Loma Lane, c. 9 p.m., November 30th 2012.

A Beer Caught by the Light of the Moon..

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Maracaibo: Where I Arrive In Kenny's Old Truck

So I left Santa Marta today.  I wanted to take a bus direct to Maracaibo, which is the first large city (population 2 million+) in Venezuela.  But there were none, and the woman at the bus station said there would be none until Monday.  Since I want to be at the Brazilian Embassy in Caracas at 9 am Monday to get my visa taken care of, I had no intention of waiting.  I had to take a small bus to Maicao on the border, and then transfer to another bus to Maracaibo.

I got to Maicao in about four hours, a place my guidebook warned me was going to be gritty and possibly dangerous, while there I needed to"watch my back."  Heartening, that.

When we arrived, the door of the bus was crowded with jammering men demonically leering, wanting to sell me services.  I was mildly disoriented, and my Spanish, which usually is quite solid in everyday situations, fled me.  I was understanding less than half of what they were saying.  I was not happy, and felt mildly threatened.  I was in no mood to trust anybody, but I needed directions.  I got one of the guys to cart my bags into the terminal on his dolly.  I always take advantage help with my luggage these days, because the 50 cents or so I tip saves me the stress of lugging my overpacked bag, which is well worth it.  This time I got a little paranoid, thinking he might run off on me.  I ran behind him as he sprinted off to the collectivo office.  I wanted the counter of the main busline, but was in no condition to interject myself properly into the situation.

There, there were more men shouting at me, pricing the trip in three currencies, and wanting to change my money..  They kept telling me that the border was closing in an hour and a half, if I wanted to go today I needed to make my mind up right away.

Way too much to handle.  I needed to clear my head.  I tipped the luggage guy, grabbed my bags, and fled into the open air.

I asked a man where the main busline counter is. He pointed the way.  One man from the collectivo office is following me.  I try to ignore him.  He taps me on the shoulder.

I turn, about to lose my temper, which is a very, very rare thing for me to do. But I'm on the edge.

He hands my wallet to me.  I'd dropped it.  I take it, stammer my thanks, and run to the busline office.

I ask if there's a bus.  No.  Tommorow?  No.  Monday?  Again, no.  Why the hell not?

The guy looks at me, and hands me a brochure with Hugo Chavez's face on it.  Because of the elections tomorrow he says.  Would I like to change my money?  He starts spouting information about collectivos again.

I get defensive once again, and start to lose my mind.  I need a pen and paper.  Write everything down.  Prices. Exchange rates.

I told him that the bankrate on the Venezualan Bolivar to the dollar is 4.25, because that is what the internet said.  He said their rate was 9 to one.

First the thuggish looking collectivo dude gives me back my lost wallet, and now I'm getting quoted and exchange rate twice the official rate.  Surreal.  What is going on here?

At that point I just surrendered, and realized that paranoia was getting me nowhere.  I decided to trust these people.

Next thing I know, I am hurtling toward the border bouncing around in the back this,

 I found Kenny's Old Truck in Venezuela. Who'da thunk?

Crammed alongside a bunch of campesinos, with twice as many Bolivars as I'd initially thought I'd have in my pocket.

Hugo Chavez decreed in 2007 that Venezuela be a half hour - that's right a half hour - timezone ahead of Columbia,  just to make arriving in his country just a little more annoying than it need be.  That Hugo.  Crazy guy.  We'll see if he wins today..

Four hours in the back of Kenny's ramshackle old truck later, I'm now safely ensconced in a hotel in center Maracaibo, which the a major oil hub here.

The guy at the hotel desk keeps putting his finger to his eye everytime I walk by him, squinting and hissing "cuidado cabellero: indigentes!"

I ignored him, and went out looking for a bottle of water.  I saw a bunch of gypsy ladies on the corner running what looked at first as I approached like a hotdog stand. I went up and asked if they had any drinks, but when they turned around the one closest me had this wicked orcish looking five inch blade in her hand, and I saw that the box they had wasn't of hotdogs, but was instead a pile of raw offal.  Viscous entrails, that is.  The woman was wearing a black dress and bandana, and looked as if capable of gutting me there on the spot.  They all snarled and glared at me, and croaked "no" in unison, like they were the witches in MacBeth or the Fates or something..  I fled, beating a hasty retreat back to my room, where I am reduced to drinking tap water for the first time since I've been in Latin America, hoping it's safe..

The hotel is a cheap one, within a few blocks of the bus station and the cathedral, which is convenient, because I hope to catch mass in the morning, and then leave for Caracas tomorrow afternoon.

I'll keep you all posted as I get along.  As always, keep watching  this space..



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Picture of the Day: Existential Kitty

The Ninth Tail

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Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

Listen to the Wicked Witch Cackle..

Now for a completely political post.

I've been thinking that one salient reason to vote Obama over Romney (who in virtually every other respect would probably govern more or less the same) is that I've thought that Obama is slightly less likely to attack Iran than the utterly neo con Romney.

I'll take the moderate neo con foreign policy of the Democrats over the insane jiggaboo neo con extremism thrown off by the Republicans in a heartbeat.

Abortion, bank and corporate servitude, health care reform, assaults on the Bill of Rights and human rights, ever burgeoning institutional militarism, all that, I think Romney and Obama will govern basically the same, because the president isn't really calling the shots anymore. The corporate elite are.

I've thought though that Obama is temperamentally less likely to do something totally idiotic in the Middle East and plunge us all off a cliff that could lead to WW III and the utter bankruptcy of our economy.

(Actually, as I think about it, Obama is probably preferable to Romney on taxes - he's less likely to cut them, more likely to raise them, if he could - and entitlement reform- I'm still naive enough to hope the Democrats really want to save and even extend to all Americans - read Gens X, Y & other future generations - Medicare and Social Security.. Both essential bastions of the Middle Class as we know it, economically.. But Obama's record has me wondering about that too, and while Romney talks libertarian smack, like most things he says I'm not at all sure he means it, and may in fact govern more moderately.  So who to trust when they're all lying and playing double games??  Obama seems moderately less oleaginous, a bit more sincere, than Romney, is all I can say..  But in the end that may mean very little, given the circumstances.)

Witness how he is blowing off Netanyahu, and refusing to meet with him.  That warms my heart.  It is exactly what Likud and the Israeli right deserve.  Exactly in keeping with our national interests.  And that is something that Romney would never do.

So I've been thinking that I might vote Obama for that reason, alone.  Because it is of utter importance that we never go gratuitously to war with Iran, in the absence of an egregious act of aggression by the Iranians.  

Then I see something like this:



This shows you just how corrupt and unified our governing class truly is.  How little the charade that is our political process matters.  The old man on the left is James Baker, former Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush.   The woman is of course Hilary R. Clinton, our current Secretary of State.

Listen to her laugh.  They're discussing a potential war that will make the Iraq boondoggle - which despite what everyone these days thinks, has come off exceptionally well, considering what could have, and yet still might happen there, precipitated by our meddling - look like tiddlywinks, the moderate act of colonial aggression it was.  

An unprovoked attack on Iran will not only discredit us utterly as a nation in the eyes of the world, shredding what moral authority we have left (and that really matters, because it makes people want to follow us, and imitate us) it could lead to global conflict, destabilizing the Gulf, Turkey, and Pakistan, possibly drawing in Russia.  It could not so hypothetically lead to WW III.

Even in a best case, it will cost trillions and kill hundreds of thousands.  More American troops will die in months than have in all the last ten years.  The impacts - political and economic - will be incalculable.

Jim and Hil of course know all this, and this type of talk is posturing to intimidate the Iranians.

Jim: "We oughta take them out."

Hil:  "Frankly, there are those who are saying the best thing that could happen to us is to be attacked by somebody.  It would unify us, it would legitimize the regime."

It would legitimize the regime?  The regime?  The US regime?  Or the Iranian? The editing here is unclear.  I think she means the latter.  I hope she means the latter.

The crazy thing is, it is no longer beyond thought that she could mean the former.

This is whichever way you cut it, utterly evil and irresponsible.  Loathsome.  And I'm just paranoid and cynical enough to believe them capable of "creating the conditions" necessary to provoke the Iranians and precipitate conflict.  I mean, it's not like they haven't done it before.  Jim and Hil are informed by a CIA/Rand Corp. Machiavellian calculus that only considers things in materialistic, economic terms.  It's all about the resources.  And Iran and the incipient Arab Shia revolt the Iranians are patrons of, sits on the jugular, threatening our Sunni Arab petrol client states. That's the real deal, the Israelis are secondary, but much more popular domestically, so they get all the propaganda airtime Stateside..

Enough.  I'm voting third party, is all I have to say.  Enough of this bullshit.  I hope everyone who reads this will consider following suit.

It's time for a change.

[h/t: Daniel @ Caelum et Terra]



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Martha, Mary, Magdelena..

I wrote a post last night that got partly swallowed by Blogsy, an ipad app I like, but that has its issues.  I gave up re-writing because it was past midnight and I was meant to be up at 7 this morning to dive.  When I got up this morning they told me that because I was the only one who'd booked diving, they were postponing 'til tomorrow.

I went out and walked about Santa Marta instead.  The hostel is at the city center, just off the beach.  There's a central square surrounded by a dozen banks, and a few casinos (and hardly anything else, scum collects) with a great equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar, the George Washington of South America, who died here at 47 in 1830.

The Liberator

There's a container port with one of those great hoist cranes to lift the containers off the boats on the waterfront, and a beach that verges into a breakwater.

Port lights at night

The water seems relatively clean, and there were urchins diving and swimming all along the waterfront, looking for coins and seafood.

I was propositioned by this very talkative and friendly woman who wanted to give me a massage.  Twenty five bucks, my choice of creams.  Much more subtle come on than usual from the prostitutes down here, who usually are quite aggressive.. She left me the pretension that we could have been talking about shiatsu, which we in fact could have been, but I'm pretty sure weren't.  I was grateful for this, because I can't stand aggressive whores.  I listened to her, as she told me about her life and all about the coast about the city.

I left my camera in the room, so this evening after eating a forth time at the superb Mexican place that is owned by the hostel, I decided to go out and walk about getting pictures, including the two prior.

This time, I ran into a whole clutch of whores.  Just as I was taking that picture of Bolivar, there.  Four or five of them, a couple I think were transvestites.  Now, to be honest, there's something venal about the Caribbean, that I dislike intensely.  One of the reasons La Cieba, Honduras got so much on my nerves, and was so depressing was that you couldn't walk the waterfront in the evening without being harassed by streetwalkers.  I've never noticed this type of aggressive pandering stateside.  Granted, I never go where you'd probably encounter it.  But the center of a city?  Right next to city hall?

This is why I detest libertarianism.  Like this crap is supposed to be legal?  Leave me the f**K alone, please. Where are the cops? If you think prostitution should be legal, think about having our public spaces invaded like this. This type of thing makes me appreciate what it must be like for girls to be hit on and leered at.  Not cool.

Still, there is in fact a certain nasty charm in being propositioned so blatantly.  They're actually kind of funny, the things that they say, like "¡Que rrrr-ico!" (how yummy!) "¡Ay, papi!" - other stuff like that.  Until they get down to groping (no respect for personal space, they try to feel you up) and flashing you (the girl - I think she's a girl - in the picture below actually has quite a nice ass, I know because she showed it to me several times) and asking to fellate you.  I flatter myself, I think a few of them would have done it for free..

They wanted me to take photos of them, I obliged:

Que rico.

Yeah.  So that's Santa Marta by night.

I then headed back to the hostel, which is quite happening.  There's a bar upstairs where they blare the tunes until two-ish every night.  Not so loud that it disturbs my sleep, so I don't mind.  As I mentioned, there's a really, really good Mexican place in the same building, and the downstairs has a groovy swimming pool in the center courtyard, with a movie room where they have probably a few hundred films tevo'd and on constant rotation.  The crowd is twenty-ish and international, but largely anglophone.

The hostel too, has an air of decadence about it.  This picture is on the wall in the stairway to the bar area.  It's pornographic and sacrilegious, so don't study this image too closely if you don't want to be offended:

That's just how we roll these days, eh.  Penis jokes never get old, especially when they're blasphemous, right?

Creepy.

There's also a ram's skull on the wall of the barroom, which reminds me of this.


All of which leaves me ambivalent, in that while this town and hostel are once beautiful, they are also charged with a souspeçon of corruption.  I've been of paranoid mind these past few years.. I've been getting over it lately, throwing myself more fully back into an emphatic life of prayer where I'm trying to avoid analyzing things and becoming judgmental (ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.. that in my case by grace alone, because I'm too much the fool to manage it by my own) and thereby jacking up my inner life with the idea that I understand anything or anyone, or that I am actually in control of anything or anyone beyond my own mind and heart, and even that is touch and go, most the time...

Anyhow, as I came back to catch some sleep before diving tommorow, I noticed that the hostel is right next door to this:

eis qui sine peccado..

Which made me smile.  We're also right around the corner from another Paroquia de San Francisco here, as well.  I took a couple crummy shots of the church, it's a humble little colonial structure, I like it quite a lot.  I hope I can assist at mass there sometime before I leave here these next couple days..

He's always popping up, wherever I happen to go..

Tonight is the eve of our little brother's feast.  Saint Francis, pray for us.  I pray tonight especially for my little whores, may they come to no harm in the resurrection..

Oracion Simple

Senor, haz de mi un instremento de tu paz, 

Que alla donde hay odio, yo pongo el amor. 

Que alla donde hay ofensa, yo pongo el perdon.

Que alla donde hay discordia, yo pongo la union.

Que alla donde hay error, yo pongo la verdad.

Que alla donde hay duda, yo pongo la Fe.

Que alla donde hay desperacion, yo pongo la esperenza.

Que alla donde hay tiniebas,  yo pongo luz.

Que alla donde hay tristessa, yo pongo alegria.

Oh Senor, que yo no busque tanto
Ser consolado, cuanto consolar.

Ser comprendido, cuanto comprendar.

Ser amado, cuanto amar.

Porque es dandose, como se recibe. 
Es olvidanose de si mismo, como uno se encuentra a si mismo.

Es perdonando, como se es perdonado.

Es muriendo, como se resucita a la vida eterna.

Amen + 

I think that's all I got for you guys tonight.  Blessings on your heads.  Sleep tight.



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Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

Hiatus, Undone

So, after fulsome promises to blog with conviction once I left Guatemala, I have instead fallen into a severe rut in which I have not felt like blogging at all. And so, I haven't.

La Cieba, Honduras left me a moderate depressive (I'll probably get around to explaining why here, soon) so that I decided not to go out to the Bay Islands to dive like I'd planned. Instead, I came directly south to Tegucigalpa, then Managua, then San Jose, then Panama City. I spent several days in Costa Rica's national Marian shrine, in Cartago near San Jose, which I will blog these coming few days. I have good pictures, and the place was impressive. I'll gloss everything I've done, mostly by posting some of my backlog of photos. That's both easier, and I think more interesting than writing and reading a blow by blow of my travels.


In any case, last week I took a sailboat to Columbia. If you were not aware, there is no road from Panama to Columbia, the isthmus is blocked by a jungle called the Darien Gap that is home to FARC communist insurgents, drug smugglers, and other thuggish types best avoided. The passage took five days, and it was exceptional. I shall blog that, too..

See how glibly I promise. I'm not much in the mood to write, even now. But I ought to, just to feel virtuous.

Tonight however, I'll just tell you that I am in Santa Marta, Columbia. I was in the extremely beautiful colonial gem Cartegena for five days after debarking, and spent far too much - 45$ - Like a cheap American motel price, for a nice room in Getsemani, one of the historic parts of Cartegena, a room that in the States would cost probably at least three times what I paid. 45$ for a crappy motel stateside would have me feeling frugal and disciplined, but that price here made me feel bovine and used. This afternoon I hopped the bus here, where I suppose I'll go diving if feel so inspired tomorrow. If I don't, I'll just hop another bus to Maricaibo or Caracas. I figure I need go pay Hugo his respects, perhaps sooner than later.

Anyway, I got nickel and dimed stupidly by the cabby from the bus station to the hostel tonight. He asked for 10k pesos - about 5 bucks, again maybe half what I would have paid in the states for the 3km ride - when I asked at the hostel what the going rate is, they told me 5k. So I was left feeling absurdly gypped over 2.5$.. Until they quoted me 35$ for a single room here, putting that in perspective. I took it, because I am in no mood to sleep in the dorm, nor look for another hotel where I may not even get a better deal.

I'm kevetching about all this because until Panama I never paid more than 20$ a night down here. One of the great charms of traveling Latin America has been sleeping and eating well on less than 30$ a day, which is rather significantly less than it costs me merely to live in a damn apartment and eat groceries and all that back home.

Anyhow, I'm sitting at the bar at the hostel here, surrounded by people speaking English - lots of Australians mate d- and being ignored by the bar tender. Like what the crap. You know. What the crap. There's a horned bull skull on the wall opposite, creeping me out. There's absurd alternative music playing, damn kids these days think it's still 1988. Have REM sold out? I still don't care. Like whatevah.

I shouldn't be here.

From here on down, I am am avoiding these gringo infestations. Puede llamarme Carlitos del Barrio.

I'd post a picture, but I got nothin on the pad. Tomorrow. Maybe.

Well, gee, I'm cranky. Time to go to bed.

 

(autre chose: aujourd'hui c'est le fete de chere ste. therese. prie pour nous tous therese. I'm beginning a novena, tonight, time to get down, you know..)

 

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Location:14th Street,Santa Marta,Colombia

 

Posted with Blogsy

Into El Salvador

 

Today I finally did something I have been meaning to do all this week.  I took the minibus on the hour long 30Q roundtrip ride up to the Salvadoran border, and walked across for 15 minutes.  You know, just to say I've been there.  (That's one more country to my list Mr. Coady!)  Unfortunately, because of the CA4 customs agreement, I entered on my Guatemalan visa, and got no nifty Salvadoran stamp for my passport, even though I asked very nicely, por un recuerdo, you know?  But they are rigid bureaucrats there, and refused me.  But they stamped me out and back in on the Guatemalan side, which is almost as good..  

The minibus driver on the way back drove like a bat out o' hell, which drove me nuts - he'd take sharp corners going at least twice as fast as my old man nerves could handle.  It began to rain, and whenever he stopped to pick a new passenger up (they pick anyone who hails them down along the way up) he'd slam on the breaks unnecessarily stressing both his stupid van and my heart simultaneously.  I was sure one or both would give out before we got home here, in a blur of hydroplane wipeout ending with us careening violently into one of the many stream gorges by the way, but we somehow all survived. 

I'll just add that I am oddly wearing the same damn clothes in this image as I was in the last I posted of myself.  That's because I only have three sets of clothes in rotation here (well packed, or something thereabouts.. clotheswise, anyway) and I had my laundry done the other day..  Just thought I'd call unecessary attention to that fact.

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The Basilica of Esquipulas From the Roof of My Hotel

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Como Siempre, Me Porte Como Quien Soy..

Okay, aside from the fact that in my last post I claimed it was the feast of Saint Dominic, when in fact his feast is not August 4th, but this coming Wednesday, August 8th ..

(an error due to my not checking the calender and thinking that the 4th of the month is always the feast of a cool and somehow important saint to me personally - see how October 4th is St. Francis, November 4th is St. Charles Borremeo (my patron), December 4th is St. John Damascus, January 4th is St. Elizabeth Anne Seaton, and August 4th, is um.. yeah, St. John Vianney.  Not Dominic.. Uh.  That's what lack of due dilgence born of laziness gets you..  I ought take this opportunity and write up one of my many cuentas de los domini canes.. But I wouldn't want to fall prey to overweening blogger ambition or anything.. )

I have to say that while I have been busy with a dozen different things, in addition to my taking full advantage of the shrine here - I've been to confession, mass daily, and have spent a bit of time there praying - I have yet to really sit down and crank out the finished essays I have been gestating here.  One of the things I have been doing these past two days is organizing my computer and hard drives (3 of them, nearly a terrabite of data) so that I know where everything is, and everything is hopping and popping the way it ought to softwarewise..  Major aspect of this is my photo and video library, nearly a decade's worth of accumulated material scattered everywhere, with duplicates and multiple caches and libraries - a total nightmare.  I have excellent software to help me address all the various gnarly issues, but it still takes a while to run it all.   Over 300G of images takes a while to process, vet, rename and properly organize, see..

When I have finished, say sometime tomorrow,  I will have a mother load of material ready to deploy.  And I fully intend to lay it on you, my dear public.   Even if there are only a dozen of you out there that may care, I am committed.  I will not disappoint.  

At the moment however, my main library is being sorted for duplicates, and I cannot touch it.  So the grand illustrated meditation on my sojourn in Guatemala that I am preparing will have to wait until tomorrow evening. 

As a sop for your ravening curiosity though, I give you this wee appetizer.  The most interesting of all possible subjects, a picture of myself before the basilica here in Esquipulas.  As I say, more coming right soon.  Enjoy:

Soy asi, me porte como quien soy.

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Cuentas de los Perros del Señor.. Que Viene Muy Pronto..

Today is the Feast of Dominic de Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers.  And thus it is one of my feasts, as I am by my association with Providence College a friend and disciple of the Fathers. 

I have a few stories to tell of that relationship, one of them of the afternoon I spent at the House of Studies in DC on this very day several years back.. But not tonight.  For while I am no longer in Antigua, I am still in Guatemala.  I have resolved to begin writing in earnest when I am finally free of this amazing country and her people, whom have given me occasion for a deep retreat these last few months.  The retreat comes to its end this week, and now I shall be bent on adventure, exploits and great feats.. of blogging, at the very least.

So, I've come to the national shrine here at Esquipulas for one last long weekend before crossing south into Honduras, Tuesday.  I will post a few final thoughts on Guate before then.  When I am in Honduras, I intend to write much more, and about many multifarious things..

Tonight, though, I am tired and have only in me to beg Saint Dominic's intercession, and bid you all dulces sueños, que sueñes con los santos ..




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Two Gratuitous Morning Views of the Great Volcan de Agua from la Ventana de Mi Habitacion..

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

La Virgencita Guatemalteca

 

"¿Quién es ésta que se asoma como el alba, hermosa como la luna llena, refulgente como el sol, imponente como escuadrones abanderados?"

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Upon the Votive by Our Door

I have yet to describe or comment much upon the habits and customs of our house here, owing defense due the privacy of my own.  Tonight I invade this near silence sharing this lone image, of the shrine near our front door.

After dinner (circa 8 o'clock) the lights in the common areas go off.  There is little spare income for electricity here, you see.  

The lone light you see when you come through our front entrance after dinner is a votive candle illuminating two icons, those of Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima:

Stuck in the corner, almost out of sight, but with flowers before them.  

I, of course, like and approve this custom very much.   It is yet one more of many things that makes me feel well and at home here.  

Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima pray for us, and bless our homes.  Ruega por nosotros Virgencita. 


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Location: 8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Sublime yet Trite view of Antigua, from Cerro de la Cruz

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Personal Note, July 17th 2012

Today, while I was walking home from the Bodegona, I noticed that I was smelling things very subtly.

Or, rather, much more subtly than I have for years.

I quit smoking almost three years ago in Medjugorje. The first week of September, 2009.

People can say what they want about the apparitions there. I know a lot of people have judged them to be false. Maybe so. All I can say is that of all the major Marian shrines I have made pilgrimage to (including Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe) Medjugorge is my favorite. It is beautiful there, a little village with a humble church nestled between two Bosnian hills... The place, like all great shrines, is overrun with pilgrims, and the lines for confession there are the longest I have ever seen. Dozens of priests in dozens of languages, lines of hundreds of penitents at every hour of the day.

If the apparitions are false, then that is odd fruit.

I know nothing about the apparitions or the seers. I can only say Medjugorje is amazing, a powerful place. One that I had a strong sense of forboding at, a sense of premonition like I have only felt a few times before. A sense that has always been followed by some consumation. I was very impressed, and was changed somehow.

I smoked my last cigarette there, the morning I hailed a cab away to Dubrovnik. I have not smoked since.

It's funny how I used to love to smoke - I never was a regular smoker, often going weeks without smoking at all. I never felt it as an addiction. I did it with friends, and almost always with good tobacco. As a social act, smoking is sublime. Drinks and a couple bowls in the pipe.. When it is a deliberate, conscious act, and you are paying attention, smoking can be one of the finest pleasures on earth. I often felt the hobbit, you see. It was good..

But not good enough.

The problem is that we all too often do it - like we too often live, eat and work - mindlessly, mechanically. So when I began to start to smoke more often, sometimes a half pack a day for strings of days - and when I began to roll cigarettes with the Frenchmen in Bourguillon, and began to become a full blown smoker, well..

I knew I had to stop, for good.

For while one in ten smokes is sublime, the negative consequences to the body are vast. One of the worst is that you lose most of your sense of smell. And when you quit, it doesn't immediately return. Your body takes years to recover from the abuse..

Years. As I say, it's been almost three now. This past year ambient tobacco smoke has begun to really annoy me. I am thankfully now a re-confirmed as a non-smoker. And now abruptly, just today, I seem to have suddenly recouped some of my long lost sensitivity. Maybe not all what once had as a child, but a stiff modicum of it. I suddenly noticed I was smelling things like I haven't in years.

It was mildly religious, in that I became plutot vif, quickened, slightly ecstatic. The world again leapt with forgotten vibrancy and texture.

Every thing vibrates with sense and poignancy. We are as open nerves receiving the vibration of creation's song; the light, the sound, the scent, the taste..

Taste and see..

How things are good: Gratias Tibi Beata Mater Maria,Virgo et Regina.

Anyhow, I have been in a mild funk these past two weeks, and have left this here blog aside. This week is my last in Guate. A frame shift is coming, and as it happens I think the blog here shall become rather more fecund. I think that I've shed the extraneous attention that I once may have had, and that anyone still following this has merited the grace of my pearls.. Such as they may be..

So they shall be strewn for your collective delectation, my dear public. I begin to write.

Tonight I write merely to tell you that I can smell. Deo gratias. Ay, Just thought you'd like to know.

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Location: :8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

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The Boatman of Atitlan, July 1st 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala


 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Diva Girl, Maximon's House, Panajachel Guatemala, July 1st 2012

 

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

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View from My Window, Antigua Guatemala: June 25th, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Another Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: June 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Upon A Magic Tuk-Tuk Ride: May 30th, 2012

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: May, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala




 

Church of San Francisco, Antigua Guatemala: May - June 2012

I've been scandalously derelict posting here. Not from lack of available material, but rather from being preoccupied with other things. As these coming two weeks are very likely the end of my time here, I am heretofore resolved to post daily, both material from Antigua and a few essays that I have had gestating for a while.

My current 90 day visa runs out on July 4th, which while I am going to get an extension, that date also is the day my parents plan on flying down to visit and join me upon a grand tour of the rest of the country. That will be the coda to my beautiful time in Guatemala, a interlude twixt this idle and my coming push south.

In any case, tonight I post some images I've taken the past two months of the wonderful church - el Templo de San Francisco - that is just across the street from my house here. It's a Franciscan mission that was established in the 16th century, and the building - though ruined repeatedly by earthquakes, and rebuilt many times over - is one of the oldest European structures in the Americas. The current facade dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, and is quite beautiful in a colonial baroque manner..

The tomb of the local saint, San Hermano Pedro, is off the front of the nave. The pilgrims flock here. There are many daily masses, all well assisted, and daily confessions heard for several hours every afternoon. There are fiestas with bands and hoardes of people every significant feast day (meaning several times a week) and the courtyard has some of the best cheap eats vendors in Antigua. There are about a dozen Franciscan priests and brothers here, and many other religious from various orders (the Missionaries of Charity I spotted were visting here, and there are currently three brothers from Fr. Groeschel's Friars of the Renewal from the Bronx hanging out here, too..) that frequent the place.

I needn't tell you that the grace of this church being found upon my doorstep (something that I had not planned, but like Antigua in every other sense just sort of happened to me) is one of the main reasons I have been here this long..

Because it, and the people who attend it, are beautiful. Look, see:

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I'll post some images of the interior (which cameras are putatively banned from, but I'll sneak a few of on the sly this coming week, anyhow) soon.

SS Francis, Hermano Pedro, and Our Lady of Poverty, pray for us.

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Posted with Blogsy

U.S. Men's National Team Ties Guatemala 1-1 in World Cup Qualifier

I'd bet practically no one up there in Gringoland knows that. But believe me, tonight more or less everyone in Guatemala does.

(Side note, I'm confused as to how come Blogsy's insisting on highlight "tonight" and "esta noche" as if hyperlinked - I've tried to fix this, but can't figure it out..)

Anyhow, I probably should have gone into Guatemala City, less than an hour away, to give our boys some support tonight. My other American housemates did. The boys, they need it. This is a point too few gringo jingoes appreciate, but our men's national team playing anyone anywhere is almost always a big deal to the locals in that country. Especially in the Muslim or third world, and most especially in Latin America. It's often a type of low grade warfare, that I've never heard reported on in our press.

Here's a clip showing how they have to deploy riot police to protect the U.S. team while entering the stadium, along with some fan shenanigans:



The upshot is that to get any good reporting on our team, it seems you pretty much have to go to the British press for it.

Here's the Guardian on what it's often like for our boys when playing on foreign soil:

Tough Crowd:

Well, as with any time the USA travel for a Central American fixture, it's one of those games that on paper they're expected to win, but which in practice is the sort of game people have in mind when they talk about the "grind" of qualifying.

That "grind" tends to start the minute the team get off the plane. Central American trips by the USMNT tend to be fraught affairs. Previous trips to the region have resulted in a Honduran newspaper printing the floor plan of the US team hotel for the benefit of "fans", a band assembling in the lobby of another hotel, and a previous trip to Guatemala City itself was marked by a local radio station hosting a "promotion", complete with loudspeakers, outside yet another hotel window. These trips have also presumably resulted in around 22 terrible Yelp reviews attached to the hotels in question, shortly thereafter.

And when the US reaches the pitch it's not likely to get much friendlier. The last time these two sides played here in a World Cup Qualifier, in 2008, there were two red cards, seven yellows, and an array of airborne objects that ranged from US players to batteries being thrown at them. The consensus is that the US are likely to be goaded tonight and while Jamaica may be the tougher footballing side they face in this phase of qualifying, this tie may be the sternest test of character.

Klinsmann is fairly phlegmatic at the prospect of what awaits: "It's hostile in Tehran in front of 110,000, it's hostile in Istanbul with 60,000 -- actually you can't even see the field before the game for 10 minutes for all the smoke. It's normal; this is what soccer brings to the table. I think it's just awesome. We are here because we want three points, and we have to take it seriously."


This report, along with a live blogging of the game (which was only available outside of Guatemala on $30 pay per view) can be found here.

The USMNT blog also has some good dirt on the game and historic rivalry.

This match was the second qualifier. The first the USMNT beat Antigua and Barbuda (as in the Caribbean islands, not this my here Guatemalan home, Antigua Guatemala) a sloppy 3-1. The USMNT began playing Guatemala in 1977. "Los Chapines" as they are affectionately called here, won the first four matches ever played, but have never again won since 1988, ever since US Soccer began to be taken more seriously at home. The upshot is that after the game tonight the U.S. is 12-4-6 all time against Guatemala, and 12-0-6 since 1988.

Compare this to Mexico, which leads the U.S. 30-15-12, and has never lost against the USMNT at home, as in not ever.

I decided not to go into the city, and also skipped going to the bar down the street that was showing the game. Probably should have, since I had a tallboy of beer wagered on our guys with Rafael my Guatemalan housefather here. Since it was a tie, the bet is null. I have a long history of betting on the U.S. Men's Team, dating back to a bottle of raki I won on our guys when they played the Turks in Izmir that year, because it's too much fun not to get into it with people when I'm abroad. They could care less about our U.S. sports obsessions, and know nothing about the NBA, NFL or MLB, but soccer gets people excited everywhere..

Excepting at home, of course. Naval gazing ethnocentric self obsession at it's most disappointing, really. If we're going to get all obsessed about grown men playing with balls like schoolchildren, we might as well do it with everyone else, you know? The fact that we have the gall to call our baseball championship the world series when we only invite one foreign team to compete (Toronto) is just pathetic. Why not invite the Japanese, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans to field their own teams? Because Boston and New York might lose to the Dominican Republic or Tokyo is how come.

So anyway, while I sat the game out here tonight in my room, I can still report that I could hear at least three televisions carrying the game from within say 100' of my window.

And that when Guatemala scored their goal in the second half, the town erupted in faint distant cheers, and probably a half dozen different sets of fireworks went off in the distance. I'm not kidding. It was awesome, really. I had to laugh.


For while I'm glad the U.S. team didn't lose (I have just enough national pride left in me to mildly care) I'm also somehow pleased that Guatemala didn't lose. I've grown especially fond, and so a bit protective of my dear little Guatemaltecos, you see.. I'm rooting deeply for them. Because while probably less than 1 in a 100 of Americans will even be aware of the game tomorrow, 99 in 100 Guatemalans will be. The fact that they at least did not lose to the great gringo satan is tonight salve for many a Guatemalan soul.. And for that I'm very glad.

Signing off,

Oye todos mis compadres, por esta noche se puede llamarme,

- Carlos Bocanegra Cortes




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Musings On Debt & Money: Some Few Slight Inconsequent Thoughts On Economics, Hereby Proffered Humbly for Your Delectation & Critique [spellchecked]

I've been thinking about the video I posted last. I decided that for my own sake I needed to type out what I think is happening in the world economy, so as to organize my own mind a bit.

I post it here hoping for your criticism and thoughts, my public. Any constructive feedback will be gratefully received.

This is the product of only a couple hours thought. It meanders and rambles and is anything but authoritative. Take it as merely the half baked thought of an ill educated layman, no more..

Ici-bas, mes pauvres pensées:

 

First truism: government debt is a necessary shelter for major capital. The debt exists solely for the purpose of sheltering massive (and usually essentially fraudulent, in that profits are nearly always privatized and losses socialized) investment returns with a guaranteed continuing return from the taxpayer.

The public debt is therefore the creature of capital.

Government investment in infrastructure (which includes investment in human infrastructure by way of things like education and health care) and subsidies of private business that is not financed directly by taxation must be financed by the creation of privately held debt.

We can either make rich people pay for the public expenditure directly by way of taxation, or else borrow the money from them.

The rich of course much prefer the second option, since the creation of public debt becomes a cash stream allowing them ever greater - by the mystical power of compound interest - control over the economy.

For capital is not "normal money." It cannot just sit there as cash on the counter. This is the first meta principle that "normal people" who think of their money as paper that they can carry around in their pocket must realize:

Money is not *real*. It is not even symbolic, not even a platonic actuality, not even meaningful in the sense that words are significantly real. Money is rather merely a number, an utterly arbitrary unit of measurement that we assign to wealth. When we say that Carlos Slim or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg has 63 (or whathaveyou) billion dollars, we mean that that person has **contractual control** over certain aspects of our economy that we "value" at that amount.

It is interesting that the very most essential things in our economy often cannot be so easily controlled, and hence "valued" by monetary contracts. Sunlight, the air we breathe, our thoughts and feelings, the energy and blood coursing our synapses and sinews; very often the water (rainfall) we drink, our "casual" and familial (which is to say the most essential aspects of our) social interaction, our leisure time when we refuse to sell it; all of these things are generally free from contract.

Ownership is the most atavistic of contracts. It is a social construct, a metaphysical system, by which things (largely the fruit of other people's labor) are associated with a person. Money is thus a type of implicit non-specific contract. When we exchange our time, effort and expertise for money we are accepting the reality of that money as a contract.

When Facebook is said to be worth a trillion dollars, we mean that the information and participation of people in that system is held by advertisers and people who value access to that information and such influence upon people that Facebook has, to be worth that much. Facebook is in investment terms merely a metaphysical construct, a contractual system. A source of information and influence over people.

Money is an utter abstraction, in other words. Apart from its very real blunt contractual power, it is unreal and so substantially meaningless. As a unit of measurement it is insubstantial, unlike most units of measure in that it is utterly arbitrary. This is especially true on the level of capital, where the contract has been substantially abstracted from the physical and human reality that the number represents.

This is even more true of contemporary speculators, who trade on stock, insurance and futures markets in an utterly abstract manner. There is no sense of proprietorship in a modern hedge fund.

So, in order to have money in the sense that a capitalist has money (which is as different from the way "normal people" have money as prosaic Newtonian physics is from Einstein's quantum physics) you **must be investing it** .. Because that money represents contractual power over men and property, and nothing else. It cannot be completely abstracted and unused. It must be somehow allocated, its power exercised.

Investment is merely the substantially abstract allocation of wealth and property, then.

And again, you can see how the public debt insulates the major capitalist from risk. The debt is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the U.S. taxpayer, which means that any economic activity financed by way of that debt is insulated from utter failure by the taxpayer. Barring the collapse of the government, the bond holder will get his return. The public exchequer is also simultaneously the perfect customer: it always pays its debts, and is a perpetual source of new business.

 

Second truism: the recent housing bubble and resulting banking crisis were (on the highest levels of banking and government) deliberately created.

Fraudulent profits created during the bubble have been guaranteed by the taxpayer.

TARP therefore essentially represents a massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayer to the banking sector.

Moral hazard has been substantially removed from the system for the major capitalist insider. Institutions may be destroyed, and minor investors and pension systems ruined, while the individuals responsible for these disasters are richly rewarded.

Legal consequence, risk exposure - moral hazard - exists in the middle and the bottom, but not the very top.

This radical imbalance exists, in that the laws criminalizing such behavior (eg, Glass Steagall) and separating prosaic banking from risky investment were overturned under Clinton, allowing the banker bastards to speculate with mortgage income (the money you pay every month for the privilege of occupying your home) - which income is the backbone of the banking system, accounting for most of the money in it - allowing them to use this money (which use was strictly regulated in the past, after the last crash that caused the Great Depression) in further very risky speculative loans to people very likely unable to repay, rather than merely as a source for further securitized mortgages.

People with poor credit histories were allowed to borrow without the 20% down payments historically required under Glass Steagall. People with no collateral, and insufficient income to repay loans, were nevertheless given mortgages. Usually under usurious variable rate mortgages that had seductively low initial rates, but then inevitably increasingly higher interest rates over time, guaranteeing quickly increasing profits until the inevitable moment they failed to repay. These loans were deliberately designed to fail. The bankers providing them knew the people receiving them would eventually be unable to repay, and deliberately issued mortgages that would concurrently fail sooner than later. The bubble was meant to blow up quickly and catastrophically, causing a "shock and awe" crisis where the "fire just simply had to be put out" or else the entire economy would go off the rails, causing another Great Depression.

The American taxpayer is left holding the flaming turd filled bag, guaranteeing the profits "earned" in the bubble, not on the level of the homeowner (or, more accurately, the dumb chump paying and so owned by his mortgage), and not even usually on the level of the mortgage seller (the bank receiving the interest), but on the level of the mortgage insurer. The major insurer in this past crisis, which is to say the primary tool used by major capital to defraud the taxpayer, was AIG.

This innovation, of insuring risky mortgage loans in large groups called "tranches," was again an "accidental" "innovation" made in the 90's at the time they overturned the banking laws protecting the public. Major insurance companies were allowed to guarantee very risky mortgage debt, allowing banks buying insurance for that debt to free up more capital under the banking laws that remained. Usually banks are made to hold ten percent of their capital in reserve (read low interest but very secure government securities and such) as a sort of anchor against a massive failure of mortgage buyers to repay their debts. In such an instance, the bank needs this secure reserve to garantee it's ability to continue loaning money, and hence the integrity of the banking process, and preventing a "run on the bank" (where investors and account holders pull their funds out of the bank simultaneously at the moment of crisis) and the resulting collapse of the lending process.

Banks were allowed both to make more risky loans without backing collateral, while simultaneously being allowed to reduce their reserve capital requirements. In lieu of significant low interest reserves, they were allowed to instead insure their high risk mortgage lending, and then release the money that would otherwise have been held in secure investments to use in further high risk (and very lucrative on the sort term) lending that was feeding the housing boom.

The insurers, most infamously AIG, were not then required to have the sorts of very conservative reserves on hand to guarantee the policies they were writing. Traditional insurers of property are bound by strict laws requiring they keep sufficient conservatively invested reserves on hand to guarantee their policies in the event of a massive disaster. These common sense requirements were not made of this new market. These insurers were allowed to guarantee massive speculation without being required to hold any reserves to back their massive exposure to risk. Again, this was deliberate on the part of the architects of the new system.

So, when the fraudulent loans (made without collateral, given to people who the bankers knew were very poor risks, to people who could and would simply walk away from the loans when they could not pay them, and who would suffer relatively minor consequence of bankruptcy) went bad on a massive scale, the banks turned to AIG to pay the policies. AIG had nowhere near the capital necessary to back its exposure, and so immediately failed. As did Bear Sterns and Lehman.

The federal government was then mugged to back the bad insurance policies, thereby saving the remaining banks' bacon. AIG is now currently more or less owned (via "bankster socialism") by the Federal Reserve (which is a consortium or cabal of private banking interests allowed to print - create - and then loan money for their own profit, emphatically not a governmental agency acting in the public good) and so now simply a tool used to dispense public monies to the banksters.

The pattern is the same as that of the collapse of the tech bubble in 2001 that claimed WorldCom, Tyco and Enron. The watchdogs were again bought out by their masters: accounting firms and ratings agencies cooked the books and gave their approval (AAA ratings to bad investments, etc.), thereby participating directly in the massive fraud being committed. Then, in the aftermath, the regulators - the SEC and Justice Department and state prosecutors - did nearly nothing, when even under the existing gutted regulatory law they could have brought thousands of Wall Street cretins to prosecution.

The public is thus left paying for the bubble. Not by guaranteeing that normal people seduced into buying homes at absurd prices can keep the houses they were seduced into "buying" at hugely inflated prices, but by guaranteeing the insurance policies written on failed loans. The intact banks keep the title on the property (causing stagnation and massive destruction in many communities) and their speculative profits, too.

Normal people (non-capitalists, those subsisting on exchange of their own labor, 99% of the US populace) can rarely afford to actually buy homes - most Americans buy mortgages, which is to say the right to pay interest to a bank for thirty years, for the privilege of living in a house whose title is held by a bank- our new lords material are bankers.

Nota Bene: while certain institutions (AIG, Lehman, Sterns: that is to say the immediate competition of Goldman Sachs, whose alumni control the Fed and so Washington) were allowed to fail, the individuals running them were made rich. Or, rather, vastly richer. They destroyed their institutions, but kept their millions in bonuses.

They failed us deliberately. They cheated us massively. And they have been greatly awarded for their fraud and thievery.

The rich own the major media. This is why this story is suppressed. The American people should be able to figure this out anyway, and react; but we are far too selfish, stupid and bovine. It is in our self interest to accept the soporific line that the bankers are rich because they deserve to be rich. We gladly believe it because we know that we in relative (global) terms are also rich, and in the very same fashion.

Which is to say that wer are rich by way of massive violence, fraud and deception. Through exploitation by way of contract. The lawyer's and banker's game is our game. We are merely their house servants, their praetorians. A privileged subordinate caste of workers and soldiers.

 

Third truism: The Iraq and Afghan wars are in the tradition of the "Great Game" played between the European powers, especially Great Britain and Russia, for control of Asia and her resources. Now the stakes (rapidly declining irreplaceable essential oil wealth in Asia and the Middle East) are higher, and the players more numerous (add a previously dormant but now very serious China and India to the calculus, as well as major wild cards like Iran and Pakistan that can at any moment throw the entire game into deadly nuclear armed chaos) than before. We are being fed a propaganda line about terrorism, WMD and self defense that is essentially false. We are there for oil and other essential mineral resources, period, point final. Without them we would be a third world economy. With them, we are a continuing super power.

There are millions of Chinese, Indonesians and Latin Americans (etc.) working for us for a dollar or less an hour. We benefit from this exploitation just as the bankers do, if on a reduced scale. The irreplaceable fossil fuels and cheap human labor we consume every time we go to Walmart or order something online makes us complicit, too.

We tell ourselves that we deserve wealth because we are a great and virtuous country, blah blah blah. But that is simply bullshit.

 

This here is the bottom line: we can either stand for justice, which is to say for the rights of workers to be properly paid and treated, and for **moral hazard**, which is to say **enforced responsibility and consequences for the powerful**, or we will deserve to fail as a society and civilization.

 

Final (I pray provocative) truism: American culture, our capitalist economy, has given us every crude carnal pleasure to live for, yet nothing transcendent to die for. We now have nothing beyond radical sustenance of utilitarian desire; the spurious, libertarian "freedom" to sate our every whim.

This is anti-christ.

 

So I say. What then say you? Any and all comments are hereby gratefully solicited. Any and all critique is welcome.

 


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