How do you know your child is Georgian?

Georgia on My Mind.

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


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

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

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

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

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

His first tooth is gold.

How Strange is Ordinary

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

Blue-faced pigeon.

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

Pigeon blog.

A small diversion

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

Progress Report

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman's cryin' to her mother
'cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I'm blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin' on the back roads
By the rivers flowin' gentle on my mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others, not so much:

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

• Halt foreclosures for the unemployed, sick and elderly

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

• Forgive all student loan debt

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

Flower viewing

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

La garúa de la primavera

There is a continuous fog over the city, but it is Springtime in Lima and the new is sprouting visibly. I confess that the climate is a bit chilly for my liking, but the area I live in is lovely, parks and boulevards and bustling outdoor cafés and attractive women and clean streets and a wealthy ambiance to say the least.

I feel like I'm becoming green around the edges. I think that's a good thing.

The pic. is of a tree next to my balcony.

Dag's Last Jag

I'm getting old. I am old. I am on my last trip, this one maybe taking me to the very end of this life. I'm living for now in Peru, one stop on a long trip to the end of time. There's no going back for me now, mainly because there was never anywhere to go back to, only forward, that road being eternal.


The sun is finally out in Lima, the first time in weeks, this place being overcast due to the Humboldt Current that brings a cold breeze and grey skies. But it's not very cold, not very grey. It's my living, and this is living la vida loca. For an old guy on the road it's acceptable. I have work to do here and not a lot of time for the sun anyway.

I am writing a five volume book on the idea of individuality and individualism, how that is better than fear of loneliness and a flight to collectivism. I have 12 duotangs of hand-written pages, each folder about 100 pages long, some more. I am a terrible typist, and it takes me 12-16 hours per day to make ten pages, often fewer. I am through the first folder now, and working on the second, that being volume one of this effort. I had hoped to live here in Lima for the year I think this will take me to complete, but I think now that I'll travel around some, looking for that one place that will be what I had hoped for when I originally planned to do all this in Vientiane, Laos, that before I couldn't get a proper visa and decided to come instead to South America. Here I am, and for a while here I stay, writing and getting nervous.

It's no fun for me to write this part of a book. I have to type and get it more or less right, which is difficult for me because I type so badly. Worse, I have to confront each and every word I type at least three times, once to type it, once to correct the typos, and once more to ensure that I got the typos fixed. It depresses me and makes me disgusted by the copy I produce and the ideas I have. It gets so bad that, yesterday, for example, I considered jumping off the roof or hanging myself because it seems that nothing I'm doing is working out well. I call this suffering for my art. I get over it by going for a walk and having coffee. I feel better now. The writing continues. I know from years of experience that this stage of writing is the worst, and that the best comes when I have a whole manuscript typed and in my hands so I can work at making the words sing. I'm not going to be there for a long time yet. This is the time to suffer.

My blogging here has been close to non-existent since I arrived in Lima, but I have done a huge amount of typing, for me. I have over one half of volume one done, and and am doing as much as I can to finish this off quickly as I can. I don't know how long this will take me, but once I feel that I have some genuine progress here I will make a better effort to get out and blog and try to be interesting and informative about Peru as I experience it. For now, for a week or more yet, blogging will continue to be light. But be patient. I will return. There's nowhere else to go, really, but forward, wherever that leads me. Hope you will join me in some way as I make my way toward South Sudan and maybe beyond over the coming year and more. till then, back to books.

There's so much to learn, and it's so hard to do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhlkEDY_O84

Lima in Springtime.

I'm in Lima, Peru, and though it is a huge and interesting city of exotic delights, I find myself engaged in the purpose that brought me here, to sit and type my large stack of notes into what should be a five volume History of Ideas, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism. I'm not getting out much to see the city and its sites.

I work to a deadline here for each month, Oct. being the first month, and I will, according to my deadline, finish typing, revising, and editing the first of the 12 binders that make up the five volumes. The first binder is 108 pages of my own indecipherable handwriting. I had a head start, of course, and am now on page 28, a mere 70 to go before I revise and edit. I have 27,375 words typed so far. That head startis looking pretty necessary.

I'm not getting out much, but I have a lovely place in Mira Flores to keep me. I'm sitting in the courtyard typing now, the sun coming out, the day looking pretty good. Will find some time, soon I hope, to go out and make some better case of my life at this blog. Stay tuned.

Vive France Libre

Our friend Tiberge gives us this; thanks to CGW for finding it and sending it.

http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2010/12/requiem-for-france.html

3:10 to Lima

I arrived in Lima, Peru a few days ago to spend some time in South America where I will be writing a five volume work on the history of ideas, A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism.

This is my chair where I say writing today. Will have more later as I settle in. If you are in Lima, please let me know and perhaps we can meet for lunch in Mira Flores.

Till next day or so,

Yalladios, Dag