Paraguay (pts. 4-10)

2,000 iguanas in the toilet.

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.]

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

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

Later that same lifetime:

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

Asunción (3:1)

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

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

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

Asunción (3:2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asunción (3:3)

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

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

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

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

Asuncion (3:4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paraguay (pts. 11-12)

Paraguay: Livin' Latina NoKo

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.] 

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

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

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

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

Raw Hide. Yee-Hah.

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

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

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

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

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

Paraguay (pts 13-15)

Nueva Germania, Paraguay: Introduction

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aftermath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ant Hills

 

 

 

Paraguay (pts. 16- 20)

A Life of Crime: When Man is Dog to Man

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horniman: Breakfast of Paraguayan Champions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horniman Tea (2): Cheery Guano Coffee

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

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

Clean, Well-Lighted Sheets

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

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

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

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

Once there was away.

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

Paraguay (21-23 )

A turn of the screwed

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.]

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

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

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

The most dangerous man in Ciudad del Este

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSI As A One Man Show

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

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

[More to come as I complete the typing.]

These Boots are Made for Standing

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Hey! Hey! It's the Mormons!

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Hey! Hey! It's the Mennonites!

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A Yellow Leather Hat

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A New Idea in Concepción

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Leaving Paraguay

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Official Duck

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

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Born in the You Sez Ess Yes

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