No Dhimmitude

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.

Onward to Macchu Piccu and back again

2011-11-27T15:13:00.001-08:00

One can walk the Inca Trail for three or four days to Machu Picchu, as I heard from a number of younger people, one a young woman who was collapsing sick at Machu Picchu itself, she and her group having fallen ill from food poisoning, and from a couple of older fellows from Rochester, New York, a building developer and a medical doctor out having a good time in this life. For me, the only practicable way to get to Machu Picchu was to go by train from Ollanytaytambo to the base at Aguas Calientes. I used to be a dedicated cyclist and mountain climber, but those days, sick to say, are finished. I've been hit twice by cars, and my knees are so badly damaged I often have a hard time walking at all. I took the train.

I took a nice train, to be fair, and went first class. On the way up I met a young couple, the boy and his mother from Chile and his girlfriend Columbia. I have notes to come in the form at some time of a book I compile as I travel. Here I must keep it brief.

We had an excellent view of the valley as we rode for an hour and a half toward Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to take photos out the window, so I chatted with my new friends. That's one of the great pleasures of train travel, the slow and comfortable ride with strangers who quickly become friends.

Off we went, and when we landed at Aguas Calientes, this below is the view from my hotel window of the pee-wee hill that is so small compared to Maccu Picchu that when I saw the latter I was thrilled at the thought of climbing it.

It didn't all go as well as I had hoped. My climb up the hill from the actual settlement at Machu Picchu was for me an effort, which surprised me badly. I had no idea how badly I had been hurt, assuming that I would be just like I was ten years ago, ready and eager to bound up and gloat over my little triumph.

I went up in a slight drizzle.The day was warm enough, and I felt good if slightly winded due to the lack of oxygen at this altitude, roughly 9,000 feet or 3,000 meters. I wanted to go the extra mile. That was a mistake on my part. I climbed the path easily enough, but I had some trouble when I needed dexterity and agility. I don't have much of that left. I encountered a rock on the pathway, suggesting a slide, coinciding with a monster boulder on the road up, which I took by bus, middle aged sissy that I have become. This little rock should have told me, perhaps did tell me and I wouldn't listen, that there was a problem ahead.

I finally did get to the top look-out at Machu Picchu, having successfully negotiated a wash-out with the help of a group of locals working on repairing the path. A stretch of six feet or so was gone, and one had to cling to roots and branches to make it across the gap. I did that with the locals lending me some hands.
****

The vista was lovely, and added a bit to my catalogue of small triumphs accumulated over a long life time of bumming around.

I spent a bit of time chatting with a couple from California, and then, having seen the view, having taken some pictures, and mostly, having made it to the top, I ventured down again.Snapping a few last shots.

Which is good for me, given that the actual site of Machu Picchu is so crowded with tourists it is nearly impossible at this time in history to have a moment's peace otherwise.

I've been to many such places, though this is something extra, being so remote, in spite of the 25,000 tourists and the hustling going on all the time that made it a trying experience for me. And then it went pear-shaped indeed. I fell on the way back down and hurt myself. I smashed my left knee and lost a tooth. But I recovered in time to meet my train friends shortly thereafter, my pain and slight bleeding mostly forgotten for a time.

Here they are, and a welcome sight, indeed.

I'll post a bit more of the aftermath next time.

Links to recent Peru Posts

2011-11-27T15:07:00.001-08:00

I'm doing so me slight catching up on my travels in Peru. For a better look, here are some links:

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/blue-zone-lima.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/cuzco-from-afar.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/cuzco-parade.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/cuzco-market.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/urubamba-onward-to-machu-piccu.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2011/11/ollantaytambo-toward-macchu-piccu.html

Ollantaytambo, toward Macchu Piccu.

2011-11-27T14:20:00.001-08:00

I got my final ride to by normal transport to Ollantaytambo, a ride in a jam-packed little bus, and then, upon arrival, I got out and had lunch and coffee and spent some time chatting about travel with a Russian. That story will come some other time. For now, here are a few sights of the village, almost to Macchu Piccu.

Not for any practical reason anymore, but I do like to look at schools to see what I, not to mention students, are missing. For those camped out in city parks and other public places in America, people complaining that their $35,000.00 student loans for graduate studies in Puppetering are hurting them, I look at people in a nowhere village in Peru who are happy to take some night school training to maybe improve their lives and the lives of their community members in a more practical and possibly finer fashion. But that's just me.

****
When I'm not complaining about spoiled American hippies, I go go lunch. I found this lovely place close to the bus stop, as it were, a big open area by the market where I spent some time chatting up the locals. They seem pretty happy with things, as was I while I was at Ollantay. Lunch wasn't free like it is for hippies sleeping in the park in America, but I didn't pay as high a price as this fellow.

The lady swinging the axe who served my lunch was quite nice. Thanks to her and the cow here, I had some good soup.

But I didn't go all the way to Ollantaytambo to have lunch. I went there to catch a train to Macchu Piccu, the only way to get there without walking. In town, this is pretty close to Main Street. It looks far nicer on the outside that what one encounters inside.

Another view of Main Street.

I looked up at the hillsides when I arrived, and there I saw what I think amounts to the Inca version of a retirement settlement for guys with bad knees.

If you click on the image you should see a settlement on the mountain side. This is but one of many seen from the town plaza. Here's a closer view.

I was still suffering from cramps due to elevation sickness, but my knee is so badly damaged now that I probably couldn't have made the hike anyway, so let us for now be happy with a picture.

I'll return in the next post with a bit more about Ollantaytambo and my train ride to Aguas Calientes, onward to Macchu Piccu. Till then, here's a Liderman, Manuel, a fellow who wandered around the riverside with me, pointing out ruins across the way, telling me a bit about his life, and looking pretty pleased with life, which he and I are happy to share here.

Hello, Manuel!

Urubamba: Onward to Machu Piccu

2011-11-27T14:03:00.001-08:00

I took a train to Aguas Calientes, the hell-hole entrance to Macchu Piccu one cannot escape except by hiking the Inca Trail, which I am no longer capable of.Lots of younger people do it, and many my age as well, but not me. :(

I was stuck with taking the train to this nasty little place and by good fortune just happened to share a seat with a young couple and the boy's mother. What a lovely time that was. But before arriving at Aguas Caliente, and out of sequence here, I stopped at Urubamba, a little village where I had coffee at this lovely spot just like home.

If one goes downtown Cuzco and finds the local bus terminal, one finds a combi or a collectivo to Urubamba for about $0.50 U.S. I did that. I transfered later to Ollataytambo, another $0.85 or so to get to Aguas Caliente and on the train for Machu Piccu. At Urambamba I had coffee. I was going to have lunch but the place filled up with a family of over a dozen and I was forgotten. Though the coffee kept coming, my lunch never did. Such is life in the Los Angeles fast lane.

Delayed in posting on Machu Picchu

2011-11-21T12:50:00.001-08:00

I´m on the move for a few days, and I don´t have a chance as yet to post my greetings to those people I met on the train trips to Machu Picchu and back. Please wait a few more days, and I hope by then to have photos and text.

Cuzco Market

2011-11-15T14:29:00.001-08:00

I come from a village in the mountains, a similar life to those in Cuzco than the life of those in a city the size of pretty much anything; and my little town depended in large part on tourism bringing in some new money. I like to think that I have some appreciation of tourists, they being not only money-bringers but those who have some curiosity that they act on for their own benefit, broadening the world of others upon return, perhaps. I have also seen towns and cities made mad in the mind because of Western tourists and their free-floating money, their tourist dollars seemingly there for the asking, for the demanding, for the grabbing and hollering and shouting and screaming and outpourings of hatred for those who are not buying, not paying, not spending. If tourists don't come to fling away their money like drunks in Las Vegas, why do they come at all? Tourists come to be seen as garbage people who are objects of deep hatred, as I have seen in some places to an extent I want to wipe out whole cities from the face of the earth. Greed is a terrible sickness. It makes me want to kill those who have it. It makes me a bad person to be among the greedy.

Greed can take hold of a community, a city, a whole nation and turn nasty people into vendor-Berserkers who lose all sight of humanness and who obsess about money at all costs. They aren't necessarily poor people trying to better themselves by taking from the undeserving rich. They are sick people who would terrorise anyone for the sake of gain. I have one particular nation and one people in mind as I write this, and I truly hate them. Against them I judge the people of Cuzco, Peru. I do not like this place. It does have some nice places to look at though. Here's one site on the way to the market I came to enjoy.

I had stupidly expected a small colonial town such as I have experienced in many places over the world, and I had thought this too would be a lovely place of culture and calm. My mistake.

Viva el Peru, as it says on the mountain side. This could be a lovely place.

There are, according to unofficial statistics, a million taxis taking two million tourists daily to ten million hotels, hospedajes, and hostels wedged between so many clip joints that my eyes blur as I walk down the streets. If you have limited time and nearly unlimited money, this is your place for organised ... I don't know what to call a tour bus full of people moving from place to place at the direction of others telling them trivia about the people and culture and place they are at this day. I miss a lot being an independent traveller, but I don't miss the hustle of professionals offering package deals. For those who don't have time to adjust, this is a good place. For me, no, it's no good at all. I have the time to be lost and sick and hungry and nervous. I have time to look at potatoes.

If you've seen one potato, you've seen them all. Except that there are a hundred varieties of potatoes here in Peru, from where they originated. Potatoes changed the course of history and made our Modern world possible. I love potatoes. I don't eat them often, but they are a wonder of our world, and that is what I love. I leave you to wait for one volume of my up-coming five volume book in which I write about potatoes. For now, a picture of beauty.

There is a market where (and I don't know where) I go for a bit of time away from all the things I hate about this place. It's a place to buy native potatoes; a place where I go to buy a sack of coca leaves from a squatting girl selling foul looking paste in a plastic bucket on the side walk out the side door, the girl who puts the coins inside her hat and runs down the street to get my tea leaves and brings it back to me; this being close to the ten by ten room with a squishy wet floor where for men it's 20 centavos to stand at a trough to use the urinario, a mirror running along side that the girl watches to make sure... well, who knows what she's watching for, and for 30 centavos-- because women take longer and thus have to pay more-- women can sit across from the men and do their thing. Paper is extra.

I like the market. In the mornings I go for baked custard in a fountain glass, costing me about $0.50 or less. When I finish eating and flirting with the old lady behind the stand I go flirt with another old lady where I get two big mugs of coffee syrup and hot water (which I call coffee) for under a buck. Sometimes I get hot milk and chocolate syrup that I have to add a lot of sugar to, the chocolate being pretty bitter. Almost as good as the best, I sit with my coffee and look across the aisle at stalls #740-726, all of them selling exotic potatoes in bulk.

In between the coffee lady and the potato people sits a lady in an aisle unto itself, she selling brown eggs, rolls of toilet paper, and red onions. She is, shall we say, stout. She might have three little girls, or one of them, or maybe she just hugs them and smiles and laughs and talks to them as equals because she is that kind of person. The lady who brings my morning coffee in this awful tourist hole is not what I would call pretty, but she has one very fine palm leaf stove-pipe hat that goes nicely with the two or three skirts she wears under a shawl. When she smiles, which is often, some of the wrinkles on her rather wide face disappear, and pretty or not, I want to lean over and kiss this lady. She is beautiful.

I thought about going to the Hilton Hotel for coffee, but I can't recall enjoying coffee in Cuzco in a place with windows. I like to sit and smell herbs cooking in hot oil and watch chickens turn waxy in the heat, and I like to look at the lady with the coffee when she smiles at me, her smile a broad expanse of nifty-looking gold teeth that sparkle like her eyes.

Once in a while I see an unhappy looking tourist wandering through, lost and hoping to buy some trinkets to take home as a keep-sake of being in Cuzco. They mill around gazing at so much gaudy stuff it would make most people nauseous, and they smile at vendors and speak to them like kindergarten teachers interviewed for their first job. You don't want a verbatim dialogue here. They are trying to be nice and to buy something memorable. I have bought stuff in Peru. I bought a sweater, a flag patch of the great nation-state of Georgia, a pair of scissors, an electric plug adaptor, and enough fabric to make a bag to replace the one I have that's ripping out at the bottom. I bought shoe laces and a spare pair of eyeglasses. I've probably bought other stuff that I can't remember. I ain't no purist. I buy lots of stuff, but I have to carry it with me wherever I go, and the less the better. I have a couple of years on the road this time. I can't carry much for that time. I have to get to Africa, after all. So I sit and have coffee and chat up the vendors and wander around a bit and hate the hustle. I go outside the market and chat up people sitting in the sun. I look at things.

I sat chatting with a girl who is probably older than 12 and I had a conversation of a good sort with her boy, she holding him up and him blowing bubbles at me, which I returned in grand style. We bubbled as a woman of 20 and her five year old left the two year old girl by a sack at the market wall and then pretended to run off. It took a couple of tries because the little girl didn't notice mom and sis abandoning her the first time round. Then it was all laughter and wonder as they came back to claim her. It's simple and it's childish and I like it, like sitting down to have ice cream from a cart.

Murmurs from the heart to the mind whisper gently that this will be my last journey, no need now to worry about returning to the homeless life I could have back in my own village in my own mountains. I could have been like these folks if I had stayed home to do something in the tourist business or something. Instead I wander around. I go to the market and chat up folks.

I don't know what this place is called. [Actually, I do know.] If you come to Cuzco, you'll have to ask around. To me, this market's sort of called home. And then I leave.

Cuzco Parade

2011-11-14T08:15:00.001-08:00

Everybody loves a parade, and especially if on is in it. I ran into this one as I moved from Party Central hostel in Cuzco to a quiet little place across the Plaza. Here I was taken with the ladies wearing hats. I like hats, believing as well that they make a statement to others about how one feels about others. A lovely hat says to me that the person wearing is has some respect for me and has gone to the trouble and expense of showing off in a pleasant way to make me and others glad to be around such a person. But there are numerous reasons for wearing a hat, many of them simply practical, one practicality being to show which group one belongs to.

Hats become part of a uniform, as does the carry-all blanket. Often times one will find a baby inside a blanket so slung. What's under the hat? Well, that's not really my business.

Sometimes a hat is the work of a year. If one looks closely one will see an inordinate amount of effort went into making such a hat. I must be misspelling the word, but I try it as "Boradoro." or fancy and weird hat making. Twice now I have met crazy people who who sew beads and such onto hats and capes and dresses and banners. Both eople, a man and a women, were probably insane. Neither could speak to me beyond a confused babble, and the last, a young woman, was frantically obsessed with her beads. But one has hats for it all.

The scene played out below, with hats, is a demonisation of Post-Columbians. All in fun, of course.

And what could be more fun than to belong to a group, to wear a fancy hat, and to show that one is not one of 'them' whoever they might be. Cuzco. Lots of fun for tourists. I didn't like it much for some days, and then, suddenly, I didn't dislike it nearly so much, which is to say, I almost came to like it.

That's a whole nother picture, though.

Cuzco from afar

2011-11-14T08:09:00.001-08:00

I got to Cuzco after a 26 hour bus trip from Lima. I didn't realise at the time, but I had a bad case of siroche, or altitude sickness. That's a first for me. This is what Cuzco looks like as one approaches from a very fine highway, a miracle of Modern engineering and human accomplishment.

I didn't like being in Cuzco. I'm not a glizty tourist kind of guy, and the hustlers on the sidewalks drove me mental. I was looking for a place where people live. This is some indication of that as we rode in on the bus, a few of my fellow passengers vomiting and others sick and in pain.

***
This is more or less how the locals live, which isn't bad if one considers that needs are more or less simple, and much of our Modern world is a perversion of such. Still, it is good to be 'rich' in the sense I am, and I expect that Peruvians await the day when they have everything moreso and nicer. Till then, this is the tourist haunt of Cuzco far from the tourists.

***

The Blue Zone, Lima

2011-11-10T19:25:00.001-08:00

Lima has a number of areas easily spotted because of the predominant colour scheme of the buildings. One of the rougher areas of town, the Cerro San Christobal, is seemingly pink. The area we see below is a little brighter. It has a multitude of music and musical instrument shops. Nice area. I bang the drum for the place.

This is in the centre of Lima, though that covers a lot of ground. I couldn't say that asking for the Blue Zone will get you any help, but it's how I know things. I live closer to the Yellow Zone.

This is not Hollywood or Las Vegas or New York or Miami but it does have its own version of CSI, Lima.

****
For those who want a quiet place to sit and contemplate, there is a church inside the area, around some corners from the main round-about where one finds the buildings above. Note that the church, like so many places in Lima and Peru generally, is only partly painted. Still, it's a nice place to visit on a sunny late November day in the warmth of summer here.

Mostly blue suits me fine. Lima is lovely this time of year.

An ordinary strange looking bird flew away

2011-11-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

At the top of the stairs of my hotel there's a sliding metal gate that I tap a coin on to get the girl's attention at the desk so she will come round and let me in when I return from the day's doing and need to go home with my stuff, groceries and so on weighing me down and adding to the desire for a sit down and gaze at the misty sky, often, as I discovered, flecked with a fine dust from the desert that this city sits on. I see mist everywhere, the sky speckled with pigeons and over-sized crows that look like small vultures. As the girl opens the gate I climb in and go to the rooftop to catch the setting sun, not a sunset but a darkness descending on the city. From the rooftop the sliding door sounds rolling in its metal track like a distant roar of a crowd of football fans cheering. Another homecoming.

I pass by the stadium sometimes in the course of my day, but I don't involve myself with local affairs very often. It's not important to me whether the hometown team performs well or otherwise. I'm just passing through, and the team is not my concern.

Today I sat sipping coffee on the rooftop in the milky sunshine at my usual dust covered table and a grey pigeon landed nearby on the wall at the street side, his black wings sporting red polka-dots. That is new to me. A strange looking bird. Ordinary like all pigeons, but odd. The sun set and he flew away. Two cheers as the door opened and closed, and I was left sitting briefly in the coming chill.

No Cranes in Lima

2011-11-08T16:06:00.000-08:00

I walked yesterday from central Lima to the sea, and having walked the length and breadth of the city, and having seen it from a hilltop at the far edge of the city, I think I can say I have seen it pretty well over-all, I have not see a single construction crane. There seems to be no building going on in the city at this time.

There is no building boom, and no building at all that I can see. Some people do private construction on houses, of course, but there are no office towers, no commercial centres, no massive industrial parks or high-tech centres that I can find a'coming.

Yet, the city is filled with people shopping, buying small things as a rule, but buying nonetheless, having at least enough money for food and shoes and taxi rides from the shops everywhere. Is it all cocaine money settling into the working class wallet?

The Peruvian economy grew by more than 4% per year during the period 2002-06, with a stable exchange rate and low inflation. Growth jumped to 9% per year in 2007 and 2008, driven by higher world prices for minerals and metals and the government's aggressive trade liberalization strategies, but then fell to less than 1% in 2009 in the face of the world recession and lower commodity export prices. Growth resumed in 2010 at nearly 8%, due partly to increased exports. Peru's rapid expansion has helped to reduce the national poverty rate by about 15% since 2002, though underemployment remains high; inflation has trended downward in 2009, to below the Central Bank's 1-3% target. Despite Peru's strong macroeconomic performance, overdependence on minerals and metals subjects the economy to fluctuations in world prices, and poor infrastructure precludes the spread of growth to Peru's non-coastal areas. Not all Peruvians therefore have shared in the benefits of growth and despite President GARCIA's pursuit of sound trade and macroeconomic policies, persistent inequality has cost him political support. Nevertheless, he remains committed to Peru's free-trade path. Since 2006, Peru has signed trade deals with the United States, Canada, Singapore, and China, concluded negotiations with the European Union, and begun trade talks with Korea, Japan, and others.

[....]

http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/peru/peru_economy.html

I've been in places where people were starving to death. This is not one of them.

The economy of Peru is classified as upper middle income by the World Bank^[10]^[11] Peru is, as of 2011, one of the world's fastest-growing economies owing to the economic boom experienced during the 2000s... and is the 42nd largest in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Peru
This country is not booming economically at the moment, but it is a lovely place to be. On a scale of 1-10, this is a 7 to my mind, below Israel at 9 and above Greece at 6, Mexico at 3, and almost any park in a large city in the United States today at 1.

Yesterday was the first time in a month and a half that I had a guy try to sell me cocaine. He was a Bolivian, and a toothless grifter no matter where from. Compare that to Canada where life is nearly unbearable from all the petty crime, the social interference from leftards, and the miserable climate and Peru beats it by a scale of magnitude.

Toot Sweet

2011-11-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

If a business in America tried using this Peruvian poster to sell candy I suspect his shop would be destroyed by white college students pretty quick.

Here, it sells candy, as if that's hard to do.

Lima faire bande à part

2011-11-06T20:51:00.000-08:00

I've spent some time with French folks here, trying to cope with the back and forth of three languages in a strange city while I speak to people from the Caribbean about foreign places we've been to. Speaking a polyglot of words, I want something, but who can say what that would be. In what language?

This evening, on my own, a Peruana approached me and spoke so unexpectedly and so rapidly that I had no time to grasp what she had said. I looked at her and spoke English, at a loss for other, authentic, words. She stared at me in confusion. I told her I don't speak Spanish well and ... "Sigo siendo humano." She understood the words, but she was afraid. I could see it. A man who doesn't speak Spanish here might as well be a stone in a field. And then to speak Spanish, to say "I'm still human" was to strike her as too strange. One must speak the language to make oneself human. One must, and yet I find I can't speak to many these days, meaning my own people. I can speak enough Spanish to get by here, and it comes back daily, as well as what I learn anew. But I cannot understand America any more. I don't know if I will ever go back. There, I'm often enough no humanos. I wanted to do something apart from the group. I took a walk to the church.

I heard music. I heard a brass band. I saw thousands of people in front of the church, and I stood among them, almost like one of them.

There was a military drill on the church landing. A group of young men drilled in elaborate formations, a team, a group with a single purpose, to be as one. They followed the music of a brass band.

I was swept away by the music and the drill, by the joy of the crowd, few of them, being so young, having had to live through the tough times of repression and violence here. Couples would suddenly and dramatically make out, children would grab their mothers, fathers would stand taller. We all cheered as the drill team did fancy manoeuvres.

Back home I find that pig hippies living in parks have lice, that they shit on police cars and on bank floors and rape underage girls and homosexuals. I speak the language, but I don't understand what people are saying oft times.

Maybe the Peruvians have trouble understanding my Spanish sometimes, but obviously they were reading my mind. So I thought about how these less than well-off Peruvians live their lives.

This we can understand. They do not camp out in parks and demand the government forgive the student loans they racked up getting degrees in Angry Victims Studies.

Maybe the Peruvians are crazy. Maybe they should camp out in parks and be pigs. This is what they do instead.

They watch marching men and listen to military bands and go to church, they have children and go to work, just like Americans do, that one percent who don't camp out in filth and demand from others. Sometimes these poor people just go for a walk.

All these languages floating around in my head. I went home for dinner and in the midst of it I heard a band outside my window, thousands of people milling about, the Church again having a procession, and people together for a purpose, whatever it might be.

There are some of us who are a band apart. I wonder about it. I like this country, and I fear for the fate of my own. What language makes sense in this confusion. I leaned out the window and I found myself almost yelling out in my finest Spanish: "Kyrie, eleison!"

No reason to believe in God

2011-11-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

I had a late dinner this evening. I still have some white cheese, and to make a meal I got dinner rolls from Jimmy's bakery, then I went to the supermarket for fresh boneless chicken breasts, mixed vegetables, salad dressing, bananas, and two litres of drinkable yoghurt (coconut and peach). It cost me about ten dollars, and I have about $7.50 left for the next few days or so. I cooked everything on a hotplate at the little kitchen on the rooftop of my place. I sat down and dined, if not in style, then in lovely comfort. I found myself saying that there must be a god, for how else could I have such a wonderful dinner in the warm air with the lights of Lima showing off my meal. I was almost swooning as I ate. It was a fine meal. But, as happy as I was, it doesn't prove the existence of God. If my heavenly meal depended on God, then as soon as I don't have any food, and there have been many times when there is famine and I have been as starving as others, then without food, where is God? My meal was the best I've had in a long time, and as much as I like it, it proves and disproves nothing about God. It only proves that when I have money and access to good food I can make a fine meal. A genuine believer would believe in God even if he were starving. I don't see myself believing in anything during a famine but in the basic mindlessness of nature and the folly of men and their oft times evil ways. This evening, if not a belief in God, I do have a piece of heaven. I am blessed.

A slow day in Lima

2011-11-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

I stop briefly in the mornings at themarketplace back behind the Congress building in downtown Lima, Peruwhere I go have breakfast before heading off to do whatever sillystuff occupies my day thereafter. It's a good way to start my day,having custard in a cup, often times two. I get a stool outside alittle stall, inside of which are a couple of ladies serving throughthe window. I get a glass cup filled with custard, smooth and sweetand creamy, the yellow reminding me of the sun that has recentlybegun to appear in the sky here, the cream and the sweetness, thesilky texture of the custard reminding me of home. There are a dozenshops all selling the same custards there, and yet this one shop is myfavourite because the girl who hands me the custard is so beautiful.I'll say she's thirty because she might be twenty or she might beforty. I know for certain that she is beautiful, and that is becauseI can see her smile, right now, in my memory. She has a smile thatreminds me of love.

[Market photo to come]

I'm not a love kind of guy, as a rule. Not a custard kind of guy. I like coffee. The best coffee I have found in the city so far, and no coffee would be better, only as good, which is about perfect, is at Cafe Victor, close to the market. Who'd know? This place doesn't inspire confidence from the outside, like so much of Lima's exteriours. But a cup of cafe american is as close to heaven as I am going to get. A cup of coffee...

I came down to earth during that final black coffee. Then I knew who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. Or trying to do. Caffeine restored my anxieties; I was my usual paranoiac self.*

This place isn't allwonderful coffee and beautiful women with heavenly smiles. It takes a bit of experience tocome up with this idea, and not of it is based on smiling women.

I haven't had any problems here, and I don'texpect I will have. My life here is good and easy, a matter ofshopping for small things daily, like food and odds and ends I mightneed during the day. Most of my day is about walking around andspeaking to strangers and noticing things different from me andplaces I have been where normal is not what it might be here. I havesome time to sit and watch a lovely young woman take a bit of time tohave her boots polished.

Sometimes Iencounter things that I can't immediately identify.

Ihad no idea on first walking past Tottus that I was missing a storethe size of Walmart. Among other things, Tottus is as supermarket,which I noticed from across the street, not as I walked past andlooked into the front where all I saw were plastic tables and chairswith some office workers having lunch. It's a good find for me giventhat they sell mixed salads and vegetables for two, meaning I canhave it twice. The custard girl does smile at me, and she makes myheart melt; but she smiles at everyone, and that is why I am so takenwith her; and she's not coming to my place to split a salad. Tottus,unsmiling, stands imposing on the sidewalk an doesn't inspire muchlove, I think, till one goes inside and finds a supermarket at leastas good as my current favourite, MiMetro, once again a store one canwalk past without realising it's a food store. I don't knowthis city or the country or the people well, but I assume that theyare family oriented and withdrawn, leading even major retailers tohunch and turn quietly inward. I'm sure something terrible hashappened to these people, some massive horror that tops all others,and now they live in relative quiet and peace. I see almost everyonesmiling, just a little, a hint of happiness. And sometimes, like thecustard girl, a real joy in the smile.

I too find joy, thoughI am no part of Lima or Peru or South America or any place or anythingat all. I find joy in a sewing machine at the front of a shop on abusy street.

And if you look closelyin the background here at the owner standing back in the shadow youwill see he too is smiling. (Or was until I took his picture.)

Peruvians smiling. That has nothingto do with dentistry, I can assure you. I came across, on Emancipacion Street, a block ofstore-fronts and meandering malls given over to dental supplies andworkshops making dentures and plates and selling equipment and so on;and in one I found a girl working some minor detail in clay orplastic, and when she noticed me she smiled too, the light of heavenall around her, like the custard girl. One might guess that I likethis city, if only because I like being around these people who canbarely understand my Spanish, who have no reason to like me, who haveno reason to smile at the sight of me. And yet, they smile at me and seem happy in themselves. I sit and drink coffee and worry about this. Maybe I'm all wrong about this place and these people. They seem happy. How can such a thing be real?

*Lawrence Sanders, The Sixth Commandment. 1979.

Curbed his enthusiasm

2011-11-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

I have word today of an attempted assault on a cathedral in Vancouver, Canada by leftards protesting against what comes down to their idiot lack of understanding of religion; and another report of presumed Occupy Wall Street imitators having fire-bombed a Mercedes dealer a mile south in the city.

But there is also good news, if not from Vancouver.

Gotta love Marines.

Yo Mismo No Sismo

2011-10-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

I was at my desk on Friday typing when I thought there was a procession of electric powered gravel trucks driving outside my building. No sound; much trembling. At first I wondered if I was having heart problems, but I have so many ex-girlfriends who swear I have no heart that I had to dismiss the idea. My chair was vibrating and then I noticed the bottle of soda on the desk was making waves in a semi-serious way.The sloshing soda made me think of other than myself, in fact, of an earthquake, this being a likely place for such an experience. But after a good two or three minutes it settled and stopped. I noted it in an email to a friend later and laughed it off. This morning I heard that I felt the tremors of a quake about 50 miles away to the south at Ica.

Here's a generic link to the story:

Peru quake destroys 134 homes, injures dozens

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Peru-quake-destroys-134-homes-injures-dozens-2242818.php

Guess I'm not such shaking guy at all. Maybe I'll go in a day or so and take a look at the real thing.

I Tune Lima

2011-10-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

I was having coffee on the rooftop of my place after mass this morning across the street, chatting about Georgia with a Croat, when he jumped up and leaned over the false-front of our building and called me over to see the procession from the church coming down our narrow little street. Suddenly there was a brass band playing what could be at a stretch tunes from a Spaghetti Western, brass and drums filling the air with sweet melancholy. I had to strain to get a view over the retaining wall, and below I saw hundreds of people, a band, priests and assorted officials, women walking backward in a cloud of incense, and people on both sides of the street watching, clapping, cheering as a float came closer, a Madonna. [Click on photos for enlargement.]

I have no idea what it's about, but I know that those who participated are joyous. It appeals to me immensely that church-goers come out for this event, and that many of them have spent their own money to buy instruments to play in the band. It's a substantial investment not only of money but of time to have, for example, a tuba and to be able to play it in a band. It's part of a life-long commitment to this community of believers.

Yes, I think immediately of Enrico Morricone, but that's me. I've been many places and seen and done many things, and I still filter much of my experience through my early life and standard understandings of things, but sometimes I can let go and take in things as unique to themselves.

I stood above the crowd and wondered what it is to be a member of a band of believers, so committed that one is in great part that identity, and that the band is what ones life is about in a significant sense. I'm just passing through. It could be a movie set or it could be the real stuff of life for many. I tune in, but the score is sort of lost on me. Life is a medley rather than a symphony. For some it's a passion. I am thankful to have even this bird's eye view and to catch the music as it floats upward momentarily and disappears into memory.

Cerro San Cristobal

2011-10-28T16:49:00.000-07:00

I walked over to the hill today and took a hike up. I wasn't expecting much, 409 meters not being a big deal. I did find myself stumped though, by a policeman when I asked for directions to the road through the barrio. He told me that it is very dangerous in there, and that I "have many years."I was puzzled because I wondered if he meant I look to old to take care of muggers or if he thought I'd have a heart attack. I hope I laughed it off, but whatever, I kept on going.

I was a good long way up when I encountered a rather large lady who panicked when she saw me, telling me that I would be robbed for my bag if I didn't take a taxi up. She said, "You are very old." OK, that's hard to mistake. So I kept on walking to prove her wrong. That lasted till I was too close to an on-coming contraption made of a motorcycle and a car axle, a local taxi of some sort. The driver stopped and told me it was too dangerous to walk up, which I assumed is a con all the taxi drivers tell tourists. But I decided it might as well give him a dollar and let him take me up rather than listen to how dangerous was my walk. I'm glad I did that. I found Jose to be a load of fun to talk to and interesting in his views of Lima, a kid who lives in a shack on the hillside.

We got to the top of the hill and walked around a while and Jose pointed out various things of little interest to me, and he told me about his family and his life in the city and so on, and I began to think that if I were 20 and staying here he and I would be good friends. I think that of many people here.

It's a nice place in many ways. It gets cold at night and not too warm in the day time, so today I paid about $12.00 for an alpaca sweater, and I had to exchange it because I wanted one of a different colour from what I first had, and the next one was, as I noticed in looking it over, not an alpaca sweater at all but one almost the same from the back room, this one in polyester. No deal, so I made the girl take it back and get me one I wanted. It feels beautiful. People here are nice, but one must pay attention to things anyway.

I did about 300 meters on foot, and next time, now that I know the whole route I'll go on my own. I went up this time with Jose and we looked over the city. I grabbed a shot of the cross just because and then shocked the lad by confessing that I am not a Catholic. He looked pretty puzzled when I told him I'm a Protestant, but he was pleased that even though I'm not Catholic I must not be a devil worshipper with so many crosses on my hat. forget about me being an atheist: Jose drove me down the hill in his contraption. I told Jose I am deeply impressed by the view. I was. Scared shitless. Much of the road is way too narrow and the drop is 408 meters till one hits the dirt.

No, it's not straight down at all. But from the edge it looks close enough.

I ended the daylight hours wandering through Rimac District by the river, and in time came across a crowd of close to 100 people watching silently as six motorcycle cops manhandled a petty criminal, the latter in handcuffs, a three inch gash down the side of his eye where a cop had hit him with a baton.

Yes, I am getting old, and I got this way by being careful in rough places, and more than that by being really lucky. I might have gotten lucky taking photos of the police and the criminal, but I hope you will excuse me for being careful instead. There is much to see here, and I hope in time to amass enough good shots of Peru to make visiting here worth your while. But I don't think I'm going to provoke the police here. Birds? Yeah, I can do that. I'll see about finding some meat to rot in the sun so I might have a chance of getting a shot of a condor up close. For now it's dinner time. More next time from Lima.

And more is from the far side of town: I was five or six miles out when I turned and saw the hilltop clearly for the first time. The curlicue on the hillside is a design ubiquitous in Peru these days, a "P" and the rest of "Peru." I see locals wearing tee-shirts and carrying bags with this design all over Lima. I assume it echoes on some way the geographs of Nazca. About halfway back from my walk I was able to get this long shot. Click for a blow-up.

Months later, as I up-date this post, here is a shot of the Nazca, Peru geoglyph that gives this some context:

About the pink houses on the hillside below Cerro San Cristobal. Who would paint his house pink? This is not Mexico. This is not machismo centro. A few days ago I sat across from a young fellow who looked like he could bend crow bars with his bare hands. Most of the time I can see most colours, and I saw flaming pink when I looked at his shirt. But I can be woefully wrong, as I know from people looking at how I sometimes dress myself. I asked to be sure. Pink. I've seen it a few times now on men who look particularly masculine. Maybe it's economy, maybe a challenge to the world they know most will never accept. I think it's a matter of the locals being pretty calm over all. This is definitely not Mexico, nor anything much like it.

Paul Evan Lehman, found in Lima, Peru this day of

2011-10-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Mr. Lehman is no longer with us, but somewhere in the great blue yonder rides a man and his typewriter, I'm sure, and he looks down on me and waves his Stetson as I look up and thank the gods that I found his book, Texas Men (Hasbrouck Heights, N.J.: Graphic Publish co.; 1936; rpt, 1951.) This book is older than I am, and I am old. I'm sure that Mr Lehman is not entirely forgotten, but for me he will be a new acquaintance in the late hours of this evening. I have no ideas as yet how I will feel about him, though I am hopeful due to his work, a novel I would love to have, Idaho.

One of my great joys in travelling is to find old books in non-English language countries, books often left to die in heaps unread and arcane. I found this book today on a side street when I got lost in Lima on my return from a government office. I can smell a used book shop, the mould and mildew, of course, but also the hands and the eyes of readers through the years leaving a sense of themselves on the pages. So, I was drawn in to a seedy little doorway and I found inside, though I couldn't take a picture, a half dozen men sitting on folding chairs amid mouldering papers, likely unemployed men killing time reading comic books and old magazines. In the muddle of pages and covers and scaps of paper from torn magazines I found a half dozen books in English, Mister Lehman's book being one. I'll let you know relatively soon how I feel about it.

****

Oh. I didn't rush to review this book. That tells us a lot right off.

I think books often tell us about who we would like to be, if not about who we are in our lives as they are, idealisations. But that's not all: I think these idealisations do tell us who we are in that they we tell author who we want to be idealised so they can write about our aspirations and our phantasies of ourselves.

Yesterday's book was not so good, even though I like westerns as a rule. It was 187 pages that might have made a better short story in a magazine back in 1941 or so when it was first published. As is, the story carries on far too long to get to an obvious conclusion, not bringing anything new after the first 10-15 pages. I got it within the first paragraph, but my grasp of books of this nature is my only real talent, and I am way too good at it. So too with movies. I get it in the first few minutes and can then anticipate the whole thing in detail thereafter, making movies a miserable experience for me. And so with this book. Loyalty is admirable, and a man has to give his best friend every benefit of the doubt, even if he hates doing it. And a rotten friend must in the end sacrifice himself to redeem himself, after which the hero who has stood by while all others would not can claim the moral high ground because, like Gollem, the bad guy done good. It's lost on me. Maybe before we entered WWII this book could have hit some readers and made them happy, promoting the ideal of manly friendship and loyalty, self-sacrifice and stoic disregard for suffering when one loses to the lesser man. Maybe.

According to the leftard social scientist I cite often, Joanna Burke, in WWII those soldiers who read Look Magazine or Life Magazine were seen to be intellectuals by the majority of soldiers who read comic books. Today, those who read Chomsky or Zinn are seen by others as intellectuals. Nothing much changes. The point is that in the early 1940s in America there was no broad and shallow education among the populace as we know it today in America. My education, a generation after the war, is far superior in many basic ways to that of the average European of today. But it wasn't what I wanted. I do have more and better than most, however, and more than Obama. Of those reading Lehman's book, they would have been working class men who had little access to television. This book might have taken the average working man a week to get through, and he might have enjoyed it in its simplicity: Men are men and men are friends of men. Men love women, and they stand aside for a man the woman wants, even if they know they are the better man. It got me thinking about the book I read a few days ago, and how we see ourselves and what we like to think we think about ourselves. I read volume two of a book about an autistic girl, Stieg Larson, The Girl Who Played with Fire. (New York: Vintage Crime; 2010.) It's close to 900 pages long. It tells us much about ourselves, I think, and in a way similar to the way the tv series Dexter tells us about ourselves and the way the movie Shane tells us about who we used to think we were or would like to think ourselves to be. These books and movies are not too much different from comic books and magazines in the early 1940s, we just think we're more sophisticated, our books being longer, our details being more sordid.

I read all kinds of things, even, dare I admit, the Bible. I read pulp novels, Lehman or Larson, anything at all if that's all there is. Larson was all there was till yesterday. I'm not shocked or disturbed by what he writes, not even ashamed of our times. It's not daring, it's not edgy, it's not sophisticated. It's a comic book of our wishes about ourselves, about how we might like to think we see the world.

Close to 900 pages of social criticism from a Swede about a girl who was tormented by by her father as her mother was physically abused. A girl who was tormented and tortured by evil bureaucrats. A girl who was a victim. She is a bi-sexual who shares a book with a bi-sexual man married to a woman who has a life-long affair with a man who has sexual encounters with willing women. How utterly Swedish. But, like Lehman, Larson lays on the moralism with a shovel. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do; and if that means shooting it out ten to one against cattle rustlers while the bad guy steals his girl, such is a man's life. Or, if a man is a gangster raping young women and a woman is mentally ill, then a man must stick up for her as she goes for her revenge, taking time out to steal from thieves, to main criminals, to cheat and lie and cause harm to numerous villains and passers by. It's about the person who must have social justice, same as the range must be tamed for farmers and ranchers. It's what we all want, the sex tossed in because we are so cool.

Yes, our genre books today are better than they were in the 40s. Larson is a hack writer like Lehman, and Larson is dynamic and interesting, as 21 million buyers attest. But is says little good about us that we want to see ourselves as sophisticated when what we would probably prefer is to see ourselves as moral. Today, stoic men suffer because their lovers are married to bi-sexual men, and they go on to do the right thing in a world of evil while taking time out to screw any available girl. This is not the 1940s, but people don't change at all, just the attitudes change. At heart, men are still the same men they have been for thousands of years.

I prefer living among simple people as opposed to sophisticated people. I like Sarah Palin and I hate Obama. I prefer in many ways Lehman to Larson. I prefer Latin America to North America. What I like about Lima is what I used to like about Mexico City and what I love about Tel Aviv: that these are cities that are what America used to be when I was a boy. Lima is a Lehman city, as it were, and America is filled to bursting with Larson cities. The former isn't great, and it would improve with some severe editing; but it is at heart, far superior to Larson in the presentation of the collective expression of the point of the Moral. If we can think about it and see ourselves as losing what good we had in exchange for a lot of tinsel and flash, then maybe we can develop a simplicity again that will allow us to like the good rather than the poisoned pseudo-moral of today's Modernity. If so, we will see superior fiction expressing our best because it will be what we demand from writers, and they will, in turn, provide us with our best selves, however made up and improbable.

It's the small things that kill you

2011-10-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

I was out for a good walk a few days ago, and I saw my next big hike in the distance, the cross at the top of Cerro San Cristobal, 409 metres high, which means nothing to me till I work it out in feet. The cross is a local landmark, and I use to to orient myself when I can find it in the fog. I need all the help I can get. I have some kind of brain problem that, among many other things, has left me with very little sense of direction. I have trouble distinguishing left from right, and in the dark, up from down. I live as a traveller, and this presents me with numerous problems as I go from place to place. Being colour blind and half blind on top of that makes my travels all the harder, though I think I have a number of good ways to compensate. Some disabilities I can do much about, and I travel anyway, in spite of what it means. It means that small mistakes might well be fatal. That's a price I am happy to pay for this life, though I suspect I am facing the cashier sooner than expected, if one can anticipate such things in a reckless life at all.

I'm going for a long walk soon, and I don't know how to go but by moving forward to a goal that I have no sense of. I understand there will be a rough neighbourhood between me and my goal, and I understand that well given that I stumbled into it recently and got out as quickly as I could. Lima has its poor and criminal class, and I fell into the centre of it without a blink between me and safety of a sort. But I know my way around the mind of the world to a fair extent, and I got in and out in one piece. Still, there is a ghost walking beside me now whose outline is becoming increasingly clearer as I see my life up-coming.

I came to Lima and to Peru to do some writing, to type many hundreds of pages of manuscript for my book, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism. I am on schedule and a bit ahead, though I have come to see what I wrote as seriously flawed and in its current condition a failure. This is good in that I can save it now that I understand that I failed. To have gone so long without noticing this is what frightens me. How could I have missed the obvious for so long? This kind of failure in such a basic way undermines me. I have to fight myself to keep on smiling. I have many flaws that prevent me from being the man I would be. I have to struggle for the most basic things, like finding my way across town and seeing what it is I am supposed to see, like how to be alive in the world. I miss it mostly and must rely on experience and determined thinking. I seem to have been born in a deep hole and it is my life's experience to claw my way to hope of daylight. It will take me a lifetime to know as much as the average six year old. Mostly I am a deeply failed person in the world, and it is my hope to become at least aware of how to try to do some things rightly. I travel so I can see how things are done and how I might do those things as well. It's too late in life to apply much of it, but I will end with at least some knowledge others have taken for granted all their lives. I will, if I am lucky, know what others simply accept without having to think about it. That is my joy. I will be aware.

But I might not be aware enough to make it through this trip. I fear that my brain is not working as it should in basic ways. I'm forgetting things. Recently I lost my eyeglasses, which I cannot see without. I was lucky enough to be rescued by someone who found them for me. And too with losing my day pack. But yesterday I lost my passport.

It is a serious loss, and I am in deep trouble without my passport. I have to go to the embassy here and go through the process of replacing it. But the problem is far deeper than that. The problem is that I seem to be losing my mind.

Open Doors

2011-10-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

Doors are specifically human, and I think they are great. Mostly, from what I see, doors are meant to keep out unwelcome company, meaning invaders with violence in mind. Doors are meant to keep out thieves, people and rodents and such. But in the past few hundred years man has honed a fine sense of privacy. It is recent. There were few doors in most buildings past times. Look at buildings, and even today the average office floor, and see that privacy is rare. It's for individuals, and communalists don't often notice a lack of privacy. I do, and its one reason I notice doors. But it's only one reason I notice them.

Doors keep out invaders and rodents and the cold, but they are also, sometimes, works of fine craftsmanship. Doors are sometimes carved and made beautiful by the labour of skilled artisans and thinkers and poets. I'm in downtown Lima looking at churches all day these days, where privacy is at a minimum, churches being communal spaces for the masses, doors being mostly for the mysteries of priests and officials.

I see one door daily that I like in particular. It's so high that I can't get a good picture of it standing across the narrow street. I'll try to do better from a different angle soon, but for now, let's look at a few details of this door.

It's not solid wood, being bolted together.

And it is old, having been patched over and over, as we see here.

The interior is worm-eaten. This is a 500 years old door, give or take. I think of it as a prize of humanness.

El Condor Pasa

2011-10-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

It's not hard crossing streets here like it is in many megalopolises where there is no sense of over-regulating every citizen out of his hard-earned money to finance social justice in the name of safety. (Whoops.)

Here, like in most other cities where you live your own life as well as you can and the gods against us all but the rich, (Damn!) one walks across the street and doesn't get hit by cars. It's life. One does not require police to regulate traffic. People do that. One drives as one can and must and one does not slam into pedistrians and they in turn do not stupidly walk into oncoming vehicles, and all but the trial lawyers are pretty well served. (OK....)

Not everything here in Lima is Libertarian City. It's not perfect. The government does not post traffic cops at every corner to impoverish the people as they cross the street. Instead, governments are just as greedy and corrupt as in America but in less "sharing and caring" ways, the p.r. routines not being so slick. The government in many countries just plain steals without the "social justice" bullshit that makes people think they're getting a good deal out of it. So, the point is that politicians here are as bad as anywhere, and they are a pack of vultures.

I don't have a camera to do justice to this, but I was crossing the street toward the Congress building and beyond, minding my own business, I noticed a couple of groups of riot police in an armoured car with serious looking attachments and some nifty looking logos (pictures to come when the sun comes out) and I got there without being hit or ticketed for a mass of money, like a hundred other people crossing against the light with me. I started to cut through the Congressional building plaza when I noticed a flock of condors settled on towering flood light posts. Yes, it is the perfect metaphor for politicians everywhere, but this is the first time I've ever actually seen it. Vultures all over the building and looming above.

Yeah, you want to be a hammer rather than a nail, but in the end it's all the same. You cross the street and the vultures are waiting. El Condor Pasa.

How do you know your child is Georgian?

2011-10-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

Georgia on My Mind.

I was walking down a side street yesterday in central Lima when I spotted, of all things, a small cardboard display on a table at a shop front for souvenirs, one thing I never would have thought to see anywhere on earth, having looked, actually, in many places for many years. I saw, among other things, a flag patch of the Republic of Georgia. I was laughing. I bought two for a dollar or so. I asked the girl at the shop if she had FYROM, Jugoslavia, which she had never heard of. She knew nothing, unsurprisingly, of Georgia. She was happy, and I was ecstatic. Later in the evening I sewed on patch onto the crown of my new black baseball cap. I pricked myself a few times. Who would think I would find a patch of Georgia in Peru? WOW!

This morning I woke and went to the rooftop to make coffee on a hotplate there, and as I was boiling water I was joined by a Japanese lad who saw my cap and asked if I'm from Georgia. I said no, I'm from America, and then, to my surprise, he said he had been in Georgia last year. We talked about Georgia for an hour while I had coffee in Peru. This is pretty strange, or else I am way out of the loop in the lost decade of being settled down sort of. Ten or so years ago Georgia was a mountainous wilderness few people would venture to from fear, rightly felt, of being killed if not robbed on top of it by bandits. And it was difficult to get visa. But how things must change in this rapidly expanding Modernity. All morning I had Georgia on my mind, and part of the reason I find this so utter amusing is that in packing for this journey around the world, if I should last, I tossed, without thinking, a map of Georgia into my pack where it has settled to the bottom to be useless for a long time. I don't know what I was thinking when I threw it in there. I don't think I could be farther away from Georgia if I tried. And to meet, a matter of hours after having found a patch, a young man who had been there recently was some kind of wonder to me.

I left my hotel and went to buy a few supplied, mangoes and bread and such, and as I was crossing the plaza to the supermarket down the road an old man chatted me up in English. I decided that even though he was a street hustler I needed some time away from speaking Spanish, if only for a few minutes. He told me he has a school for orphans up the north of the country, which he eventually asked me to donate to, and which I politely declined, saying that I am working my way to an orphanage in South Sudan and need all my money to get there. The strange thing is that when he approached my and spoke English he asked if I am from Russia. He then chatted about Georgia, obviously something he picked up as a way to hit on tourists, street hustlers like him and Obama having a sack full of sly come-ones for any occasion. I had at that point spoken to four or five people in the day, and two of then spoke to me about Georgia.

To end this story on a note I think is amusing, I was coming out of the store when I bumped into an English couple in their early 30s, and I said excuse me (con permiso). The guy looked at my cap and whispered to his companion loudly enough for me to hear, "Bloody yanks."

Now, anyone who knows anything knows that I can pass easily for a Georgian. Why? Because my front teeth are gold.

It's an appropriate joke here: How do you know your child is Georgian?

His first tooth is gold.

How Strange is Ordinary

2011-10-22T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have seen some wonders in the world that make me wonder where I am in this universe, wonders that shake my sense of what it is to be a man in the world, disorienting me and making me reassess what it is to be a man at all. And then there are simple things like blue-faced pigeons in the park. I couldn't get a good picture of any due to a lack of sunlight here, so I must rely on the efforts of others to give at least some adequate substitute for what I saw. This photo is of a Peruvian pigeon, not quite what I saw, but not your average European pigeon either. It makes life strange to see such an ordinary thing as a pigeon in blue.

Blue-faced pigeon.

Here is a link to a few dozen exotic pigeons, a pretty-much ordinary bird otherwise.

Pigeon blog.

A small diversion

2011-10-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

Use your mouse to scroll over this guy's head and gain an insight into the Muslim mind.
http://www.selfcontrolfreak.com/slaan.html

Progress Report

2011-10-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Lima, Peru. I sit most days writing, typing, and hoping that I will come out with a series of books that make some sense of the world we inhabit as denizens of Modernity, now a place so rich that kids can demand and demand and demand, and they just might get all that they demand simply because it'll be easier to give them all they demand that to hold out and tell them to work for things themselves.

Occupy cities and demand. This is what Modernity has become. I'm not so keen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpqPM7E7PO0

I went out for lunch yesterday, down to the cliff side where one can look down a thousand feet to the beach and the roadway. But I didn't go anywhere near the bottom, opting instead for lunch at a pretty much up-scale restaurant, Tony Roma's, where I passed on the ubiquitous sea food, and had a lovely day of it looking at a Third World country coming to the cusp of the Modern. It is lovely here, clean and pleasant and well-to-do. But this is Mira Flores, not the interior, the jungle of the old. This is real living, in spite of the Occupy Cities crowd would have us believe. This is what all people can have if they work for it. There is food and cleanliness and happiness here, and it is a product of Modernity alone. It doesn't come from dressing up like a primitive and howling at the gods and demanding manna from heaven. It comes from dressing up in a suit and tie and polished leather shoes to get a job as a parking lot attendant working 12 hours a day for minimum wage. I call it progress, the move up from dirt and squalor to a suit and tie and shiny shoes so that ones children might drive a Mercedes to the office in coming years. I see it here daily, this move to riches and satisfaction from the efforts of work and rationality. I do not see Inca human sacrifice in the form of "Eat the Rich." I see people who grasp for satisfaction and cleanliness. This is a very lovely place.

However, I am not so well-adapted to the world as I would wish. I stand on the outside and look in at what I love so much. I see it in a letter to a friend, as below. I quit that letter because I was depressed over my lack of ability to settle down and be part of the world I love. I sit here in Lima today and think about how the "poor" here are slowly becoming rich and satisfied, and how in America the rich are sickeningly rotten. The rich are those who demand that others pay their student loans and give them jobs and security. I love those "rich" like Sarah Palin, middle class people like those around me here in Lima, who work at jobs and make money and on Sunday afternoon after church go out for a meal with family at a nice place overlooking the ocean. This is the life for everyone who can live with Modernity and accept that it is progress rather than a falling back on the primitive. This city's population doubles every ten years, now at about 8 Million, most of whom have escaped from the jungle to come live and work here and thrive. Not all do well, but most do unimaginably better that starving in huts and dying of diseases from filthy water. This district is the beauty that awaits those who work for the Modern. A filthy park and hand-outs from the working class is the Occupy Cities crowd's product of the Modernist primitive. Real people escape from poverty by working in the Modern world.

I had a problem yesterday with my computer. I had no idea what to do about it, so I emailed a friend and begged for help. It came, taking up some hours of my friend's time. I got back on-line and did some work and went for a lovely afternoon in the rare sunlight here. The Freak Show in America banged drums and demanded. Peruenos worked all week and yesterday went to the ocean to sit and have a fine meal. I have no job at all, do no paying work, and had a fine day with people living a fine life. I have a computer, like them, and I travel the world. I could almost laugh. But I could almost choke when I see on the Internet that some many in the heart of the Modern world would destroy all this, not only for themselves but for people here and elsewhere, people who will leave the Death Hippies to languish in squalor if the latter refuse to adapt themselves to the world as it is, the world of compromise and temperance and dedication to the whole of Modernity that allows us all, even me, to live so good a life.

I had a computer problem that a friend in Canada was able to fix for me. I am amazed. My father worked all day during the week and at a private business in the evenings and on weekends, and my mother worked full-time as well till she died of cancer. One of the last things she did was scrape together money to buy a microwave oven. I have a computer in Lima. I think many people do not realise that today in Peru those with some sense can live better here than my parents did in America 40 years ago. I saw a peasant family at a hole-in-the-wall diner I was at recently, and the boy had a computer nicer than mine. I rejoice. I am proud of humankind. A peasant family Peru can live in the Modern world and buy for their boy what my parents could never have dreamed of for me. And we, we can do so much more for our own. I prefer it here. This is progress. America is stagnation and rot. My family wasn't poor, but we had nothing like what a peasant family in Peru has today. Except that we did: We had a driving need to do better.

I some how fell off the tracks as a young man. I can't claim anything good about my life, just that I am lucky to be alive as I am. If not for the Modern world taking good care of others and leaving lots left for the likes of me, I would long ago have died off. Instead I can travel the world and fly up and down in my moods. The world is not perfect, but it is good. It gets better all the time, as I have witnessed in my own lifetime, and as I see daily. But I do little to make it anything different. I'm stuck on wander.

There's a song I like a lot, being a C&W fan. It's supposed to be about a man who has a casual relationship with a woman, but a moment's thought will reveal that there are no women in the world this song could be about. The song is a celebration of the "homosocial." A man can have a friend such as this song portrays, but that friend will be another man, not a woman. When I listened to it last I started writing the letter below. It wasn't long before I quit. I didn't realise till I got so far as I did that I had left the Modern world as a young man. Like the creepy kids of the Occupy Cities camps, I have lived in confusion most of my life. I learn a bit each day, and if I could I would live a thousand years to try to be a better man, something most people take for granted as they progress toward the Modern.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1_J855MK2E&feature=related

It's knowin' that your door is always open
And your path is free to walk
That makes me tend to leave my sleepin' bag
Rolled up and stashed behind your couch
And it's knowin' I'm not shackled
By forgotten words and bonds
And the ink stains that have dried upon some line
That keeps you in the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
That keeps you ever gentle on my mind

It's not clingin' to the rocks and ivy
Planted on their columns now that bind me
Or something that somebody said because
They thought we fit together walkin'
It's just knowing that the world
Will not be cursing or forgiving
When I walk along some railroad track and find
That you're movin' on the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
And for hours you're just gentle on my mind

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence
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

I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin' cracklin' cauldron
In some train yard
My beard a rustlin' coal pile
And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands 'round a tin can
I pretend to hold you to my breast and find
That you're waitin' from the back roads
By the rivers of my memory
Ever smilin', ever gentle on my mind

Glen Campbell, "Gentle on my mind. (1967) Composed by John Cowan Hartford(December 30, 1937 – June 4, 2001).

Lots of them, we know, they hate us. I feel better that they don't know us at all, that they hate us for what they see without understanding.

When I was a kid I got fed up with working in a warehouse with old men, living in Baltimore, living a life of misery and depression in a crowded ghetto of low-rise tract housing and dinky toy cars and folks staring at their feet when they spoke to me. People crushed and beaten as they sought salvation after their shifts at the warehouse in watching sports games on television at the local tavern, one night of drunkenness turning into a lifetime of nothing better. I hit the road, went south, went to the open range.

I got work in the southwest at a ranch, hard work, poor pay, and damned hard work for it. In town one day I met a girl, and I asked her if she would like to go with me to the dance on the weekend. To my amazement she said yes. Work was excellent all the rest of the week. I got to her house on the Saturday evening, too early, I didn't know it. I drove up and stepped onto the porch and knocked on the screen door and said hello in there. The girl's mother let me in and called to her daughter, me bounding past and into the kitchen. There she was, and her face fell and I figured she would cry if only she could.

I can't say if she was the prettiest girl I've ever seen, but she was the girl I was keen to go out with. That makes her attractive, and the rest is not so much important. Oh, I hurt that girl. She was standing in the kitchen and her mom came up behind me and saw the daughter, saw the shame, the fear, the coming cascade of tears and blame. The girl's party dress matched the kitchen curtains and the table cloth and who knows what all else in that house. Maybe every gawdamn thing in the house was wrapped from the same bolt of cloth. I didn't care, just thought it was funny, is all. You don't have to wonder any more why I love Walmart.

God, I hate these fucking hippies who sneer at people. When people don't have much they make do with what there is. Sometimes they make their own clothes and their own curtains and table cloth and what else I don't know, and I hate that people would laugh at that. I never married that girl. I think I should have, and I base that on the last words she ever said to me: "You get off'a my land or I'll shoot you!"

Obama can sneer at us and his lackey fops can rage and call our girls cunts and men Nazis and all of us cavemen. That girl had something none of the sneering hippies will ever get: she had her own mind and her own place in the world. She and her mom had a ranch where they raised dust and tumble weed and had little more than grit to show for it. Maybe I loved her. I loved lots of girls, and I've left all of them for some other place and some other girl and some other tears. I'm leaving again.

That girl was little different from the working class Peruena. In fact, she had far less than they today. I missed that girl and the honest day-by-day struggle to progress toward Modernity. I thought, like the idiot kids protesting today in the Modern world, that I could have it all by wanting and demanding and expecting. Now I see what that girl has left the world, seeing it here in Lima, a world of getting ahead by working and struggling for the day and the day after, and then, in time, one has this beauty and one can say one helped it happen. I'm a vagabond, if not a bum, and I too am blessed in that I can see the world of beauty that poor people have made rich and lovely. I can bum around the world because others work hard. I think, yes, I am a bum not better than the idiot kids in the park. I, at least, am thankful. I am deeply grateful for this Modern world you have helped make for all of us. I thank you.

Others, not so much:

We believe that it is possible to inject justice into the global economy. We have come up with the following list of things [truncated] that can be done right now to rejuvenate democracy and economic justice in our country:

• Halt foreclosures for the unemployed, sick and elderly

• Increase funding to public services by taxing the richest 1 percent

• Forgive all student loan debt

http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/10/17/ows-manifesto-massive-theft/

Flower viewing

2011-10-16T15:35:00.001-07:00

I live in Mira Flores, Lima, and I find it very pretty and pleasant to be here. There is the constant fog, which will lift as summer comes, and there is the chill that I wouldn't believe when I read about this place before coming. I know now that it's truly a desert here and it's cold and foggy. But at least where I live it is pretty and well-to-do. Mira Flores, "looking at flowers" is maybe right, I haven't seen a lot other than today when I encountered this.
There were many more wreathes inside. These wouldn't fit. I might have made a better photo if the situation had been less solemn. Still, one gets a sense of the life of a well-to-do family occasion here, and some flower viewing.