Saturday, November 10, 2012

Iquitos, Peru: Back to School (Part One)

I sometimes put myself through brutal times for no particular reason other than to have the experience that I later laugh about, adventures that now leave me somewhat crippled and probably harder than the average middle class guy from the suburbs; and I've even done some crazy stuff that seriously scares me to thing back on; but one thing that has never come to my adventure seeking mind has been rising at 5:00 a.m to catch a little wooden boat to some tiny village in the jungle on the Amazon River to teach elementary school for a day. When the opportunity came, I took it. I was on that boat. 
 
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My buddy in Iquitos, Peru is a little old lady* (Paula) who used to teach school in France, and now that she's retired she likes to keep busy, teaching still, this time at the little village an hour away by motorised canoe from one of the minor ports a mile or so from the centre of the city. She invited my to come along with her one day after I insisted that I wanted to see the place and get to know a bit more about the area and the people. All I had to do was get up in the dark at 5:00 and go with her and the two American lads looking for volunteer work and a chance to take ayauasca in the jungle on the cheap with a shaman from the area rather than to spend a lot of money on American drugs-and-mysticism hustlers in the city. The four of us rode in a chicken bus to the port in the dawn light and I tried to finish my coffee as the bus jerked and banged in the pot holes down the side streets as we picked up workers on the way. We too were off to work, a first for me in a long time.

I'm a writer by profession, but I never make enough money at it to live on, so I find in my life I have done so many other jobs to bring in cash that I have even been for long periods a school teacher as well as being a semi-professional bad guy in a rough world of hard men. In spite of my occasional forays into war and ultra-violence I am at heart a teacher, a bookish fellow, and I love to chat. I've even been a school teacher in war zones, though not the kind one finds in America with children bringing guns to class. Usually I teach adults-- and in fact I have never spent a day with children since I must have been one though I can hardly recall it beyond those times when I gaze in wonder at my world and feel like a boy so lost, a motherless child in a story book itself, this day a boy in a boat on the Amazon River in the jungle, me now a one-eyed pirate with a bum leg and able if I choose to have a parrot on my shoulder. Good morning, class.

My last real teaching job of a sort was at a local university where I lectured on the History of Early Christianity, thinking I'd play a joke on my students for a time or two by not once referring to Jesus. When I mentioned to my class that they had sat through lectures twice a week about the history of Jesus and I had not once mentioned his name, I was met with dull incuriosity. Why mention Jesus when I had spoken for months about Christianity and shown it is all about anything but? The alternative to teaching is to return to editing trade magazines, teasing the sense out of tangled prose about the latest glue used by leading industries in plumbing, or perhaps to sit for days and weeks and months correcting articles on 'my glazed-over eyes' that only see words on pages as lines of a moonlit night driving down a deserted highway, the miles of prose an empty road leading nowhere in the darkness all around me. To have a day in the jungle to teach school children about anything at all, such is a day in a Dag life. I jumped in that boat with high enthusiasm, looking forward to teaching the making of exotic paper aeroplanes and teaching girls how to terrorise boys by playing "mind-reading" card tricks. In the jungle all things are possible for the fugitive intellectual on the run from a pirate past. 

 

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I taught Byzantine history in Jugoslavia to grown men whose real interest was the history of their neighbours' ancestors who had perhaps 50 or a hundred years before raped and murdered someone's cousin and had to be repaid in kind. If Hatvik or McCoysky was absent from class there was every good chance he was absent from this very life, his body perhaps smoldering in a blown-up building where he had been trying to kill the man across the street, a man who had an uncle 200 years ago who stole a chicken and deserved to die for it, the man alive today being as guilty of the theft as the man who did it. I too am close enough to such men to hate the rotten Campbells. I go through the List of Irene. Grim men stare ahead and dream of death to their enemies and love Irene and revenge. By the instant I am expanded as I stand in the classroom speaking of old wars; I grow to a size I have never known, the artillery shells exploding nearby sending concussive waves through the soil of the people and up from the floor into my body till my joints are about to burst their moorings and make me alive longer than I have been before. I struggle to catch my breath before turning again to Irene and the history of the people as I stand before a group of men in dust and smoke who will after class take up their arms and drink themselves into an angry stupor while the enemy cuts through the perimeter wires and the razor wire and the chain link fence to steal anti-tank mines and even my pack while I'm in the shower as the dogs in the yard eat half of one of my shoes as the guard sleeps through it all and on waking refuses to fire on the enemy, smashing my head with his rifle butt when I try to grab his weapon to defend us all, three days later eight men dead by our stolen matériel. I too become less than irenic. As I move I find myself on the Amazon river floating toward a day at school again, with children in the jungle.

Paula, a Pied Noir, left home as well when young, and like me she remembers her home that is so impossible now and then to return to. We met in the Amazon, and this day we go with young lads to teach children at school in the jungle. 

Drums along the Amazon


 
The plastic canopy over the canoe obscures my view of the river bank so that I have to hunch down to see the shore and the sudden looming maze of black painted steel that makes a tanker-landing for an oil company in the selva. Blood sniffing fish are inches from me as I try to lean out of the boat to see the wonder that is Modernity, a massive maze of metal that supports the shipping of oil stored in monstrous black drums rising above the bright green canopy, a towering black beast dominating the landscape, tiny figures crawling across its breast like beetles on a rain darkened tree trunk. Massive black metal storage containers, two and then three, loom above the forest, almost alive and striding forward to steel bars welded into complex geometric patterns of a landing stage for ships, almost a scene from a movie of a Lost Jungle Temple of Death, sacrificial virgins tied helpless and waiting for the towering behemoths to devour. Our boat rocks badly in the wake of a sleek fiberglas watercraft with mirrored windows that rushes past us without a wave, our boatman pulling hard on the long pole that ends in the peke-peke motor that propels us, the boatman keeping us from capsizing, and we carry on toward the village. I knock the water off my camera by tapping it on my pant leg, and I sit back and use my finger to daub up the last drop of coffee from my plastic cup. The outer world returns again to muddy brown and verdant green and the clear blue sky that carries on to Manaus, a million river miles away. Mile after mile the river is the same, and the banks and the blue. There is nothing to say, and we sit silent for the duration. 
 
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People are created by nature, itself a dumb a force more mindless than any of its creations. People are born by design of individuals to families, and those who claim there is a plan to it, some choice among preborn babies, I have no patience. Who could ever dream of choosing to be born to anyone living in a backwater village up a cut off the Amazon in a tiny village where a few people might someday land for a day to look and talk and write about a few hours of a lifetime among generations gone and yet to come. It is arbitrary and it has no meaning. Paula, the boys, and I, we land at a steep and slippery river bank of sucking mud and make our way up the hill to the shaman's house in the selva where Paula stays with the family part time. The villagers live isolated from most of the world, even from the river itself, living in the village and living privately within its confines as if it were the world in its totality. It might as well be, if not for bottles of Inca Cola that come by canoe and the Mysterious Hand of the gods. We could be anywhere. For some this is everywhere that matters and the rest is nowhere at all. We walk down a pale sandy trail and into the deep jungle to find a hand hewn wooden plank building and a man weaving roof mats. He will weave for much of his life, the insects and the sun and the rain destroying bit by bit his work so he must return to it daily to stay in place. This is home, and this is life. Down the river the jungle oil drums pound, but for now the sight and sound of them is too remote to notice. Life in the village goes on and on like the river, water and lives in an endless stream carried away and replaced without interruption. 
 
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One man weaves, another man mends. 


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Everyone every day must eat, and fish swimming in search of prey are eaten. The net encompasses all. We are all trapped, and eventually all of us are eaten. Like drops in the Amazon, we come by and then we pass along to the ocean beyond that we do not know. 

Paula and Jake


Paula and the boys and I made our way from the boat landing to the shaman's house where Paula stays during her time at the village. We left our day bags and walked again through the jungle, thick trees with myriad shades of green leaves and dark dirt paths in shadows leading into a black ravine filled with broken branches and the flotsam of a forest of a day and a time. Birds I couldn't see flitted between the trees and stopped to sing and coo, and small things moved in stealth in search of food. I couldn't see the details, only the outline of life all around, the mystery of green engulfing me, a stranger who knows not any detail. And so it was that I came into the village centre where at the top of a bare hill sits an abandoned Catholic church, a large dwelling suitable in size for a solitary man in search of shelter from the world at large, a place I later said I would be pleased to buy, though why was of concern to others, they who laughed uncomfortably when I said 'to put up a perimeter fence with posts mounted with skulls; and that I would sit inside, the windows painted black, and there I would hunched in my chair cleaning my guns, muttering to myself in the darkness.' The church itself is deserted, the idyll of the village being the scene of a recent feud between those who wanted the priest to stay and those who prefer some variation of the Christian revelation in the making. A fine and potential home for me, but alas, I shall not linger. Searching the abandoned church I found a private corner inside and took a piss in a mound of dust. I christen this place "Almost home."

 
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I looked down from the hill and the church and saw the sweep of the land and the rivers and byways, the land those around call home and are part of. I could have been such a person had nature left me there as a baby, but I cannot be part of it now, me a man who has no roots, none anywhere but in the mind and the lost, storm shrouded mountains of my old home. 



I recall the pine trees and the trout rivers and the ice capped mountains of my home, the ice on the tree boughs, the snow on our roof, the sun shining thin through the forest and melting bits of snow on the ground, the forest floor streaked in black and white and there was no shade of grey. 


 
They were calling me to join them to go to school, my first day, and my excitement rose as I made my way through the jungle again back to the edge of the river where the school house sits. I saw a butterfly on a leaf, I saw the sky, I saw the land where people live and work and make life whole and real and round. I don't belong there. It's not my place. I'm simply there to learn a bit one day and move on too quickly to something else. I have no roots like the forest, less course than the river, my attachment less deep than the selva sand. It's other people's life I was seeing. How happy I can be sometimes.




Why am I so happy? See next installment
*OK, so I'm not exactly so happy until Paula gets over being described here as a little old lady, by which I meant something nice about her that somehow came out wrong. Who can figure women anyway? She told me she wanted to kill me, but that doesn't mean she isn't nice. She's way shorter than I am, and she's older too. None of this, of course, means a thing in the real world. I'm working on that. Not very hard, mind, but I do think about it sometimes. Always something to learn.



To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X


A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Friday, November 09, 2012

Iquitos, Peru: Ayahuasca (Part One)

Ayahuasca Ceremonies of my Psychic Fucking Pains

It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.


James Fenton, "A German Requiem." (1981)

Bar stared at me hard as he sat in his new electric wheelchair at the Fortress where I worked as bodyguard and buddy to his corpulent self in the late stages of his decay, a great man trapped in a mound of rolling, rotting flesh, his determined and agile mind capable of tasks needing strengths I sat in wonder of as he banged away through many a night and following day working on a computer problem till he had it solved, all of us amazed and most of us bewildered; and a fine soul in that rotting body, all of Bar soon enough to leave this world, though it took too long. I still see Bar sitting in his wheelchair, his sweat shirt filthy with food stains, his track pants dirtier still, he glowering at me in mock sternness, saying, as my mind reaches back to him laying on his bed, his  hand searching for the telephone just out of reach, his call for help laying dormant in the gap, close to 400 pounds of disease there dead, my friend whose voice, a beautiful baritone that would fill our fortress where we worked in the midst of the lowest scum people in North America, a voice that sent shivers through the thighs of young women and a voice that made men lean forward in eager anticipation of wisdom and love, his clear blue eyes filled with humour and happiness at times, with compassion for the scum people, depression over the loss of his family, his bruises and running sores seeping through the bandages wrapped round all his limbs, the stench of his gangrene as bad as the piebald sickness sight of his skin, him rotting there, his hernia flopping like a hot head cheese between his swollen to bursting legs, his feet so huge he had them wrapped in plastic bags, his whole self a horror of dying in slow motion; Bar, a dead man speaking, said: “Who needs friends when you can sit alone in the dark and drink?”

It was nearly two years that I didn't see Bar at all, me sometimes asking if he had died yet, they saying no, month after month Bar living on against all expectations, particularly his. I had raged at him that last day, slamming the door so hard I feared I'd broken it, going over in my mind my screaming at him, demanding that he die quickly like a man or that he go with me daily to the clinic where we would take him for whatever help they could give to restore at least some health to him, to lessen the pain somewhat, to clean him up and wash away the stink of him. I slammed the door on my way out, leaving him with my last words: “You'll die like Mary!”

It took a week for anyone to bother looking in on Mary, and in that week she had suffocated from the tumors in her throat that grew around the machine she used to speak with, she too, like Bar, a huge hulk of rot, wheelchair bound, her soft pink flesh marred with homemade tattoos from her frequent bouts in gaol for petty crimes and prostitution and drunkenness and stupidity. Mary was clever, though, and got herself an apartment to die in, a nice place where one day she sat in her livingroom and choked and died and stayed day after day as the sun light shone on her and her trapped gas kept building up in her piglike body till she exploded and hit all the walls with her stuff that stuck so badly the cleaners had to rip out the walls and tear up the floor to be rid of her.

It was two years passed by, and one day as I sat working at my place the doorbell rang and there was Bar, so hideous with running sores and seeping cloth I could barely recognise him but for the outline of him and his voice. Thus, we spent the evening chatting about the nature of things, his lost family pressing on his mind, his friends who had stayed and those who had given him up and left him. I'd been hard on Bar that last day when I left, not so gentle as I might have been, screaming at him and calling him names and telling him how much I hated him, how much I wanted him to die. I left him there and returned to my books and my ideas, my brooding. I don't have a lot of friends. Who needs friends when you can sit alone in the dark and think?

There he sat in my apartment and we had dinner, a baked dozen chicken legs that I couldn't eat at all, and Bar ate them, spooning out the grease from the pan in the kitchen, scraping up the potato left in the pot in the sink, and finding an apple pie in the fridge for dessert to go with the bottles of whiskey he'd brought to wash it all down, and a loaf of bread with mayo. He came and we talked and he came to apologise for making me upset when I'd demanded that he die and he was sorry about it and my psychic fucking pain and all. But he didn't say anything, of course, we being men who don't speak like women. We just talked, maybe about the Yankees, maybe about women. Maybe we talked about sawing boards and hammering nails and lifting sacks of cement. But he was there and didn't say he was there to say he was sorry about me being sick over him dying so slowly. Yeah, we talked about cars and motors. '57 Chevies. We sat and we talked and I laughed a lot and not long after Bar laid in his bed and tried to reach the phone to call for help and he couldn't and he died and we found him dead with his hand reaching out for help as he died and he was dead.

Here I am far from Bar and I find myself in the healing centre of the universe where people come to partake of psychic fucking pain healing ceremonies of ayahuasca drinking and shitting and puking and hallucinating that makes one somehow 'whole' again. Yup, in the centre of people who can heal the pains in my brains and I can be a good and decent man if only I pay a shaman from California $40.00 or so to sit with hippies and get stupid and puke.

I've asked people for months about this jungle drug they drink, ayahuasca, and what it brings them they don't have already if they thought. I am in the centre of such folks who love me and want to be my brother in a circle where we can heal together, they ubiquitous and thick like beetles on the ground around. I'm not so keen to sit and shit with my psychic brothers and spiritual gurus who commune for me with the native Mystik. Everyone pukes. Still, I'll try this trip. I feel I must. But who needs a circle of healing hippies when one can sit alone in the dark and stink.

I find it offensive that folks tell me I should come to know myself and heal my psychic fucking pains. I think I know my pains because I caused them all by monstrous harms in this here life my own. I know those pains each one, and why. There are those who feel nothing, and I have written elsewhere and still believe, the less the pain, the worse the hurt, till those who are harmed the most feel not a thing at all. Should they suffer? No. That's revenge; that's the justice of it all. They don't feel a thing.

Should I wash away my psychic pains in jungle drugs and feel whole and healed? Should I go harmonious into the cosmos attuned? Should I lay aside my hates and rage for horrors done? Men in the world hurt. We are small. I look deep into the endless empty skies and see the gods that hate us. Wounded? I laugh. Healing ayauasca? The man is grand who sits so still alone in his own pain, his rotting body, his hand grasping in the dormant gap. We don't need others to heal or hurt; we harm ourselves just fine. Who needs fiends when he can die alone in the dark with the gods I thank.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Sewers and toilets in Iquitos, Peru. (Part 2)


"I think I've got a lead on a story. A really good story. About toilets. I want to check out a few things, but if this pans out we'll have a fantastic article for the June issue."

"Toilets," Nilsson muttered.1
As a traveler I encounter many strange alternatives to my assumptions about good and bad, right and wrong, the way it should be and the way others do things. I'm not at all "non-judgmental" over things I see. I hate with some deep passion so-called cultural relativism, a girls' view of post-war Europe and a cheap M.A. thesis in one. There is right and good, wrong and bad. Bad water is bad, and it comes often from lack of proper sewerage.


To read the rest of this story, please turn to the following link;
http://www.amazon.com/Iquitos-Peru-D-W-Walker/dp/098776151X


A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

Sunday, November 04, 2012

Iquitos, Peru: Cosas and Stuff--and Books

I am so easy to meet that I often wonder if I must be crazy to be so open about myself and my whereabouts at any given place and time. Sometimes I write about myself in ways the prudent man would never dream of, and I write of others in much fashion sameways. Just one man's opinion, I think so. Below is a piece I wrote a few months ago and am only now putting up for public view. It probably means nothing at all. One would really be better off sitting with me for an hour to find out if really I am such a man as I seem to some on paper, as it were. Yes, some things about the man are revealing even when written as humorous or self-mocking. I am, I swear, a lovely man and open to friendships with most. But there are those who mistake my loveliness for love, and they fall into strange ways and become what I can only describe as weird. Yes, I too can come across as weird; but come and sit with me and find out about me for yourself before rushing to judgments. Or not. 

Below I wrote as I mused about tourists buying stuff to take back home. I have no home to go to and don't seem to be making much success at finding a place in the world to call my own. Because I move so much I might be open to others defining me. I find it disturbing at times, sometimes finding others writing about me such weirdness that I am almost speechless from confusion. How can people be so outrageously wrong on the facts. But the world is filled with stranger folk than I. I must shrug and offer to buy you a cup of coffee and we can sit and talk about stuff and even cosas

I am not the president of the United States of America, and thus I am willing, I guess, to haul out my birth certificate and show the curious just what it says. I honestly don't have much in this life, but I do have a few things and for the most part I'm generous with them within reason. One thing I have much of is a curiousity about the world we share, and thus I am a writer of stuff. I am today pleased and proud to announce that I will soon, or as soon as I can get a decent Internet connection, publishing a new book, almost all of it about me. Then again, all about me isn't much about me at all. My new book is about stuff and folks, by D.W. Walker, Iquitos, Peru: Exilic Art from Selva to Plant.

Cover Graphic for D.W. Walker, Iquitos, Peru: From Selva to Plant
 
I'm following that up with what is now three volumes of travel writing on my travels in the Andes and the Grand Chaco, Andean Walker: Freak Show Profugo; Andean Walker: Making the Mariscal; and Andean Walker: La Vida Escorpion. With luck I expect to have all four volumes published early in 2013, followed by my five volume History of Ideas, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism. I like to think it matters what kind of person a writer is. To know a bit about the real me one must sift through the things I write about myself, not all of them factual, and compare those writings to reality as one can sense it intelligently. And of course, one must consider my enemies' accounts of who and what I am, as well as the accounts of weirdos who write weirdness. Judge for yourself, if it matters, by joining me for coffee, or simply read away and decide for yourself just what kind of man I am who would write such things as below about the dream of home and happiness. Until my next book is out, please consider reading the current volume below:

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html

Dag Walker,
Iquitos, Peru
Nov. 2012

I'm within days of my first year in South America, and today I decided to organise my backpack, it being so filled with stuff that I can hardly lift it anymore. To my surprise I find there isn't much in my pack that I can ship away to my storage locker in Canada. The things I have, the cosas and stuff, are mostly clothes I've picked up on the road, shedding much of what I brought as I lost so much weight I couldn't wear my old clothes, and then picking up new things for the cold Andean mountains and now for the sweltering Amazon, an alpaca sweater, an alpaca poncho, a couple of Andean caps for the freezing times, and shorts for the jungles. I have some things I don't know what to do with, like a spring-loaded steel baton and a set of lovely brass knuckles I expect I will never use, and my bull whip, which I hope to be buried with. I have a razor-sharp hunting knife, a nice flashlight, and some small things like a guitar wire and treble hook for strangling my enemies on the sly. These are new things I'm going to keep if I can. Every tourist probably travels with-- other things, but this is my trip, and thus I am armed and ready to don my cool combat utility vest should need arise. In this land of peace and relative plenty I am set for death to my enemies, of whom I have not a one, though they would be seriously endangered had they existed here in my presence. I got killing stuff galore. I don't got much tourist junk. After nearly a year I have only some stickers and decals, some embroidered patches for uniforms, some maps, a couple of unsent postcards. I feel like a failure as a tourist. It made me nervous to see my neighbour at the market yesterday loaded down with so many bags of stuff he asked me to help him carry stuff to the mototaxi so he could drop off his packages with the mountain of other stuff he's bought in the past few days. I realised I too must buy some tourist things to decorate my home. I'm missing out on the tourist experience by ignoring the vendors shoving things at me. I should look at it and see it and maybe buy some stuff to keep and recall and enjoy in place when I finally settle and have a place to call more or less my own.

Today I bought another pair of shoes. I think it makes eight pairs of shoes so far on this trip, most of them ruined by hard travel, other than the lovely cowboy boots I bought in Bolivia, boots that nearly crippled me because, though they were the biggest size available in the nation, they were two sizes too small for my large feet. And now my $8.00 crocodile boots too are too small, and they cut my toes and my leg where they pinch so tight. It's meant a second pair of $1.00 plastic flip-flops to replace the runners I used to wear, two pairs destroyed by the terrain so far. I bought a pair of beautiful leather dress shoes today, and today I call myself a real tourist. But it's not tourist enough till I have a package of souvenirs to send to my friend to stash in storage for me in case I should ever return to claim all my things and start over as a man settled and content. I have a pair of flip-flops, a pair of boots, and a pair of shoes. I have so much because I travel much, if slowly. Now I can travel in style, and I can walk with purpose and dignity looking around looking for things to buy because I am a legitimate tourist, my killing gear hidden away in my pack, my public presence that of a well-dressed gentleman, i.e a Yanqui tourist in fine shoes.

Too true, I do have some tourist things from the previous year, a bit of paper and some textile stuff and things of prettiness and curiousity. Today I can add to that a couple of bloodwood bowls made of second-growth trees, me doing my part to destroy the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth, our mother. I have a resin covered jar made into hideous faces and jungle nightmare figures that I suspect will arrive in splinters. I'm gonna bust my bank soon and I will buy a couple dollars worth of sticks with coloured cotton string wound round them, I think they supposedly should resemble Amazon Indian arrows of yore, which I will stick into a vase and call them lovely. To gaze upon them in all their cheap glory I will hang up three balsa wood swinging monkeys from my ceiling someday. And all men and women and children too, even art critics who might venture into my place by mistake, will 'ooh and ahh' the painting I will buy of Belen Market a la Renoir in Dayglo paint. I'm on my way to real tourism at last before I drop off the map of reason and return to the life of war and hatred stoked I love even more and cannot rid my life of. I'm going to buy some pretty things because I want to have a pretty place to sit in, what one might call my home. A serious lack of money prevents any accumulation of tasteful things, so tourist junk must suffice till I find my way in the world and can afford better junk and cosas. I probably would if only I could....

I don't know if ever I will have a home again, the last one not being so much what one would think as desirable, the home I grew up in where my parents lived and hated and screamed and beat and raged like wild and tormented beasts. But that's the only home I've ever had, and I miss it. If ever my happy home dream comes true, then I will have so much stuff and cosas that I will have again a chance to sit in a lovely chair and just be there in something akin to contentment, a place, a space, a shelter all of my own where I can think about murdering my enemies, torturing them with dull and rusty spoons and daubing their wounds with vinegar and salt, cauterizing them with a butane torch, picking out the sore spots on them with a pair of needle-nose pliers, and perhaps, if I am a real tourist at last, returning to the surgical supplies store in Lima for scalpels and pincers and instruments of terror that make me sick to think about. For now, I will buy some pretty things for storage and the hope of a future pleasing. Yes, I want a home, but what would I do with it if I had one? I fear I might never actually see it. And the rent on the storage locker to keep it safe would kill me. I might let that part go and just buy some things to add to the locker I have already. I can carry my home in my mind and there it will be forever mine, safe and warm and inviting. Home. The walls covered in paintings and tourist souvenirs, the floor sticky with blood, the drains clogged with hair and torn fingernails, the smell of burnt flesh deep in the plaster, scratch marks on the bed posts, tooth marks in the leather bits, and stains of all sorts on every surface. My home and my safe place to be at peace. It would be pretty, indeed. Home, sweet home, when my touring days are done.

A gentle reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at the link here:

http://www.amazon.com/Occasional-Walker-D-W/dp/0987761501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331063095&sr=1-1

And here are some reviews and comments on said book:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/04/dagness-at-noon.html