No Dhimmitude

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

My really good friend, this guy I met in Iquitos, Peru

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Life on the road is one without lasting friends, one moving from place to place before lasting relationships have any time to develop, people who might be and sometimes obviously should be people one would be with for the duration simply fading away as ones boat or bus or taxi moves elsewhere, one moving on to meet other strangers who have yet to become those friends one delights in knowing and being with to share ones life and mind. So, on the road like this one finds those first inklings of companionship and incipient friendship in street vendors and knick-knack sellers and waitresses and people who contact tourists first and most often.

One such fellow for me is the guy whose name I will never bother to ask, like Primo Levi not thinking of his fellows at Auschwitz because he knew they were doomed from the start and there was no point, only pain, in knowing the drowned, is a street vendor, a cheery fellow who sells one day floppy hats, the next day sunglasses, maybe next time showing up with an armload of teeshirts for sale to those who long for a conversation with the locals so they can say they had this friend in this place and they felt that they belonged and were appreciated as people by people who live the life the tourist only visits and barely comprehends. I don't know the street vendor, but in a cheap and silly way I like him and we chat a bit when he passes by as I sit writing and drinking coffee, he off to find that magic tourist in need of stuff to validate his experience in this or that place, his contact with the locals made real by a piece of stuff with the name of this or that city painted or carved or embroidered on it somewhere, like the stuffed piranhas on a stick with the wooden base painted crudely with “Iquitos” that will set otherwise dumb on a bookcase shelf collecting dust as a talking piece for visitors who will ask: “Where is Iquitos?” which will give the collector opportunity to say how he met this fellow, a good friend of his, who gave him this fierce fish as a gift, a sign of friendship, not some commercial transaction between two strangers on the street, a man and a man meeting as equals and happy in each other's company.

I like this guy, and to some extent he would be, were I to live here, be a friendly acquaintance for me over time. He offers me bugs in a jar, and I can't take him up on such a cool offer because I haven't got a place to put them, though I would like to have them, have some time chatting with him about selling stuff, and to have a home where maybe, if I felt like it, I could have him over for coffee some lazy afternoon to find out about him as a person. He, like most I meet, is the surface of a river broad and deep that I will never dive into. So I smile when I see him, and I say hello, I ask how his day is, and we part on good terms, my life drifting along the surface of the city, not quite as stable as a beetle in a jar, not quite as fleeting as a tourist off and on a plane, bags stuffed with stuff to take back home as memories of a fine time that floated by one time long ago before the dust settled.

***

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Iquitos, Peru: Amazonian Freedom's Sonrisa Magnetica

I think often of what I call "privacy and publicity," the life one
lives as ones own or the life one lives as a collective rise above the
masses in the hope of finding some great thing that will validate a
probably meaningless existence. As a boy growing up in the remote
mountains where television was limited to a few hours per day and few
had access, church and the local cafe provided most answers to most
questions about the nature of things, our best and brightest weighing
in on matters of import to us all. But even that was mostly private, a
matter of Buddy or Mack or Bill spouting off, and not too serious. We
had our lives to live, bills to pay, families to raise, and in the
case of a boy, fish to catch, baseballs to hit, and a dog to run
through the forest with. The larger questions weren't even for adults:
they were for nothing. But there were always a few who couldn't find
their peace in privacy and had to make far more of their own lives
than their own lives justified in the eyes of others and obviously in
their own: There was always an old lady and a few friends who would
continuously bring to each and all conversations a template patter
about the end of the world and the damnation of those of us who didn't
pay her and them close attention. We sinners were doomed, and that was
that, and damned soon. The old lady and her claque of oldsters would
be angry at us for not falling down and repenting our sins and asking
her to guide us to salvation. No, important as our eternal souls
burning in Hell might be, we had other concerns, and she and they
would ramble and bitch no matter. We had private lives, and the
publicity the others demanded of us could fly off, for all anyone
cared. That was then and there. Now, publicity rules the land. Creepy
religious fanatics harp endlessly about pubicity, hectoring the masses
as doomed sinners, as racists, as sexists, as homophobes and
islamophobes and bigots, all us us doomed to an eternity of Hell in
our own bitter lives. And yes, we have to give us smoking, drinking,
gambling, and fooling around with women as well as giving up such
sinful things as meat, gasoline, sugar, salt, and television, as if
the missionary religious old ladies of the Left today are some kind of
Freak Show Mormons.

I live these days in the Amazon in Peru. I would leave now for the
Amazon in Bolivia if I could. Por que is mucho mas freedom in the
totally incompetent state of Belen where the government just doesn't
have the money to track me down and piss me off about drinking a Big
Gulp soda. I can smoke $0.50cigars inside a cafe, hustle girls till I
droop, and dislike homos to their faces without a blink from any of us
at all, and swill a $2.00 bottle of rum in the park and ride away on a
motorcycle without wearing a helmet.

I'm not at all anti-American. I just hate living in America. Because
now I know, too:

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/09/23/happy-endings/

I'm making a new home in a free land for me, free and happy. I don't care what Obama supporters have to say. I save the Amazon rainforest one piece at a time, a feather here, a skin there, some wood on my shelf, and so on. Let the old religious fanatic ladies curse and burst a vein in the forehead, it means not a thing out here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I smile, and my steel teeth shine bright in the hot sun.

Grace at the Yellow Rose of Texas, Iquitos, Peru.

Most times I remember to say grace before I sit down to eat something, but it's not like I much care about it, my appetite usually being poor, coffee helping me through the day pretty well. I say grace so I know I 'am,' though sometimes I'm just hurting from not eating and I skip to the last line and eat.

If I don't say grace I feel like I missed out on something essential in my life, a bit of time to think about being alive and how lucky I am to be at all, not for long, just for now. I need that pause to be aware.

There's a cafe in the heart of Iquitos, nice cafe, The Yellow Rose of Texas, that I've never eaten at because I hardly eat at all, and it looks too nice for me who prefers beans and rice and leaf-wrapped river catch on a cracked plate at a plastic table with wobbly chair on the roadside in the dirt at night, the lady there spooning out my three soles meal and passing it over the charcoal burner that heats everything all day and into the late hours of the night swarming with flies, dogs under the table scratching fleas and shaking my chipped glass of muddy jungle juice with a layer of floating wasps drowned in sugar. I sit with people I don't know and we chat about stuff like how hot it is and how many kids do you have and I like living here, and the fish is often not so much cooked through that I can eat it all so I slip the raw bits to the dogs when the people aren't looking at me wasting good food on a stray who doesn't do anything but get in the way and slightly pisses people off. The Yellow Rose of Texas, on the other hand, is a nice place. I don't really belong there sitting out having coffee. So I don't go very often. But I went today anyway and had coffee and looked at things. I didn't eat anything and it meant I didn't feel obligated to say grace and consider myself.

I've been in a few times, the first time tagging along with some folks from my place who wanted to go out for a drink and a sit outside and watch people. I did that. I watched one of my mates there, a fortyish guy, big and sort of good looking who talked all the time about how life in Iquitos is so easy for him because he wakes in the morning and doesn't have to decide whether to drive his Lamborghini or the Ferrari. It's cheap in Peru, and he can hardly get by on a hundred grand a year back home. Hit on the waitress for me, he says, tell her if she wants to be with me she'll never have to work again, and tell her she's not my type because she's not the right shape, and tell her, tell her, tell her that. He might stay or he might fly off to the Riviera or maybe he should go do business in New York City and wrap up a huge deal that he has been putting off because he doesn't need the headache right now. Tell the waitress she's sort of cute and tell her to bend over more so he can check her out, and tell her I'm not really interested. She has no clue what a goof this goof is, and I'm sitting far enough away that I don't have to-- though I do-- think about the gods inventing brass knuckles just for men like him, my brass knuckles somewhere at the bottom of my pack anyway because I like Peruvians and I don't want any trouble. Yeah, I want to kill this guy. I want to. I want to smash this creep. I want to kill him. Any arsehole can kill a man; but show me a man can raise him up he laid him down, and that's the man I will worship him. I shrug it off and sip my coffee and chat with the waitress a bit, though she isn't paying attention, her focus on the guy who has her off balance and liking him and wondering. I just go because I've seen his kind too many times and there's nothing in him for me to laugh about anymore. I left the cafe, missing the yellow roses of Texas and the broad blue skies and the brown dust and the dun dried river beds all cracked and cake, the brittle and tough tumble weeds, silvery and rolling across the dusty plains....

I went to the yellow Rose of Texas cafe for coffee today because I'm not too happy about the lady I've been dating for a week or so now. I wanted to be somewhere else if she came looking for me. I hit the cafe I seldom go to, The Yellow Rose of Texas. And there I sat and sat and looked at stuff and thought how fortunate I am to be alive to do all this stupid sitting and doing nothing while the waitress has to hustle around for guys like me doing nothing for almost nothing. Life is good.

I saw this old lady on the street, she being a lot younger than I, which means not a thing because a woman ages in a way totally different from a man, like it or not, she being maybe 40, and she's pushing a wheeled cart with a half dozen or so coconuts rolling around in the box, and she's walking so fast that when I try to get her picture from my seat at the cafe I find she's out of range. So I got up and walked down the street to get ahead of her, and she was going fast, but I got ahead and she stopped and leaned on the handle bar of her cart and she was gasping, which is reasonable because she's a huge fat old thing, and I wanted a picture of her because she's old and ugly, poverty etched in every wrinkle and her red teeshirt is blotchy pink and too small so I-- and the world at large-- can see she isn't wearing a bra, and her grey stretch pants have dark, liquid stains on the hanging down butt like she's been dragging herself through the lanes at Belen market after the rain; and in all she's awful.

This is the picture I was trying to take because it was really funny:

I'm sitting at the table outside on the walk, the pine tree slab table rims painted with barbed wire all round, the tops various ersatz Texas themes, one of which is a fat lady who looks way better than the local gal down the street with the coconut cart. Behind me is Carla the waitress having a quiet melt-down because she thought the mouth who had been on about her was a good guy and she had been interested in him and questioned me about where is he and when is he coming to pick her up and told her he's a goof and has gone back home and didn't bother to tell you baby bye bye. Carla, a beautiful girl to start with, is putting a good face on this even though it's easy to see through the stone facade. I don't care much because she's not keen on me even though she's professionally polite and wants to kill me for telling her the guy dumped her and she had no clue at the Yellow Rose of Texas cafe where my bag is on the table half a block away and I'm not freaking out that a crack head victim of capitalism is going to grab it and run. Life is good for me, and I think this photo I'm setting up is pretty funny because the old lady is pushing this bright colored, hand painted, rickety old cart with barely legible letters saying: “welcom to iquitos thank you for you visit” I like it because I know I am going to put up a photo of a painted fat lady on the cafe table top and a picture of hotty Carla and I rush over to frame the ugly fat lady so she and her cart are in front of a nice looking building front of hand made Portuguese tiles and the contrast is so funny I laugh; and I walk over to the lady who is now bent over the cart so her face is staring into the scrap wood box of coconuts and scraps of crap and a dull knife, and I figure she's exhausted from pushing so fast so far, and I go up to ask her if she'll stand beside her cart so I can get a hilarious contrast photo of her, the cart, the building and put it all together with heartbroken and humiliated Carla and the cool décor of the cafe and it'll all look so ironic and I can have a laugh about how arty I am and how I write about grace and the gods who fucking well hate us and death to my enemies.

I say hello to the ugly fat lady and I see her gasping, holding down the gasps and heaving, trying to hold back the tears, and the tears running down her face and dripping off her chin, she can't look at me and tries to shake her head as she searches in the garbage and the filth among the coconuts for a bit of clean cloth to wipe her eyes.

What? That's it? That's the end of this story?

But no, I found myself sitting on a park bench later in the evening thinking about how badly some guy can treat a girl when a lady sat beside me with her four year old son and they shared an icecream cone, passing it back and forth. There might be some argument that this is sanitary and not weirdly too personal, but I can't begin to speak to that. Instead I spoke to the boy who took some interest in my foreignness and tried to speak to me in child Spanish. I told him I like icecream and I wish I had one, that his looked pretty good and I hoped he enjoyed it. He was pleased and smiled at me a lot, mostly curious that my face is so different from men´s faces he´s accustomed to. And when they finished I said, ¨Buenos noches, senor,¨ and the boy smiled and went away with his mother. Then he let go of her and walked back to me and held out his arm and we shook hands like men do and he returned to his mother, leaving me wondering how to clean off all the ice cream on my fingers.

***

Yes, there is even more, and it is about my first and second and now total experience of the owner of Yellow Rose of Texas cafe. I refrained from slagging the guy even though I usually don't restrain myself at all from such poor behaviour. I don't want to piss off the locals, even expat.s who know far more and better than I, because I don't know better or more than they. I keep myself to myself often enough even in the face of egregious shit. So, when the locals speak, I feel free to let it all hang out. Here is what they say, cut to the limit, about the owner of The Yellow Rose of Texas cafe:

http://dawnontheamazon.com/blog/2007/04/17/is-gerald-mayeaux-the-iquitos-scoundrel/

I say nothing more.

But then I do. I say all this time later, now in late March 2014, a year and a half later, having met the man in question, the notorious Gerald, that I find him to be fascinating. In just pasing through I fell for the first impression of the man and missed the man himself. That was a lazy mistake on my part. Now I intend to find out about the real man, not the cartoon villian he is made out to be above.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Equitos, Peru, Belen Market, Part Four (of 4)

I remember the day I came to Iquitos, not expecting much from my visit, which I thought would be a short one of seeing some sights and enjoying a few days in the jungle, a rest from the hustle of Pucallpa where I had a girlfriend who made my days nervous from the concern that she might run into the other girl I was seeing there. So, a short trip to think about things, to finish up a bit of travel in the Peruvian Amazon before heading off to the north coast to pick up my girlfriend in Mancora where I would get a job at the local university, get a house and live with the lady and her daughter and there, perhaps, call it a life. but things in a random life often fall by chance into routines of the past, and in my case it means walking around talking to people, sitting down for coffee, asking questions about the purpose of such a strange adventure that seems to have no purpose at all. It's a card game. I keep coming up with kings.

I move on to see the next hand. Once in a while I see a queen.

In Lima and beyond in my first months in Peru I stooped down and picked up a playing card laying face down in the dirt, and when I picked up the first I found I had a tarot card of the King of Swords. I don't find tarot cards by chance often, and since it was pretty I kept it with my now huge pile of stuff. Over the next few months I found two more playing cards on the street, each card laying face down, and each a King of Spades. I found that coincidence remarkable. But now I see people playing cards daily, and finding Kings of Spades, even a King of Swords seems totally likely. Sort of. Or maybe, which I prefer, there is a message from the gods telling me something. I don't know what it is, so I keep wondering.

And then, yes, I find a Queen of Hearts or even a lady standing in Belen Market with card players. she smiles, and my day shines. I continue on to visit my buddy in the market, stopping to chat a bit on my way to visit my other buddy who owns all the stalls on his particular street, the Chinese, from what I gather, owning many stalls they rent out to the locals. What fills is what sells. A lot of people smoke tobacco, to my surprise.

They smoke handmade cigarettes and cigars, tobacco grown in the Amazon somewhere, dark and pungent and probably deadly. But it's a living and a life.

Life, of course, is more than smoking and eating, it is much to do with love and laughter. I find that too in abundance in the Belen Market where I spend much time with those I hope sometime will be real friends, should my few days here extend even beyond my now few months here.

As I wander around and meet my buddies and chat I find out more each day about the continuing process of making the city better, in this case that the Chinese government is installing the city's new waterworks system, which the locals are hopeful will actually work, the problem and concern being that if it fails the backup of sewage will be far worse than the current problem of an inefficient system. But hope springs, the cards falling as they may in this less than rational world. One need take care in negotiating through it.

Sometimes it's the smartest move to find a place out of the way and sit it out, waiting for a quieter time to make ones move.

There's room for that here in Iquitos. And there is also sometimes nothing one can do at all to preserve oneself from death from seeming nowhere. It's a matter of chance. Even the fiercest predator finds himself at the mercy of the Fate.

It's in the cards. And there is nothing one can do but smile and wait out eternity.

Now I know that when the day is done many people close up shop and return to homes most Modernists would find less than adequate. The shop roof of plastic on sticks goes into storage for the night and the night brings a home made of plastic on sticks and a night of less than one might hope for. Who is the dealer?

Maybe He too is at rest.

Maybe tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the kings and queens of Belen Market will come to some better day of peace and plenty when the river rises and the rot and sewage is washed away for another season. But not today. Today one rests and hopes and perchance, one dreams. I linger here, I stay and I might stay on tomorrow as well and tomorrow still.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28

.....

***

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

9-11-12: Mr. Breivik has left the room . (Part One.)

All peace, as Chairman Mao puts it, grows out of the barrel of gun.

When one is done with the killing, then it pays to pay off the
survivors, giving them double reason for loving the peace. One without
the other is a waste. And most people won't involve themselves in
either pursuit, violence or money, without money being involved.
Hence, peace is a rare occupation. War generally doesn't pay so well.
Right-thinkin' folk do get it: Make violence pay. Give violence a
religious core of any sort, and on the road to peace we be. First we
win the war, and then the killing starts.

Peace is a good thing, and to have it one must rid oneself of those
who would make violence against the Order. Butt Butt Butt, then we
would be just like our enemies, they say with a scowl and a frown and
dramatically knitted brows, the 'look' practiced in the mirror after
watching 50s gladiator movies, the "really concentrating hard look"
just so we all know by the signs they're serious about their deep
intellectual analysis. Butt. Quite seriously, take a page from the
Algerian War and kill the wankers first. All "moderates" must die if
we are to have peace. Clear the board for the serious players to win or
lose the game and become the Order of Peace. Who cares who wins so
long as it's us. We don't want to be as bad as they are, we want to be
far worse so we win and they, who cares who they are, will be so
devastated by our violence they will not be capable of fighting us
further, and they will be so disillusioned with their previous beliefs
that they will flock to the new Order because it is demonstrably
stronger and therefore better and it pays cash money. This is peace.
We can talk democracy and perhaps morality later, but peace first.

Kill, kill, kill, and kill face-to-face so the enemy can see the men
killing them and have faces to fear and live to fear forever. Machines
don't do that job. Killing that isn't personal, man to stronger man,
is just accident. There is hope in 'death by machine', and that hope is
in getting better machines than the enemy has. There's no fear in
death by machine, only the resentment that lesser men have better toys
to kill with. Kill for peace face-to-face and the losers will long to
be on the side of the triumphant, switching sides to be a winner,
becoming "one of us" against their worthless own. Then there is peace.

Maintain peace by paying and letting the people make money. Kill those
who disrupt the peace of the people. Peace is money and terror.
Because we must kill in grander ways to make a lasting impression,
let's then forget the sentimentalities of terror and look at real
peace, what I am happy to call "Horrorism." Kill till the set clay of
culture is turned to dust, and then remold the work of man into a new
figure according to ones liking, the peaceful man. To the dust of the
pulverized defeated add the water of cash. One can create the peaceful
man therefrom. Smash, smash, smash till all that was the Good is now
the Horror. Then let the survivors become us and make a peaceful life
of making money.

Why do any such good thing for the world? No reason at all if it doesn't pay.
So make it pay. Kill for money. Make lots of money killing the enemy,
and then there will be perhaps even an excess of killing. But better
too much peace than too little. Peace is a good thing, and it is
especially good if one can make a living at it. One needn't count on
another's good heartedness, one can simply go out and make good money,
the Good coming from the happenstance of Horror.

Islam will be the religion of peace when we have destroyed the Muslim
will to live as they do now. That is, exercise Horrorism. Make money
by being masters of horror who bring a longer peace. Some might call
it murder. I say, "Off with their heads, these monsters who would
prolong the violence." Kill till the enemy is so sick of blood they
just can't take it anymore. St. Augustine argues roughly that, and I
find myself becoming happy about Christianity in the thinking about
it. Massacre is pity. Slaughter is mercy. Killing is charity. Why
bother? Because it should make one rich as well. And then the world
will also have some peace, including the world of Islam. Peace is a
good thing, and those who are against it, no matter what they say,
should be killed. Killing is sometimes a good thing, and really good
if it pays well, too.

The sentimentalist is a monster who must be slain. The true
humanitarian is a butcher. Make it pay and butchers will come a
running. Then there will be long peace till we have to do it all over
again. Peace. I love peace. Kill our enemies and we will have peace.
Kill them all and we will have lasting peace. Long live peace.

***

Monday, September 10, 2012

Death in the concrete jungle

I'm bugs about the Amazon!

In Lima most afternoons downtown one finds a sad looking fellow sitting amidst scenes of death so beautiful one could weep.

This man sells butterflies and beetles and other Amazonian bug in wood and glass display cases to the locals, most or probably all of his collection being illegal in Europe and North America. Perhaps some things he has are rare, but most likely not. There seem to be a billion of everything anywhere one looks in the jungle; but sense is not an issue for those Europeans and Americans who are intent on Saving the Amazon Rainforest. For the sad man, it's some extra money after work. He sells art, wildlife now deceased and preserved under glass. We should be so lucky as Lenin.

I think I prefer the painted wooden butterflies on display at tourist joints ubiquitous, but maybe if I lived here I too would be thrilled to look at my walls decorated with specimens of my environment mounted for me to see as I would. I think I'd rather have a painting sentimental, but maybe not. I might like dead bugs. I like looking at them on the street corner in Lima. I might like it even more if I saw them on my living room wall.It's a question I won't have to answer now. I'm satisfied with pictures from the street.

These bugs are exceptionally pretty, and one sees them in flight in the jungle, though they rarely land close enough for me to get a good photo.Until I get to the butterfly farm in Iquitos, this will have to do. And for those who will never come to the Amazon one might hope this is good enough as well.

I have, I confess, seem more beautiful and more dramatic butterflies in wilder jungles than the Amazon, but there is nothing less about this beauty for its lack of drama. The butterflies here are as beautiful as any, different, to be sure, but as lovely as a woman one from another. Yes, there are some ex-wives and girlfriends I would prefer to have under glass, but that's not hardly my poetic point here. I'm on about bugs of a different sort.

Let's forget about that for now and concentrate on life as beauty in the world and the earth, two very different places. Here, bugs are of the world.

The jungle is so wild here that one needs a local expert to guide one in and out. One sees what one sees, of course, but what one sees is from the world as one is of the earth. Few of us from outside the jungle know it as anything other than pretty, if dangerous. We are of the world. Those things of the Earth look pretty to us, but they are otherwise in Nature. They kill. And they die. Just like us.

Some years ago I nearly died from a spider bite, and during my recovery I still came close to losing my arm. I have some deep fear of the wild things. But I love the beauty. I love it as much in the wild as I do when it's preserved harmless and dead under glass. Beauty, death, longing for eternity, maybe the man is sad about something trivial that we don't know of. Or maybe he knows he's a butterfly and he can't wake up.

Iquitos, Peru: San Juan Market, Part Three (of 3)

I came to Iquitos by boat, first from Pucallpa up the Ucayali River and then from Columbia down the Amazon. In all cases I missed the aeroport. That made it easy for me to miss the San Juan Market, which might be geared toward those who fly in and out and buy up stuff without really entering the heart of the city. For me, mostly centred in the middle of town, the San Juan Market, way out by the aeroport, is easy to miss as is missing Belen Market for the upscale tourist.

Happily for me I can do it all if I can know about it and then find it. The San Juan Market is simple to find, one just has to know to look for it. There are things there I haven't seen elsewhere, and things that I have but didn't notice at all. Unlike the market stalls down the Malecon by the river I had my time mostly to myself at the San Juan Market, wandering freely and browsing at my leisure, taking photos without people demanding that I buy something. In fact, I did buy something, and I am definitely going back to get the swinging monkeys on a hoop. Lots of stuff that one won't see elsewhere at this market, but mostly it is peaceful, if one can think of shopping as anything other than a matter of nagging worry over the promise of stuff fading into the reality of possession and regret and fear of loss. If I had a bottle with a genie inside and could make three wishes, I don't think I'd wish for anything stuff-like at all. But, no genie means I might actually put some money into buying a cool bottle a genie might like to live in. Maybe I'd buy a chair and just sit and think about things of no real importance, like saving the earth.

I'd want a nice chair to sit in to goof off for all of my days. As is, it won't fit in my pack, so I must pass for now and hope someday I have a place to call my own and to put my own chair into. I could then sit. I could sit for a long time.

I could lounge around in a hammock, but I really don't like them. I always fear the rope will break and I will fall and cripple myself. I am now working in the second hammock of this trip, as well as my sith pair of shoes. I could lie down for a while, but I walk around and see things instead, not having a cool chair to sit in.

A hammock, though, is easy to cram into my pack, and I have one stored in Canada, a beautiful thing I got years ago in Nicaragua. It's decorative. I really don't want to have another one. A bunch of photos of hammocks, though, works well indeed.

There are a lot of ex-pat businessmen in Iquitos who are swimming in money due to the aeroport bringing in tourists with tons on cash to spend of souveniers. I like a lot of what I see, and if I had the cash and a place to put everything I like, I might well go for some boat oars painted pretty and I would hang them on a wall and think of the fishermen I've seen who use the same design, though without the fancy paint jobs. Many ex-pat business put such stuff on their walls, and it works. It looks fine and the locals make a bit from it as well. Well, maybe not so much from me. There is the aeroport, though.

I assume there is even a market segment of minimalist tourist who wants a pair of working paddles. Or maybe a pair unpainted simply await the buyers design.

It's not all store-bought stuff retailed at stalls in the market. There are people who make what they sell in their stalls. It sometimes doesn't look so romantic as it would at home on display. Part of the beauty of it is that one might see something being made on the spot. It becomes real, in a sense, the work of a person rather than the product of machinery.

Machines are good, in my opinion, allowing us all to have something rather than nothing while the rich have it all in its highest.I settle for plastic when I must. Wood is better. I am even better than wood, I like to think so.

So we chatted between the walls till the moss grew up and covered up our lips. But no, that would be Emily Dickenson. We, my neighbour and I, talked with craftsmen and vendors and folks at the market, people who were nice to us and happy to chat. Truth, beauty, stuff, people, it's all a good day.

Well, rattle my skulls, it came time to move along, and in the moving I got some stuff after all. Chances are the chances are I'll sneak back sometime and splurge on those swinging monkeys, me being a philistine of no good taste at all. maybe some birds, fish, and some butterflies. Love that stuff.

And when I'm gone things will continue as they do all the time, men and women living the life of the market day to day in the Amazon, no news at all, just a day in the life.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-san-juan-market.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-peru-san-juan-market-part-two.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-peru-san-juan-market-part-three.html

Iquitos, Peru: San Juan Market, Part Two (of 3)

I'd usually avoid a place that gets a cheesy blurb like the one below, but I was there before I found this. And in truth, I probably would have gone anyway, but with a chip on my shoulder, thinking I was being manipulated by a p.r. scammer paid to make a place seem better than it could be. That attitude could easily have stayed with me during the course of my visit, poisoning my time there. And I would have been the worse for it. I loved this little market and its silly stuff for sale. Some things there, like wooden bowls, are genuinely exquisite. Other things are just plain fun to have and to hold. Birds and butterflies and little wooden monkeys and fish and rattles and hums. If one can't love it, one should stay home and drink, me thinks.

The place was empty of tourists the time we spent there, we not being "tourists" at all but world travelers with serious minds and duties. Buying cool stuff, it's not really tourist activity, it's helping the local economy or something significant like that.

My ceiling in the last apartment I had was a mess of hanging parrots, one of which pissed off my last girlfriend by knocking her head every time she walked under him and forgot where he was. He used to say to her, "Watch it, dummy." I swear he could talk. I used to hear him say exactly that and other things like it. No, really, it wasn't me. It was him. My home was filled with colourful birds and fish and butterflies. They often originated in such places as Peru.

Yes, I am keen too on butterflies, and my fridge was covered with them, they being hungry, I assume, and patient. If I had a lot of money, who knows where I would stop. I might have a forest full of butterflies in my kitchen.

I'd have big ones, too.

And I would have a lot more birds.

My bathroom was swimming with fish, but none so real and these, sorry to say. Well, I do have a sea snake in plastic wrap in a box, a beast I got from Africa one fine afternoon, a toothy monster I love to show to guests. I could find room for more....

Fish, that is.

I have some excellent can openers, antiques of various sorts, and one pretty thing from India that has never come close to a bottle cap in my time. Sometimes a can opener is just a can opener. Some times it's a bit more. It's like a cigar, for example.

Yes, I even have a lot of embroidery on tables and desks. I have no examples of Shipibo work to date. I might work on that.

I am at the cutting edge of knives, I say, but mine are functional rather than so prettily covered as those above. I might like to have a knife in a carved sheath that just sits and collects dust. I might come to like all that.

And anything that covers the pig-tail light bulbs the Electricity Fascists who barged into my place one morning to install as I stood in stupified anger, well, enough of that.

I have, now that I think back on it, more masks that I would have thought. I like them for a number of reasons, especially for nights of kinky sex.

And to have over the bed a collection of swinging wooden monkeys....

WOW! I'm going back for those.

I lived in the hellish city of Vancouver, Canada for too long, i.e. more than a week in the temperate rainforest, and in my hallway I had an umbrella stand. I had a Chinese plaster ugly thing that i didn't like much. I would like, now that I live in a better place, a stand for jungle rattles and arrows and spears and stuff I don't know what the hell it is.

For now I settled for a bowl full of rattles. I'll rattle and roll onto the next part of our visit to the market next up.

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-san-juan-market.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-peru-san-juan-market-part-two.html

http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/09/iquitos-peru-san-juan-market-part-three.html

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