ideas, stories

I’m convinced. Nothing convinces me like puking convinces me. Puking convinces me with absolute pure and immutable resolution bigger and more solid than a huge windowless brick building that life always has a base or even baser place waiting just one bad dinner away.

So here I am on my hands and knees on the floor over a half full pan, in that baser place. I think about how some boxers puke before weigh-ins, then next thing I know I’m remembering the club and how everybody talked about the legendary fast food runs that coach treats his fighters too after the weigh in, and this one time when someone’s like “ah man, I’d load up on double macs” and one of the assistant coaches is like “awwwwWWw MAN that stuff’s nasty, you gotta go B-K or the Bell,” which by the way is totally the truth. But that’s mostly aside of the point, except that this thought triggered another one, and in a moment, me on my knees over a pan, pathetically wheezing little breaths because for a reason I don’t understand puking jacks up the respiratory system, every single strategically placed subliminal message of McDonalds’ big and disgusting food came rushing into my nauseous head at once.

I puked again.

ideas, stories

Running down a mountain after the last gray light has begun to fade away, I see a firefly for the first time in my life and stop running, hold out my hand and it lands on my hand like it knows me, this little insect, absolutely nothing at all and at the same time the neatest little beautiful thing, walks on my finger then lifts up again lighting its own way off into the last bit of dimming light. Then they all came out and lit my way as I ran down the mountain.

Exquisite grammar is so far out of the field of question, even words just seem wrong.

ideas, stories

After running halfway up and then back down a mountain’s foothill in hot sun, showering and then eating beef stew exquisite grammar just feels wrong.

stories

There’s anothern.
He ran his arm down the hole and lay on the ground feeling about in the dark beneath them. He closed his eyes. I got him, he said.
The dog he brought up was dead.
Yonder’s your runt, Billy said.
The little dog was curled and stiff, its paws before its face.
He put it down and pushed his shoulder deeper into the hole.
Can you find him?
No.
Billy stood. Let me try, he said. My arm’s longern yours.
All right.
Billy lay in the dirt and ran his arm down into the hole.
Come here you little turd, he said.
Have you got him?
Yeah. Damn if I don’t think he’s offerin’ to bite me.
The dog came up mewling and twisting in his hand.
This aint no runt, he said.
Let me see him.
He’s fat as a butterball.
John Grady took the little dog and held it in his cupped hand.
Wonder what he was doin off back there by himself?
Maybe he was with the one that died.
John Grady held the dog up and looked into its small wrinkled face. I think I got me a dog, he said.
——-

You sure you don’t want a glass of water?
No mam. I’m alright.
Betty, he said.
Yes.
I’m not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I don’t know why you put up with me.
Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning.
Yes mam.

From Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy

I’m gonna make a big stretch…McCarthy is like Messi. Yup. Messi doesn’t use tricks or gimmicks or anything that he doesn’t need, just perfect timing and sense of the game. He’s so good he doesn’t need that silly stuff. Reading these books, it’s like that–there aren’t tricks or gimmicks in the plot, and it’s all so much more story for it.

Down drift the leaves of change, I think the long time standing winner in my book of series of books, the Hitchhikers Guide, has come to the end of it’s season there.

ideas, stories

I have always loved to goof off, it’s so great to live the happy go lucky life–I’ve thought of aspiring to be the man who’s whole life is that life.

Almost..but not. Not all the time.

When faced with bad and dark things in this world you’ve gotta let your blood boil sometimes, some days at the end of a week that is lonelier than an empty cave on a rainy day or when a friend dies, you’ve gotta cry.

Sometimes. And the rest of the time I’ll be the leprechaun on the pogo stick.

———–

This was written about a week ago, here’s what happened yesterday, a conveniently timed epilogue:

I’ve been sick for two weeks now, it started with a nasty fever and sore throat, muscle aches and all, dropped down to a mild sore throat, now it’s a runny nose and cough. So I haven’t been sleeping all that well. When I’m tired, I actually usually fare well with controlling my temper.

Yesterday was valentines day. I didn’t get to sleep till late, and at three in the morning a ****-*** *** ****-**** ***-**-*-***** ****-**** weak excuse of a man pulled up at the window of one of my housemates (whose room is adjacent to mine), and proceeded to serenade her with one abominable pop song in spanish and then another, at full volume from his Landrover with the windows down.

I woke  up. Not only did I wake up, I woke up from a good dream. You know that feeling, when you don’t really remember the dream, but you know it was a good one, and you just woke up from it? Yeah, it was that. The songs finished, finally, and the (insert a lot of asterisks here) drove away. Puchiga mucha.

So rolled to my other side and closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. And started to cough. And coughed more. Legit, abs-hurting real coughing.

So, at this point I’m not only utterly indignantly disgusted at this pathetic excuse of a man that doesn’t have a pair to just knock on the door to tell a girl he likes her (ok, not gonna lie, when I’m tired and sick and it’s 3am, my temper isn’t too tempered) but also mad, because I have to get up at 6 o’clock and wolf down breakfast so I can get to the office because there’s a whole bucket load of work waiting for me that I’m not entirely convinced ought to be as so.

Easy Dave..chill. It’s their way of celebrating Valentines day. Yeah it seems really weird and offensive and…well, weird, but get over yourself already. He’s probably a good guy, likely not worthy of half that many asterisk-words. You just need to stop being a judgmental gringo and go get a nice cup of tea to settle your throat and go back to sleep.

Ok, a cup of hot green tea with panela (pre-sugar sugar-cane extract. Mmmm) sounds really great. So I went to the kitchen for my mug. Now, I’m not sure if it’s a USA thing, or maybe just a Dave thing, but I have MY mug. I like MY mug, it’s from the Marine Hardware Supply store in Anacortes, one of my favorite shops in one of my favorite places in the world. I miss that shop and that town and I like my mug. Every time I use my mug, I wash it out and set it by the coffee machine; creature of habit, I like my mug. So I was alright, calm cool and collected. I’m just going to have some nice tea and go back to sleep.

I hobbled tired halfway to the kitchen–then walked back to my room and put on my hoodie, then went to the kitchen for my mug. It wasn’t there, so I looked around for it. There sat my mug dirty on the table half full with cold coffee and with sticky sugar residue on the inside and on the outside too.

So much for calm, cool and collected.

Two cups of tea and something like two hours later I fell asleep on the couch.

(insert a lot of asterisks here).

That all may not be a bad and dark thing in the world, but it takes the (asterisks) silver medal.

ideas

So as I was eating a really delicious bowl of beef stew (to avoid “bragging,” per se, I’ll say that I have about perfected making beef stew to my taste) and a piece of french bread, a thought came to me. I could live off of this.

Then another thought came to me.

I think I will.

ideas

Take a look at the first before you read this second one,
http://wp.me/p14q4r-Rx

Also, I’m not sure whether or not I think the word god, as used here, should be capitalized or not. Thankfully the word Christian is a straight up syntax question without baggage, so it stays normal.

I don’t like to write something that’s not a story; I’m not very good at it and it feels stuffy.That said, here she goes.

The churches here in Guatemala have given me some problems, of them there’s one whopper. They made me realize something: I feel that god is for people who have good education and read lots of good books. If you don’t wonder deeply about redemption and covenant and all that and then go have a scotch and cigar and talk about all that with another  well educated book reader, if you don’t ponder infinity or make philosophical jokes about god…I feel you’re pretty much screwed.

When I first arrived here I first noticed that the churches are loud–the one across the street from my house is unfortunately very exemplary. They sing a lot of songs that sound much like what I imagine pagan chants sound like. They don’t sing the worship songs I know, like and am moved by. Then, when I began to visit churches and hear radio sermons, I noticed that they always preach very topically*. That’s not all, the topic almost every time hits hard on prosperity doctrine. Also, when someone prays it does not sound to me like a boy talking to his father or a woman to her mentor, what I feel prayer should be closest to. Instead it sounds like a screenplay being exagerated by an unskilled actor.

All these things together in my mind made for a single mental swing of ego and judgement: “wait-all these people are fake Christians. What’s all that   about?” If you want to duke it out with me for having thought that thought, take your best shot and see what happens.
So I notice all these things that are so different, and I am really bothered. I think to myself that I’m not like them. The next thing I think is “why?”

Why am I not like them?

I’ve come to the place I am at with respect to god by four things: (1) praying, (2) arguing about god and man, (3) thinking and (4) reading. So then I think to myself “of these four things, what makes me not like them?”

They pray here; they pray really differently, but prayer is such a complicated and peculiar thing I’m just going to leave it at “they pray here,” and so rule out number one. I’ll smoosh 2 into 3: arguing about god and man only counted when the arguement made me think, and what counted was the thinking, not the arguing. I know that the major part of how I think came from my studies at the university, and I know that very few here have had an education like mine. I’ll keep number three, with smooshed-in 2, and rename it “education.” Lastly there is reading. I’ve simply read more substantial books than the majority of churchgoers here. Through these books I’ve seen so many crazy different ideas and wild created worlds. Without doubt what I’ve read is key to how I think and a not-insignificant part of how I’ve come to where I am with respect to god. So I’ll keep number four.

So the result is that I threw out number one (prayer), smooshed number two (talking) into number three (thinking), and kept number four (reading). Education and books. So I look at these people and think to myself, they are spiritually fake and I am the real deal because of a degree I earned and the weekends and evenings I’ve whittled away reading books.

And worst of all, I have neither scotch nor cigar nor another “educated” book-reader to go argue, banter and joke about this with.

…maybe for now that’s best.

The end

———-

PS:
I implicitly cursed once. If you spotted it on the first pass, come visit me and I will make you a complex three course meal in 2 minutes flat and then give it to you.

*If you’re not familiar with preaching, there are two general ways to make a sermon. Exegesis is exposition using something resembling the “when did who say what to whom, where were they, and so why they say it like that at that moment?” It’s like this: imagine you were my boss’s coworker and needed to completely understand a very quickly-written incomplete email I’d written to him. You’d first need some knowledge of me and my job. You’d need some feel for the context of the email: was I pointing out a problem, clarifying a detail of an in-progress design job or maybe poking fun at the CEO with an inside joke? This is a good way to preach: good exegesis leaves little room for subjective error. Obviously there must still be a personal element-a preacher can’t just spew facts. But without the presence of rigorous reason and fact, sermons are at best lukewarm and at worst extremely decieving. Topical preaching is exactly what it sounds like: an arbitrary topic and an arbitrary batch of bible verses, almost always clipped out of context, that “talk” about it, where the definition of “talk” is up to the preacher’s whim. It is, at the core, the preacher expressing an idea or viewpoint in terms of phrases from the bible. If the idea or viewpoint is good, then often no harm is done.
stories

Last Saturday:

12 hours traveling (4 car, 8 bus), enough dramamine to kill a freakishly large lab rat, possibly the single most delicious lamb meat I have ever had in my life for breakfast at the highest place in central america with blue sky above and clouds on the horizon, one sponsored child successfully examined for hearing aids that will let her be a kid again and at the of the day one extremely sore butt.

Edit: I tweaked the exposure of the second picture in lightroom a little bit. Otherwise they’re both unedited.

other, stories

After trying two commercial html editing programs, two commercial WYSIWYG programs (neither of which I actually bought, just “demo” tried), then both an open source editor and an open source WYSIWYG, right now notepad simply works best.

Regardless of the truth or lack of it in the matter, I do feel like I’ve made it, arrived at somewhere good.

Edit: Jan 19th, 2011
Thanks to a very kind donation, one of the commercial WYSIWYG is now “free” so to speak. At the moment it works best to do a sidebyside mix. This program to quickly arrange visual elements and do things I don’t know the syntax for, then notepad to scrub and polish it. Someday maybe I’ll be cool enough to work fastest straight up notepad.

stories

Yesterday morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. This song wasn’t horrid like the title says, merely very curious. It was being played over a megaphone on top of the house kity-corner to the one I live in. It was being played very loudly, too. I didn’t really understand the lyrics, could only make out something about jesuchristo, then something about jamas asi o algo asi. Anyways, I was only bit annoyed; by now I’m accustomed to things happening unexpectedly in the morning (machine-gun-fire story coming soon). The part that mildly annoyed me was how the chorus had this terribly screechy and out-of-tune violin part.

Then the song finished. Phew! I thought to myself–now onto a different song, or if I’m lucky that was just some good-morning-world greeting from friends to another friend. They have different ways of showing friendship here.

Silence…for a few moments and then the music started up again, the same song.

Uh-oh..this cannot be good, I thought. I thought right. This song, at first innocently curious, for 14 hours repeated, became horrid.

At eight-thirty p.m. yesterday I left the house to go to the office. I’d spent the better part of the day making soup and reading and was at my wits end with this horrid song. I’d tried thinking about it as a joke, and this worked for a while. I tried enjoying it, and this worked for a while. I tried making fun of it in my mind, and this too worked for a while. I finally plugged earphones into my little mp3 player and used this, but the earphones aren’t sound isolating so I had to use serious volume to overpower the neighbor’s megaphone-piped screechy-violin song. Finally at eight thirty my head hurt too much to think or really do anything, so off to the office I went, and there I found good peace and quiet–it was wonderful.  I’m ashamed of it, but I actually did have brief thoughts to wait till a bit later at night when there’s good darkness and then to hurtle a rock at this screechy-song-spewing megaphone. Honestly, I thought about it–but no, that’s not a good thing at all. I quit the ideas of destruction or violence, but remained very bitter and somewhat angry at whatever ridiculous person, the ridiculous person who thought it some sort of stupid joke to play the same horrid song all day long.

This morning at six thirty sharp I was woken up by music. Again.

Yes, you guessed it, the song with the out-of-tune screechy-violin chorus. However, there is a saving grace, and because of this saving grace I actually laughed out loud (lol!) when I heard the song pipe up. Today is the first day of work–a day I’ll spend at the office, not at home, not near this horrid, horrid song. Because of this, I laughed–those silly fools, their snarky joke today will fall on nothing but an empty house. Bahahaha. I have to say that, at the office the night before, the resident security guard Don Alvaro had mentioned that an old man had died and the music was some sort of tradition, some custom of the indigenous people–that didn’t really strike me as too important though. It paled in comparison to both my headache and the concept of this ludicrously snarky joke. By morning today, I’d practically forgotten what Alvaro had mentioned.

There’s a little tienda, this tiny snack store, a stone’s throw away from the office; I’m a ten-a.m. regular. At least two or three days out of the week I head down to the tienda to quench the jones for some sweet and salty treats; sometimes I go healthy with juice and a piece of bread, other times it’s Coca-Cola and chips.

As I was walking out of the office to the little tienda thinking about Coca-Cola and chips, I heard music. It was the screechy-violin-chorus song! I heard it faintly, growing louder; I froze in my tracks and looked to my left down the dirt road towards where the music was coming from. There was the funeral procession, forty or fifty people: family members and friends. All the men were dressed in old suits dirty with road dust and the women in traditional woven skirts and blouses, all of them somber and quiet. Towards the back of the group was a beautiful ornate coffin on the shoulders of five younger men. I walked to the side of the road and stood, cap in my hand, thoughtless. Walking next to the pallbearers was an older woman with a single candle. The small yellow flame, barely wavering in the calm breeze, was hardly a notable thing in the bright midmorning sun of a cloudless sky. One man was carrying the megaphone mounted on a tall two-by-four, another was carrying the stereo and battery, a third the cables that carried this song from the stereo to the megaphone to be sounded out in static-heavy reproduction for all to hear, as if it was transmitted from a poor radio station or a radio station in a town very far away.

They passed by me and proceeded on to the cemetery, led by a pastor with an old and worn bible in his hand.

I ate lunch at home in peace today, the song wasn’t playing any more. The man who had died was 65, I don’t know if he left behind a wife or not.

The end.

Edit:
Later, I explained this a little bit to my sorta-boss and really-mentor, Danery. As I got to the point about hearing the song and realizing that the funeral procession was passing by, I thought of my friend who died and his funeral and what it was like to see soldiers and his brothers and his coffin being carried by them and I nearly started crying right there half an hour ago. And right here as I type this in the office I’m a hairs-breadth away from falling apart into a bawling mess. Asi anda la vida.

stories

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west. He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

-All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

He really knows how to make things with words. That’s only one part of many that it takes to put out a good book, and that book is certainly a good book. I don’t know much of the many other parts it takes–I’m thinking I’d like to, though.

photography

So this one time I went to Mexico.

street in a little town
Self portrait courtesy the window of the bus that took me from a Mexican town to a Mexican city
a little town in Mexico the bus passed through
The pacific ocean, Playa Linda