing to win, the failed man is all the more noble for trying at all. That the failed genius is reduced to packing boxes in a factory is proof positive of the evils of the system. He is unrecognised only because the system is ruled by idiots. That is not his fault. Those who might recognise his genius would be those who are at odds too with Modernity, i.e. the barbarians of the world, his allies in rejection. Thus it is not surprising that one will find some such philobarbarists in the outlands of Peru, as at Lake Titicaca. One might find, as I did on a twelve hour boat ride, three such self-rejected people as we visited the floating “islands” of the Uros and the folk of the island of Taquile. The latter's claim to fame boasting the most outrageously expensive and worthless restaurant in South America as the sole purpose of its fame. But if it looks “primitive” it satisfies the philobarbarist intensely, regardless of the price one pays for such self-delusion. What is essential? The authentic.

Lake Titicaca: Part One

Our boat left Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca for a lovely trip across the deep blue waters on a sunny and warm late Spring day, the constant danger of sinking due to a sudden fury of waves being part of the experience one pays for. This day, at worst, the waves hardly exceeded a foot and a half, though it was enough to make some nervous, the boat rocking severely side to side, the waves tossing us about like dolls without will. But our day began in tranquility and optimism, making our way to the tortora reed Floating Islands of the Uros and Aymara people who live on them at Lake Titicaca.

It is finger thick tortora reeds in Lake Titicaca that the people of the floating islands use to make these rafts they live on, the rafts being the attraction that brings so many tourist to look at them and spend their money to visit, to ooh and ahh and smile at the exotic natives who live on them. I'm a simple philistine who enjoys the meditative aspects of boat rides. Upon landing at the Uros Islands, I looked, as did others, as a couple of local residents put on a show for us, in this case at a demonstration of tying together with nylon string the bundles of reeds that support the “islands” large and small, the former being family areas, the larger being the so-called commercial islands meant to receive tourists. The commercial islands have exhibits of handicrafts for sale, the main source of income for the locals, though it seems that mostly none of this array of stuff is made on the islands themselves, as pottery needs a kiln, an impossibility on a reed island, and the lack of animals making the production of fabric equally impossible there. But for most, such pickiness defeats the point of the visit, which is to imagine a simpler time and place in the life of man. For most it is but a diversion from the steady grind of homeland chores and duties, a few keep-sake reminders to bring a smile to those who see them on their domestic scene sometime later. It is an innocence not to be disparaged by the cynical. I was there. I had my experience, and it is of some value for that sake alone, regardless of the quality of the reality. Such needs no other justification. It is the life of the islanders to pretend that they are noble savages, and it is the duty of the tourist to pretend this is a good thing. Few would take it seriously beyond the experience of having a day's entertainment. But, aside from the Disney Land on the Lake atmosphere, there are some serious needs that one must address, one being the 12 foot depth of the lake at this point, a concern for the risk of cholera, a catastrophe the Peruvian people are well acquainted with.

Each commercial island is thus outfitted with a sewage treatment plant, in the case of the island we visited, cleverly disguised in a falling down tin shack at the far end of the island, outside the range of the typical tourist with little interest in such ignoble things as waste treatment. To play for tourists at being a primitive is fine as income, but life prevails, and modern sewerage, as unromantic as it gets, is one of those practical realities one addresses however quietly and discretely. It is the imported knick-knacks that are the draw and reason for the islands, not a display of the necessities of life in the modern that make it all happen. If not for the display and sale of knick-knacks there would be no reason for such islands to exist for any but the most disturbed misanthropes. They might well be pleased to reject sewerage themselves, though the risk to them will be slight since others make up the gap. If not for tourism, the life of the local would be reduced to subsistence on smelt -like fish, a dwindling resource since the planting of Canadian trout and Argentine king-fish, more or less out of range of the locals on the islands. Thus it is that the islanders make twice weekly runs across to the mainland for supplies. They enjoy Coca Cola as much as anyone else. It's a show as much as is Disney Land or Las Vegas, and one must accept it as such or face a devastating let-down of failed “authenticity” that one really must not expect from the sane.

I'm up for a show like the next man, but my curiosity propels me further sometimes to look for the insides of things I witness; thus I found myself distant from the group and standing face to face, as it were, with a very sturdy boat with an outboard motor attachment, a boat the locals use to go back and forth across the lake. At the other end of the island were highly stylised reed boats, having nothing to do with the daily doings of practical living. These people are not fools, risking their lives in high waves for nothing.

Even of those who make a living as characters in a watery diorama of the floating islands for the sake of tourists there is the practicality of living in the rest of the world, which includes not merely wealth but health, and so it is that though there are clinics for the masses, medicine itself is not free, and one must work to make a living, however eccentric ones profession might be, whether as a taxi driver or as a professional Indian on a raft. So, one hides the real from those who come to engage in the show, much as one hides the ropes and ladders from the audience at any performance. Most of us suspend our disbelief but not our genuine appreciation for the real behind the screens of performance itself. We would know, if we thought it through (and mostly we would not) that somewhere there must be a sewerage plant. Most of us are acutely aware of the artifice of the performance. Some few are not at all aware, having given over their lives and minds to artifice as reality, beyond which they cannot see. I have, sorry to say, lived with genuine primitives at the urgent insistence of a lonely traveler who wanted to experience such at first hand, barely surviving it, having come down with life-threatening dysentery for his troubles. I half carried him to the nearest village where the miracles of modern pharmacy allowed me to continue to carry him to greater Modernity, i.e. a hospital where his life was saved in time for him to carry on to further travels into the heart of illness. Few are so reckless.

My boat ride, a personal experience, to the Uros Islands, beyond, and back again, was isolated from my fellows, I being, as it turns out, a solitary soul at heart, though such is always a surprising insight to me. I did meet and did enjoy the company of strangers, though, and without their presence on the boat my solitude, though I would have enjoyed it, would have made the trip less interesting than it turned out. But there were not merely two couples of interest to me but three, as we shall see in the next part of this account. It is the third couple who become the centre-piece of my trip to the islands of Lake Titicaca.

Lake Titicaca: Part Two

I was the last to board our boat, and thus sat in the last seat at the stern, which gave me full-on view of my fellow passengers and crew. Soon after we set sail, as it were, many of my fellows came past and climbed onto the canopy roof for a better view of the harbour and the lake. I stayed in my seat, not having slept in three days, and was nervous that the vibration of the motor would lull me to sleep and make me miss the trip, but I sat because I was too tired to move. I waited for the plunge into the darkness. I remained wide awake, even moreso than on land, unlike the metro-sexual 20 something in the seat across the aisle who fell asleep almost instantly and who stayed that way till his friends roused him and took him to the back of the boat deck, he lying down, face exposed to the sun. I didn't pay attention for a long while, but I realised at last that his thin pale face would blister in the sun; so, as I was about to move to wake him, another passenger laid a sweater over him to keep him from serious burning. I sat back then and enjoyed the view of the lake, the churning waves of the wake, and the sunny blue sky in what would be dead winter were I stranded in the north.

I'd been watching a couple at the prow of the boat, a couple resident at my hotel. When they came down the aisle to take a turn sitting on the cabin roof they stopped briefly chat with me, the girl strikingly pretty, vivacious, and exuberantly affectionate with her boyfriend, devoted partners, cooing and caressing like newly weds on honeymoon. The severely overweight and not particularly handsome boyfriend was in seventh heaven, sighing with delight, his huge round face the picture of happiness. I was happy for them.

A fellow across the aisle I chatted with turned out to be riding a motorcycle from Mexico to parts south unknown before returning to work in America. He'd noted my leather bike jacket, and so we talked about bikes and travel, though he being an engineer, my interest turned quickly to sewerage, which I have only the slightest understanding of, but matched with huge enthusiasm. He was rescued by his girlfriend, a Ph.D. In genetics, she being a charming and very attractive young lady, sophisticated and cool in a natural way that was as appealing as was the vivacious girl with the infatuated boyfriend. There were many couples aboard and I was alone to meet them. When asked, I explained that no one likes me. Strangely, most people laugh and we begin conversations and pass some pleasant time together till once again I am alone. In part my solitude is of my own choosing, I having the time and freedom to think and consider the thinking of others without interruption beyond my own nagging interior voice. And now, after a long hiatus from the road I find that I also appreciate in new ways the company of locals, so different in a mere matter of a few years, the locals, those who previously were stagnant and myopic and ignorant now blossoming into exotic beings I find I often prefer to my own people, those being ones who truly make me love my solitude, one such being the owner of a loud, deep, English accent and a haughty and surly tone that my superficial friendliness encouraged further to prompt his middling idiocy and laughable pretensions. He too was alone.

I asked the young Englishman, in the hope of starting a conversation about nothing at all-- something at the level of cocktail party chat-- where he was from, though it was clear he's from upper southern England, university educated, and not at all bright. I am a democrat. People surprise me if given a chance, often to my delight. But not always. Where is he from? Oh, silly me. In his highest haughty he dismissed me with: “It doesn't matter.” But of course not, we all being one in a multi-cultural world of the good European who hates his shameful imperialist past and loves nature and his fellow victims of Modernity. He's European, a man of the world, a sophisticate, an intellectual. What was I thinking as I said in today's roughly equivalent 'How do you do'? No, it is not a question; it is an English formality. I recalled an anecdote from W. Somerset Maugham, a young American man on an ocean liner who sleeps with an English matron. After arrival and some time passed, he meets the matron at a party where she ignores him. In a snit he complains that she didn't ignore him on the ship, she had sex with him. Her reply summed up for me the Englishman on my little boat: “What makes you think that constitutes an introduction?” Yes, we speak the same language, but the English are not really human.

I moved on, glancing at the sick metro-sexual who is actually European. He made not a sound, too sick to move and moan. His friends came and looked at him on occasion. He was delicate to begin with, and sickly; he looked worse. His friends seemed to treat him the way animals sniff a sick fellow, though here no sniffing. I looked away, it not being my concern.

Uros Islands

We landed at the Uros islands and disembarked to watch an embarrassing comedy skit put on by the locals, how they hunt with a pop-gun, how a rubber duck falls to the ground, how everyone is happy and fun. We were directed to the handicrafts available at various stations around this small space of Utopia. I found myself wandering, weaving through the perfectly made reed huts that looked like sets from a Hollywood movie. Behind the props I stumbled upon a row of small motorboats hidden in the reeds moored at the floating islands, those effectively temporary rafts, an illusory place for the tourist to spend a bit of time, spend a bit of money, to take away some pleasant memories, the locals living another day.

The sky was blue, the sun warm, and to wander on the yellow reed bales made for a nice day among the smiling locals and brightly coloured handicraft items displayed all around us. I spotted what I assumed to be a sewage treatment shack, and my day was better. I nodded to myself and returned to the group, encountering on the short walk the girl whose friend was sick. She stood alone on the reeds, smoking a cigarette, gazing into space. After a meaningless and insincere statement of sympathy for her sick metro-sexual friend I moved away and flirted with a local lady roughly my age. We could flirt and smile and laugh quietly because we're old enough to know it's just a game we play, that no one is hurt, no one is broken.

Taquila Island

The talk on hats was so trite that even a cultural anthropologist would snort in derision. Questions? Well, yes. 'Why is it that when it's so hard to get a date on Saturday night that people still throw virgins into volcanoes?' But I figured there was no point in revealing myself as a dirty of man, so for once I kept my mouth shut.

Return to Puna

At the dock we boarded the boat in silence, sat in, looked at the girl who had left her friend behind somewhere on the island. We went out into the depths of the lake and made our way homeward. Our boat rocked badly on the open water, driving us into the cabin for hand-holds, giving me the happy thought that I could drown in the relative comfort of a soft seat. The swells, once I reined in my imagination, were probably no more than a meter, that is to say, a foot and a half high, but the boat was rocking badly and some passengers were alarmed. As well, the unspoken concern for our lost passenger was in the air. Looking out the window we saw a huge plume of grey smoke rising from the water somewhere, the fire there attributed to the girl's cigarette smoking on the reed island, indicative of the general feeling toward her. I looked at my shoes. I should buy new ones soon. It's important.

We passed yet another billow of smoke on the water, though the source was too distant to see in the growing gloom. The third was very clear to see, two bright orange spots burning hard in the darkness. A German man spoke with at least the voice of authority, stating, “The colours of diesel and plastic.” A boat was burning on the lake, the water freezing cold. When another said he hoped those aboard had gotten off none pursued the thought.

We went on till the fire was too far to see, and the boat came into a calm. Suddenly we stopped dead. There was some panic among the passengers, one lady becoming a bit noisy, a stifled cry from another near me, and then the sound of a motorboat in the near distant dark. The captain announced that all was well, that a couple of people would be leaving the boat to spend a night on the floating Uros Islands with a local family, those two being the couple who had abandoned their sick friend.

Some things to some people are as important as new shoes, and for the couple in question, spending a night with locals on a floating island is that important. Rather than stay behind at Taquila Island, they had decided to continue on to experience the authenticity of those who have abandoned the vacuity of Modern living and its corruption and amorality, its evil neglect of the oppressed. How much better than European banality than to spend time with those who live an incredible 'real' life on the floating islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru.

As they boarded the electric outboard motorboat for the islands, no one said good-bye to them. There was silence as the burning boat across the lake flared in the distance. I thought the engineer would break the silence by spitting in disgust, but all was quiet as the couple departed, the motor itself silent. The lovers at the front of the cabin were oblivious to it all; the engineer's girlfriend rested her head on his shoulder. I broke the silence by eating chocolate chip cookies.

Lake Titicaca: Epilogue

I've written a few drafts now of the end of our outing, attempting to alter these minor chords to something harmonious, but my notes remain the same, our voyage to the islands of Lake Titicaca and back variations of variations, each draft telling the the same story in the same way with the same ending. I can't say it's unhappy or that I would wish it were different. It is a matter of a day, and life is oft times hard.

On the street in front of my hotel a few hours after our return I saw the newly-wed unmarried love girl as she approached me, stepping close, shaking my hand, coming closer, holding my hand in hers, hers warm and soft, her eyes sparkling; and she smiled and cooed and caressed me there, her bright blue-grey eyes the very vision of tender care and sweet promise. I let go of her hand but still she held me, her breath on my cheek, her scent enveloping me, and I have not felt such love in years as she whispered to me that her friend was leaving for home in the morning, that she would remain. I need not be alone.

To some, only the idea of people is important. Themselves are the ideas of others. The real is what they dream. For some, it is the idea of a Golden Age to flee to, a floating island as real as a painting by any Surrealist. I looked at a real woman in the real world. Her man tomorrow would leave her. It is hard reality that people have ideas. These people cannot stand to be alone as they are. One man is another man is any man.

She held me. Rocked by dark waves and the possibility of drowning, there could be a hand to hold onto, and I could float on her island....

Tarija, Bolivia

2012-01-16T15:54:00.000-08:00

I'd never heard of this city till the landlord at Sucre handed me a ticket to go and be on my way to Paraguay. Tarija is not really on the way the way I intend to go, i.e. through el Chaco, from north to south, skipping the usual Argentine route so few take.

To my delight, and it took a long while, I find this to be a most excellent city. However, I had difficulty finding a taxi from the bus station, as it were, that would take me to the city centre. I'd arrived at the station, a round spot with kiosks and buses that pull up around it, at 5:00 a.m., dead tired after a sleepless night of watching the Andes by moonlight. No driver would take me to the city centre. I had to cross a major blvd to find a taxi driver who didn't notice I had come from the station. I got him to take me to a hotel, booked full, they told me, and then to another, and finally, after at least ten places with no vacancies, I found one on a dirty side street, a one star dump that I took without complaint. I showered, and having slept for a few hours took a look around town. My pleasure. What a lovely looking place. Getting lost within minutes I found myself by the river.

It started to rain at some point, so I took shelter in a church in this city that supposedly considers itself more Argentine than Bolivian.
I'm left wondering about that. In a walk a day later I missed the road to the cemetery, which I assumed was a church on a hilltop. Along the wrong way, I spotted a nicely painted house.

Some things are universal, such as love. Saw that, too. It's likely more meaningful in a foreign language, forcing one to repeat it to ones loved on in Spanish.
Yeah, I'm sentimental. More later about my trip to the cemetery and more of the city.

And stuff.

Livin' Latina NoKo

2012-01-16T15:34:00.000-08:00

In days to come it will be my pleasure to take the last bus in Bolivia to shining city on the hill, Villemonte, Bolivia somewhere to the east of Tarija, a fine city I had not known of a week ago. And from the city of Villemonte I will alight form my bus sometime in the early hours of the day to make my way to the frontier of Paraguay; and there, taking my chances with local transportation, I will go yet farther south through the lowlands of el Chaco to the city of Filadelfia,, onward south again to Asunción, and to the lost jungle utopia of Elizabeth Nietzsche-Forster's proto-Nazi communal failure, Neuvo Germania, temporary home of Dr. Mengele, dark paradise of the blind Aryan descendants of the perfect race, sightless from birth, bequeathed a life of lack of vision by visionary fore-bearers. Nor will my road end at the end of the Naziesque retreat from Modernity: I will continue to the farthest reaches of civil sanity to the jihadi refuge of Ciudad del Este, the tri-borders area of Paraguay where Muslims have taken themselves to hatch plots against humanity, their post-Nazi schemes fitting in perfectly with the past lost to blindness in the jungles, as drowned and unmourned as Mengele himself. I'm off to Paraguay, the land once described in a 1970s Rolling Stone magazine headline as “'The Last Place on Earth for the Worst People in the World.”

Far from expecting a brutal autarkic dictatorship of the Stroessner regime of old, of peasants toiling for latifundista fascist land barons it is my uninformed guess that I will arrive in a land rural and benign, populated by quiet people in the countryside, lively and pleasant in the city, but perhaps not ground down by the the weight of post-Modernity's demands for public moralistic purity and the deluge of self-destruction in the pursuit of personal excellence at the cost of life itself. In Paraguay I do not expect the German fascist fist to crush me and all others in the nation as of old, nor do I expect the vicious assaults on man's nature that are the norm today in the Modern world, in Canada, for example, the nation of my choice for the mantle of Paraguay's past designation.

Time will tell me if my guess is correct, that Paraguay is a green and pleasant land of rural living, a city by the river sometimes swollen and sometimes quiet and languid, peaceful and perhaps charming. Time will tell me, and I will tell these pages. I will tell if I come to the Latin version of North Korea or if I have left it in leaving the living of Livin' Ca-Nada Loco.

High Andes Drifter

2012-01-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

Curiosity finally drove me to find out just how high in the world I am here in the Andes, which I did by looking at other places in the world to compare this to. Back home we make a big deal of Denver, the Mile High City. Today I snort. Tourists sometimes mention the thin air and chill of Mexico City, higher still. And we all know of the high Himalayas, home of Mount Everest, highest mountain in the world, dwarfing Denver and Mexico City without question. South America, land of the steaming Amazon jungle, the gentle breezes of the Argentine pampas, the swamp lands of the Guianas and the rolling rivers of Venezuela bring to mind ever-warm landscapes of easy summer living and laid back, life-loving people, coups and revolutions aside. I for one had never till yesterday had any thought of comparing South America, e.g. La Paz, to the elevations of Lhasa, Tibet. Today, depending on the source, I know that they beat each other by a hundred feet, each over 13,000 feet. Bolivia, the Himalayas of South America.

When I was years ago bumming around the Dead Sea, lowest point on earth, so far as I know, I read about two deserters from the Roman army who were spotted running away and were chased to a cliff over the sea. Facing death, they jumped, followed by soldiers hurling spears and shooting arrows at them as they swam away. The Roman commander tired of that and decided to let the deserters drown. Of course, the deserters did not drown, and the commander, seeing them live, decided to let them go, anyone being that lucky deserving to live and go free.

I've hiked f along the bottom of the Grand Canyon climbed Mount Olympus and Mount Zion, and I've dined atop the World Trade Centre tower in Manhattan. I've been in pain so terrible I can't recall days at a time, and I've had sex that dissolved me into the oceanic. Highs and lows of many kinds, today being in the Andean highlands, drifting ghost-like toward el Chaco and some further differences I cannot foretell the outcome of visiting. Maybe good, maybe bad, high or low. I leap and hope. I'm just curious.

Canterboli Tales

2012-01-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

My mind is crammed with world literature, poetry, history of times and places past and exotic, filled with the arcane and the wondrous, intellectual delights and much too awful to recall without falling depressed into debilitation and sickness, weltschmertz, and loathing; but there is the swell of grand and elaborate hopes and dreams, visions of an impossible future of unfolding treasures and mad joys to indulge, of joke to retell. I have a full mind. But my Spanish is limited, and I slow down to a halt often enough, finding myself in a void of communication, searching for something I just do not have, i.e. the word that others will understand. And then, too, I find my English lowers to the simple, to the cliched, to the basic just above my Spanish. I speak the easy and the immediate. Gone are Bocaccio, Dante, Chaucer. 'I'm going to the tienda to buy soap.' This I say to travelers I meet, my tale, my contribution.

People I meet are often mysteries to me, as occult as stones. And when their secrets are reveled to me, when I hit on the right words and combinations thereof, I find often that they are going to the tienda to buy soap.

Few people traveling (those I meet) are on a pilgrimage to some holy site of universal power, they chattering away the days telling tales of the high and low to wile away the hours and the days as they move slowly toward the magnificent, telling tales of eternal delight. Nor are they driven from their homes by plagues, public or private, in search of anything much more than moving along from here to there in search of another mile and tea at a cafe in the sun, a stroll down the market highstreet to browse among local handicrafts for some thing or other to take back home when the traveling is done. Some might stop on the sidewalk briefly to admire the old statuary atop a church facade, or they might stop for ice-cream to eat under the shelter of a tree in the park. The tale of the day is cosmically interesting insofar as it is possible. The day of travel is as simple as buying soap. The great literature of the world rests idly in my mind, and I long to chat with simple girls, clean and smiling, their tales of sweet smells and smooth skin and warm water, tales of soap and bath.

19/21

2012-01-16T15:27:00.000-08:00

I've gone about as far as I can in my search for the Nineteenth Century, and here in southern Bolivia where shops are filled with 16 speed Oster blenders and see-through nylon panties and a hundred varieties of Chinese radios and toys that cause moments of psychic storms, I come as close as possible in my time to that lost time I long for-- to a place where a band of haggard men play old beaten brass

horns to the beat of cracked drums as they return from a funeral, previously solemn, now up-beat, the Twentieth Century all around them in their mourning, resignation tempered with belief in the good of eternity. The small group of men carrying a make-shift shrine of plastic flowers and a doll like Jesus half hidden in a polyester blanket, these men trudge up the street in old plastic sandals and ragged cotton jeans, slowly, slowly, to the annoyance of the family caught behind them on a narrow stone lane, the father tapping impatiently on the steering wheel of his shiny silver-grey Hummer, plump and clean well-dressed children in the back seat gawking at the men in procession ahead.

Electricity obliterates any illusion I might hope to wish for that this is the last vestige of the Nineteenth Century. The metal frames holding up the plastic tarp roof of a sidewalk vendor selling medicinal herbs and witchcraft charms from a stack of boxes printed in China defeats my hopes. But pregnancy gives my spirits a lift in this time, a scene of vitality the Nineteenth Century lacked, pregnancy being a delight and a fulfillment today that was a potential death sentence then, now a promise of good, a curse to others in the Modern world of the Twenty-first Century so many Modernists claim to despise, the latter ignorantly longing for a time closer to that of the hunter-gatherer era of starvation, rampant disease, total ignorance of the night, and the love of the darkness of the mind that is pre-Modernity.

In this land of relative simplicity of work, family, and death I startled those in the courtyard of my hotel when, leaving the shower, I suddenly crouched stark naked behind a stone column, reaching pointlessly for my non-existent pistol, trying to point it at the sound of distant fire-crackers exploding harmlessly elsewhere. This is not the Nineteenth Century. This is not the war. As much as my despised fellows in other lands I fall far short of living in the age of my time.

Andean Corn God

2012-01-16T15:24:00.000-08:00

I took a bus through the Andes from Sucre to Tarija, and I can easily believe in God now that I have crested these high Andean plateaus and seen with my own eyes thereon miles and miles of crops growing on otherwise desolate plains at the very top to the world, these majestic mesas producing for the first time in history food enough for the people of a nation. If every man on earth today were to pile up dirt and stone, at the end of a lifetime they might altogether rival the being of one mountain here among the thousands standing silently and without celebration, these marvels of nature, mute and unremarkable in their glory. And yet it is only a few scattered families working who outstrip nature in a season by growing corn on these mountain tops so high they leave most men breathless and sick. Corn grows here enough to feed a million men for a year. And there are more mountains yet to please us.

These giant bulks of stone and a scattering of soil would leave most expecting to find hovels housing the semi-starving peasants, as has been the history of man for most of history and beyond; but here and now, in the mountains, just barely a reach from the sky, one finds Japanese-made 4X4 pick-up trucks pared in a glow of electric lights cast from farm houses fit for kings, houses filled with healthy children watching satellite television or playing video games on personal computers while parents prepare dinner to satisfy the hungriest traveler who might knock at their door, the children eating and sleeping in peace and security of a loving household after a day's pleasant life, awakening to a hot shower provided by solar panels, washed fresh with soap that smells of heavenly gardens, breakfasting on mixed mangoes and milk made smooth in a 16 speed Austrian-made blender, fresh eggs and bread and butter. If life is better for a Malibu multi-millionaire, it might be only marginally moreso, if at all, all the surface of California glitter being worth not one family member's day away from home. A farm at the top of the world, and a family cashing life under the skies, all of it looks down at the earth's abundance made real by man acting for man. There was a man named Norman, but there are others, unknown to all but family who made and maintain this paradise of food and family, people as unknown to the world as the mountains of southern Bolivia, giants all of them.

In the night I travel across the mountains, down steep valleys and up again over passes the rise into the clouds, moonlight shining through puff-ball blue clouds drifting across the sky, purposeless in their existence but proof of the further road ahead of me as I ride over the roads made my man to fulfill his destiny as living thing content in a bountiful world.

Mountains so high one is sick to travel across them, and there is food there and there are families who make it all flourish. I know all this because man has made roads, and I travel over them. These roads ar the paths to the future of mankind, higher than any mountain, grander than any peak, all of it pointing to a wonder one might see as God in his perfection.

The Moved Unmover

2012-01-16T15:21:00.000-08:00

My grandfather was born before the Wright Brothers first flew at Kittyhawk, North Carolina. My father was born the day the stock market crashed in '29. I was born and lived a long time before my mother, working full-time while she wasted away dying from cancer to the point her co-workers couldn't stand the sight of her sickness and had her moved to an isolated room out of their view, had spent enough at the supermarket to amass books full of Green Stamps coupons that we licked and pasted into books that she redeemed to buy, in her final days, both a colour television and a microwave oven, our house being the first in the area to have such luxuries, the wonder of the neighbourhood, drawing gawkers to look on at such modern marvels. Today, in my hotel room in Sucre, Bolivia, I have a colour television with a connection that brings in a hundred channels or more, and I have a microwave oven to cook my dinner. No wonder. I have much that few would have dreamed of not so long ago, including a laptop computer in my backpack. I can communicate now with the universe in an instant, free for nothing, from a past that used to charge significant amounts of money for making a dial-up phone call across town. I am rich beyond the dreams of any man of my youth.

Since I was last on the road in the Third World I now see a change created by the unloosing of the Chinese economy and a nation of people dedicated to producing an ocean of consumer goods for the world. I could not have dreamed yesterday of such things as I see for sale on Sucre sidewalks today. I know the world without such stuff. I know a world with. I know the difference.

Ten years ago the Chinese had not flooded the world with consumer goods. Today, the world is flooded everywhere with Chinese things. If the Chinese quit their efforts today there will still be enough to last the world a hundred years. Chances are the Chinese will continue pouring stuff into the world for a hundred years beyond a hundred years. What I see in Bolivia today is for me a frame from a movie reel projected at 24 frames per second, if such a reference makes sense to the average reader any longer. No matter what I see today it is not what will be tomorrow's Bolivian reality. Tomorrow Bolivia will be a foreign country, not only for me but for Bolivianos.

Sucre (5): March of Mayo Malo

2012-01-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

I have a severe case of exotophilia, i.e. a love of the exotic, and it goes so far as a love for that fancy French food such as mayonnaise on a cheese bun. Every illicit love has a price. In my case, like other loves, fluttery stomach, inability to concentrate on other things, remorse, and so on. I've been sick due to this love of the exotic. On the other hand, it should have had the benefit of losing me a bit of weight, which would have been welcome. But I don't seem to be dropping any pounds at all, strange as that is. I'm the same waddling porker today I was last week. I'm just a sick porker today. No loss, no gain. And no wiser, either, in that I am certain that I will continue my diet of exotic foods soon enough. I'm tied to the men's room, a short leash, and an unrequited love holding me in thrall. I can't let go. I sit in the courtyard of my hotel and wait for the pains to send me off, like a young man waiting for his lady-love to appear at the balcony. Oh, mayo; oh love.

[My office in Sucre, Bolivia.]

This sitting has given me a chance to meet others I might not have encountered had my waist been more in line with my mind, lean and hungry, I like to think. But now I have had the chance to look at and think about a young American lad here, a recluse, who at our first meeting told me he doesn't like to talk to people, who turned his back on me in the communal kitchen, and stared at the cupboard till I left the room. I got the point after he began clenching his fists as I told him I know exactly how he feels, I too needing some solitude and ....

[Motorcycle blues next to police station.]

I'm liking Sucre, Bolivia quite a lot, at least from my brief encounter with it so far. It is what some call a “conservative” city, one at odds with the ruling clique of politicians today, the latter being allied with Castro and the dictator in Venezuela, Chavez. The local petty dictator, Morales, holds power in La Paz, a huge city and his power base. Here in the smaller city, the people are on the political outs for the time being.

[Not all are political: Some like to drink.]

It is a dialectic of the highschool sort, the significance being only more important in that it involves money rather than getting laid. Business, and the quality of life, depends on political favour, which without, one is doomed to sit on the sidelines while the popular get to dance. Them that's got shall get, and the getting is got from the political leaders of the day. One must suck up to the incrowd or sit it out. To me on the road it's not particularly important who rules and who sulks. I have my pack and a bit of money to make my own life as I can. For me it is freedom. Those next to me, richer or no, have less, though we share the same place. Their situation can change in an instant, but mine will remain the same. I am outside it all. For others, this is the serious stuff of life that will not change much ever. Tomorrow I will be gone, leaving all this far behind me. It ain't my life.

[Sucre Lovers]

I was mulling it over when, a few hours later, the American came into the courtyard to apologise for his abrupt behaviour toward me. Saying that if he had only known that I am Don Pedro, owner of the establishment, famous throughout the city, powerful and rich, he would have been more polite. He was sorry. That had me stumped. I told him I am not the owner at all, merely a regular guy traveling and moving on soon. He stared at me, smoking a couple of cigarettes that burnt like a forest fire. He turned away in silent disgust and left the courtyard.

[Even cops have friends in Sucre.]

I saw the American a day later, he telling me he's been on the road for a year, much of it back home, and that he was homeless, living in his car, unemployed, rootless. I said that we travelers are all homeless unless we have some permanent address to return to. He abruptly told me not to talk to him again. Though we had been speaking English, the locals were listening in and at the sound of his abrupt dismissal of me, they turned and wondered what I had said that was so offensive. I went to the bathroom.

[Caution: Retards Crossing.]

My stomach problem will run its course in a day or so, and from there I will move on to other ailments and delights, maybe to some other exotic experience such as, like the last memorable, eating gerbils baked in mud. The gut ache will pass and I too will move on. I'll leave the Bolivianos to their political bickering. The American, though, is a different story. I will leave him too, but not without concern. He is, for me, home. He is mine. We are one. I want to tell him to go back home, to find some help for what is, to my mind, his bi-polar disorder, known to me as manic depression, a serious mental illness. For him it's a permanent state that he cannot escape from by being in South America. He'll be sick for life regardless of where. I leave my mayo miseries behind me, and do so with hope. I seek out the exotic, and sometimes, knowing in advance, it makes me sick. I seem to be incapable of letting it go. Tomorrow, some other strange illness and slight regret that I indulged.

La Paz, Bolivia, Dec. 2011

2012-01-07T15:11:00.003-08:00

My problem with auto safety-glass isn't that one is bound to be killed, even in the event of a minor crash-- to be expected-- the problem I have with the plain glass is that one is shredded in the going back an forth through the window. This image occurred to me as I looked out the bus window at oft times beautiful scenery as we rode through the Andes south from Puno, Peru to Copacabana, Bolivia, winding up and down the road in the bus, the tan-brown mountains with almost uniform flat tops on one side and on the other, under the lovely sunlight, the clear blue Lake Titicaca. Looking at this loveliness my mind turned to our bus crashing, perhaps from a blown tire or the driver having an attack of weirdness, hurtling us all into a deep canyon, my self turned to raw manburger in the jolt and the landing. I have to die someday, and since my travels don't add up to a vacation I travel without expectations of comfort or happiness from my experiences. I expect to be in pain much of the time, if only slightly, and that it will be a large part of my journey's process. I assume sickness and injury and possibly death. This is what I take to be a good life – for me.

I took a first thing in the morning bus from Puno to Copacabana just across the border in Bolivia. I get nervous crossing borders because the guards always pick up on my edginess that to them rings “criminal” bells. In my way I have lived a hard life, and because I have lived it among thugs and maniacs, some of it sticks to me, an odour, as it were, of toughness like one finds in prisoners. Border guards sense it, and they are in a position to prevent me from entering their nations. I get nervous. So, I booked a ticket to the first border crossing I could, just in case I couldn't enter at all and would have to return to Peru. At the border a Columbian and his girlfriend were stopped and interrogated for an hour. Our driver honked and rolled a few feet and honked again. We all sat nervously, wondering if he and his friend would be released. Indeed they were. They returned a bit embarrassed by all the fuss. I got through just fine, being, essentially, a pretty normal guy with no criminal record at all. Normal middle-aged guy going to Bolivian in a chicken bus.

I don't fret over a bit of discomfort if it's a matter of a short haul. Being jostled over dirt roads and pot holes in a cramped chicken bus is OK with me if that's what the situation is. In this case, I made the mistake of not booking the bus myself but let the hotel do it for me. In the rush to get out the door and on the bus I forgot my change for the ticket. Instead of $5.00 it cost me $6.00. I roll with it. On the bus we bumped and ground and I looked out the window at the beautiful brown Andes, so unlike the black and grey Rockies I love so much. I thought about death and mutilation as we rode on to the border of Bolivia, land of a moronic socialist acolyte of a lunatic South American dictator dying of cancer in a nearby nation. Business as usual circa 1965.

Entering South America's poorest country was simple and fast, costing me nothing, unlike the American passport holders who are required, because America is an imperialist running dog nation even with our current president high-fiving said dying dictator, to pay a pretty hefty $135.00 visa fee. Funny thing, though, I didn't meet any Americans at all doing that. Those who crossed all have second passports. It's the nature of our game. So I got my exit stamps and my entry stamps, and I entered Bolivia with a smile on my face.

I had decided the rational thing to do when I arrived in Bolivia was to go straight to a bank and withdraw money locally so as to save the transaction fees of cashing in Peruvian money. I landed at the border with 20 Peruvian sols, which I cashed in for 50 Bolivian bolivianos. That would be enough for lunch and whatever I might need till I got to a bank machine at Copacabana. Upon arrival, finding the ATM was too easy. I already had a room set up and my pack stowed safely, so things looked good right up till I finally conceded that the machine was out of order. I had 50 local bucks. My room would cost 40. I went for coffee to wait for the tourist information office to open so I could get some details officially about the ATM malfunction. The town had run out of energy, said the locals, and there was no electricity. It might come back on by 4 or 5 p.m., depending. I talked to the hotel owner, who was convinced that my bank card, not being Visa, would not work even if the power came back. I sat out in the sun at a competitor's hotel and blew 10 b.s on coffee while I waited for the Tourist Information Office to open from the lunch break. Then I sat on a log for an hour more waiting still for Godot. When the official did show up I was confronted with a thug slouching his way to grinning, drooling imbecility. That things had turned to cosmic justice just for me, I had to make up my mind about abandoning the village of Copacabana and risking the perils of the big city with no money. If La Paz were on strike again, if protesters were stoning buses at road blockades again, if there was no electricity in La Paz, which is quite easy to believe, then things would look poorly for our humble traveller here. I stared into space like a pure genius and then took out a ten dollar bill in Canadian money, the kind of bill no one would take for anything. I walked back up the hill to the main tourist trap section and entered a money exchange, unbelievably getting another 40 bolivianos, far less than I should have had but a wind-fall for me. I hopped the first 15 b. chicken bus to La Paz and considered my lilies in their field. Off to La Paz.

I was one of the few non-Aymara speakers on the bus, the rest being mostly females chattering away in the local native dialect. The empty seat beside me fell to the floor as we hit a large pot hole. I put it back, sat on it, and looked out the glass window, thinking of death again.

We arrived at a ferry landing, and when we got off the bus to take a motor boat while the bus was ferried alone, I found I had to pay a fee for that little boat, throwing me into cheapskate confusion. Uh. I paid. We got across just fine, and I still had money in my pocket, though I decided not to buy food till I arrived in La Paz in case other emergencies arose. I snapped couple of photos of blood-thirsty statuary showing how the brave Bolivians had bayoneted an enemy in the throat during the war the Bolivians lost, becoming a land-locked nation in the process.

I looked around at mud and adobe places partly built, and I waited for our bus to cross. Strangely, it had come across while I was watching the wrong ferry. I noticed out ladies boarding on a far side street. I went over and got on too. Then we waited. We waited for a lady who did not come. The passengers grew angry at the driver and demanded we continue. This went on till he reluctantly drove a few feet, stopped, honked repeatedly, and drove a few more feet, the majority of passengers soon becoming so irate he did leave the lady behind. She had no friends, I assume. I might be wrong.

And so it went, driving along the lake side and then into the dun landscape till clouds covered us at dusk, blackening the view, and the rain came, furthering the gloom of the journey. We reached the mountain top dwellings of La Paz in a fog, which at first I thought were rain clouds but soon discovered were clouds of diesel smoke mixed with simple fog. Rain came on like a monsoon, my pack resting somewhere on the rooftop under a tarp. We bounced around tiny streets, up and down and up and down, La Paz being in the depths of a valley but one with hills dotting the whole. The streets in the outlying area, if paved rather than mud, were stone. We slid and slipped and meandered up and down in the dark in traffic that is worse than many parts of Africa. This is a bad thing. Then, I know not where, we stopped, and I had to greet the rain in a city I know nothing much of and knew not where I had landed. I looked around on the way up and down the hills into La Paz for signs of hostels, ubiquitous elsewhere, and saw not a one. As always now I walked with supreme confidence, my leg dragging slightly from a permanent limp, hauling my pack up and down streets in the dark and the rain looking for somewhere to lie down, not having slept at all the previous night, still wide awake. Not hostels, and no one knew of any, they being locals who have no reason to know, no reason to want a stranger with no home to go to among them. I finally flagged down a taxi, telling him I needed a cheap room for the night. He told me he knew of none, and off he went into dark rainy gloom. I said to myself, “Huh?” Then I walked farther on till another taxi came and took me across town to some place else. He dropped me in a knot of traffic, telling me there were three places in a row across the street and why couldn't I see them? Ten bolivianos for this. I took my pack and went across the street to what were, in fact, places to “sleep.” What had I been thinking?

I demanded of the first place that the clerk show me the room he wanted 30 b.s for. As I figured, it had a mattress on a metal bunk fastened to the wall, and a paper sheet that might have come from a doctor's office examining room. I spent a bit of time looking at the room because it was my chance to see the life of a Bolivian prostitute's work environment first hand. I have little sympathy for those Modernists who claim they themselves are poor. Of course, I am a fascist. There's no need to imagine the room scene, and less reason to describe it. It's a life most will never need to encounter and most of us would rather not recall having seen it once. It takes my mind from thoughts of death and brings me to consider the living. I left in search of a bed for my own self, alone. The next two places were as bad.

Finally, I stumbled across a fancy looking entrance that I hoped I could afford.

I rang the bell and was met by a friendly geezer who let me into the courtyard and took me to the office where he told me there were no rooms available. I sat and wondered that over, wondering why he would invite me in to tell me there were no vacancies, thinking that he would find one, but at a premium price if I waited long enough.

Yes, indeed, and it cost me all of half of what I was paying in Peru. It took every boliviano I had, and I was thankful to escape the Dantesque scenes outside. La Paz in the night with rain is hellish for the first time visitor arriving broke with a wet backpack.

Daytime, well, it's not that much better.

After a terrible night's sleep, the air being so thin that I suck it in to the point my mouth dries so badly my lips and tongue stick to my teeth, forcing me to gulp down a glass of water, in turn waking me an hour later to use the bathroom, and not to mention the broken springs in the thing that passes for a mattress, I got up before dawn and went out in search of life, finding plentiful evidence of the storm I had arrived in, broken tree limbs and trash everywhere.

The sun rose and showed a city climbing the mountains that surround and that are La Paz. If one likes science fiction scenes, this is it. I returned to my hotel, and had breakfast, resigned to staying here for a while to explore, to find out exactly I have no idea what. I saw a poverty-stricken city enshrouded in fog and gloom. So I set out on foot to see more.

Down, down, down one of the hills in what passes for the centre of the city I found a huge building with no sign, though I took it to be a church. To one side I saw uniformed guards at a small alcove entrance, and having no reason to move on, I went in to see what valuable thing lay inside, it being the tomb of a fallen hero of the lost war.

Winners move on. Bolivia is stuck with making this issue the biggest thing in the nation's history.

I looked at broken tree limbs and rubbish. Going into a small opening in a block otherwise boarded up I saw a crest of some official kind, and I took a picture of it, not only because it says much about the nation's values, but because it had come loose from its moorings on the wall and hung at such an angle that even normal people would normally be driven to straighten it. It hung at two o'clock, by my reckoning, though I am not a mathematician at all. Badly, shall we say. I walked further, my mission-- to see.

I got some cash from an ATM, no problem, and stopped for food that I could hardly eat, it being fine. Then the rain came again. I dashed across the street and up three levels of a market that offered me hardly any view of the city at all. There are more high-rise buildings here than I saw in all of southern Peru. I assume earthquakes are less frequent here, but that seems unlikely. I am at a loss to grasp it. I looked around, looked down and saw that some fool had spray-painted a slogan of sorts on a nicely tended public road side: "Down with hunger.”

I had just walked up three levels of a market in La Paz where at least 100 stalls were given to selling food.

I saw mounds of food going into cook pots and pans so fast as the owners could work, men and women and children eating food that looks to me as good as any one could ever hope for. At least a hundred stalls over three levels, and that was the cooked food, not the raw. One market, not mentioning the stores and street vendors. There is food galore, all thanks to Modernity's push to create a better world through individual initiative, ie., making a profit. There was so much food that the look of it was making me ill. And yet, this is a poor country, even by my own low standards. It lacks democracy, for one thing, though I have seen far, far worse.

Here, poverty or no, people still go shopping for Christmas, still dress up in their finest, still live life to the fullest. As much as my first impressions of the city are negative, I see that I might see more and come to like some of it.

Most people in most countries (though not all) live lives of happy belonging. I wouldn't want to live here. But there are worse places than La Paz. I'm OK.

La Paz, Bolivia, Dec. 2011

2012-01-07T15:11:00.001-08:00

My problem with auto safety-glass isn't that one is bound to be killed, even in the event of a minor crash-- to be expected-- the problem I have with the plain glass is that one is shredded in the going back an forth through the window. This image occurred to me as I looked out the bus window at oft times beautiful scenery as we rode through the Andes south from Puno, Peru to Copacabana, Bolivia, winding up and down the road in the bus, the tan-brown mountains with almost uniform flat tops on one side and on the other, under the lovely sunlight, the clear blue Lake Titicaca. Looking at this loveliness my mind turned to our bus crashing, perhaps from a blown tire or the driver having an attack of weirdness, hurtling us all into a deep canyon, my self turned to raw manburger in the jolt and the landing. I have to die someday, and since my travels don't add up to a vacation I travel without expectations of comfort or happiness from my experiences. I expect to be in pain much of the time, if only slightly, and that it will be a large part of my journey's process. I assume sickness and injury and possibly death. This is what I take to be a good life – for me.

I took a first thing in the morning bus from Puno to Copacabana just across the border in Bolivia. I get nervous crossing borders because the guards always pick up on my edginess that to them rings “criminal” bells. In my way I have lived a hard life, and because I have lived it among thugs and maniacs, some of it sticks to me, an odour, as it were, of toughness like one finds in prisoners. Border guards sense it, and they are in a position to prevent me from entering their nations. I get nervous. So, I booked a ticket to the first border crossing I could, just in case I couldn't enter at all and would have to return to Peru. At the border a Columbian and his girlfriend were stopped and interrogated for an hour. Our driver honked and rolled a few feet and honked again. We all sat nervously, wondering if he and his friend would be released. Indeed they were. They returned a bit embarrassed by all the fuss. I got through just fine, being, essentially, a pretty normal guy with no criminal record at all. Normal middle-aged guy going to Bolivian in a chicken bus.

I don't fret over a bit of discomfort if it's a matter of a short haul. Being jostled over dirt roads and pot holes in a cramped chicken bus is OK with me if that's what the situation is. In this case, I made the mistake of not booking the bus myself but let the hotel do it for me. In the rush to get out the door and on the bus I forgot my change for the ticket. Instead of $5.00 it cost me $6.00. I roll with it. On the bus we bumped and ground and I looked out the window at the beautiful brown Andes, so unlike the black and grey Rockies I love so much. I thought about death and mutilation as we rode on to the border of Bolivia, land of a moronic socialist acolyte of a lunatic South American dictator dying of cancer in a nearby nation. Business as usual circa 1965.

Entering South America's poorest country was simple and fast, costing me nothing, unlike the American passport holders who are required, because America is an imperialist running dog nation even with our current president high-fiving said dying dictator, to pay a pretty hefty $135.00 visa fee. Funny thing, though, I didn't meet any Americans at all doing that. Those who crossed all have second passports. It's the nature of our game. So I got my exit stamps and my entry stamps, and I entered Bolivia with a smile on my face.

I had decided the rational thing to do when I arrived in Bolivia was to go straight to a bank and withdraw money locally so as to save the transaction fees of cashing in Peruvian money. I landed at the border with 20 Peruvian sols, which I cashed in for 50 Bolivian bolivianos. That would be enough for lunch and whatever I might need till I got to a bank machine at Copacabana. Upon arrival, finding the ATM was too easy. I already had a room set up and my pack stowed safely, so things looked good right up till I finally conceded that the machine was out of order. I had 50 local bucks. My room would cost 40. I went for coffee to wait for the tourist information office to open so I could get some details officially about the ATM malfunction. The town had run out of energy, said the locals, and there was no electricity. It might come back on by 4 or 5 p.m., depending. I talked to the hotel owner, who was convinced that my bank card, not being Visa, would not work even if the power came back. I sat out in the sun at a competitor's hotel and blew 10 b.s on coffee while I waited for the Tourist Information Office to open from the lunch break. Then I sat on a log for an hour more waiting still for Godot. When the official did show up I was confronted with a thug slouching his way to grinning, drooling imbecility. That things had turned to cosmic justice just for me, I had to make up my mind about abandoning the village of Copacabana and risking the perils of the big city with no money. If La Paz were on strike again, if protesters were stoning buses at road blockades again, if there was no electricity in La Paz, which is quite easy to believe, then things would look poorly for our humble traveller here. I stared into space like a pure genius and then took out a ten dollar bill in Canadian money, the kind of bill no one would take for anything. I walked back up the hill to the main tourist trap section and entered a money exchange, unbelievably getting another 40 bolivianos, far less than I should have had but a wind-fall for me. I hopped the first 15 b. chicken bus to La Paz and considered my lilies in their field. Off to La Paz.

I was one of the few non-Aymara speakers on the bus, the rest being mostly females chattering away in the local native dialect. The empty seat beside me fell to the floor as we hit a large pot hole. I put it back, sat on it, and looked out the glass window, thinking of death again.

We arrived at a ferry landing, and when we got off the bus to take a motor boat while the bus was ferried alone, I found I had to pay a fee for that little boat, throwing me into cheapskate confusion. Uh. I paid. We got across just fine, and I still had money in my pocket, though I decided not to buy food till I arrived in La Paz in case other emergencies arose. I snapped couple of photos of blood-thirsty statuary showing how the brave Bolivians had bayoneted an enemy in the throat during the war the Bolivians lost, becoming a land-locked nation in the process. I looked around at mud and adobe places partly built, and I waited for our bus to cross. Strangely, it had come across while I was watching the wrong ferry. I noticed out ladies boarding on a far side street. I went over and got on too. Then we waited. We waited for a lady who did not come. The passengers grew angry at the driver and demanded we continue. This went on till he reluctantly drove a few feet, stopped, honked repeatedly, and drove a few more feet, the majority of passengers soon becoming so irate he did leave the lady behind. She had no friends, I assume. I might be wrong.

And so it went, driving along the lake side and then into the dun landscape till clouds covered us at dusk, blackening the view, and the rain came, furthering the gloom of the journey. We reached the mountain top dwellings of La Paz in a fog, which at first I thought were rain clouds but soon discovered were clouds of diesel smoke mixed with simple fog. Rain came on like a monsoon, my pack resting somewhere on the rooftop under a tarp. We bounced around tiny streets, up and down and up and down, La Paz being in the depths of a valley but one with hills dotting the whole. The streets in the outlying area, if paved rather than mud, were stone. We slid and slipped and meandered up and down in the dark in traffic that is worse than many parts of Africa. This is a bad thing. Then, I know not where, we stopped, and I had to greet the rain in a city I know nothing much of and knew not where I had landed. I looked around on the way up and down the hills into La Paz for signs of hostels, ubiquitous elsewhere, and saw not a one. As always now I walked with supreme confidence, my leg dragging slightly from a permanent limp, hauling my pack up and down streets in the dark and the rain looking for somewhere to lie down, not having slept at all the previous night, still wide awake. Not hostels, and no one knew of any, they being locals who have no reason to know, no reason to want a stranger with no home to go to among them. I finally flagged down a taxi, telling him I needed a cheap room for the night. He told me he knew of none, and off he went into dark rainy gloom. I said to myself, “Huh?” Then I walked farther on till another taxi came and took me across town to some place else. He dropped me in a knot of traffic, telling me there were three places in a row across the street and why couldn't I see them? Ten bolivianos for this. I took my pack and went across the street to what were, in fact, places to “sleep.” What had I been thinking?

I demanded of the first place that the clerk show me the room he wanted 30 b.s for. As I figured, it had a mattress on a metal bunk fastened to the wall, and a paper sheet that might have come from a doctor's office examining room. I spent a bit of time looking at the room because it was my chance to see the life of a Bolivian prostitute's work environment first hand. I have little sympathy for those Modernists who claim they themselves are poor. Of course, I am a fascist. There's no need to imagine the room scene, and less reason to describe it. It's a life most will never need to encounter and most of us would rather not recall having seen it once. It takes my mind from thoughts of death and brings me to consider the living. I left in search of a bed for my own self, alone. The next two places were as bad.

Finally, I stumbled across a fancy looking entrance that I hoped I could afford.

I rang the bell and was met by a friendly geezer who let me into the courtyard and took me to the office where he told me there were no rooms available. I sat and wondered that over, wondering why he would invite me in to tell me there were no vacancies, thinking that he would find one, but at a premium price if I waited long enough. Yes, indeed, and it cost me all of half of what I was paying in Peru. It took every boliviano I had, and I was thankful to escape the Dantesque scenes outside. La Paz in the night with rain is hellish for the first time visitor arriving broke with a wet backpack.

Daytime, well, it's not that much better.

After a terrible night's sleep, the air being so thin that I suck it in to the point my mouth dries so badly my lips and tongue stick to my teeth, forcing me to gulp down a glass of water, in turn waking me an hour later to use the bathroom, and not to mention the broken springs in the thing that passes for a mattress, I got up before dawn and went out in search of life, finding plentiful evidence of the storm I had arrived in, broken tree limbs and trash everywhere. The sun rose and showed a city climbing the mountains that surround and that are La Paz. If one likes science fiction scenes, this is it. I returned to my hotel, and had breakfast, resigned to staying here for a while to explore, to find out exactly I have no idea what. I saw a poverty-stricken city enshrouded in fog and gloom. So I set out on foot to see more.

Down, down, down one of the hills in what passes for the centre of the city I found a huge building with no sign, though I took it to be a church. To one side I saw uniformed guards at a small alcove entrance, and having no reason to move on, I went in to see what valuable thing lay inside, it being the tomb of a fallen hero of the lost war. Winners move on. Bolivia is stuck with making this issue the biggest thing in the nation's history. I looked at broken tree limbs and rubbish. Going into a small opening in a block otherwise boarded up I saw a crest of some official kind, and I took a picture of it, not only because it says much about the nation's values, but because it had come loose from its moorings on the wall and hung at such an angle that even normal people would normally be driven to straighten it. It hung at two o'clock, by my reckoning, though I am not a mathematician at all. Badly, shall we say. I walked further, my mission-- to see.

I got some cash from an ATM, no problem, and stopped for food that I could hardly eat, it being fine. Then the rain came again. I dashed across the street and up three levels of a market that offered me hardly any view of the city at all. There are more high-rise buildings here than I saw in all of southern Peru. I assume earthquakes are less frequent here, but that seems unlikely. I am at a loss to grasp it. I looked around, looked down and saw that some fool had spray-painted a slogan of sort on a road side: “End hunger.”

I had just walked up three levels of a market in La Paz where at least 100 stalls were given to selling food. I saw mounds of food going into cook pots and pans so fast as the owners could work, men and women and children eating food that looks to me as good as any one could ever hope for. At least a hundred stalls over three levels, and that was the cooked food, not the raw. One market, not mentioning the stores and street vendors. There is food galore, all thanks to Modernity's push to create a better world through individual initiative, ie., making a profit. There was so much food that the look of it was making me ill. And yet, this is a poor country, even by my own low standards. It lacks democracy, for one thing, though I have seen far, far worse.

Here, poverty or no, people still go shopping for Christmas, still dress up in their finest, still live life to the fullest. As much as my first impressions of the city are negative, I see that I might see more and come to like some of it.

Most people in most countries (though not all) live lives of happy belonging. I wouldn't want to live here. But there are worse places than La Paz. I'm OK.

Rusting up in Sucre

2012-01-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

I'm having severe troubles in posting from Bolivia. Below are a some shots of a train settling into history in Sucre.

Whoo--oo--whooooo!

More to come. All aboard.

Facing the future, even though it looks pretty bleak for this train.

Choo-Choo for now.

Tourists line up for photo op w/ S. Am. Beauty

2012-01-06T13:52:00.000-08:00

Three Iranian tourists were in town today, Sucre, Bolivia, attracting quite a crowd of on-lookers as the trio took in some of the sights, one of which is a lovely lady who graciously allowed them to pose with her while I took their photo in front of a local church.

Tres turistas Iraníes sospechosos estaban en la ciudad hoy en día, Sucre, Bolivia, que atrae a una gran multitud de espectadores en el trío tuvo en algunos de los lugares de interés turístico, una de ellas es una señora encantadora que amablemente les permitió representar con ella mientras yo llevaba a sus foto delante de una iglesia local hoy.

Bolivia can even improve the attitude of Middle Eastern men toward women. What a place.

Mi mejor a la señora, y gracias por tomar mi foto.

My best to the lady, and thanks for taking my photo.

Socialist Big Turkeys

2012-01-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

Just prior to Christmas of 2011 I spotted the Bolivian government's contribution to ending hunger in the nation, providing the people with giant turkeys just in time for the season's big yummy. As usual, the socialists got the whole idea wrong. Yes, these are big turkeys, but if you look closely you will see that there is almost no meat on them. And cooking the bones to make soup? Well, I don't think so. Christmas was good for me in La Paz, dinner with a few people I had met and was on happy terms with. A short friendship over the holidays; but such is the nature of travel, this short life being broken into tiny pieces strung out over a brief span. But where friends are, for however short that time to like them, life is good. It's even better when one has ones own money and need not rely on government for dinner.

Someone suggests they are vultures. I certainly agree.

Sucre (4): Coming Clean

2012-01-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

Sucre is the administrative capital of Bolivia, and if I have the hang of this travel writing genre, this is about the right time and place to interview a political giant in the land, someone on par with my status as a world renowned writer of pithy pieces; and it will be my exercise to ask questions of passing import of a deputy minister of wasted taxes about this and that, the real point being to show off my dry cynicism and cool indifference to the shadow of power, me being worldly and generally unimpressed by such petty things, having seen it all before. My goal in interviewing this titan of the twisting to his will the Public Good for the Nation, this Haephestes of Bolivian politics, would be to-- basically-- show off for my readers, lending this account a “You were there” significance that is meant to have us all feel superior to a mere mover and shaker in the Andes somewhere. But there is interviewing such a man, and then there is my other plan.

For close to three weeks I've been living in the cold, a room in La Paz in which I swiped the bedding from an adjacent room to add to my own blankets, tossing my leather jacket atop all that in my futile attempt to sleep warm. I turned on my laptop for an extra bit of heat, and eventually burnt candles around my bed to cut through the frost. My one and only shower during the time resulted in a severe case of bronchitis, which I still carry, and the thought of doing my laundry in the shower was out of bounds. So, Stinky Fellow tried to stay away from enclosed spaces in the company of others.

For close to three weeks I've been living in the cold, a room in La Paz in which I swiped the bedding from an adjacent room to add to my own, tossing my leather jacket atop all that in my futile attempt to sleep warm. I turned on my laptop for an extra bit of heat, and eventually burnt candles around my bed to cut through the frost. Y one and only shower during the tie resulted in a severe case of bronchitis, which I still carry, and the thought of doing my laundry in the shower was out of bounds. So, Stinky Fellow tried to stay away form enclosed spaces in the company of others. Yes, I could have gone to a laundromat but-- I couldn't find one. Nor did I turn over my laundry to the landlady to wash and hang in plain view of all in the courtyard, she, though I will never see her again, being witness to my personal person in the flesh, as it were, and my pride refusing to allow such a thing to be open to examination and inevitable horror. Dirty laundry? I think of it as something close to Medieval.

By now the astute reader will have gleaned that I hate hippies. This hatred is not due to their being stinky: it is due to hippies lauding a romanticised “authenticity” of the Middle Ages, “a thousand years without a bath” as French historian Jules Michelet puts it.

Two weeks without a proper shower is, I hope, my extremest limit. I look back to my ancestors and yours and see such things as a time when Jewish converts during the Inquisition were tortured and killed for showing up at church on Sunday bathed from the previous Friday afternoon. If the Jews had bathed, then obviously their conversion to Christianity was insincere, and off with them to the auto de fe. Not that a ritual bath meant much in the days, soap being unknown. My own, washing their woolens, used amonia, which is to say, urine. Silk and cotton having a tighter weave kept bug travel to a minimum, thus being a favourite of the upper classes, the rest of us itching to get filthy rich. The famous philosopher of his time, Carl Leibniz, finding himself at a wedding and being told he was supposed to give a gift to the bride, gave her valuable advice: “Now that you have a husband, don't stop bathing.” And we might well pass lightly over the bottoms of Dutch girls of early New York City, notorious for contextual reasons. Until recently mot people were filthy and stinking, even if they didn't really notice it among themselves. I do now, as do most of us today, notice stinky.

I could, because I'm a totally medium famous writer, interview some local politician and slyly humilate him on this page by portraying him trying to blow flourescent smoke up my arse, telling us how all his wondrous plans to transform the nation will soon come to pass if only he has more power. But instead I found a fellow who took in my laundry. I pass on the politician in favour of clean. That, dear reader, is cosmic progress. Long live that revolution.

Feliz Navidad,

2011-12-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from me in La Paz to you world-wide.

I´m a bit under the weather here, which is cold and wet, but soon will be back to my usual self and will post a lump of stuff I haven´t been able to get on the net in recent weeks. Till then, my best,

Dag
La Paz, Bolivia,
Christmas 2011.

Visa Expiry; Bolivia

2011-12-13T19:27:00.000-08:00

I have a three part post to come on my boat trip on Lake Titicaca, but I am facing an expiring visa that requires me to move out of the country for a while. I have to go.

In the morning I leave for Copacabana, Bolivia. Once I'm there I'm going to do some travelling. Will have my Lake Titicaca post up as soon as I settle in Bolivia. I expect to be soon in La Paz.

To those who drop in to see what I wrote of our day on the lake, I apologise for the delay. Meanwhile, I recall my time in Peru more than fondly, almost all of that due to the character of Peruvians in general. I hope to return soon to continue my adventures among such good and decent folk. At the risk of revealing too much, (you know I mean you) I look forward to meeting someone again when I return to Lima. Life is good.
"Peru of the Incas" poster by Paul George Lawler (1938)

A land of ladies in funny hats

2011-12-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

Peru has a 19th century feel to it at times that I find attractive, a simplicity that even electric lighting can't erase. There is enough Modernity to please me but not so much that the nation is overwhelmed by Hollywood images and Wall Street vacuity. People here, and I notice especially women, are not so much beauty queens as one sees in the heart of America's fashion capitals, even in affluent suburbs of small cities. Here, women look like ordinary women, some wearing make-up, others looking like they just stepped out of the shower, dressed, and came out to do their daily doings. They look like the ordinary working class women they are, and I find it 19th century, though well-fed and clean. Perhaps most women here won't be fashion models, even fashion models on local television, but the women here look feminine and attractive as women, if not as models of womanliness, not so attractive to me, for what it's worth. And then there are those women, stout, to be polite, who are dressed in genuine 19th Century fashion, women who make this a land of ladies in funny hats.

When I think of women in Peru, especially in the Andes, I think of ladies in bowler hats, flowing skirts, psychedelic design blankets tied at the shoulder as carry-alls [aguayas].

This is not a perfect place, and I won't live here for all of my whole life because I think it has more to offer me than America. It has many aspects, the culture, that make it far superior to America today; but it's not enough to look at women in funny hats to make this a place to live. What it has of real attraction is women who have 19th century values to a large extent, values so alien today to many American women that returning home is ever more unlikely for me. There is Modernity, which I love very much, and there is the current rule of the Freak Show that turns my stomach and turns my mind from home to other, better lands and people, Peru being one of those places, Peruvians being some of those better people. We could in America have it all, but not with the attitude so many today carry around like weapons. America has much to relearn, and some of it, important things, to learn from Peruvian ladies in funny hats.

A bit of history about the funny hats:

The bowler hat was devised in 1849 by the London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler to fulfil an order placed by the firm of hatters Lock & Co. of St James's.

[....]

The bowler, not the cowboy hat or sombrero, was the most popular hat in the American West, prompting Lucius Beebe to call it "the hat that won the West."[7] Both cowboys and railroad workers preferred the hat because it wouldn't blow off easily in strong wind, or when sticking one's head out the window of a speeding train. It was worn by both lawmen and outlaws, including Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, Black Bart, and Billy the Kid. It is in America the hat came to be commonly known as the "Derby".

The bowler, called a bombín inSpanish, has been worn by Quechua and Aymara women since the 1920s, when it was introduced to Bolivia by British railway workers. For many years, a factory in Italy manufactured the hats for the Bolivian market, but they are now made locally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowler_hat

Lake Titicaca, coming later today

2011-12-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

I have some things to do with the day before I can sit down to finish writing my account of a trip to the islands of Lake Titicaca and those experiences of others on the trip as I understand them. Please look again tomorrow.

Yalla, Dag.

The Thirty Nine Hundred Steps: Condor Hill, Puno, Peru

2011-12-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

I came to Puna in the night after a heavy rainstorm, and in spite of all that darkness I saw atop a hill a statue of a condor. Next day I saw the statue again, from the far distance of the centre of town, and having seen it, seen it on a hill top, I knew that I would have to climb up and get a closer look. Pain, no pain, sun, rain, snow, I don't care. When I see something high and vaguely challenging, I have to go for it. Today I sat having coffee and thought of the vulture hanging high above me and the city, and I knew this would be the day to do it.

I could see a stair way leading to the cerro, the place, the lookout. I glanced at the taxis available for cheap, but there was no road that I could see that would get me there, and besides, I wanted to walk up to make it a challenge. I like these little taxis, but I was more interested in the walk up than in the being there. I finished my coffee and began walking toward the hill, passing through town in a series of loops as I looked for a way up. 3,000 steps is an understatement. I wandered for a long while till I got within sight of my steps.

I got into the right area of town and took a look at my direction, off for me to the right. My useless sense of direction is probably what has led me to this wandering life. My parents are going to kill me when I get home. They gave me a dollar and sent me out to the store to buy milk and bread, and I haven't been home in 40 years. Lost. Perdido, as it were. Here, today, I had my eye on the prize, and determination makes all impossible things happen anyway.

Even that which looks not very promising can surprise us. Give this street a couple of years at most and it will look like any other street in the city. One must work in faith. Seeing this photo later, one local was shocked and upset that I took it, thinking it makes him and this city look terrible. It is terrible. That's today. Come back later and it will likely look quite pretty, or something.
For me, it's not part of the city, it's part of the goal, the walking up a long path to see the whole of the city, but mostly to prove to myself that in spite of sickness, pain, and lack of air I can do this on my own, adding in some small way to my basket of triumphs, silly as they are. And then I got to the mirador, the look-out point starting point, a mere 500 more meters. I have no clue.

Not long after I started walking up the steps I began counting, missing the first 20 or 50 steps. It was a way to break up the journey. It's always the same distance, but to have a running total allowed me to break every 200 steps to take a look around me to see how I was progressing. Any cheap trick that works works for me. I counted roughly 900 paces, though the Internet tells us there are 600 steps with short plazas at different landings.

And so I went on bit by bit to higher and higher, the turkey still distant but there for the taking.

And I made it, going from the city's elevation of 3,830m (12,566 ft.) to ever more and better: 13,180 feet.

,,,,It was here that I breathed the proverbial sigh of relief. I'd made it- almost. I saw immediately that there was a series of steps leading onward to dead grass a bit further up the hill. I did it. Then I came back and looked at the wall I was leaning against.
The point is to get a good walk up the hill and see the city from a good vantage.

I took my time doing that.

I had the company of sacred images. And an old woman selling sodas and water and cookies. I sat down beside her and closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes again I looked at the bird that had attracted me in the first place. It's not what I would call art. The art is in the going up the hill because it's there.

The condor monument has an 11-meter metal wingspan, according to the Internet. The old lady selling sodas told me I had more climbing still to do. There is a door at the base of the pedestal, which I entered and then climbed the spiral stair case to the top where I clung to the railing. I'm not dealing well with heights in my old age.

I laid down on the cement to look up and to lie down. And then, having annoyed a watchman in a tin shack I had taken for an outhouse, I went back down to town, just in time to see a happy couple leaving their wedding.
The wedding ended, and then the rain came.

,,,,

Homosocial Hardship

2011-12-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

America today is ruled by and for the enveloping Freak Show. This is not a real nation of real people but a phantasy world for losers and scum-bags bent on destroying the nature of our nation in favour of the German Revolution. In short, collectivists following the German state socialism of Bismarck are determined to turn the American Revolution into a collectivist neo-feudal nightmare, and one way to do so is to lump people together into "identity groups" rather than leave individuals to make their own free lives in a free nation. The Freak Show is now triumphant. Tomorrow it might all fail. We will see.

What I see from afar today is a parody of life and man. A friend writes that he suffers from a "demanding graduate student" taking up his work time and pissing him off with strident demands for superfluities of political correctness that he is obligated to meet by dint of his association with the state. He's got to nod and smile at this woman and her silliness or he could lose his job. But the joke is on her.

Women who think they must be men, who must be masculine, lose the whole point of being women. The will never be men, and they will never be friends of men. They will never reach the inner circle of the homosocial, not with men, not with other women.

Glen Campbell performs the tune linked below. It says more about the difference today between men and women than anything one will find in any scholarly journal, though it is written to appeal to the romantic view of love. It is about men loving men. In the Freak Show vision of life, this must mean homosexuality. There again is the clear failure of the Freak Show and the best sign of its failure.

In Peru today there is no visible Freak Show. Men are men, women are women, and life is pretty good for most. As I am coming to recall after too many years of sitting at the desk typing on the Internet, physical fitness is a major key to understanding life. When a man is in superior good shape, his body is entirely different from that of woman, and the difference is stunning to both. Sex, the very point of life, is amazing for the fit couple, their differences shining toward each other. Life, hard as it can be sometimes here, is superior to the Freak Show parody of oneness of all things. When a man is a friend and a woman is a lover, life is at its best. America has lost that sense, for a large part of its citizenry. Time to shape up. Time to find the reality of love between friends and lovers.

Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin' on the back roads
By the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFIRTtn_ZSE&feature=related

I talk to the wind

2011-12-09T15:08:00.001-08:00

A musical interlude during a downpour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kVNl-9cS9c&feature=related

We aren't looking at a picture of Anne Hathaway's Cottage here. This is the home of a peasant family outside of Puna, Peru. They are "poor."
They choose to live in a collection of stone huts, no electricity, no running water, no nothing but what their primitive ancestors had. This is "authentic" Peru. This is how most people in the Andes lived until recently. Now it is an anachronism, lived by choice by those who make some kind of living by being museum pieces. Tourists oooo and ahhhh over this spectacle of poverty. It is our common heritage, a state of living from which most of us are happy to ignore. We might, and many often do, get weepy over the conditions of the "poor," and this family qualifies. But why care? They choose this life of theirs and no one would dare impose it on them.

I've been here, and I've been there, and I've been in between. I've seen a lot.

I talk to the wind.

The answer comes from a boy too young to be corrupted:

I'm 500 miles from my home

2011-12-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

I must be 500 miles from my home. Can't go home this a'way.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-972434625103435361

Sillustani, Peru

2011-12-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon on the spur of the moment I decided to take a bus trip outside of Puno, Peru to see, well, I wasn't clear on just what I was signing up for. What the hell. I only live once, and if I don't do things of probable interest, then I won't have lived even that much. So, I got into the bus and off we went, to Sillustani, as it turns out, and there I had a great time, making up for the miseries of my trip to Machu Piccu. I had no idea what to expect until I got to the site. Then I had not only the pleasure of a new and interesting experience in ruins, I also had a nice time chatting with my fellow bus-riders.
From Wikipedia:

Sillustani is a pre-Incan burial ground on the shores of Lake Umayo near Puno in Peru. The tombs, which are built above ground in tower-like structures called chullpas, are the vestiges of the Colla people, Aymara who were conquered by the Inca in the 15th century. The structures housed the remains of complete family groups, although they were probably limited to nobility. Many of the tombs have been dynamited by grave robbers, while others were left unfinished.

[...]

[T]he term "chullpa" remains used today for the towers. Many of the chullpas at Sillustani show pre-Inca characteristics that were later redressed with Inca stone blocks. Similar chullpas are found throughout the entire south Central Andes with the above ground burial styles going back at least to mature Tiwanaku (ca AD 500-950). The insides of the tombs were built to hold entire groups of people, most likely extended families of the Aymara elite. Corpses were not intentionally mummified, but in the dry environment created by the closed tomb, they survived for centuries. Most mummy bundles indicate burial in a fetal position. Some of the tombs also have various animal shapes carved into the stone. The only openings to the buildings face east, where it was believed the Sun was reborn by Mother Earth each day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sillustani

I've been doing this for so long now that there's little new in what I see. I have some mummified bits from the desert in Arabia, and I have had the dubious experience of encountering desiccated bodies. But, in spite of this not being so new to me that I had no choice but to be impressed, I did have a good time comparing this Stone Age site to others. It gives me a chance to compare the universal in humanness. Much of this site brings to mind the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands north of the mainland in Scotland.
It's the circles that make it so much like my ancestral homeland, and that this is a desert as well, though, like Glastonbury Tor, once surrounded by water. It was so much like home that I became nostalgic for the lost years of my wandering life. I felt at home here in a way I don't feel at home in most places, even though there is nothing here for me at all, nor there. This is a burial site. But it is a Stone Age site that evokes feelings of life and family for me.
The way this is laid out gives a mistaken impression of Avebury. In truth, it is a pre-Inca and Inca burial site. The round-houses are the burial sites. We do things differently now in the Modern world, sometimes well, I think, but seldom as monumentally. Below we see the two cultures, pre-Inca and Inca, as they build their monuments to the dead:
The loose stone is pre-Inca, and the fine cut work, resembling the work of my ancestors in the islands north of Scotland, are Incan. We can see the contrast a bit more clearly here:
Here we see the burial sites themselves, cone-shaped, unlike those I've seen elsewhere. However, these inverted cones look to me like proto-keystones, the downward pressure keeping the stone stable. It's not Hagia Sophia, but it is lovely and clever.
Families were interred here, as they are in Arequipa today. I see that little changes in human nature, sometimes assuring, sometimes a matter of despair. But that people find reason and dignity and value in work and the fact of an end to life itself, that too is a constant that I appreciate. My ancestors were stone-cutters and builders in the far islands, cutting tombstones and building castles and churches. I feel some good affinity with these builders. It doesn't always come to much, but there is that longing we have to make good the good that was.

Many of the stones lay scattered across the site. It gives us a chance to see up-close that they are hollowed out and were then packed with clay to reduce damage from earthquakes, somewhat similar in intent to Japanese high-rise buildings that have cores filled with hydraulic oil today.
And then the spirit of man makes whole that which is ruin.

I recall laughing at men using cranes to reconstruct buildings at Luxor, Egypt. I was a purist who had no real sense then of the grandeur of building, whether one uses modern equipment to do so. The alternative to using modern machinery is to do as the contemporaries had done, not practical, merely sentimental. But, given the technology of the time this is, as Hiram Bingham points out in his book The Lost City of Machu Piccu, very clever. Like the Romans at Massada, build a ramp and haul material up:
Burial mounds. It's not about death at all, I think, but about coping with the mysteries of loss and the hope and faith of meaning in this life. For those who are insistent that this life is all there is, then one is unlikely to build much for the future, burning bodies, giving up on the living too, diminishing this life for the sake of this life, as it were, by not striving for the transcendent, by building greatness for all to come.

It's about living, all this monumental building of tombs. The circles of the site, here and elsewhere, as my companion for the day, Miguel Piaggio, points out, is a reconciliation of life with the sun and the moon, a creation of Order, a making of the synthesis of an otherwise incoherent and frightening dialectic of meaninglessness. I've seen this too, this unity of man and the Sun, the light of the solstice flooding into the protected space inside the tomb, shining for that brief time, on the departed, restoring him to life, as one sees at Maeshowe, as here too.

In all, I find it life-affirming, the celebration of meaning even in death.

I had a day of pleasant company with fellows interested in such things, and we had what I missed at Machu Piccu, i.e. a day of quiet contemplation and memories of my own life and times. It makes all the falling down and breaking a tooth, getting an infection, getting altitude sickness, being sleepless and hungry and cold and tired, and whatever small or large miseries await me, all worth the while. A Dag Day at Sillustani, I call it.

The high life

2011-12-08T18:27:00.000-08:00

Puno elevation 3,827 m (12,628 ft)
Cuzco elevation 3326 m (10912 ft)
La Paz elevation 3640 m (11942 ft)

Yes, I feel like I've been hit by a truck. The elevation here means the air is so thin I can't sleep even when insomnia isn't tormenting me. I fall asleep for a few minutes and then wake up suffocating. I force myself to get three deep breaths and then sit up and get nervous. I would normally go to the fridge for something sweet, but I can't find an appetite here. That makes it all the harder to walk around and do things of interest-- or anything at all. I am totally worn out from this, and I have yet to go across Lake Titicaca to make my way to Bolivia. But I will somehow keep on going. As hard as this sometimes is I don't want to turn back till I do whatever I can do. A boat ride on the lake is just the thing for me, I think. And if I survive it, on to La Pas, south from there to the place Che was shot to death, and maybe a detour into the souther Altiplano to visit the reputed place where Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid were shot. If any of that doesn't kill me, then I will attempt some further travel, down to Paraguay, described in an unforgettable headline in Rolling Stone Magazine about 40 years ago as "The Last Place on Earth for the Worst People in the World."

It's the high life for this guy. Tomorrow, assuming I have the strength, I'll report somewhat on my away trip to see a pre-Inca burial site outside of Puno. It was all that I had hoped to have at Machu Piccu. Had a good time on an away trip with a bus load of others.

But it has to wait till tomorrow. This evening, I'm beat.

The continuous quiet of living

2011-12-07T19:27:00.001-08:00

I have yet to meet (and I hope it stays so) anyone who was an adult at the time who isn't to this day angry and disgusted by the Philosophy professor, Abimal Guzman, founder and leader of the Sendero Luminoso, the pseudo-Maoist terrorist organisation that ripped Peru's social fabric in the '70's through the 90s. This country is still recovering from the damage that maniac murderer did, and people are still pretty angry over it, him, and them, the Senderos now turning their hands to cocaine smuggling in the jungle. Peru is as stable as it is, and it's not at all perfect, because in the past decade or so it has embraced a free market economy and deregulation to a large extent. It's a nice place for me and for many Peruanos, most of whom are happy people in a fairly happy county. I compare it to America, my home and my heart, all said and done, that is nasty, ugly, and increasingly disgusting to me. We suffer from fools who elected utter fools, and in time I suspect this will be seen as a time as bad for us as the times of Guzman in Peru. But regardless, life will go on.
In Peru there was a time when Tupac Amaru was featured as a figure worthy of coinage. I would love to have one of those coins, but they aren't readily available, and so far I have seen only one, losing the photo of it somehow. The lack of such coins tells me that people here are happy to have faceless coins that say nothing much about things in general. There is the anonymous fact of money, no political posturing involved. Money is money, and it is good. In America we celebrate our founding fathers for the most part, but in recent times we see the icon of Obama disgracing our nation. There is some going back, I think. A return to neutrality would be a good start.

I had a chance to post a vivid picture of a Red Star on a wall, over which another graffiti artist had added "Ratta." I opt now to show Peru without politics.

Life goes on, and the less we find of megalomaniacs murdering or attempting to control, the better.
The long-faced llama, the short-faced alpaca.

Life does go on, and it has little to do with imaginary figures like Tupac Amaru. Life is stuff that grows, like children. Like freedom.

Medical-Dental Living at its best.

2011-12-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

Somewhere P.J. O'Rourke writes that for those who deny the concept of Progress he has two words: Dental Care.

Dental care is pretty useless to those who can't afford it. I can, thanks to being in Peru where I recently lost a tooth in a slip on a washed-out section of a mountain path. And I am going for the best that the world can offer.

someone recently questioned the state of the medical system here in Peru. I have no idea about the details of that, but looking at this picture tells me the Peruvians have a good sense of organisation. Here we see the emergency hospital on one side of the street, and on the other a row of funeral parlours. I mean, yes, who goes to a hospital but sick people. And why waste time dicking around all over town for a place to bury those sick people who die. It makes good sense to have this near one-stop-shopping.
[Click on photo for details]

And they call this a backward country!

If I should die in the dental process, it's all taken care of. If I survive, then expect to see my smiling face around Christmas.

Dead in Peru

2011-12-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

I was out for a walk to the local university in Arequipa, Peru recently, when I saw out of the corner of my eye a huge edifice with an inscription, "The Family of ..." in a cemetery. I don't often see families together in life, let alone in death, so I found a gate and entered in just to satisfy my morbid curiosity about whatever the hell I was thinking about. Not surprisingly, I found a range of post-life experiences, some of which surprised me. Take, for example, Julia Bueno, d. 1928, who died almost a hundred years ago, and who still has at least one person leaving flowers. Why? Who would care?

Others are lined up in galleries row upon row, and galleries abound in this cemetery. So too do the family crypts. I had some family somewhere, most of whom, those I know, are dead, and I don't give them more than passing thought. I don't care about the dead, and it might say something as well that I don't have any children. One might wonder if the galleries and the family crypts are actually about individuals at all or if they are simply about place-holder people. I don't have any answers here.

I did see the dead respected for whatever reasons. Those reasons are beyond me. I see that some do not survive the time. One might wish to be a good person and so to be remembered by those who couldn't possibly recall the living being. But life is not fair, and one cannot say of another that he or she did not deserve to be loved in death. sometimes people just get buried and left, and sometimes they get buried and rooted out. For me, living still, there is a wonder that I can't satisfy. I will never know if I am forgotten and buried or forgotten and burned or just forgotten. But in this life I can look at others and live with their experience because others cared at least a little bit and left some of that for me to think on.

The university might teach things of this nature, but I missed that part.

I might have learned something in a walk through the grave yard. It'll pass.

Limited Space, Limited Choices

2011-12-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

The things I don't have but will probably someday kick myself for not getting. I have a backpack that is jammed tight with stuff that I really could do without, like a sweater and extra socks and shorts and toilet stuff, and I mean, I am never going to use that stuff, so why, I wonder, did I pass up such cool stuff at the market where I had a chance at the occult and witchcraft stall to do myself some real favours for later?

I am probably going to kick myself for passing on dead llama babies pre-dried out and decorated with ribbons. Man, I think sometimes I just don't get it.

I don't have any dried llama babies, and I don't know anyone who can lend me some if I need them. Let this be a lesson to you, dear reader, to take what you can when you can. You will tell you children about the poor fool Dag who, when the only thing that could save him was dead llama babies, and he didn't have any. A lesson in life, friend. Even though it probably reflects badly on me, I think it important that others learn from my idiot mistakes.

Get them llama babies while you can.

To Lake Titicaca in fine style safe and sound.

2011-12-07T17:02:00.001-08:00

Life on the road can be sometimes a tad scary, especially when the local papers have screaming headlines every week announcing "Many Dead, More Horrible Mutilated in Bus Crash on the same road Dag is taking today to a new town he knows nothing about." And there I was, your humble narrator, sitting right up front with a great view through the plain, untempered glass without any of that plastic shatter proofing I am so used to, looking at the vehicles our driver was passing every chance he got. Not that I worry.

Nice view of the highway and sights along the way. Many of those were of gas trucks. I like it. Nice and close view of a gas tanker right in front of me. I call this experiencing other cultures so I can expand my tiny mind and see how valid it is to live in other cultures and therefore give up my evil xenophobic ways. I py good money for this kind of thing, and I hope and expect it makes me a better person for it. More sharing and caring and less an imperialistic arsehole. The bus last week, well, 8 dead, 48 injured.

That's an education, if you ask me.

I've witnessed a couple of bad bus accidents, and I was in a bus that went part way over a cliff, saved by the driver's cousin who swung himself out the window and climbed along the roof to help a bunch of others hook chains to the axle to pull us back onto the pathway that wound its way through the jungle. A couple of others I met weren't so lucky. But this is life, and it beats the alternative greatly. Dangerous up close and personal, but one must live.

I like it, if only because so far I survive it.
Surviving is the important part for me. Close is cool.

I have a friend whom I tell that should I die in a fiery car crash he should do certain things with the stuff he keeps for me, like sell it off and retire in comfort, given that I won't need it any longer. He always laughs uncomfortably and says I'll be fine. He is a good friend.
I mean, what could happen?

The truth is that the bus trip was uneventful for me. I got through the thunder, lightning and rain storm just fine, the only problem being that just as night fell we were a bit back of the truck that flipped over and had to be shovelled off the road by a guy with a front-end loader. No fire, no flames, and thus no photo, given that it was pitch black. Just a mangled truck and stuff strewn all over the road for a long stretch. No danger for me at all.

Philadephia in Peru.

2011-12-07T15:03:00.000-08:00

The modernist world has gone to Hell and nothing is getting better there as time goes on. It's about time to re-evaluate the meaning of our place and see if we aren't so rich in terms of cash that we have bought with our money a second-rate dictatorship.

I look back at my miserable years in Canada and other Western hell-holes, and I thank the gods that I now live in real peace and freedom in, for now, Peru. I hope never to return to the Velvet Fascism of Canada or Western Europe. I truly and deeply hate most of the Modern world as it is today, and one can see why in the daily life of Peruvians, those people who should be shining examples of possible freedom in our world.

We in the West have lost too much of our freedom, and we pay for that loss with our own money. Image, for example, that one has graduated from an art college in Canada and is now selling pottery in an upscale market where most of ones money goes for rent and taxes. One might sell some replica version of pre-Columbian pottery to those living in an up-scale neighbourhood, people who fancy themselves collectors of fine crafts. One would not dare fall asleep in the sun, leaving ones wares open on the sidewalk. If it didn't get stolen, it might be damaged. More than likely, the police would issue a citation for selling on the sidewalk in the first place. There is no rest.

In Peru, where the lady above is asleep at her post, there is no college grant to study the making of pre-Columbian pottery. She and her family make pots because she never had a chance to go to school to learn anything else. She doesn't think of herself as an "artist" making pottery. She and her family make pottery because they don't know how to make money doing anything better. She is a very pleasant lady when one has a chance to speak with her.

Much of what goes on in poor countries is hidden from public view. This isn't because there is some deep love of privacy, it's mostly because one cannot trust ones neighbours not to see and envy and steal. So, things are hidden away.

Often it's not pretty at all. It's dirty and broken and ramshackle. But it is ones own. There are no health inspectors or building inspectors or inspection inspectors inspecting. One is on ones own, for better or worse. One cannot "make do" in most of the modern world. The neighbours would call the police if one tried. All things must be regulated because the social world would suffer if one person, doing something on his own, made a mess of it for every one else.
You cannot have a thatched wall. What if it caught fire? Everyone would be in danger. So, one calls the police.

Much of western Peru is desert. There are in Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, a couple of smallish rivers, one of which is dry this Spring. But not to worry, there is an artesian well that stepped farmers, like their Incan ancestors, have created to graze cattle. It's brilliant, lovely, and stinking. The steppe is right close to unregulated produce sellers who work and live and live pretty well by selling fruit and vegetables fresh from home. In America, land of the free? Maybe not so much.
Almost everything in Peru today would be illegal in the most Modern of nations today. It would violate "regulations" of any number of sorts. But Peruvians get on just fine with freedom, whereas the regulated nations, Bolivia, for example, do not. Peru, unregulated, is a better place to live for the free man than any place that comes to mind in America today. Not rich, not cutting edge clever and inventive, not booming and futuristic; Peru and such other free places on earth are just good to live in if one can live at all. It's not easy here. One must struggle and work hard to live at all. That's the price of freedom.

How bad is life in Peru? I took an hour to talk to locals at the Plaze de Armas in Arequipa on a Sunday afternoon recently. We were swarmed by pigeons. This tells me that, unlike Canada, no one is eating them because their welfare cheques didn't show up on time. Here, people work, have families, and go to the park on Sunday after church. I've been to a number of places other than Canada where there are few pigeons, and that is because pigeons get eaten. Not here. There is lots of food, and people grow it and sell it and consume it freely. Flies? Yes. Filth? No. Health inspectors? What?

I met a fat bus-driver and his dumpy and not very bright wife who live on a street beside a park in an area with about zero crime. They live near a million dollar house similar to the one I fell in love with, its adobe walls and unfinished siding being typical of the haphazard way things don't get done here. This beautiful house might well belong to some guy who has a dull and unskilled job. It's pretty typical of houses in Arequipa, affordable because one begins with whatever money one has, and as one gets more, one eventually finishes the building, maybe.
Building inspectors? What? It's the man's home. Who asked the government for an opinion about how to build a mud brick house in an earthquake zone?

Strange as it might seem to many living in the Modern world, I have not yet met anyone working for the government or an NGO in Peru on the strength of a degree in Wymins Studies who expects to live in a nice house like the one above. OK, I haven't met any Peruanos who have goof-degrees. Most people who live in nice places do so because they work for a living doing something, and sometimes strange things indeed, that make other people happy to give them money to finance nice houses that could well fall down in an earth quake. Some people sell fruit and vegetables, or pots, or maybe brooms. Who cares?
Yes, there is the matter of reaching ones full potential, and selling brooms on a side street isn't likely to qualify. But to work and make money and have a nice place, that might compensate for not being ones artistic genius in the world. The Modern world could really use a lot of sweeping today, mostly of idiots who think they're too good to work at boring jobs that make money. It's freedom here that we miss in the Modern world, and the self-respect that comes from self-sufficiency. The only thing that would impel me to return to my home is some deep personal failure that shows me incapable of living like a man in the world, me needing a baby-sitter all of my life. I hope I die free instead. But, and I have my doubts, maybe we will come to our senses and recreate the Modernity we used to have in the Modern world before we threw it all away for the corruption of the German Revolution. Me? I don't need it. I want freedom. I hope to live like a Peruvian.

I don't need others to ensure that my life and world is perfect. I can make do with less so long as it's the best I can do. Maybe some day America will come home again, and then so will I. I don't wait for perfection, just for the nation we used to have.

Till such a day, hello from Peru.

Leaving ones print

2011-12-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

I come from a family of printers, perhaps so far back as Caxton, but certainly so far back as my grandfather and my father. That my alcoholic father had a severe case of lead poisoning from working with the hot lead type of his profession might prejudice me against some aspects of printing, i.e. actual printers, doesn't diminish my love of the actual printing process, i.e. the machines, the type, the fonts, the paper, the ink, the readers themselves. I love printing presses. I love Gutenberg and Caxton, and I love Luther and Tynedale. I love the Internet. I love the freedom one can attain because of reading, and the machines, even the men who make it all possible.

In a short walk to the bakery to pick up a slice of chocolate cake for dessert I poked my head into a small space in a doorway and saw, to my surprise, a working print shop.

[Print Shop, Arequipa, Peru.]

I can't identify the press itself. I would guess it to be some Heisenberg press, but another could say more and better than I. I like it just as it is, regardless, because it brings information, i.e. freedom, to the masses, for good or ill.

Men such as my family, and me too, we had California Job Cases full of lead bits, of types of various fonts, of slugs, and so on, and from those cases and into boxes went words, all backward, images, backward too, and then on to the bed and under the press to print.

[California Job Case.]

I have endless evil memories of lead poisoned lunatic alcoholics, but that is a personal story, and the story of printing, of literacy, of thinking, of learning and exploring, much of it is universal and available to all of us if only we care to sit down for a bit, to let the world rotate in its natural course, and we can read and maybe gain a bit more from life thanks to the efforts of others who might not, like my family, have any respect whatsoever for the product itself.

[Old man sitting in the sun, reading, Arequipa, Peru, 2011.]

Printing. Oh, I sometimes just laugh out loud when I realise how fortunate I am to live is such a world as this.

The sweet smell of success

2011-12-07T14:40:00.000-08:00

I can't pass up a good sewer. I live a homeless life in Peru these days, not at all settled, not a legitimate resident, but not a tourist either. I'm a long-term independent traveller, as I like to call myself, a man without a real home or even a nation to belong to in any but the most tenuous legal sense. I'm just one man with a passport, and one man out of 350 million people entitled to the same passport and rights. A leaf of a certain colour and shape, I am sort of part of a tree of a kind of forest. I'm detached now, and floating on a breeze downward. No home but somewhere today in Peru. I like it here very much, and not least because I like its sewers.

Peru, from what I have seen so far from Lima to Cuzco to Arequipa, doesn't stink. I haven't encountered dead babies everywhere I turn, dead from sewage in the water. I eat vegetables here, brush my teeth with tap water, and even, if I can't find a cup of coffee, drink the tap water itself. I can do this because of sewers. This is not the cleanest place I've been to, but it is good enough to keep its people from mass death due to shit in the water. I've been there too, and I remember. I love sewers.

It takes some concern to make a sewer cover into something more than an iron covered concrete plate to cover a hole in the street. It takes some artistic skill to design something for the world, even if hardly anyone but a strange old man traveling would care to notice, if I may judge by the looks of those who looked at me taking a picture of a sewer cover. Yes, I have seen prettier covers. But this, like so much of Peru, is beauty itself. Someone cared enough to make it so. And others cared enough to make the cover come to reality, paid the money to make this cover for everyone to walk on and walk over and not notice.

I can make out, with my failing eye-sight, Medieval symbols of royalty and vibrant scenes of power and law. Some bureaucrat cared about this, and others made it happen, through agreement, finance, and labour. It is, this simple covering, a statement of benign concern for all.

I found a modern version of the man-hole cover, the city emblem. Most cities have such romantic emblems to promote themselves and their glorious pasts. Arequipa, Peru is no different. What is also true of other cities and this is that the city put their emblem on a sewer cover. This is a sign for those who care that cities value the work they do, no matter how insignificant it might seem to others, even those who directly benefit from it in the form of, for example, sewerage. One can be-- and I am, among others-- proud of sewers, and I (and we)) are proud to see city emblems on such master-works as manhole covers.

Even as an old guy drifting from some strange cold land through this land of warm wonder and equal strangeness I am blessed here by seeing on man-hole covers such concern for details and this expression of care for all, citizens or not, who pass by Sucre Street and who might, perhaps, look down for a second and smile at the work of those who did this for us all.

The Man Makes the Hat

2011-12-07T14:24:00.000-08:00

I find it easy to miss the effort and labour and thought that goes into so much of the Human world, the sheer work that people do to make things good for me and the rest of us, being all of us. Sometimes something odd strikes me and I do look, and I do go out of my way to inquire and see for myself the detail of the maker, i.e. I go into someone's home or workplace where I interrupt the worker and demand answers to whatever questions I might have. “Who are you? What are you doing? Do people love you for your work, or are you anonymous and forgotten as soon as they leave with your work in hand?”

Work, as much as family, is the meaning of life. For some, work is sewing beads onto fabric in elaborate patterns so others can parade in public in wonderful grandeur. In Latin America, such people who sew such things are Bardados. I've met three such people now in Peru, and others in different nations, all of them mad as hatters. I would guess that is co-incidence.

When I see parades and look at the costumes and banners people have, I think of the men and women who sit for uninterrupted hours and days stitching and sewing and gluing bits of stuff to fabric, to sheets and shoes and wood and plastic, who must go blind early, who seem to go strange in the mind from so much solitude. But, assuming others value the work if not the maker, such things will last for a long time, longer, I would guess, than the makers themselves.

I'm a hat guy, myself, mostly because I use a hat to keep the weather off my head so I don't go baked and loony. But beyond that I think of hats as making the man into a public figure among men, a man wearing his identity for all to see in wearing a hat of a certain style.

None of us dress simply for the sake of weather. We all dress because we want to say something about ourselves to others. This is not a hat for me, but for those who do wear them, and who say to me that they care about themselves and their community, I thank those who lose so much to give so much to us all. We're all passing through, of course, and few of us will leave any mark at all. Maybe just a hat. Good enough.

See also: http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2007/12/hat-makes-man.html

Andean Walker, cover graphic

2011-12-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

I keep private notes that I expect to use at some later date to compile a new book of travel tales, the working title being Andean Walker. The following photo I hope to use as the cover graphic, taken from the unpublished piece, “The Bodega of the Last Gasp Mannequins.”

If anyone comes across this picture, please include my photo credit.

D.W. Walker,

Author of

An Occasional Walker

and up-coming

Andean Walker

And

As Pacific Walker.

Lost?

2011-12-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

My best gal will be an old woman now, this being her birthday, she being ageless and timeless to me. She is long gone for a long time, and yet it seems like yesterday she left for better. I lost her.

My gal found another man, a better man, a stable man who provided her with the life I could not. She looked long and hard for a man who could do for her the things a woman needs from a husband, and she found him. She was married to him for a long period, stable and happy.

But things are not static in our world, and she lost him. He was well-to-do, and the economy changed all that for him. He had some idea that stability was his right and that providing wealth was his duty to his family. He lost all that. He went into the garage and shot himself in the head.

There's always music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOKI_tIBWVI

Arequipa, Peru.

2011-11-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

Having smashed my bad knee into a rock at Machu Picchu, and then losing a tooth on top of that, getting exhausted at high altitude, and stupefied to the point I forgot (and therefore lost) my guide book there in the downpour of tropical rain, I decided it was time to go for more water at the bus pick-up station at the entrance to the site. That only cost me a few bucks, whereas the woman next to me paid closer to twelve dollars for a sandwich. A cup of Coca Cola was around $5.00. I was mightily discouraged by most of the experience of visiting Machu Picchu, and by the time I left I was happy to say it was over.

I've been to a fair number of lost cities recovered from the wilds, and most, in fact, all of them, have offered me some interesting and often times unique insights into the ways of humanity that are, for me, beyond my experience in the modern world. Often times I am transported, if only in my imagination, to past times and am allowed experience of other ways of living that I can't get from reading or imagining on my own in the privacy of my own space; but in a setting far from the usual, in a place where I am surrounded by the exotic, then I find myself in a different state of mind altogether, at times so strange and awe inspiring that I am hooked on such adventure seeking. My time at Machu Picchu, however, was not a great experience; it was a huge let-down in that there were so many people tramping around, that the commercial aspects of the visit so over-powered any sense of the sublime, that I was put off badly and could hardly think of the place in situ let alone the hoped for and expected transport of the mind. But, having grumped about it, there will come a time when all the edges are worn off and the bright spots will shine like the sun.

At Machu Picchu I saw a marvel of human ingenuity and perseverance and imagination that is almost unrivaled in my experience. I was more or less disgusted by the initial encounter, but such will pass. I have the images of Machu Picchu vividly in my memory, the kind of deep impression that lasts and grows stronger with time. Good for me, after all. But my tooth. I was in trouble and needed help, which I couldn't act on at such altitude. I could hardly breathe at Cuzco when I returned, it being even higher up than Macchu Pichu itself.

I went for a consultation with a dentist, who just happens to be the most beautiful woman I have seen in Peru. Her name is Yerte, and not only is she young and beautiful and delicate and lovely, she wrote out a persciption for antibiotics and antiinflamtory drugs to get me within spitting distance of health. I had to get to a lower elevation, which I did by hopping a bus to Arequipa, some 12 hours south. At 6,000 feet I am in the safety zone, more or less. I've been a week now on the medicines, and will continue my way south from here. But I have had a week to look around Arequipa, a city I enjoy to some extent, though in many ways I am forced to consider that the people here are of a different race from those of Lima, a race not so pleasant that I feel any desire to stay here longer.

I've been here a week, in which time I've been taking my pills on schedule and am now more or less recovered from the infection I got. I've taken some time to explore the city, to see what I can, and to learn about the life of others. I see from the rooftop of my latest home the mountains all around this quaint and sort of attractive city, cobblestone streets likely laid at the beginning of the 20^th Century, crumbling buildings, unfinished buildings, empty buildings crumbling, and rubble. The sidewalks are narrow, and the main street of downtown, San Juan de Dios, a two lane cobblestone street filled with taxis and pedestrians, drivers and pedestrians alike looking like extras in a Hollywood movie, near misses and seeming chaos as everyone negotiates without the benefit of stoplights or traffic control of any kind other than luck and daring, cars darting in and out, intersections a heart-stopping spectacle of rushing and jumping, of what looks like certain death turning into just another car crossing through.

In many ways this is a 19^th Century city, but here there is electricity and endless imported consumer goods for sale in shops on every street, some shops selling stuff so obscure I can't describe it. What can one say of a shop filled with metal bits that make no sense to the average man? It must be for something, though I can't place metal bits as anything useful. Perhaps it's for some repair job I have never seen before. But other shops sell things universal, shoes, plastic goods, Chinese food.

Often I just wander around looking at this anachronistic city. There must be something this city produces, but it escapes me. So far from the centre of things, from Lima and the manufacturing and exports on the coast, and so far from the handicrafts economy for tourists that one finds in the Machu Picchu area. I have no idea what sustains this place. People have enough money to buy everything a people could need in our time, and I see only a few homeless men, obviously mentally deranged, and I see many people well-dressed and well-fed. It's not rich here, but stable and livable. It should be a good place. I find I don't like it at all as much as I hoped I would. On the surface it looks just about right.

I took a short walk to the river here, and on the way saw what seemed like a happy middle class area of smart looking houses and a well-tended homes.

The street is off the beaten track, the fronts looking clean and healthy.

But behind the houses I found the ruin of ages.

The stench of sewage behind the facade was unbearable.

But, like so much of this nation, the facade is as deceptive as the seeming disgusting reality behind it: I found a super market here that is a delight to my mind, a place a block in size and a beauty like a cheap Walmart. Food, food, food, and clothing and housewares and electronics and endless delights of the Modern age. All of it cheap and clean and new. I am in love with such places, the sign of the future when every man can live in peace and plenty. Vea. I see. I see the future. It is beautiful.

Manuel Carceres, Jefe of Machu Piccu Trains.

2011-11-30T15:24:00.000-08:00

I took a walk along the Rio Urubamba this afternoon, crossing the train tracks and inching my way along the bank to look into the water in the faint hope of seeing fish jumping for flies. The water here churns in swift rapids high up in the mountains, and dark, filled with dirt and vegetation. I don't begin to know what kind of fish there would be in such waters. I had seen on my way here to Urubamba many fine places for a fisherman to cast his lot in the hope of plenty, but this is the first time I have had a chance to examine the water closely, and I must be pleased with the beauty of it all, passing on those natural places a fisherman would test his skill against nature, the man connecting, perchance, with a fighting fish, the two becoming one in the duel. I seldom eat fish anymore, catch and release being my personal policy, if only because I don't kill solely for pleasure. I have killed many fish in my time, but it's clear to me now that for the most part those days are fading. Much is fading, as I am slowly and painfully discovering on this leg of my journey.

I walked along the railroad tracks gazing at the river, many other rivers running through my mind as I did so, memories of wild beauty and calm. Those rivers flow through my mind even though today many of them have likely shifted and dried up and died on this earth from those places they were. But the flow continues somewhere, forever. I wanted to know about fish in the river, and I saw a young man who works for the railroad company and I called to him and asked about fishing. This is not, as I knew, a place of cutthroats, of sparkling trout. This is a land of Inca ruins and trains and locals working, so the man and I took a walk down the riverside and talked about rails and ruins, Manuel and me.

Another tired man, I had no need to tell him I am a stranger. Everybody knows. Manuel and I took a walk down the riverside by the tracks and he pointed out ruins there and a path across the water on the mountain side, part of this settlement built on steep slopes and the constant danger of falling. We looked at trains. At railroads that curled like smoke above his shoulder.

Maybe all things move and all things change; or maybe all this is illusion. I love the rocking and the swaying of the movement forward in the night, the surrounding darkness giving shelter like the womb or the perhaps the tomb, quiet and peaceful like a fish swimming in a river; like a man going nowhere.

In this valley of rivers and trains a man could reach for the sky only to surrender. There is nowhere else to go but onward. A stranger to Manuel, a man among trains by the river in a dark valley.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLq7Aqd_H7g

Primarily Red

2011-11-30T14:43:00.001-08:00

Times come when gutters over-flow and men walk ankle deep in blood curdling slowly on paving-stone streets.Women suffer and die, as do children, all being one. Cities burn to the ground, motley smoke wafting upward through heated troughs, released to the sky beyond, grey ash swirling amidst the blackened ruins. The skies themselves aglow, a deep, shimmering red. The streets lie down and wait in red.

Red, red, red. Red as the eyes of thegirl what loved me.

Red. To display what can be seen but cannot be felt.

I have read 10,000 books, listened to100,000 conversations, dreamed a million nightmares; and still my grasp of the moral is mired in red. Far from clear, the moral is marbled. It is red.

[image]

I have seen churches and cathedrals,galleries and museums, all filled with the glories of human greatness in this world. Across the spectrum of the arts much is red. Far more is empty space, not red at all.

People come from far away places toraft on white-capped rivers, to hang in clear amarillo skies, to tramp the pardo plains, to gaze in blanco astonishment at verdant jungles. I do not know what I am looking for, although I think it must be red.

As a boy I walked away from the black holes of mines, copper and silver, for the red wide world. Now in my old age I have travelled far and forever, and red eludes me when I most need it. Red. Red. Where art thou, red?

I fear that many a man's soul is red, and I see in my blind state only green, finely wrought.

My road is red, and I shall want. I shall want red and have red. Red will be mine for all the days of my road, and I will give thanks for red.

Life is horror and ends in red; but life is red for us all, and I rejoice in red. Red, red, red. Red as the road that loved me, a flood of flowing red, organ's red. All the days of my life i will in wnder in red.

Part Three of Primary Colours.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/02/primarily-yellow.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2010/03/primarily-blue.html

To Arequipa from Cuzco by bus

2011-11-28T15:52:00.001-08:00

I got lucky, I guess, in that my bus trip from Cuzco to Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, was more or less uneventful, especially given that some of my fellow travellers were not so lucky. We all have seen newspaper filler of "Bus Crash in Third World Kills Dozens." I've seen some of those crashes myself, though only once was actually in a bus that hung off a cliff side without going over. A few days back two bussed did go over, killing eight and injuring over 40. That was from Cuzco to Puno, my alternate route. I went instead to Arequipa. Lucky me. I had stayed a few more days in Cuzco, seeing the sights, and resting up from my broken tooth and sore knee. I looked out the window to see what the world is like there, and of course I saw a lady and her llama.

I saw a lot, which I hope to detail in my book when this part of my journey is over and I have a sense of what happened and can write it in some coherent narrative form. I'll leave it for now and will write more about Arequipa next time.