tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73775812024-03-13T12:59:48.807-07:00IMPROBABLYThe Life and Rambling Times of a Lifetime RamblerEl Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.comBlogger233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-78343147708481590982016-10-20T20:11:00.002-07:002017-08-27T05:48:48.379-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>I Fell in Love.</i><br />
My friends are all amused and even delighted that this old bitter, selfish cynic could find love at the end of a mostly pointless existence. I am the most surprised of all; I had assumed that this was the way it ended; that I just become more and more asexual/single/masturbatory until one day a tube/valve/transistor in my brain ruptures and shows me the picture above, which is certainly how my 'tunnel of light' will look like if I have any say in the matter.<br />
What I find most amusing is all the curious inquiries about the particulars of the matter: how old, where from, what does she look like, what does she do, etc, etc. These ceaseless questions do not make me tired, but merely reflective. None of these things matter to me, nor that she is already in a relationship in a home to which she will return soon. What matters to me is that she is my Goddess and that I have rediscovered religion. What matters is that she is here/now and forcing me to be here/now which is the only true religion, that she has opened doors for me that I could never have imagined exist, that she effortlessly lifted boulders that I couldn't see had me pinned down by the wings, and that yes, I have wings!<br />
So she will go away, and come back or not. She will either become Us, or not, I am not pinning all my hopes and salvation on particulars, of course in the real world there are a million objections to the practical side of things. And of course revolution is always followed by a difficult and imperfect period of government, like relationships must follow falling in love. But I think part of our mistake is in putting too much emphasis on falling in love as a means to an end instead of the end itself. Neither she nor I would waste too much energy on a relationship that was not fruitful and parallel to our own spiritual development, and I think that is what she has awakened most in me; not just that there exists another person like me , who makes me feel un special in a special way (accepts my eccentricities as if they are necessary preconditions), but that the world is full of wonder and beauty waiting to be appreciated.<br />
So this is the first chapter, and there does not need to be any further writing in this book, as far as I am concerned. Winter and its hardships will come, I will survive (or not), but no longer will I be a wayfarer by accident, without eyes in a field of flowers.<br />
Post Script: I have since fallen in love with another....artist. Life goes on!El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-75501923099198769972015-06-26T16:21:00.002-07:002015-06-26T16:21:30.320-07:00At the end of the road, looking for the new road. <h2 style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
At the end of the road, looking for the new road. </h2>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pscZAh3Xo1k/VY3TtZoNCrI/AAAAAAAAWLM/T9uU4txIdV8/s1600/20150626_164851%255B1%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pscZAh3Xo1k/VY3TtZoNCrI/AAAAAAAAWLM/T9uU4txIdV8/s320/20150626_164851%255B1%255D.jpg" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">beauty in chaos with regularity</td></tr>
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In a lot of buddhism, the number 10,000 is special (perhaps because this was a special unit in Sanskrit, with its own word, like 'one hundred, one thousand', etc. At any rate, allegedly, if one does 10,000 Grand Prostrations, apparently one is entitled to instant enlightenment, which I just see as another version of the Christian 'salvation'. Alternatively, the number 108 is also magical in eastern religions, more a side effect of using the numbers 12 and 9, it seems to be used either for things which must be completed quickly (a chant, for example, or things which might take a lifetime , or even be unattainable (108 circumambulations of Mount Kailash, for example).</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P7YMtnEoLhg/VY3UZ1g8HAI/AAAAAAAAWLg/qzcNuDjbhpY/s1600/20150626_155720.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P7YMtnEoLhg/VY3UZ1g8HAI/AAAAAAAAWLg/qzcNuDjbhpY/s320/20150626_155720.jpg" width="320" /></a> Coming to Busan by trike, though it was my second time by Human Powered Vehicle, was a lot like doing 10,000 leg presses in a nine day period, since the setup of the gears and leg positions is a lot like that gym machine, especially where the flat is more like 30 kilo weights, and the steep hills are more like 150 kilo weights, and the whole machine is straining and groaning under your effort.</div>
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After nine days, certain critical parts like the knees need rest, and throb under the covers of the cozy guesthouse you're booked into as a reward to yourself. The next morning all muscles are taut and screaming out into the universe, spitting in the face of entropy, the life force within you is pure and unobstructed. City life has yet to take its toll on you, to make your pulse dull and irregular, to turn your eyes leaden, to dizzify you with 10,000 distractions.<br />
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El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-79347222742749177322015-03-28T19:48:00.002-07:002015-03-28T19:50:39.809-07:00Birds but not Birds (continued)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HjBeu8NSGVs/VRdbN7ujcuI/AAAAAAAASzw/cfFBeXw16_4/s1600/glue-sniffers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HjBeu8NSGVs/VRdbN7ujcuI/AAAAAAAASzw/cfFBeXw16_4/s1600/glue-sniffers.jpg" height="236" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><b>Huele Pega</b></i>, or glue sniffers, who are often street urchins.</td></tr>
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Behind the story of the Birds but not Birds story below, is one of the saddest chapters of the Human Experience that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter.<br />
If Heroin is the dead end of artists and poets and others who wander down that alley, then Glue is the death of youth, of potential , of lives completely thrown away and wasted. Glue is the slow, lingering death, the numb blackness of the void out of which we all came; it is the stupidity of senseless life-taking industrial accidents and the driverless car smashing into societies' picket-fenced garden.<br />
I'm not sure that the Drug Addiction label applies exactly to this substance, which can be bought in a million shops worldwide, often for pennies. I think of it as more of a fruit of poverty and abandonment. Its use is most popular among the homeless street children of Latin America- perhaps it is an enabler for them, to endure their horrific situation, which means that they must sleep where they can, steal to eat, and endure countless other horrors at the hands of society and each other.<br />
I had put this story away into a deep, dark place in my consciousness, the details of which are fairly gruesome. At the time I was living and experiencing this reality, it was perhaps the darkest visible aspect of poverty in large urban places I had briefly been in contact with (until Colombia, I had lived mostly in small towns in the mountains or beaches). In fact, in going over my memories, I remembered that there was a rumor about one of the other boarders at a cheap hotel I had stayed at once, though I have no idea of the veracity, but others had said that one of our neighbors would purchase this glue, and would invite a young boy into his room, and there use the glue to abuse him. This is the kind of thing that I <b><i>still </i></b>don't even want to allow into the realm of my imagination, and I apologize for breaking the peace of your mind as well, but this gives you an idea of the level of evil of this stuff.<br />
Of course, I didn't always see the urchins as merely victims. They were more commonly viewed by the local people as adversaries. <i><b>Huele pega</b></i>, or glue sniffers, are mostly homeless children who band into gangs of two or three, or sometimes ragamuffin armies of ten to twenty, as I witnessed in the previous Birds but not Birds, and most likely sleep in abandoned properties or other places where they are out of sight. One sees them sometimes in the daytime, shoeless, with clothes grunge stained from their sleeping place, hair often unwashed, it is the most pitiful sight you can imagine. <br />
However, this empathy is often tempered with fear, because if you see a huele pega, it is most likely because they have seen you, and are now closing in for the kill. Foreign white tourists are pretty obvious targets, and even with a different skin color, their clothes and expensive accessories would give them away. I think personally, as one of the whitest looking people I know, I have avoided a lot of suffering by never having any sort of jewelry or accessories when I travel, not so much as a watch, and my phone I often have safely stowed away with passport next to my skin.<br />
There are many threats of pickpockets, scammers and other street robbers in Latin America; the prevalence of razor-wielding bag slashers was so acute, that some travelers a few years back were tramping about with their enormous 70 liter backpacks entirely enmeshed in steel webs, essentially a chain link fence around their belongings. Personally, I just opted for camoflauge: from a farmer's supply store, I purchased a plastic 'burlap' grain bag, the kind of 50 pound sack that serves as a ubiquitous parcel on all the public buses in Latin America. Often I would just toss my bag inside of this, so though it clearly was connected to me, once it was stowed on the rack above my head, it rarely attracted more than a moments glance by professional thieves, who would often conclude I was on a day trip or had stowed the bag on the roof instead.<br />
From the same farmers-type hardware store, I had also purchased a fine, 26 inch long machete. I wasn't really clear on my reasons for buying it at the time. I knew I was unlikely to put it to its most likely use, cutting sugar cane- I just knew I had always wanted to own one of these, and since almost everyone in Central America had one, I felt left out of the fun. I was even allowed to walk across land borders carrying this modern sword, and no guards even looked twice at it! That's how universal and widespread these 'agricultural tools' were then. The blades come without an edge on them, usually you'd just pay a few cents more to have them sharpen it for you on a rotating stone at the back of the store, or sometimes an indy sharpener guy would be stationed out in front of the store on the sidewalk. <br />
Whatever the case was, I made a conscious decision to leave it without an edge. I really did not want to hack someone's arm off at the shoulder, the mere idea of which was repugnant, but which often occupied the back page column of the local news after a particularly rowdy night at the <i>pulque </i>or <i>aguardiente </i>bars. Yes, machete attacks were a regular occurrence here, and I never wanted to be part of one. I decided that this machete was going to be a deterrent and a psychological tool- what's more, if I actually had to draw it, then I could lay about someone without actually drawing blood- they might piss their pants from the fear of losing an arm or something, but would come away with nothing but a bruise at worst. If I were challenged to a fight with another machete wielder, gods forbid, I planned to throw it down at the guys feet and point out that it had no edge and rely on future public opinion of him as a coward to save my arm from being hacked off.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pJWRjgQfIWw/VRdoOhV4VYI/AAAAAAAAS0A/ZL_iQ3bPY_4/s1600/machete.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pJWRjgQfIWw/VRdoOhV4VYI/AAAAAAAAS0A/ZL_iQ3bPY_4/s1600/machete.jpg" height="299" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This deadly weapon is mostly viewed as just another tool like<br /> a rake, and only costs about 6 dollars in a local hardware store.</td></tr>
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So it was, that about that time, I was also making myself a custom backpack. I had found some amazing bags that were woven of <i>agave</i>, one of the strongest of natural fibers, in beautiful colored patterns, that would form the bottom of the bag (since the bottom seems to be what rips out first from the effects of gravity.) The top would be made of ordinary canvas, with a big zipper access. As for the backbone, because this would be an internal frame, I would use the long machete, and have it bolted in so that its rigidity gave the bag the ability to stand up instead of mushrooming out like a bean bag. While I was not carrying about this immense behemoth (overall, I think it was almost 100 liters in capacity, and often weighed 35 kilos or more), I would take out the machete and stick it in my day bag, where the handle popped helpfully out of the top, and if I needed it, I just needed to reach over my shoulder and grab it. I needed no sheath because of the lack of an edge I mentioned above.<br />
So about three months after the first time I had witnessed the horrifying speed and fury of a mob of <i>huelepegas </i>stealing from someone, the multitude of hands whirling in and out of pockets, I began to form the idea that the machete would be central to my escape plan, if I were set upon by a similar mob. One must immediately get into a small enclosure if the storm of small hands overtakes you, and then hopefully you can deal with a smaller number of hands stealing from your pockets; obviously it would be wise to have only one pocket well protected in this case, however impractical that is. My thinking was that I could use this machete and some good acting, to clear the way enough for me to achieve the safety of a smaller enclosure.<br />
So about three months later, I was on a date with another traveller I had met, a lovely girl from Canada, and we had just come out of a movie theater in downtown Lima. It was around 9 PM, hardly a witching hour, but late enough that there were no longer crowds of people about. I remember that we walked arm in arm in the chilly night, in that pleasant slow manner that they call <i>andando </i>in Spanish. The first sign of trouble was when an urchin appeared on the outside of my lady friend, a small dirty faced urchin was attempting to wrest her purse out of her hands. Of course she was no fool, grabbed it with both hands and firmly grabbed it out of his hands, shouting at the same time. No more than a microsecond after this, I felt another hand feeling into my front pocket, and nearly simultaneously, another in my back pocket. Hands appeared to be groping my bag, and swiveling my head, I soon realized we were surrounded by what seemed to be about one or two dozen of these little guys.<br />
Completely by blind instinct, without any conscious thoughts beforehand, I reached back for the handle, whipped out the machete, and to my own surprise as well, began screaming and shouting complete gibberish, almost like speaking in tongues. I must have seemed like a crazy man run amok, and even my date was suddenly cowed and afraid, as the machete caught the light of the streetlamps and went shining around the square. Like a Warner Bros. cartoon, the imps vanished in all directions, almost leaving little cloud trails behind them. Our problem was over even faster than it had begun, and we went home, discussed it a few times and went to sleep. Later I was much troubled by the inevitable questions: what if I had had to use it? What if there were men with machetes instead? and many other things which I had no answers for.El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-87667547234846480242015-03-16T07:07:00.001-07:002016-10-20T20:15:19.442-07:00Birds but not birds. (Part one) By the time I reached Ecuador, I had matured and ripened as a traveler and as a person. The year in Guatemala had given me time to be introspective; to do nothing all day but gather fruits, explore markets, study Mayan hieroglyphs, and generally have the ease of a dilettante who needn't worry about sustenance, since dollar hotels and fifty cent meals abounded in the hills of the Highland Maya.<br />
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In the Caribbean coast of Honduras, I had been given a taste of Island and Marine life, and had learned that the clear blue waters of the <i>Caribe </i>were good for healing any psychic misadventure one could possibly have suffered from. In El Salvador, during the height of their Civil War, I had learned that life is most precious when it is not guaranteed (eat, drink, and be merry...)</div>
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There, I had been <a href="http://www.improbably.com/arrested" rel="nofollow">arrested</a>, I had been threatened with loaded guns pointed directly at my chest and face, and I had once stood up to them, refusing to allow a soldier's grubby fingers to search my freshly made popcorn while on the way to a party. None of this seemed real, or even significant, until I left and was in a normal place again.</div>
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In Colombia, I had fallen deeply in love with a girl, someone who was as easy to love as eating a piece of pie. She so completely and effortlessly disarmed me and dismantled all my self protection mechanisms, that before I knew it , I was in the grips of love, and panicking, since I had promised myself that no such fate would befall me, ending my days of travel prematurely and turning me into a married zombie. I had promised myself to keep going south until I saw penguins, and then from that point I would look into further travel, or the possibility of sticking in one place a little longer.</div>
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I suppose in part, I was a refugee of this old devil, love, in this very different, and very native-dominated country. Ecuador was full of Incan tribes and different languages like Quechua, which was very different from Colombia, which had European, African, and a small portion of Asians and Middle Eastern peoples, who had mingled with the original peoples, the remnants of which had mostly been pushed up into the hills and hinterlands of the country. Here in Ecuador, there was no such push evident; since most people I met were Native American at least in appearance if not actually in culture as well (much more difficult to accurately gauge in South America).</div>
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Here in the capital city, one could see more clearly the ties with Spain and the Colonial past, even in the rare European looking faces of the <i>capitalinos</i>, and in the long, narrow avenues of the cold, grey metropolis. It was in this capital that I got my first taste of the <i>huelepegas</i>, gangs of homeless street urchins who are all united by their addiction to smelling glue, or more specifically xylene, the active ingredient in 'airplane' glue. </div>
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I was coming back to my <i>pension </i>a bit late, perhaps midnight, and perhaps a bit light headed with grog, when I saw across the darkened plaza what appeared to be a cloud of birds, perhaps pigeons, forming a ball of activity with their beating wings and even cries. As my eyes began to focus better, and my brain engage, the cloud seemed to lift and fly away, and I realized that at the core of this imagined pigeon mass was a middle aged man in a suit, apparently drunken and dazed, sitting on the curb. The 'pigeons' were urchins, moving very fast, stealing the man blind and then stealing from each other, so quickly that I was as clueless as the drunken man that had been picked clean, until I realized that it must have been theft, why else would all this fluttering and sputtering and even mistaken bird cries be so self-evident and then the next minute so totally wrong?</div>
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By the time I had realized all this, they were gone. I was physically afraid of going across the plaza to help the poor old man, simply because that thieving cloud was probably still around, and looking for the next target of opportunity. I was later to experience the cloud firsthand in Lima.....</div>
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El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-79497705315484324732015-03-13T19:23:00.001-07:002015-03-15T07:47:29.892-07:00Yes, ANOTHER Robin Williams Story (cheerful)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DSZoHsXg-So/VQOMsw-HYWI/AAAAAAAASX0/SQRYWLfG9cM/s1600/robin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DSZoHsXg-So/VQOMsw-HYWI/AAAAAAAASX0/SQRYWLfG9cM/s1600/robin.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">YET ANOTHER Robin Williams story-<br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">the Good Morning Vietnam</span><br />
guy for those of you who are too young...</td></tr>
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Yes, it's another Robin Williams profile piece. But I would like you to note I waited long enough after his tragic demise, until all the puff/questioning pieces had died down in the media. And, yes, I did meet the great man, sometime around the time this poster picture was made. Because this story is yet another part of the "Swimming to Cambodia" type saga from another viewpoint.<br />
Actually, this story, in true STC style, begins actually at an art school in California known as CALARTS. It's a huge, nearly Pentagon-type structure in the Orange groves about 100 km north of Los Angeles, and is considered to be "the Harvard of Art Schools", though anyone who truly knows Harvard would question its use as a metric. (U of Chicago snobbery, perhaps).<br />
I had two filmmaking friends from my San Francisco days, one of whom, E, we'll call him, who was my personal instigator. He had traveled in India and SE Asia in the seventies or eighties, and had made it his personal mission to get me on 'the hippy trail' , as he called it. San Francisco of the mid eighties, where we met, was sort of a hippy museum; one could detect traces of hippies past, but there was no real juice or life left in the place, the same place that Keroac had described in such glowing tones (though I now understand that it could very well have happened for the Beats in just about any other town).<br />
E and Z (the other friend) were hosting my last night in the US, before the grand hippy tour I had planned out with E's assistance, and some cash I had scraped together from the summer of salmon canning in the panhandle of Alaska (another story in itself). I was supposed to fly out the next night out of LAX, and when I left San Fran for the last time, my trusted VW mechanic and friend, Eric, had slipped a film cannister of dope into my pocket as a going away present. Now, I wasn't such a big dope lover at the time (still aren't), it was more of one of those gifts you get which are magically easy and convenient to regift.<br />
So I thought I'd better get rid of the film cannister, didn't want my own Midnight Express happening in Los Angeles airport, so I dumped the contents into a Betty Crocker carrot cake mix. To be honest, I don't even remember what brand it was, I just thought it sounds a lot more ironic if it were a Betty Crocker mix. Now in my scant experience cooking with weed, I've found that it blends down ok into chocolate chip cookies, as long as butter is used to soak in the THC and the green bits discarded. But with carrot, and possibly other 'orange' veggies, when you mix in the weed the resulting mixture tastes a lot like pumpkin bread.<br />
So that night we had a big party, the pumpkin bread was fresh and sitting out, we had warned everyone of its magic properties, and everyone was steering clear of it. I ate the inaugural piece to hopefully encourage others, and managed to get about as much attention as a minnow jumping out of an abandoned pond. So I ate a second, and third, and ....oh crap, there's just one piece left, and it DOES taste good, especially now that it's starting to kick in.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aROtbpi90VQ/VQOTb5IaPUI/AAAAAAAASYI/dBWiT44o7DU/s1600/finley-groceries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aROtbpi90VQ/VQOTb5IaPUI/AAAAAAAASYI/dBWiT44o7DU/s1600/finley-groceries.jpg" height="320" width="253" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Karen Finley on stage two years later.</td></tr>
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How is this story ever going to link to Robin Williams? Hmmm, it's fairly improbable, at this point. So, in case you've never eaten it, weed takes a long time to show effects, and you may not even be aware of it, so gradual and hauntingly smooth is the effect. I may or may not have been 'high' at the time my friends announced it was time to curtail the party and go see the big show that everyone had been talking about, that I simply HAVE to see while I have the chance : <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Karen+Finley">Karen Finley </a>, live, performing for the arts community at the school auditorium. The way they spoke in reverent whispers made her out to be a kind of rising star in the art world, though if you know anything about performance artists, you'll know that using the word 'star' is a bit of a stretch.<br />
Anyways, at this point, the pumpkin bread is starting to make me a happy seven year old child, and this sounds like a good idea to me. The plan is, to take me and all my luggage to the show, because after, they'll drive me to LAX and directly put me on my flight. "See, perfect timing!, they say to the 7 year old, who nods his head slowly....<br />
What can I say about Karen's show? Really, it was probably not so shocking by today's standards, and if I had been in my right mind, it may not have been as shocking. After all, I was no longer a virgin, and no stranger to women's bodies by that point. But still, I found it incredibly 'culture shocking' (to my OWN culture) to hear her go into this harangue, in the persona of a male Texan in full southern accent, about how her ass reminded him of a can of candied yams. "I shore would like to get me some yams, uh-uh" and so on, and while she carried on this one-sided sexual harassment against herself, all the while opening a can of candied yams. After a few minutes of this, and holding the can of yams in front of her, she hiked up her skirt and started jamming the contents furiously up her womanhood, in plain view of the audience. The effect was A. to put us off vagina B. to put us off Candied Yams and C. to put us off our screwed up ways of thinking. At any rate, that's the effect it had on me, and as we drove to LAX, I kept getting flashbacks over and over.<br />
Where is Robin Williams? If you really have lost patience with me, I promise he's coming. But not yet. The weird thing about the pre-9-11 era is that people assume airport regulations were tighter than the age of hijacking (a period of about seven years) of the seventies, but they really have no idea of how many irregularities. How else can I explain that I'm by this point, so high I can barely stand up, so my friends were able to take me all the way to the gate (also allowed) supporting me between them. I can't even imagine how many people would try to stop us, for how many different reasons, today. All I know now is that I found my seat, or had it found for me, and then collapsed after sitting down.<br />
"This is your Pilot speaking. We are now making our final approach to Bangkok International Airport, where the local temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit....."<br />
It was winter of 1987. I was in Bangkok, with a wad of travelers checks, a rudimentary backpack with camping gear, and was wearing a turtleneck polypropylene shirt, perfect for California winter weather, and I had two important pieces of information about Thailand in general and Bangkok in particular: Bus number 57, and Khao San Road.<br />
The former was the 5 cents bus from the airport, to the latter location, which is now a mecca and hub for travelers, though now the description includes surfers, divers, beach bums, tattoo punters, sex tourists, freaks, heroin junkies, Israelis just after military service, and now increasingly Korean tourists. In other words, the kind of place that Keroac would have described in loving tones. Of course this was 1987, so the same sorts were all there (except the last two), but they all sort of looked the same, like a nondescript traveler with a backpack (short hair hippies, I like to think of it).<br />
The first thing I noticed is that my polypropylene turtleneck shirt, being dark blue, was soaking up the sun like a solar panel, only instead of outputting electricity, it was outputting rivulets of sweat under my arms. I was on bus 57, and the strange foreigner was attracting a lot of side glances and otherwise polite attention. Everyone was smiling, but no one except me was in serious sweat distress. The bus had no aircon, just a rattling old cage of metal and rubber hurtling down a road that looked like all others. I could be totally on the wrong bus, but these people's reassuring smiles were telling me otherwise, that they had seen shorthaired hippies on their way to Khao San. After about an hour I started getting antsy and anxious, but looking around me I could tell that they were going to make it all right. I waited a few more minutes, sweating, until a man tapped me on the shoulder, saying something in Thai, I motioned to the door, and he nodded. It was like the Jumpmaster in a plane telling me it was time to make my way to the open door and do my skydive.<br />
Outside the bus, the world looked for a few moments what it must be to some autistic children, who are so sensitive to input that all the world comes rushing in their heads, unfiltered, causing them considerable pain. 95 degrees in the shade, of which I could find none, my shirt screaming at me to rip it off, I looked around at traffic surrounded by black clouds of diesel smoke, people hurrying hither and thither, scanning for street signs (for I understood that Khao San was the name of a street), I discovered that there <i><b>were </b></i>signs in English, only they were five meters off the ground and printed in what appeared to be a font size reserved for the small print in unfavorable contracts.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IB9tUQrT8-8/VQOaPyqUPoI/AAAAAAAASYY/0g_aTpGy_08/s1600/thanon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IB9tUQrT8-8/VQOaPyqUPoI/AAAAAAAASYY/0g_aTpGy_08/s1600/thanon.jpg" height="133" width="200" /></a></div>
I ripped my shirt off, my body screamed relief, though that was soon quelled by all the skin cells that were soon to die from solar radiation. More urgently, I now discovered that a lot of people around me appeared to be smiling to the point of a fabulously funny joke. I was that joke, apparently, though I didn't realize that smiling (especially back then) was a dangerous sign that you have trespassed on the cultural norm, a sign of embarrassment (or more properly, of cringe), and my shirt soon went right back on. I would find this magical street called 'khao san', I would get a hostel , and relieve myself of this horrible wardrobe mistake.<br />
I stopped a few friendly looking sorts (they all looked friendly, just some less busy than others) and repeated, in that stupid-tourist-louder-than-life stage voice (they aren't deaf, they just don't understand your babbling, silly) "Khao San? Where? Khao San?". After one or two of these encounters, I got someone pointing down a nondescript street, where to my shock, I saw English signs along both sides. "Hello cafe" , and the "Good Morning Cafe" and the "Happy Cafe", all of which were advertising 'European breakfasts"<br />
After stopping another friendly hippy (short hair), I got a recommendation for a place behind the temple, a place called Apple Two. I sauntered into the back alley behind another alley behind the buddhist temple, and saw the sign pop out from a row of non-descript (except they are possible to describe, being a typical working class thai urban house, but I don't have room) houses in this tiny, dark alley. It was actually a cheerful place, tiny little box rooms, but clean, and a big space in the middle with couches and chairs where all the hippies were hanging out. I soon made the best of friends, and rum and coke appeared, and we were all chatting and stuff, and before I know it, they are all saying that I HAVE to go and see this show, that it's the ultimate, that I'll hate myself if I don't. So we all scramble our stuff together, boys and girls and fill up two taxis, who take us to this neighborhood downtown, someone is in charge, not sure who but he seems to know the ropes. Next thing I know we are going in a nightclub, there's a doorman, I hear him clearly say "Fuck you" and give us all the biggest, politest smile, and I know we are in for an experience.<br />
I then watch the infamous ping pong show, only for me it's not the ping pong show, I'm flashing back to Karen and all of the inappropriate yam jamming, as balls and darts and all kinds of even more inappropriate things are going in and out of orifices, and before I know it my head starts to spin in that backwards way, a special kind of headache that only extreme double reverse culture shock can bring you. And so it was, that I saw the ping pong show on both sides of the Pacific, in a way, within twenty four hours of each other, though interpreted through different filter.<br />
The next morning, I slept in, trying to forget all the cultural compression and decompression of the previous week, and was just hanging around the open living room of the hostel, and the phone rang. No one picked it up right away, for the family was away, and the rule there was that the guests could answer it, and try to take a message for another guest, or give out information, or whatever, since it was usually another traveler on the end of the line. I was closest in the living room, so I picked it up and spoke gingerly to the unknown caller: "Hello?"<br />
"Good Morning! sang a distinctly American, somewhat impatient female voice on the other end. "Is John X there?" "John!" I shouted to the two or three people in the living room, for it was emptier than I had realized. Blank stares came back at me, perhaps the people were trying to figure out which language I was blathering in.<br />
"I'm sorry" I apologized to this stranger. "I think he's out. Can I take a message?" Then the stranger spoke four words that were to change my destiny, at least temporarily. "How tall are you?"she intoned rather seriously. This was not a joke. I was going to take John's job, whatever that is. "About 5-11" I said, hoping it wasn't a casting call for a basketball team or something. "What color are your hair and eyes?", she asked, perhaps afraid she was talking to an Asian person. What I was to learn later is that Hollywood is at the very epicenter of racism and all kinds of bigotry, which is perpetuated through the typecasting of villains, good guys, and especially extras, now known in doublespeak as 'background actors'.<br />
I told her basically what she wanted to hear, that I was caucasian (though it turns out they were also casting blacks), and she gave me a set of job descriptions and directions to follow to get myself into this movie thing they were shooting down in Phuket. The pay was forty dollars a day, a fortune in 1987 Thailand , since this hostel itself was actually 2 dollars a night. The bus fare was paid already, I would sleep in paid accommodation there (it turned out to be very similar to Apple 2, actually). So when I realized I could stay an entire month in Apple two from just three days work, I needed no more convincing. I was in. I left that night.<br />
I arrived late night at Phuket, stayed in the hostel, and the next morning they came and drove all us extras to the set. It was really early so this part is a bit fuzzy, still groggy with sleep they were shoving rifles and army uniforms at us , we got into the togs and grabbed the guns and jumped on these big transport trucks, and started winding up this jungle hill in the middle of seemingly nowhere- though probably that site is now all condos as far as you can see.<br />
It occurred to me, looking around at all the fresh faces, still half asleep, all the other young white and black American looking G.I. types, that this experience might not be much different from actually being drafted. I mean, we were all here on this 'adventure', and what not, but who's to say, that if another army with a different uniform were to appear on the crest of the hill and start shooting at us, like real bullets, with people getting hit left and right, that you might not fire back, in fact who's to say you couldn't get into a real 'fake' war this way; by the time the extras had figured out they'd been tricked, it'd be far too late, you'd have to fight if you wanted to see the light of the next day. So in a way I was sort of dreaming Tropic Thunder (minus the Simple Jack part, of course, I wasn't going full retard)- but I can't have been the only fake soldier to have done so. <br />
In fact, it prompted me to more carefully examine my helmet, which seemed unusually heavy to me. I had in fact just come from India where I had lost 45 pounds and nearly my life, leaving me a skinny little runt to the point where I thought it was my skinny little neck having a hard time holding up the scant weight of a fake plastic helmet. But this thing in my hands was a big, old chunk of metal. I looked inside and found markings. THIS WAS A REAL HELMET FROM 'NAM. Holy shit, the whole Tropic Thunder thing seemed to reverberate when it sunk in that I was WEARING A FUCKING HELMET THAT MAYBE SOMEBODY DIED IN.<br />
I looked at the gun they had given me. I remember that as soon as the guns were handed round, a whole bunch of the meathead extras (I heard that they had combed the beaches of Phuket, and had rounded up an annual gathering of Canadian firefighters) started immediately pointing the guns at imaginary targets, in some cases each other, and going 'click' with the trigger, while childishly mouthing the sound 'pow'. At the time, I had thought nothing of it, since I assumed that any Hollywood production would just use made-for-stage rifles, or else 'formerly' real ones with muzzle and breach blocks to prevent any real ammo from going in or out of the machine.<br />
Not stupid enough to actually look down the barrel of my own gun, I contented myself with the knowledge that this was a safe gun, no problems with accidental live rounds or what not, and the fact of the real helmet just sat in the back of my head, nagging me while I quietly put the other thoughts away.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TlHIHo8UCoU/VQWa8PoSzYI/AAAAAAAASZs/CBY-dRG-GG0/s1600/m14rifle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TlHIHo8UCoU/VQWa8PoSzYI/AAAAAAAASZs/CBY-dRG-GG0/s1600/m14rifle.jpg" height="164" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm pretty sure it was one of these earlier models, not the M16s<br />
you normally see in closeups of "Full Metal Jacket" etc.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I think it was on the second take going up that hill, a big take, since it involved about five troop transports , a couple of jeeps and a helicopter or two all kind of synching together, before long, we had stopped halfway through the take. I looked over at the helicopter, since that would be the most logical snafu that would require rewinding the scene. it was in the same place it had been on the first take. Not long after I had these thoughts, a jeep pulls up, only this time, instead of extras in costume, it had an ashen faced props manager, in civ clothes. "Hand down your rifles" he barked, almost as if he was in character for a Sergeant. We dutifully handed them down, and he immediately jerked open the bolt and peered into the chamber with one eye cocked, then handed them back one by one.<br />
"What's this all about? " I stammered, suddenly not caring if I lost my precious forty dollar job, since my life had to be worth at least twice that. He reached into the floor of the jeep and brought up a big army ammo can, which he shook vigourously, so that we could hear the four or five shells inside of it. "I found these inside the other guns" he said, and we all turned the same color as he was, thinking about those Canook beefheads and their idiotic antics with point and shoot. One of us could have been killed on the set that day.<br />
The third day was a bit dolorous, not just because we had escaped death by bullet, death by repeated takes over and over of the truck scene (which got cut down to a 1.5 second establishing shot; my truck got completely cut out of that), not just because we had been eating bland Wonderbread fucking mayonnaise and some mystery lunch-meat sandwiches on set the whole time (Seriously? That's the only food you could rustle up in fucking Thailand?),not just because the day was a bit overcast and gloomy, but because most of us were at the end of the extra shoot and would be losing our sweet forty dollar gig. <br />
Some of the extras had wormed their way into 'permanent' temporary positions, like driving a jeep, looking extra 'soldiery', etc. I had to laugh at this one guy, who had apparently grown up with WW2 movies, cause he was a living breathing stereotype of the fake heroism macho bullshit of that era, a cigarette butt dangling at an angle out of his chompers, the sleeves rolled up with a cig pack in it, helmet askew with chinstrap dangling down as if he didn't give a good goddamn. I halfway expected John Wayne himself to come up and congratulate this man for giving his soul to the devil of Hollywood. Yeah, I'll admit it, we all hated him cause he had made big bucks by having got there early; he was now in his third month of filming.<br />
NOW COMES THE ROBIN WILLIAMS PART- GET READY<br />
So it was with no small surprise that, when they called a few of us (meaning less than 20 out of the 100 something that we were) out to the 'set' and had us sit around on stumps around this campfire pit (not lit of course, cause temps were still in the high 30's) and make like we were R and Ring or whatever it is that soldiers are supposed to do in Nam in their free time (minus the 'me love you long time' part). No small surprise when Robin Williams rolls up to the center of our little gathering and starts doing an impromptu stand-up set.<br />
"This is the Reverend Squirrely Bush!" he boomed in his fake Radio Evangelist voice, with no mike in sight, in uniform. I was taken completely by surprise, not even realizing that the cameras were rolling now, for they had sort of wanted to get us reacting like humans would. Maybe I had been given this honor because of all the extras there, I was having the hardest time, still suffering from Dehli Belly in the worst way, and having to often dash off to the loo in between takes. In fact, their advisor, a black vet, had patted me on the shoulders and said, "Great! You're the most authentic of all! We were always shittin' our brains out back then"<br />
I had missed seeing Robin live not four months earlier, back in a little comedy club called The Other in San Francisco, where he was quite famous for popping in unannounced and jumping on stage to do an impromptu act, often in tandem with who ever happened to be up there. Just a couple of weeks earlier I had missed one of these legendary moments when Dana Carvey was up there, Robin shows up, jumps up and they started doing some sort of comedy duel to the death. I knew a waitress there and after she told me that story, she slipped me in the back door so I could watch Dana myself (though with no Robin). Now here he was , standing up directly in front of me a few meters away!<br />
Dudes were cracking up all around me, but I was so shocked I literally couldn't pick up my jaw from the ground where it had lain all this time. I still see some of those 'professional laughers' cause one or two of them made the final cut - the irony is that in the movie, they are listening to Robin on the radio, when they were actually just a farting distance from the real dude.<br />
The shoot finally wrapped up, I got over my shock, and we all began walking to the lunch tents, where as I already knew, extras go to one tent and eat fucking Wonderbread, and every one else goes to another tent and ate, I don't know, chicken or something. I wouldn't be able to schmooze with the big man once we split to our tents, so I started walking alongside him, there were actually just two gawkers already there, they were even more awed than I. He was continuing to tell jokes! In fact, for him the cameras had not stopped rolling! What I mean is, in a nice way, he needed an audience- and for now he needed us, desperately , to laugh at him. He was seeking our approval. I thought back to all the funny amazing comics I've known in my life and not one of them was not without a dark tragic side. They had all filled that void with humor, and here was the biggest black hole of them all, a dark genius. That truly filled me with more awe than anything, than being shot out with fake guns which turned out to be real, than all the rest of it.<br />
We were nearly at the tents. I've always been a timid sort, so much so that nearly all my girfriends have made the first move, so much so that I voted against myself as fourth grade class president. So I don't know what prompted me to be the first extra that dared do anything besides laugh at the great man. I said "So, do you still go to the Other sometimes?" He looked at me in shock, as if I had punched him and knocked the wind out of him. "You've been to the Other?" he said, in disbelief, suddenly being transported to home, to the thousands of people in the Bay who loved and supported him even before his television career. "Yeah, I saw Dana Carvey, but I was kinda bummed that it wasn't the night you showed up" I said. After that it was a little awkward, cause I could tell he had granted me special status as a fellow SF person, not just a normal fan or extra, but now it was time to go to our special tents, perhaps he would shake hands in the other tent and then do his trailer to be alone, who knows? Of course we also saw him later with this gorgeous woman in her late twenties, the rumor spread that it was his affair of the moment.....<br />
Sorry to make you wait so long for the Robin Williams part, it was a bit devious of me, but it just seemed wrong to cut out parts of the experience which were really integral to it. Years later I was to return to the 'Vietnam set' in Phuket as an extra, with the great Werner Herzog, who was even more charming, humble and personable than I could have imagined.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-64330574008983077052014-07-21T00:24:00.001-07:002014-07-21T00:45:30.781-07:00Travelling by cycle<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MbigksGG1N0/U8zBp3nhmCI/AAAAAAAAM4Q/s-Cj_VXDjr4/s1600/2014-07-19+14.19.57.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MbigksGG1N0/U8zBp3nhmCI/AAAAAAAAM4Q/s-Cj_VXDjr4/s1600/2014-07-19+14.19.57.jpg" height="200" width="112" /></a>I just aborted a ten day, 550 km trip by cycle from the capital of Korea, Seoul, to the second largest city, Busan, in the opposite corner of the country. There is an amazing and perhaps globally unique system of car-free trails that shuttle the cyclist along two major rivers, keeping the trail mostly flat. Lee Myung Bak, the last president, left it as a legacy to the country which shouted him out of office after a scandal involving free trade and American Beef.<br />
<br />
All along the trail, I kept meeting people who seemed to think that the only important thing was completing the whole trail, or arriving at the destination. I rarely met people who were allowing the weather, the terrain and the sociocultural interest level to dictate their pace of travel.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WjCurqJk-Gs/U8zBmIMYkaI/AAAAAAAAM34/PnO3d1FfFFI/s1600/2014-07-19+10.28.56.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WjCurqJk-Gs/U8zBmIMYkaI/AAAAAAAAM34/PnO3d1FfFFI/s1600/2014-07-19+10.28.56.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Bicycle Museum is right on the actual path, but many cyclists arrive when it is closed.<br />
I stayed the night so I would be able to check it out, as last time I arrived after its opening hours.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I too, am guilty of not following my own travel ideal, which is sort of epicurean, maximize experience, and if possible, pleasureable experience at the cost of completion or thoroughness. Honestly, if I had done it right, I would have completely skipped "LG valley, the entire city and outskirts of Gumi, which is 60 km north of third-largest city, Daegu, and serves as a giant Detroit full of flat screen makers and associated industry. The skyline is mostly smokestacks and there are entire blocks along the river without a single dwelling or corner shop or anything, actually, except factories. <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sIjBHzjY7II/U8zEvtsSCKI/AAAAAAAAM40/5Zdj_F47LQk/s1600/2014-07-19+17.42.56.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sIjBHzjY7II/U8zEvtsSCKI/AAAAAAAAM40/5Zdj_F47LQk/s1600/2014-07-19+17.42.56.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Abandoned factory in Gumi, on the bike trail</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's a spooky sight, especially on a Sunday, and I should just have taken a bus or train from the last good spot, Sangju, to the next, Waegwan, which is mostly interesting because of the tide-turning battle that took place there. But as Ju-Won ("Juan with an American accent, he told me) put it, Korea is more often efficient than reasonable. To translate that back to a cycling tour, there was no way to avoid the industrial ugly that is Gumi, without crossing a mountain range or two, because one of Korea's largest manufacturing centers was built along the second longest river in the country, and upstream from perhaps a fifth of its food producing regions.<br />
<br />
I had hoped fervently to lead a tour of American cyclists on this miraculous trail from city to city, but it was in Gumi, looking at it honestly with a marketing eye, that I realize I would need some serious tweaking to make this happen in a pleasant way. Most Americans, though we certainly have worse canker sores like the chemical processing areas in Louisiana, would be decidedly turned off to see where their LCD TVs were coming from.<br />
<br />
For the most part, though, the trail winds through some pretty virgin and unspoiled areas, as witnessed by the fishermen we saw fly fishing in every quiet bend of the river, and as confirmed one night when we heard an Asian barking deer, which was barking pretty aggressively after having swum across a 900 meter wide river with a pretty decent current. Dragonflies and sluggish grasshoppers were our constant companions, and small, annoying gnats which only seemed to exist in the shade, and only became a problem when laboring up a steep grade, which could approach 20%, about the same as most stairways in public places.<br />
<br />
So what I'm trying to say here, is that maybe 'Muricans would be as impressed as I am, that nature still managed to struggle through the cracks left it by rapid Korean industrialization, and that despite all the out of control development in places like the endpoints of the trail, Seoul and Busan, there are still plenty of lovely rocks-and-trees-only type vistas, plenty of sleepy towns where the country mile/hour/effort system of guestimation applies. (In fact, we gave up asking local people distances because they would vary as much as 4 times from person to person.)<br />
<br />
So when I aborted my trip at the 350 km mark, still over 200 km short of the 'destination', it was with some sadness and even sort of partial capitulation to someone elses idea of 'victory' and 'defeat'. I did it because quite simply this marathon of heat was becoming more and more an issue of survival and shrewd discipline and planning, and less about enjoying the countryside. Even the gorgeous vistas became steamed up with haze so thick as to obscure nearby mountains before 11 in the morning, so that effectively, if one wanted to do this trip, it meant going to bed upon arrival in a town, ideally 8 pm, then getting up at four and hitting the road at 'civilian dawn', which means when ordinary people perceive that the night is ending.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GxMtfDWwOIE/U8zBsm2wxUI/AAAAAAAAM4k/Fnh2dJEp_F8/s1600/2014-07-20+13.34.08-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GxMtfDWwOIE/U8zBsm2wxUI/AAAAAAAAM4k/Fnh2dJEp_F8/s1600/2014-07-20+13.34.08-1.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Many people in a hurry miss all the great art center only meters off the trail...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Not my idea of fun, and with all the restrictions, you are only likely to meet really Type A, spandex-breathing Serious Athletes, who have no time to stop and shoot the shit, share a non-reccommendable bottle of booze or other performance killing things like cookies and whatnot, and actually, this will turn your lovely Vacation of Experience into a Grim Army of One. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8csn3sqg4Fk/U8zBqAwO0yI/AAAAAAAAM4U/WFTZjvE3kq4/s1600/2014-07-20+13.33.00-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8csn3sqg4Fk/U8zBqAwO0yI/AAAAAAAAM4U/WFTZjvE3kq4/s1600/2014-07-20+13.33.00-1.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nothing quite like coming in sweating buckets to this cool museum</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
On the bus on the way back, our driver apparently cut off a trucker and really, really pissed him off. We spent the next hour on the edge of death, as the truck in front tried to box us in the slow lane, swerving dangerously every time our driver attempted to get in the fast lane, and the driver in front consistently drove 20 km under the speed limit, so as to rub salt in our driver's wounds. It went from being an obvious vindictive revenge, to a very very dangerous game of cat, mouse and chicken, from which I actually started believing was going to be my very last experience in this life. <br />
<br />
It all came out well in the end, but it reminded me that I had at least attempted another of my bucket lists, to ride, ride ride until the very end, whether real or fake.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bHFGQWaDuHs/U8zBr_PT4UI/AAAAAAAAM4g/KZJrSUftTF8/s1600/2014-07-20+14.00.28-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bHFGQWaDuHs/U8zBr_PT4UI/AAAAAAAAM4g/KZJrSUftTF8/s1600/2014-07-20+14.00.28-1.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">bundled against the x rays of the sun, posing for a shot with the mothership</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-50499207664830187692014-07-12T21:00:00.009-07:002022-07-20T03:01:02.232-07:00Jail Cake Most would say that jail is not their idea of an adventure. However , there are certain circumstances under which I would always choose jail as the preferred experience. For example, if you had a chance to be jailed with other key civil rights protestors in the 1960's, or even in Selma with Martin Luther King, in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, wouldn't you jump at the chance? Well, we cannot always be so lucky, or so righteous, or persistent, as to have those kind of moments, but I cannot but maintain that this jail experience I had was the best possible use of my tourist self at the time.<br />
<br />
My Jail story really began in Guatemala, where I had been living in the hills of <i>Huehuetenango</i>. I had gone to Chi Chi (<i>Chichicastenango</i>) for a Mayan festival. I had been hoping to see some shamanic rituals that I heard about, that might or might not have been related with the ancient Classic Maya and their calendar, whose hieroglyphs I was studying at the time. It was there that I met Thomas Lang, the war reporter. <br />
<br />
Tomas (Spanish spelling) was a hard drinking, hard playing, down to earth war reporter originally from Chicago, where he had learned his predilection for siding with the underdog. Working in the mostly black South Side at the time, he had realized that he could transcend his race and become accepted by the locals, which is how he worked his magic as a reporter. Previous to working in El Salvador as a stringer for an Illinois small city paper, he had covered the Beirut beat, which according to him was far, far more dangerous. <br />
Tomas said he wouldn't even have made friends with another American, but that I spoke to him for the first time in Spanish (which I confess was more whim than habit), and we shared a small bottle of <i>El</i> <i>Venado aguardiente </i>('Deer brand' 'firewater', the local hooch, which we all lovingly nicknamed <i>Envenenado </i>, or 'poisoned'), which naturally had to be diluted with coca cola and friendship.<br />
<br />
After passing many of Tomas's litmus tests, such as having lived on the South Side of Chicago, having been the only non-Jewish <i>WhiteBoy </i>in an otherwise 'All-Black' high school, speaking Spanish and a smattering of Maya, but most of all, being able to metabolize <i>Envenenado</i>, he invited me nonchalantly to come to El Salvador, more specifically the capital where he was based.<br />
<br />
"C'mon down to El Salvador, you'll like it. Especially the parties..." he said , leaving me just enough of a worm wriggling to intrigue me. Guatemala was really beautiful and deep with indigenous culture, but I had been a little bored recently, I felt the need to move among my own and socialize a little. I had been cooped up in the hills for far too long. <br />
<br />
So although I had now been living in Guatemala for a full year, making occasional trips to Mexico for Visa purposes, with no definite end in sight, I now started to slowly make plans to tie up loose ends and continue my journey, which had been stagnated by my love of Guatemala. In fact if it had not been for this catalyst, I might never have reached Argentina, or even Colombia.<br />
<br />
When I got to El Salvador, I checked into a hotel, which is still one of my favorite travel memories, because the ground floor was used as a tobacco curing shed, and the aromatic, heavenly smells of drying tobacco wafted up through the floors and into all the rooms. Tobacco is not an unpleasant plant; it makes me wonder how much chemical wizardry goes into making it smell as bad as cigarettes do.<br />
<br />
After a week there, Tomas found me a friend's empty house to stay in, and he proceeded to show me the party life I had dreamed of living up in the hills. It wasn't sophisticated, no cocktails, nothing but beer, the people were great but not exactly what I would call 'my crowd'. What set the party apart was that it was taking place during a civil war. <i>Eat Drink, and Be Merry, for tomorrow some of us could be dead</i>. Not a cute quip, but a reality in that time and place. Everything seemed to have more meaning because of it, colors were sharper, sounds more crisp, food more tasty.<br />
<br />
Of course after a few weeks of partying like this, even this began to get a little old, and I yearned for more indigenous folklore, some local culture, and there was this town called La Palma in the hills near the border of Honduras and Guatemala, that was apparently worth it, for the entire town had been turned into this art village by this one visionary artist. He had this unique and yet teachable naif style of painting that he taught to the villagers, and the entire village was just devoted now to churning out this painting style in a variety of handicrafts; gourds, wall hangings, clothes, etc.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, travel around the country was simply not a matter of getting a ticket and going. More than half of the country was more or less in the hands of the guerrilla, and in a losing battle with the hearts and minds of their own people, the government was restricting travel to these areas. Any place within walking or even horse riding distance of guerrilla territory required a travel permit issued by the Salvadorean High Command, or <i>salvoconducto</i>, as it is called in Spanish.<br />
<br /> Applying for and successfully receiving a <i>salvoconducto </i>often took more than a week, and often two weeks. Unfortunately, I was at the end of my visa and wouldn't be able to wait that long. But Tomas simply told me a little trick: " These things are always changing, according to the situation of the army and the guerrillas. So just get on a bus, and sit at the front where you are clearly visible. If you are not allowed in the area without a <i>salvoconducto</i>, they will pull you off the bus and make you go back to the capital, and if not, if the situation is all clear, they'll allow you to go through.<br />
<br />
So we did just that....because by now I had recruited another person, a very blond looking Norwegian dude, in this adventure plan. We both sat side by side, doubling our apparent foreignness, in the very front seat of the bus, where the soldiers at the roadblocks could clearly see us. We passed more than five roadblocks in five hours, and at the end, we couldn't believe that we were entering La Palma, village of artists.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-omm36UTe7-Y/U8CeOz8B_YI/AAAAAAAAM2w/fzB3fXGAoo4/s1600/la+palma+2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-omm36UTe7-Y/U8CeOz8B_YI/AAAAAAAAM2w/fzB3fXGAoo4/s1600/la+palma+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Once we had gotten off of this magic bus, we sought out a hotel in the center of town, threw our packs down, and headed off to the market to search for dinner. We found a lovely little vendedor selling pupusas and beer, and we joked about being the whitest guys on the bus and how it had worked like a magic talisman for opening up this lovely city to us. Once we were here now, most of what there was to do was to go souvenir shopping, and possibly to visit with people and see how the art had affected their lives. With all these plans, we finished our beers and went back to our hotel to get an early night in, so we could be fresh in the morning.<br />
<br />
When we opened the door of the room, there were three <i>milicos </i>(military police) sitting on our beds, going through our bags. They looked up at us, without any apology or remorse. "Good evening, gentlemen" said the one with ray bans, who seemed to be in charge. "Do you have your <i>salvoconducto </i>to be here?"<br />
<br />
So we explained the whole deal , about how we really wanted to see La Palma, which is internationally famous, but that the <i>salvoconducto </i>required too much time, and how our friend had recommended the method of sitting at the front of the bus. The commander shook his head when he heard how lazy the roadblock guys had been at doing their job. We should have been stopped immediately out of the capital if things had been working well.<br />
<br />
He went on to say that this was a restricted area, and that we were actually in a little danger here, and so for our own safety, he insisted, before we could object about all the casual, safe looking people we had seen strolling around the market, 'for our own safety' we would be taken to the military base, and then in the morning, back to the capital by military transport.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Sn9ydlHKFQw/U8H03hFrXuI/AAAAAAAAM3A/UOLlfwFw5Zc/s1600/la+palma.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Sn9ydlHKFQw/U8H03hFrXuI/AAAAAAAAM3A/UOLlfwFw5Zc/s1600/la+palma.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">La Palma today, reflecting not guerrillas but urban criminals.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
When we got our first look at our new digs for the night, the military base just outside of town, we were a little agog, for the entrance had bullet holes and divots right at about head level, all around the entrance. Maybe people had even been killed in this deadly entrance. The entry was not straight, but protected by a bullet pockmarked wall, and behind that wall, where the other walls were higher, there were other pockmarks to show how ill advised it would be to stick your head up during a fight.<br />
<br />
Once inside the base, they took us to a room no larger than a closet, and locked us in there. It didn't take long for us to realize that there were no windows, just the locked steel door, no hope of escape , and possible danger of asphyxiation or being dehydrated to death if it got too hot in here. We wasted no time nor oxygen in going to sleep. As it turns out, there was just enough air in there for two men to pass a very short night. In the morning, when they opened our door, we stumbled out, dizzy from lack of oxygen. It took me all that day to recover my brain function, which I then used to realize how lucky we were they hadn't killed us through incompetence and negligence. This was how cheap life had become here, apparently.<br />
<br />
They loaded us on the back of a Datsun pickup, with a mounted 50 mm machine gun, the sort of weapon you see now in a lot of middle eastern conflicts, an improvised weapon that is cheap and mobile, and easily switched out with another cheap Japanese pickup when the Datsun breaks down. The ironic thing about this is that we were now being used by the military as human shields to pass unhindered through what was surely guerrilla territory. To top it off, the men who were escorting us were out of uniform to increase the confusion for guerrilla snipers. All that day we fantasized that a really talented sniper would pick off the military guys, freeing us and beginning a fantastic adventure.<br />
<br />
But it was a quiet and uneventful ride. The green hills were more like the kind of touristing that we had originally signed up for; only now, we were leaving all of that verdure peace for the bustle of the Big Smoke, where the large and mostly empty prison of the Treasury awaited us.<br />
<br />
My cell was padded and right next to Ulf's as I'll call the Norwegian travel buddy, to protect his real name, in case he is now a cabinet minister or some other politician. We could communicate by shouting through the little barred windows in our padded doors. At first I thought we might have mistakenly been taken to some mental institution, the walls were very thick and it would be pretty difficult to hurt yourself by running at them.<br />
<br />
Looking around the cell, I found the answer. There was a bloody handprint, at about eye level, and the fingers were smeared downward, as if someone had been thrown there. This was a torture cell, and the padding was to muffle the screams, for as I found out later, this prison (like so many others) was located within earshot of a residential district.<br />
<br />
It was a chilling sight, and steeled my resolve to take this experience seriously. I was an American passport holder, I reasoned, and so if I didn't give them any reason to kill me, it would be difficult for them to kill me with impunity (poor reasoning, as I found out later, since they killed over two dozen journalists during that conflict, possibly for having seen something they shouldn't have). Ulf and I kept each other company that first night by shouting back and forth through the bars; both of us were afraid that we might be the last living witness of the other's demise, and it made us uneasy in a way we had no words to express, so we traded stories and Ulf even sang a Norwegian Viking dirge for me.<br />
<br />
The next day, it was time for the military to sort us out. We had been dumped here by the army, but the actual prison was owned and operated by the Treasury department, which put it in some sort of legal loophole, or at least off of the usual journalistic radar. It was perhaps for these reasons that this particular prison was actually a locus for torture of suspected communist sympathizers, thus explaining the padded cells and the blood stains. <br />
<br />
My cell door opened, and an interrogator in civilian clothes walked in. He spoke English. At that point my Spanish was certainly good enough to travel with, but I think they wanted no mistakes when it came to taking my statement, since the results of that could determine whether they let me live or not. <br />
<br />
He was holding my passport in his hand, and began with a classic itinerary interrogation. Years later, I would study interrogations in detail for my master's thesis, and though I couldn't have known it at the time, this is one of the oldest and simplest gambits for a cop to catch someone lying. You have the record of their comings and goings, and you simply jump around on the calendar, hoping they will slip up. The main problem with this is that over a period of years people's memories are not so perfect.<br />
<br />
"So in April you entered Mexico at the border of Zapotal, Chiapas?"<br />
I thought for a second. April was nearly a year ago. I had left HueHue to get my visa renewed, that time had been a quick crossing just to reset the visa clock.<br />
"I believe so, yes"<br />
"And then in July, you re-entered Guatemala from Belize?"<br />
I was trying to figure out his game. Was he just trying to get me to slip up on itineraries, or was he referring to my pattern of travel in Guatemala, which had been, just before leaving, to go to remote jungle zones, which just happened to be Guatemalan guerrilla country. Indeed, that time, instead of turning around and coming right back, I had made a loop through Palenque, Aguas Azules, and the Yucatan Peninsula before returning to Guatemala through the Peten, which is where most of the guerrilla operate.<br />
"Oh, yeah, maybe I confused that with another time", I said.<br />
The interrogator furrowed his brow. Clearly he had just caught me in a slip up, but something else seemed to be happening. He clearly seemed bored with this routine, and this line of questioning was not leading where he wanted it to.<br />
"So, earlier, it looks like actually a year earlier, you left Mexico and re entered from the U.S. border.<br />
"Yes". (trying to recall this distant event)<br />
"So what were you doing that time?"<br />
"It must have been Nogales, Arizona. I went to visit my friends in Tucson"<br />
"You have friends in Arizona? Is that where you were living ?"<br />
"No, actually I was living in California before that. San Francisco."<br />
His posture relaxed, and his demeanor shifted. He parked one leg cross one knee, and said conversationally "So how is California? Are there plenty of jobs nowadays?"<br />
I could barely believe my ears. <i>The government itself is abandoning the country</i>, I thought. <i>This war is completely lost</i>, I felt my head thinking autonomously.<br />
Seeing my chance, I shifted my gears also and began making polite conversation, following his lead. Do you have relatives in California? I asked, knowing that it was a popular place for Salvadoreans to immigrate to. How are they liking it? I continued, trying to draw the attention away from me and my travels.<br />
We continued that way for another twenty minutes, and by now his mood had lightened considerably. He went away, leaving the door open for the longest time, a really deadly pause, during which I considered,<i> are they doing this so I'll attempt escape, and they can shoot me down as target practice</i>?- thoughts which I later discovered were not so fantastic or out of touch with the reality of that grim time.<br />
After this long pause, with the door swinging on its hinges in the late afternoon breeze, not knowing whether this serendipity had bought my life or not, he then reappeared with a generous slice of cake with pink and white frosting. I wasn't particularly in the mood for cake, but like so many other offered gifts from tribes and what not, I knew there was no option to refuse or even to put off eating it till later. I don't know how to evaluate cake, but eating it there, with all the padding and blood stains around me, it tasted like absurdity.<br />
Ulf, the Norwegian, was released that day, but I had to spend another night, because even though there was no Norwegian embassy at that time, the Norwegian Charge D'Affairs businessman came and got him as soon as he was informed; whereas my American attaché; of whatever department is responsible to come and sign for Americans abroad imprisoned by accident, decided to stay at a Saturday night cocktail party a little later and come for me on Monday instead, because as it turned out, it was a weekend, and so the pink 'jail cake' had been given me on a Saturday.<br />
Walking out of that place, I decided the best way to decompress from the whole experience was to sit down at some café or restaurant, have some coffee or food, and get my bearings slowly, while feeling what it was like not to be in a blood-stained, padded eight by eight cell for a while. I found a nice little street place directly across from the prison, and the woman was pleasant, taking my order for <i>pupusas </i>and eggs and sausages. <i>Pupusas </i>are like giant, fat steaks of the corn masa that is used all over Central America for making tortillas. They sometimes come stuffed with cheese or meat, but they are the emblem of El Salvador, a unique cuisine that stands in for the nation, like Kimchi does for Korean nationality.<br />
After she brought me my food, the lady was bored and a little curious, since I was her only customer, and a foreigner. From her face I could tell she hadn't had many foreign guests in her little café. Between eggs and <i>pupusa</i>, I stopped to give her an explanation. "I just got out of there", indicating the jail across the street, and then I saw the clouds of confusion cross her face, so I gave her a brief rundown of my weekend activities at the Torture Hotel.<br />
When I tried to pay, she said "No charge!" and held up her hands strongly as if Elvis himself had just eaten from her menu and it was an honor she would treasure forever. As I would later find out from other Salvadoreans, I was one of few people ever to walk out of that place.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FSKf_tb6g7M/U8IDkwbOlnI/AAAAAAAAM3Y/SDJKwRZs0sk/s1600/Pupusas-with-Curtido.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FSKf_tb6g7M/U8IDkwbOlnI/AAAAAAAAM3Y/SDJKwRZs0sk/s1600/Pupusas-with-Curtido.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />
Years later, while married to a Korean, I would end up living in one of the Salvadorean enclaves in Los Angeles, and as I chatted to my neighbors in Spanish, I wondered if I should bring up the story of the ride to La Palma, the Prison cake, and the free Pupusas...better not, I thought, it would bring up bad memories for most; my good fortune in having this adventure would be made absurd and meaningless by all the horrors of war that had gone on. While remembering this story, I did some basic research on the civil war, and it remains one of the most horrific conflicts a country has survived in modern times.<div> <div>I dedicate this story to all the martyrs of that conflict and to the longsuffering Salvadorean people in general.</div></div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-4972000130933427112014-07-07T18:11:00.000-07:002014-07-07T18:39:02.900-07:00Hippy Roots<h2>
My Hippy Roots.</h2>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nGzYfN77bVs/U7s4EmwRQmI/AAAAAAAAM2Q/pZiyZFDanpw/s1600/2014-07-06+22.22.46-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nGzYfN77bVs/U7s4EmwRQmI/AAAAAAAAM2Q/pZiyZFDanpw/s1600/2014-07-06+22.22.46-2.jpg" height="320" width="180" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The legend goes that if you dance long <br />
and hard enough, the Fire Faerie will appear</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's been the fashion to make fun of hippies pretty much since the first time someone dodged the draft for peace reasons (which would be maybe 1770 something) or smoked hemp (again, the same period), or put flowers in their hair (since maybe 1000 A.D., when it fell out of fashion), or claimed that the government is involved in a conspiracy to enslave the people (since the invention of democracy, because before that time, the slavery was transparent). But there's an aspect often overlooked about hippies, that they perform an important function as the heart and conscience at the root of our culture.<br />
<br />
Recently I had a chance to revisit my hippy roots (not so deep, since I was raised as a Southern Baptist, went to John Birch Camp, and my parents actually denounced Reagan as a liberal) in a 'gathering', as they are called. Many people think that gatherings are just gigantic drug fueled orgies of people out of control. That's pretty much the propaganda that's been around since Charlie Manson first inspired other hippies to stick forks in pregnant ladies bellies (yes, that actually happened). Dirty, dangerous, out of control.<br />
But this gathering was unique, since it was completely drug free, unless of course you consider alcohol to be a dangerous drug, which most do except the government of South Korea. Korea is an Alcoholic Nation, and other drugs are simply not available. So what does a hippy gathering do without drugs? They spread different manifestations of love; hugs, music, dance, gifts, and most important to the process, the rhetoric of love. When one feels love for a fellow human, they need to change most of the language structures and habits that are common to 'normal' discourse. Many of the things we say to each other are said without love, and are cynical, critical, and ultimately un-self-loving.<br />
Now this is usually the point when my more cynical or analytical friends are quick to point out the many contradictions and hypocrisies that hippies are well known for: smoking (a herb) while talking about air pollution or the many toxins in our foods, claiming that appearance is immaterial and then being clearly biased about people wearing suits or other 'conformist' clothing. Most people just think of hippies as people who don't bathe enough and are clearly <a href="http://www.cracked.com/funny-2081-hippies/">full of shit</a>. Which is fine, even though I have adopted them since about the age of 18 as my people, my family, my tribe; because even hippies themselves have recognized the problem among themselves and have coined a word for the most egregious trespassers on the sum of our common senses: trustafarians, a new portmanteau of 'trust fund hippy' and 'rastafarian' to signify a new breed of douchebag who uses dreadlocks as a ticket to trample upon every one else around them, and generally act entitled. In other words, the outward appearance of hippies is far too easily mimicked, just as the word 'natural' is too easily hijacked and subverted by the food industry.<br />
Taking all of this into account, I realize it's dangerous to my social standing to even be associated with these people - but at the same time, I cannot but help standing with them, because even though they often fail at their stated goal of peace and love, though they be infiltrated with lazy, useless, parasites who are seemingly rotten to the core, at the very least they are people <i>attempting </i>to make the world a better place, in their own imperfect way. I honestly don't want to live in a world where people are simply following the Adam Smithian copout of "self interest economics dominates all", which is ultimately based on incomplete observations of the world, and as we are now learning, doesn't jibe with biology, either.<br />
What's even more important to me, is to look at the history of the world since 1960 and realize that actually most of the things that hippies advocated for, which were considered weird, ridiculous, and just plain obscure, are now a standard part of our world; organic foods, whole grain products, almost all things that are now acknowledged to be 'healthy' were things that were 'fringe' and 'bad science' in the 'better-living-through-chemistry' era that spawned them. Judged by the standards of those times, we'd all have to admit that 90% of us would be considered hippies by at least one of the things we eat, believe, or language that we use.<br />
So I'm not saying you should stop making fun of hippies, who were actually so used to the public ridicule in the 1960's that they rejected the word 'hippy' in 1968, rebranding themselves as 'freaks' (sort of like the activist use of 'queer') and even holding a funeral for the 'hippy' , complete with a coffin and procession down Haight-Ashbury. By all means, if you need an easy target, go ahead and make fun of these imperfect futurists, because your children will all be just like them eventually, and it may be your last chance to make fun of your own family. <br />
But what I had really hoped is that you might entertain the notion that they actually have a function in our society; that they play an important part in helping us to regain what was lost in the industrialization and fragmentation of our societies over the last few centuries. I'm sure many anthropologists would have a lot to say about this crude analogy to tribalism, but then again, who has ever met a happy anthropologist? Hypocrites who enjoy the tribal hospitality, only to travel back to the world that is crushing their subjects out of existence, write a book about it and make some coin or further their career...I don't see any of them being called 'lazy idealists', and mostly they are respected because they maintain a distance between the observer and the observed.<br />
Imagine now, for a minute that we are all anthropologists, and that we are living among tribes, only one of which is the hippies. Other tribes are the sportists, those whose temple is a surfboard and a wave, churchists, those who find communion with others in a building and some magic words, even cynics must be acknowledged as a tribe, since they gather wherever an open conspiracy theory is proposed, stamping out the fire of ideas with their words.<br />
I don't know where this essay is going, so you could just put that inability to finish down to the classic crazed and fruitless hippy way of being, or accept my 'square' version when I say that I'm a little run down and have just run out of coffee.<br />
<br />El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-15979825177308613932014-04-06T21:17:00.002-07:002014-07-07T21:26:54.777-07:00So I Bought a Little House Lion...<h2 style="text-align: center;">
Taming HouseLions</h2>
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.....<span style="font-size: large;">So</span> I bought a little HouseLion. All my friends had one, it seemed.<br />
HouseLions were popular for a reason. They were very convenient in going about your daily business. Having a HouseLion sometimes meant you could get twice as much done, especially if you had a lot of pesky-type errands to accompish. Girls looked at you with that special look when they found out you had a HouseLion. If you didn't know what that special look meant, then a HouseLion was totally wasted on the likes of you.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FPYWPqxwzHo/U0IHkkhJOAI/AAAAAAAAMlQ/UXQ9k_LphGw/s1600/houselion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FPYWPqxwzHo/U0IHkkhJOAI/AAAAAAAAMlQ/UXQ9k_LphGw/s1600/houselion.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">HouseLions were great on transport</td></tr>
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Now, some of you may object, saying that a house is no place for a lion, that cages are not good either, most people would just wash their hands of lions altogether, saying that lions and people should not mix. Women, in particular, with their typical fears of everything from spiders to cheezy horror films, seemed to regard them with a mixture of terror and awe. Remember, some of these girls were the same ones who had been eyeing us when they saw us going down the street with our new HouseLion, so this kind of ambivalence was only to be expected. Guys with HouseLions tended to end up with the kind of women who had the ability to tolerate the HouseLion as part of their life, and the more fanatical scaredycats just went out of their life completely.<br />
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Now, the fans of HouseLions insisted that this is not the case, that HouseLions were made for people, and that people just needed to be careful, and there would be no problem. At first, I guess I was one of the people sitting on the fence of this issue; it seemed to me that there were both safe HouseLions and unsafe HouseLions. At the time, it seemed like a little HouseLion was going to be safer than a big one, and they were cheaper, so I bought a little one. In fact, most of my friends were quite happy with their house lions.<br />
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HouseLions had all changed our lives, and we were proud of that fact. So proud, in actuality, that we thought that it made us belong to a defacto brotherhood. A club of sorts, where HouseLions were welcome to prowl around together , while we drank and talked and laughed as if there were no tomorrow. We laughed at all the people without HouseLions as if they were some sort of inferior species, and that we, the lucky ones, could see more clearly than they that a Life without HouseLions was not a life worth living. Some of us even began wearing what looked like Clubhouse uniforms...<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IAK3E--IZvI/U0Igg7DHFgI/AAAAAAAAMls/KzgbDz6Sa6Q/s1600/LionRaah1med.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IAK3E--IZvI/U0Igg7DHFgI/AAAAAAAAMls/KzgbDz6Sa6Q/s1600/LionRaah1med.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a>In fact, so zesty was this thirst for membership, that many of us drank deeply of this new, intoxicating idea. Some of us began to include HouseLions as part of our core identity, as part of who we were as men. It filled us up and made us into an improved and better man than all the rest. But of course it did not end there, it never does. When we saw others in the club get rid of their tiny HouseLions and get larger, sleeker, sexier ones, we envied them and counted the days until we could get our own. It was considered the ultimate acheivement to wait until someone was leaving town for good, and then to buy their great big HouseLion at a discount. All of of the HouseLion upsizing was accompanied by a new change of thinking; in fact, it was the tinier HouseLions that were more dangerous and difficult to domesticate; in reality, it was the bigger and more expensive ones who were easy and not really so dangerous. True, they were bigger, but they just moved slower and so you (probably) had time to avert a disaster in case of the unthinkable happening....<br />
All of this was really difficult to verify or even discuss properly, partly because the statistics were so unavailable to us, or because it was sort of taboo for us to talk about it when in the presence of HouseLionClub members. In fact, there didn't seem to be a reason to bring it up because everyone knew it was a really rare occurrence, anyways, and that there were other things more important to talk about, like who the latest HouseLionClub member was, and where he got his HouseLion, and whether it was a good deal or not, and whether it was the right kind of HouseLion for his lifestyle, what his wife thought about the HouseLion in the House, and so on....<br />
By this time, I was on my third, bigger and better HouseLion, and pretty proud of myself. All my friends had either gotten bigger and better ones, and were also now higher status in the HouseLionClub, both as a result of their HouseLion status, and also the fact they had been members for so long. Every now and then someone would drop quietly out, usually because they got married, or had kids, or were doing the usual thing of leaving town for good. Sometimes people would drop out so quietly, that no one would notice. We'd be sitting around the HouseLionClub and then someone would say, "Oh, I haven't seen B around with that HouseLion of his for some time now, does anyone know if he's still around?" These sorts of observations were met with dead silence. Sometimes, it might have been genuinely because nobody had seen B, but I think a lot of times, we were contemplating the sliver of the possibility that his HouseLion had gotten wild, and had gotten hold of him, and that was so terrible nobody wanted to go there.<br />
I remember the first time one of the HouseLion club members had his animal turn on him, and it was really something to remember. Nobody could believe it; he was a strong, stalwart man in the prime of his life, no enemies of anykind, and so no one could believe his HouseLion had gone and done a thing like that. It just made no sense, and what was worse, the memory of it stuck like a fart in an elevator, for years it was hard to go out in Public with your HouseLion without remembering that this was the same species that had done poor old T in.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just an abstraction...</td></tr>
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The second time it happened, we all almost laughed it off. It was a tiny little HouseLion that was responsible, hardly housebroken at all, and so the guy was fairly asking for it. Sure, it was horrible and all, just not horrible AND senseless like the first, larger and shinier HouseLion had broken with the ranks. Somehow the second HouseLion incident was easier to swallow, like a chaser at a bar. The whole incident became abstracted, just as we had gradually come to abstract HouseLions themselves, they were no longer domesticated wild beasts, in fact they were just the idea of doing such a thing. Most of us couldn't even draw a realistic picture of one if our life depended on it.<br />
The Third time a HouseLion attacked, it really took the wind out of our sails. After telling a whole meeting of the elders of the HouseLionClub that I quit, I stormed out of the club and began making plans to get rid of my HouseLion in a humane, but orderly fashion. The other HouseLionClub members looked at me as if I was Rasputin attempting to strangle the life out of the Czar. It was simply not good form to renounce membership in the HouseLionClub. People did that quietly; they went away out of town, or they made quiet plans to relinquish their HouseLion on Craigslist, and then conveniently forgot to get another one. But it wasn't the fact that three is a magic number, or even a number at all, it could have been three thousand. It was when I received a photo of the incident that it really made me SEE for the first time what an Actual HouseLion looked like from a HouseLion perspective. All this time I thought the HouseLions had been this separate animal, and only then did I realize that not only did it become part of your identity, it actually ATE you, from the inside out, and then was usually so hungry that it would eat everyone else around you as well.<br />
RIP Lex.<br />
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El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-84970931639117174072014-03-09T01:16:00.002-08:002014-07-07T18:51:11.566-07:00Shipwrecked!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Although not my personal shipwreck, this google pic</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"> <i>does </i>sort of embody the moment.</span></td></tr>
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A freeze-framed moment. A handful of fragmented moments strung together....<br />
The moment of the car crash, after the bomb blast. Hollywood has recently gotten good at portraying this with editing techniques. The moment the world comes undone, when mother adrenaline puts sticky nano-glue between all the microseconds, and reality reveals itself as flattened and two dimensional, as if you were looking down on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland">Flatland</a>.<br />
So I woke up in the middle of one of these moments. I woke up, not from unconsciousness, not in the least bit blacked out, but that is the feeling you get if your short term memory tape just misplaces those last few seconds. In the first few weeks after the accident, I began to get short pieces of that lost tape back: the missing five seconds between the following two events:<br />
<b>First</b>: I'm sitting on the boat, talking to the Argentine facing me across the narrow deck. Our knees are touching. We are in heavy seas now, having left the harbor and the smaller winds, waves and storm. We are now in open seas, and that means two meter swells, and what that means on a five meter long double outrigger canoe is that we are sometimes staring at a wall of water, before successfully riding it up (and slamming down the other side, usually). Perhaps as a way of relieving the stress, Jose started telling me a story about the last time he was in rough seas in Honduras, and the boat flipped over. This really wasn't helping, but to give the story a little more stress relieving action, he added that everyone on the boat, especially the captain, was drunk and high, and as an added bonus, it was a dive boat and they were all experienced divers. No casualties, he said, it was all like a fun little silly accident for people who spent as much time in the water as they did out of it.<br />
<b>THEN </b>I'm sitting on top of the upside down canoe, straddling the hull with my legs, alone, and holding on to my bag, which is still dry, as am I. I'm thinking about my ipad inside and the galaxy note 2 in the money pouch around my waist. Then I notice the other six people below me, treading water like kittens. We are all of us spouting abuse at the gods of fate for having put us here. I begin to remember why we are here, then where we are, then oh shit....this is where we are? in the middle of the ocean, in one of the remotest places on earth?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5zPcEC2hcjA/Uxq25kpBbBI/AAAAAAAAMjs/eoBLBWntD9E/s1600/cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5zPcEC2hcjA/Uxq25kpBbBI/AAAAAAAAMjs/eoBLBWntD9E/s1600/cropped.jpg" height="229" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Which one of these looks like a weird sea creature?</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dxdm1njWdXQ/Uxq4RMIvWaI/AAAAAAAAMkI/hudutUBMIas/s1600/celebes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dxdm1njWdXQ/Uxq4RMIvWaI/AAAAAAAAMkI/hudutUBMIas/s1600/celebes.jpg" height="200" width="167" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The odd shape even attracted<br />
the attention of the<br />
Dadaists...</td></tr>
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I had first wanted to go to Sulawesi because, well, it has a weird shape. Some say it looks like a squid or octopus, some more land based creatures, but it is certainly a shape that doesn't come up much in the geography of large islands, which are mostly bits and bobs. But the best part is when you tell people where you are going for the vacation. "What is that?" they almost invariably say. I mean, for me the boundary between exotic and mundane destinations is the question "WHERE is that?" so Sulawesi exceeds that by several orders of magnitude.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">No Longer worth its<br />
weight in gold...</td></tr>
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Of course, this is not just geographical obscurity, part of it might be that Sulawesi underwent a makeover. It was quite well known in Magellan's time as 'Celebes', or the Spice Islands. That's right, I had finally achieved what Columbus and countless other government-sponsored explorers had failed to do. (Assuming the main objective was not to actually enslave heathen, which they were pretty good at). And at some point, the value of cloves and nutmeg per kilo started to fall, not because of competition, but because the world correctly identified energy (and unfortunately for us,carbon based forms of it) as the source of civilization and not spices. But back in the day, and that would be the Dutch Colonial Empire days,<br />
there was a pretty tight lid on the place; originally the Dutch surrounded it and wouldn't let anyone else near it, so they could have the monopoly. Long before the Dutch were kicked out, though, the monopoly was broken by the usual methods; smuggling plants out and planting them in less tightly controlled tropical areas, but I think it's safe to say that long before that, the Europeans lost their fascination with spices, though it's still interesting to see how these tropical spices (including cardamom) pop up in 'traditional' Northern European cuisine, even though none of these plants will grow even in Mediterreanean climates.<br />
But I diverge from the boat accident. and the water, and what happened after we all simultaneously realized we had been unceremoniously shipwrecked. At this point, we didn't fear the boat turning over, we feared death, making the last concerns pretty ridiculous indeed. Lucky for us, the two meter swells were about as bad as the waves got. Sometimes you can have a freak wave , say four meters, that would completely destroy you once you are sitting there capsized and helpless. And indeed, even those two meter swells kept tipping the boat on its side again, threatening to conk us all on the heads with the outrigger booms and pontoons (deadly much more than any amount of waves), so we had to be constantly wary.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not the actual boat, but pretty darn close.</td></tr>
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So after a few minutes of shouting at the gods for our lost gear, which turned out to be about 10 thousand dollars worth collectively (no wonder the natives are convinced we are just cash cows walking around waiting to be milked....), we began to think more naturally of survival and just trying to get life started again. One of our group, Gayle of Australia, was a trained rescue swimmer, and she immediately began assessing the situation and the hazards therein. "Is everyone OK? she asked, after we had all finished with the Shit! word. We all reported in, except Diana, the Argentine's wife, who said with a shaking voice, "I can't swim...". She was all right for the moment, clinging to a board that had fallen out of the boat. Gayle swam over and began cracking jokes, like the most natural thing in the world, as if she had just walked out on the stage in Vegas. This amazed me, because it calmed Diana, and all of us, and then I remembered that Panic is always the main enemy in "Nature vs. Man" kind of situations.<br />
Gayle was so good at this, and at shepherding Diana to safety, that she completely left out any consideration to her own belongings, none of which had surfaced (in fact she returned to shore without a single possession, but later got all of them back). By now about half a dozen bags were bobbing in the waves with us, and most of us began collecting them and shepherding them like little sheep, keeping them from drifting, or god forbid, sinking. My own bag floated almost like a buoy; It had always been so heavy when I carried it, even I was mystified to see it bobbing on the waves. <br />
Later I discovered that one of my obsessions had kept the bag afloat; not through telekinetic will power, but hermetically sealed bags of green coffee beans. A coffee freak friend of mine had mentioned that I was passing through one of the world famous coffee growing regions, <a href="http://www.peets.com/coffee/by-region/coffee-shop-by-category-indo-pacific/sulawesi-kalosi.html">Kalosi </a>coffee, and so I had done a bit of investigating, and discovered this little grinding/roasting factory outlet there, and honestly, one of my best memories of my travels, olfactory wise, was the moment I opened a barrel of their roasted beans and stuck my entire head in and breathed, as the flavors and colors danced around me.....<br />
These reveries were really not happening at that time; these are all later reconstructions, in those adrenaline minutes, as we floated out there helplessly, there were a series of steps that we were taking, probably typical in the first minutes after a wreck:<br />
1. People identifying the situation they were in. (In Diana's case, a life and death kind of thing; for us, figuring out how much immediate danger we were in (medium), how much likelihood our 'things' had in this situation (little to none), and how many game plans we had left (one or possibly two- we appeared to be drifting back towards an island, but there was no way of knowing which way the currents would take us)<br />
2. Attempting to flip the boat back over- on the face of it, a splendid idea. But according to mariners I consulted, idiotic. This outrigger seemed happiest when upside down, especially since our former roof was now serving as an excellent keel. We wasted what could have been crucial energy and life force trying to rock the pontoons back to the upright position.<br />
3. Standing on the struts and waving and yelling all at the same time- an excellent idea. It didn't seem to work for the Gilligan's Islanders, but it worked wonders for us. A boat about three times larger than our boat saw us, and came around in a large circle. When they came near, THEY nearly flipped over, and judging by the captain's ashen expression, we had better haul our buns quickly aboard. I added a few new barnacle razor scrapes to my already museum-quality collection as I scrambled aboard.<br />
When we got back to shore , to the small town capital of the Togeans, aptly named "Togean", there was a small crowd assembled to greet what may have been the first shipwreck that year (or possibly that month). A kindly soul loaned us their house, and most importantly big barrels of freshwater to wash the salt out of our bodies, clothes, and belongings, and we turned their backyard into an impromptu drying rack. Hundreds of paper folding money bills, weighted down by rocks, clothes laid out to dry in the sun, on racks, made for a bizarre scene something like what I imagine an airplane disaster scene after ten Obsessive Compulsive people had been at work there.<br />
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As we toiled and grumbled about our recent misfortunes, we were looking at the very dock from which we had taken off; the Alpha of our disaster. Like a dream, we saw the same people leading four MORE hapless foreigners, loaded down with backpacks, electronics , and possessions, into an identical boat to ours, as if they were preparing to make a new sacrifice to Poseidon, since the last had been thwarted. We all dropped what we were doing, and frantically ran to the edge of the water, waving our hands and shouting at the new lambs. "Hey, DON'T GET ON THAT FUCKING BOAT" is what I think most of us shouted. The foreigners looked at us like we were crazy, and continued to load their things. </div>
El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-5180097591445496232012-08-28T17:16:00.001-07:002014-07-07T18:52:38.139-07:00Coming to Terms<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q1nO5d_3S3c/UDy-_UPlQ7I/AAAAAAAAAVg/nqwUDVfj7EE/s1600/kelly+creek+mist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q1nO5d_3S3c/UDy-_UPlQ7I/AAAAAAAAAVg/nqwUDVfj7EE/s320/kelly+creek+mist.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Morning on Kelly Creek in the Clearwater National Forest</td></tr>
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<i>"There are strange things done 'neath the midnight sun</i><br />
<i>By the men who moil for gold..."</i><br />
The Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert Service, my father's favorite poet.<br />
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When Dad first asked me to sprinkle his ashes in the Bitterroot mountains of Idaho, I didn't wan't to talk about it. Fear of death, the unapproachable subject. It was an odd moment we two were sitting around the table; it came out of the blue, or so I thought. Maybe he had long been working up to this request; all I remember is that the topic of his passing hadn't been broached, and he didn't even intimate that his health was failing until a few years later when it was written quite plainly on his withered frame.<br />
So it was that I put it quite out of my mind, and this summer, fully two years after he left his body on the floor of that house, it was with some dread that I approached this task that I had been clearly appointed to. It's not as if I don't like hiking and camping: I adore them, and this was clearly the reason I had been chosen. It's just that there was something of facing up to myself; because although the concept of death was not the focus here, but rather what we make of our lives when a significant influence- in this case, a crutch for my weakness of character, I'd always felt- is suddenly removed.<br />
At first I must confess I felt a little threatened when all of my siblings and even their families wanted to get involved with this project. I felt I had been singled out by him to do this, as an honor and also as the sole adjudicator of this part of his verbal will. At that point I couldn't see all the positives in the form of support and reinforcement that such group participation would bring; I just looked at it as some form of annoying 'horning in on my thing'.<br />
It was the first time I had been forced to rethink the very nature of this project. From the time after the funeral when I lifted the cardboard box of ashes - so much heavier than I had imagined - my mental picture of this adventure began to change, and evolved over the next two years as various plans hatched and faded away.<br />
I'm not sure what it was, but something told me that this summer had to be the one. As a sugar coating to what by now was seeming like a bitter pill to me, I promised myself a bike trip to sandwich this experience with positive feeling. Things began to happen almost as soon as I landed. An older friend, and more experienced than myself with death and dying, told me I was in for a treat, that it was one of the better hiking locations in North America (which proved to be true). Another friend who also had said goodbye to four people in the last three years reminded me to be mindful when I performed the act, not to let the act be meaningless or hollow, since it was as much for me as for the person I had promised to do it for.<br />
Then my brother pulled out, which actually made it a much smaller and more easily managed operation, since three less people would be involved. Two nephews and a niece had expressed strong interest in the project, and another nephew was added around the time of my brother's cancellation, making us a merry band of five hobbits setting off into the forest. I was a little uneasy at the last change, since I felt I didn't know this last nephew very well at all. But so much had changed and transmogrified in just the last week that it seemed that one needed to go with the flow if one was to ever leave Bag-end at all, to paraphrase Tolkien.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GUhb-6gvMno/UDy_bx3lzPI/AAAAAAAAAVo/ELInanSwu_o/s1600/nephews.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GUhb-6gvMno/UDy_bx3lzPI/AAAAAAAAAVo/ELInanSwu_o/s320/nephews.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My new crew: Nephews Joe, Arlen, and John Michael</td></tr>
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I arrived in the hometown, after a brisk drive from the Portland airport to the hometown (Pendleton) with two of the nephews, one of whom I hadn't seen since before the funeral. The remaining nephew was mustered; the niece having been banned by her brothers for lack of a proper babysitter for her two year old; and suddenly and almost miraculously we were on the road, thankfully not forgetting the ashes behind us. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BFqHpsDmPYU/UDy_vJ5phzI/AAAAAAAAAVw/D4_QwxtU-sY/s1600/joe+and+arlen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BFqHpsDmPYU/UDy_vJ5phzI/AAAAAAAAAVw/D4_QwxtU-sY/s320/joe+and+arlen.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mornings at 3500 feet tended to the chilly side</td></tr>
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Even from the first few hours, it was obvious that this journey would not be one of massive contemplation, solitudinous pensiveness or inner reflection. An old hiker turned green by city living, accompanied by three young men eager for experience were setting out for the mountains, and the weight of this factor shaped our experience more than any custom or social expectation of ash ceremony could possibly have. <br />
We did what a normal group of men would normally do in such circumstances. We did not form a solemn procession with the ashes in a special bier. We played Texas Holdem and swatted tenacious horseflies off each other; we sipped rum and chuffed Cuban cigars around the campfire, which blazed away under a sky afire with starlight, the likes of which none of us had seen in quite some time.<br />
I did not escape completely from any meaningful contemplation, however. It occurred to me, almost from the first step of so many along that gentle, smooth trail along the side of Kelly creek, that this 'mission' was not a mission at all- but rather a set of instructions to follow, a formula for a certain kind of experience which was guaranteed to bring about or unlock an insight. Dad was guiding me to discover a hidden secret- in these mountains and in the experience they were sure to bring, was a side of him I had never seen. I was rediscovering the father of <i>his </i>youth - not mine- and was granted a feeling of what it must have been like to be him, before fatherhood, before marriage and responsibility chained him to a desk in an unpleasant office far removed from these emerald walls of paradise.<br />
I could not help feeling that surely my father would have traded stories around this very campfire, would have shared the rum, would have dealt the cards and even chuffed the stogie. None of these things, in fact, were things I had really done before with any panache, and yet they felt natural- and enjoyable- to all of us, as if we were born to do these things. This feeling of near-possession didn't stop with our outdoorsy woodsman behavior; it also became evident when we came to the question of the remains.<br />
My original understanding is that I was to go to Kelly's thumb and 'sprinkle' the ashes there. When Dad had told me about the mission in the first place, we were in the living room, where a painting of the mountain in question had hung for nearly two decades. So it was manifest to me for many years that I had to find the place 'of the painting' or 'in the painting' and put it there.<br />
We carried a digital copy of the painting, and showed it to the nice lady at the reception of the Ranger Station in Orofino nearby. She recognized the mount, and even expressed admiration for the painting (I later resolved to donate the painting to the station, since she would make sure it hung in a nice, prominent place). When we rounded a bend in the trail two days after that, we came upon a very similar version of that viewpoint. We stopped and began to compare our picture with the vista, and concluded that the picture must have been painted from a closer (impossible, since it would be a point in space) and higher-up point of view. The way up the mountainside was blocked by new growth pine trees, and severely dense undergrowth. My conclusion was that the painter must have been here when the present mountain (next to the one in the painting) was bald , perhaps during a forest fire, and that he was in that position whilst either fighting a fire , or resting at one of the lookout towers which must have dotted the landscape back then (many of them have been replaced by electronic gadgets or made obsolete by satellite, I'm guessing).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jyIQdsdrO1w/UDzAFw5UkVI/AAAAAAAAAV4/aiPqq3RUcpU/s1600/blue+flowers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jyIQdsdrO1w/UDzAFw5UkVI/AAAAAAAAAV4/aiPqq3RUcpU/s320/blue+flowers.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I started to see the beauty around me</td></tr>
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So it began that the original idea, of some special place to put the ashes, began to degrade, and while we spilled a good portion of them on that exact spot, it became really clear to me that what father actually meant by 'Kelly's Thumb' was not the peak, nor the mountain, nor even the painting, but the <i>experience </i>itself..the <i>whole experience of camping in this forest </i>was what he meant, for it was this experience was what brought us close to his 'salad days' of hiking and working these forests, these pleasant green vistas that brought a feeling of peace and beauty to any and all who were lucky enough to see them. <br />
We began to distribute his remains all over this park, concentrating on the experience instead of a more left-brained idea of what 'location' entails. We sprinkled him in the beautiful, clear , Kelly creek (was I named for this? I remember he told me he had a friend that he named me for...). We found an amazing orchard of huckleberries, a fruit so magical that surely it must be the fruit of the faeries and the forest folk...so some of the remains went to nourish the future crops. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oKxNuMCL3XU/UDzAZpvskRI/AAAAAAAAAWA/jt5ab804JiM/s1600/outfitter's+tent.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oKxNuMCL3XU/UDzAZpvskRI/AAAAAAAAAWA/jt5ab804JiM/s320/outfitter's+tent.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">an old fashioned campaign tent</td></tr>
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We found, at the foot of Kelly's thumb itself, a peaceful and inviting mountain meadow, so pure and aboriginal, that we all felt surely that Grandpa (as my nephews called him) would have been at home and in his element, whether it was the settled and sedentary later-years Grandpa, or the early young-and-restless Grandpa that we never truly knew. Near the meadows was also a seasonal camp setup, the old-timey kind with the cotton canvas tents, compleat with pot belly stove and real beds (cots, but they look like beds when you've been sleeping on the ground)...that sort of seemed like the camps of Grandpa's stories of<i> the early days</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RxuEOg7Mz-A/UD1egGaXqrI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/mODIkJmVPVo/s1600/kelly+creek+bear+creek+meadow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RxuEOg7Mz-A/UD1egGaXqrI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/mODIkJmVPVo/s320/kelly+creek+bear+creek+meadow.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">the meadow at confluence of Kelly Creek and Bear Cub Creek- <br />
over the ridge is Montana and the waters that flow to the Atlantic Ocean</td></tr>
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This idea of Grandpa was a little bit of a new one for me, as well. Not only was I sharing the mission I thought was mine and mine alone, I soon discovered that I had been sharing my Dad with others for whom he was <i>Gramps</i>- and they had a whole trove of stories of interactions with him that soon had me feeling a twinge of jealousy- in fact, my father had gone on to love an entire another generation of youngsters besides me, a fact I simply had to accept under the rubric of maturity. Not only was I connecting with pre-me Grandpa, but also another version corresponding to the post-me after I had grown.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NhlOzFDLd4k/UD1e13IQsOI/AAAAAAAAAWY/MYc9hGzo5XE/s1600/dusky+end+of+trip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NhlOzFDLd4k/UD1e13IQsOI/AAAAAAAAAWY/MYc9hGzo5XE/s320/dusky+end+of+trip.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
At the end of the road was the realization that we had come here to this green alpine valley, not in search of a final resting place, but in search of a part of ourselves that we barely knew was there. Guiding and helping us to get there were the last instructions of this man that we shared in common; the recipe was as simple as waking up in the morning, packing your bag, and trudging upward, ever upward, to greener and more pristine vistas, cleaner and cleaner air, less humans and more animals and plants. If this isn't an ascent toward heaven, then I don't know what is.El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-38577596403395240212012-04-12T21:06:00.002-07:002012-04-12T21:16:07.172-07:00Dude, what happened to your Iphone? And your arm....?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SakDcvgsE8k/T4ei1CBRQ9I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/PW2Ssm0Ioig/s1600/broken+iphone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SakDcvgsE8k/T4ei1CBRQ9I/AAAAAAAAAQ4/PW2Ssm0Ioig/s1600/broken+iphone.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"> "Dude, what happened to your I-phone screen?" "Oh, that. It fell out of a hammock at 35 kilometers an hour..."</div><div class="MsoNormal"> This is really not a story about hammocks, or I-phones, although it does mention them. This is a story about an insidious tree called a Mangrove.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2kyRlAW5_zA/T4em7CeJKVI/AAAAAAAAARo/qGZa-UcFCCU/s1600/mangrove.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="154" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2kyRlAW5_zA/T4em7CeJKVI/AAAAAAAAARo/qGZa-UcFCCU/s200/mangrove.gif" width="200" /></a></div> If you've heard of mangroves before, you are probably in one of two camps: A. you know it has something to do with river deltas or swampy things. B. you did a post-doctorate internship in one of Costa Ricas national parks where you studied the lifecycle of saline environments, and you could write a 100 page summary of mangroves esssential role in maintaining a delicate ecosystem.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I'm not really that interested in either, because I nearly lost my life <b><i>to</i></b> a Mangrove forest. That's right; I said the trees were trying to <b><i>eat me</i>,</b> and I'm about to prove it to you.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> It all started innocently enough when I decided to take a 'shortcut' between Buffalo Bay Beach and Ao Yai Beach in Koh Phayam, which is a lovely, almost 90's style undeveloped island looking directly across the border to the Burmese Maiek Archipelago in the Andaman sea (due east of Calcutta). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D7LZjn1e3Og/T4ekXuSHrYI/AAAAAAAAARA/tR4QdKsGS1I/s1600/koh+phayam.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D7LZjn1e3Og/T4ekXuSHrYI/AAAAAAAAARA/tR4QdKsGS1I/s320/koh+phayam.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"> On the map, these two beaches are separated by a peninsula which juts out less than a kilometer, and I was at the extreme end of Buffalo Bay where it nearly, save this peninsula, stretches out to touch Ao Yai. So on the tourist map there is a little dotted line connecting them, and itself is less than a kilometer.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> So I followed the beach path until it sort of petered out; it looked as if a new property owner was setting up his fenceline, judging by all the cement posts in a line, waiting for the rest of the fence. I followed the property line, hoping to catch a glimpse of this legendary trail, about which I had also heard rumors.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> At the end of the very last concrete fencepost, I still hadn't located a trail. But I could see very clearly through the mangrove forest which began just at its edge, so I was tempted to just follow a straight path into them using the sun as a compass. </div><div class="MsoNormal"> Mangrove forests are very easy to look through, since they have very dense 'knees', or root systems which stick out like flying buttresses from their trunks, but above that, the trunk is branchless for about three or four meters. So if you are in a mangrove forest, at low tide, the knees come up to about waist or chest level.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-51NkvuvuFbM/T4ekgV6GlyI/AAAAAAAAARI/WlyaWnRcOxQ/s1600/mangroves01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-51NkvuvuFbM/T4ekgV6GlyI/AAAAAAAAARI/WlyaWnRcOxQ/s320/mangroves01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"> It was, in fact, low tide, and the trees were spaced about five meters apart, so that when I entered the forest, I was merely winding my way through them, stepping carefully on the oozy mudflats. After about twenty minutes, the trees got more and more dense, so that I had to squeeze between them, and then finally really packed in tightly, so that I had to either duck under the knee roots (for really big trees) or clamber over them (for smaller ones).</div><div class="MsoNormal">It wasn't until I had been making my Indiana Jones adventure style jungle traverse for about an hour before I looked back and realized that I was now completely surrounded by a Mangrove forest; that it was just one species from here as far as I could see. Reasoning that the one kilometer must be at least reduced to two -thirds by now, I continued on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> It was then that I had my first realization about the nature of mangrove forests. They grow along the shore, because they can handle the salt water; and in fact they seem to thrive where lots of streams and tidal cuts run inland from the shore. So it was just such a stream or tidal cut that I encountered in my first hour of what was to later become an ordeal. I decided to take off my money belt, containing cash dollars, Thai baht, my passport and watch, and sling it around my shoulders. I was also carrying a flimsy 3rd world plastic bag into which had been heaped a hammock I just bought, the map, and by now my tank top shirt, for I was sweating from all the knee-clambering already.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bKPFYQI8DaI/T4ekobNOYVI/AAAAAAAAARQ/-qLEivF8N6U/s1600/Mangrove_stilt_roots_Costa_Rica_DP10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bKPFYQI8DaI/T4ekobNOYVI/AAAAAAAAARQ/-qLEivF8N6U/s320/Mangrove_stilt_roots_Costa_Rica_DP10.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"> This first foray into the water proved to be something of a small disaster. The mudflats gave way to alluvial, two feet thick mud that was unsteady as grounding, so I naturally had to lower myself into the actually quite steep rivulet with the aid of one of the mangrove knees. The water was quite opaque, being brackish and the color of the mud itself. I felt the coolness of the water on my sweaty, greasy skin and it was a relief at first. Then I nearly fell, and grabbed underwater for stability on one of the mangrove roots. When I raised my arm from the water, it was streaming; no- gushing- blood.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7woGyb5BgyA/T4elNJR_H1I/AAAAAAAAARY/bW7yVmb7YQQ/s1600/google.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="121" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7woGyb5BgyA/T4elNJR_H1I/AAAAAAAAARY/bW7yVmb7YQQ/s320/google.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">I had passed my forearm across a small colony of razor clams, which apparently were attached to the roots of the mangrove below the waterline. I looked at the cuts; only one of which was seriously deep and would need medical attention, possibly stitches...later I realized that it missed a vein by about a centimeter and that is why I am here now to tell this story. The cuts were numerous, however, so it made a much deeper impression on my psyche to see the blood streaming from so many sources. I washed off the wounds by dipping my arm back in the dirty water, at the same time wondering if there were any species here that might see me as prey. As far as I could see, the only moving things I had to worry about were crabs and possibly mosquitoes, which strangely had not been a concern up until this time.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> On the other side of the bank I determined to make a very hard push to get to the other side of the mangrove forest, where my bungalow, a fifth of Burmese rum, and sympathetic friends would all be awaiting me. So I ignored the bleeding arm, hoping it would stop soon, and pushed on through the thicket of knees.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PW3dT1aWkNE/T4elua-EMtI/AAAAAAAAARg/DK2-MN3VWV4/s1600/mandalay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PW3dT1aWkNE/T4elua-EMtI/AAAAAAAAARg/DK2-MN3VWV4/s200/mandalay.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"> Things just got worse. I now realized that not only was this central part of the mangrove forest more thick than the outskirts had been, it was also ten times more difficult to traverse. There was a mix of young, old, dying and half dying trees all side by side, so that now, traversing them meant climbing up on the knees, then reaching out for the trunk of the next tree, and half-leaping across to the rickety knees of that tree. Unfortunately this could be disastrous if the tree was old, half rotten or otherwise dying, since the trunk might be stable enough, but an old half rotten knee would give way and bring me crashing down. More than once I reached out with my leg to test a knee, then hear it crunch and give way, while I pulled my leg back.</div><div class="MsoNormal">I should also mention that I was not at my physical peak. Not only have I gotten older than I can ever remember being, but I also had a sports accident where both biceps tendons were ripped off the bone, and had to be stapled back on with surgery. This was just six months prior, and the doctor had cleared me for 'normal activity ', by which I suppose he meant bathing myself, washing dishes, carrying a backpack with a few books, not lunging through a half rotten murderous mangrove forest, clinging like a monkey to the few good limbs left, my hammock by now suspended doggy style in my mouth, the map long gone, the t-shirt floated away on the stream. No, I didn't suppose that it was normal behavior, but I was quickly approaching the point where this was just survival, to preserve the whole organism I must risk the parts, right?</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I took stock of my situation. I had been slogging through this forest now for about two hours, though my digital watch had taken a soaking and now had this black ooze slowly eating up the time display. My heart, however, was ticking along just fine, in fact I was keenly aware of it, as if it were beating outside of my ribcage, and it was then I realized I had a dangerously high heartbeat, somewhere in the 200 beats/minute region, a speed I had only ever achieved before with adrenaline. I was, I realized, in the state of mind in which people grow confused and make bad decisions leading to their death. In fact, all I needed was to fall through a rotten knee and put my eye out with a broken root, in order to be that much closer to incapacitated and doomed to die in this miserable tree-hell.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I took time to catch my breath and let my heart slow down, trying hard to grab the reins of my runaway paranoia; If I could get control of my mind, I at least had a fighting chance of getting out of this with minor injuries, as I would surely see my still bleeding arm. I looked down at my legs and realized that they had also miraculously escaped a break, sprain or ligamental tear, since every time I stepped on a branch that either wobbled out of the way or came crashing down, my ankles had been subjected to the worst sort of multi-stick squeezing, scraping, and thwacking, and my ankle area was now bleeding and bruised and looked even worse than the razor clam cuts. Worst of all, it was getting dark and I would soon lose the only advantage I had; the sun was both illumination and direction finding for me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Considering my situation carefully I realized the folly of my original quest; that it was now time for an all-out-push to return to simply the place from which I came. Thinking even more carefully, I realized that it was actually the waterways which presented the easiest way of moving through this impossible pick-up-sticks forest. True, there were the deadly razor clams to contend with, but if I proceeded more slowly and carefully avoided the roots underwater, I could avoid them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> So I realized that probably the most important thing, after my life and well being, was the functioning of my phone, so I took the iphone out, wrapped it in many layers of hammock, and slung the hammock in a high branch well above the high tide line. If I survived this I could at least return at high tide in a boat, and hopefully there wouldn't be other conditions (a torrential rain, a human who could somehow come here to salvage it? no, it seemed impossible) that would ruin it. I found a broken branch about three meters long, broken down to two, made a good stabilization/depth tester for the water which was now well at chest level as I eased myself into the water, hoping that blood-smelling sharks would never dream of coming so far inland...</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I headed upstream, since it was back in the general direction of whence I came. After losing my shoes several times to the nearly two feet of soft, oozy mud in some places, I came to another split in the stream, and as it veered off to the left, it looked as if possibly there might be some grass growing between the mangroves, and even enough space to easily get between the trees. I squeezed my way up on the bank, feeling hopeful but not daring to think this was the way out until, about a meter from the bank, I glimpsed what was at the time the most beautiful thing I thought I had ever seen: <b><i>Human garbage</i></b>. All in a <i>pile</i>. Think about it....<b><i>human garbage</i></b>. <b><i>Someone</i></b> had put that there.....and that someone had come by road or trail.....</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g7GsIECAtiQ/T4eoJ13iFUI/AAAAAAAAAR4/zCq4fE2WJTE/s1600/garbage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g7GsIECAtiQ/T4eoJ13iFUI/AAAAAAAAAR4/zCq4fE2WJTE/s320/garbage.jpg" width="320" /></a> It was an unusual stroke of luck. I had found the single best, shortest route back to where I had begun this ordeal. I looked at the watch, whose display was now totally eaten up by the black ooze. Useless. I decided I had enough strength and wits to go back for the hammock and iphone, and when I got the iphone back safely on the dry garbage bank, I realized that the whole ordeal had lasted just under four hours, I had probably lost several kilos in sweat alone, and my top speed I modestly estimated at one hundred meters per hour through the forest.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> Thinking these things distracted me from all the pain my body was giving me; ankles smarted from all the scratching and beating they had taken in their crashing journey to the mudflats criss crossed with treacherous mangrove roots, alive, dead and half rotten. I was determined not to look at the worst gash until I reached the clinic or hospital of the island, which I prayed would be open and not subject to some perverse siesta hours.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> I passed a few foreigners on foot, and too much in shock and dazed, I continued on, thinking that I could return to the last place I had taken a Thai massage a little further on, and seek help there in reaching the clinic. Half an hour later, there was no one there, and it was the victim of a siesta tsunami, since neither were guests visible in the guest houses below. I used the bathroom to wash a few things with slightly cleaner water than the swamp and continued on. Before long I reached a place where a thai man was laying in a hammock while a fire burned nearby. He immediately jumped up and helped me, but said he couldn't take me to the hospital, 'because he was sick' - apparently suffering a bad fever himself, he just gave me a lift to the next house, where he gave orders to take me to the hospital, and somewhat ironically having taken care of me, he ran back to his motorcycle and retreated in the direction of his hammock.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> On the road to the hospital, with my new chauffeur, I heard a terrible clattering sound, and as we both looked back, I glimpsed my iphone on the road. I got off, ran back and retrieved it. The plastic screen shield had kept all the glass from falling out and further penetrating the LCD screen, so weirdly, it still worked. Maybe the phone was just being sympathetic; I had also nearly lost my eyes, my life, but for just the kind of luck that prevents a small accident from snowballing and becoming a truly large catastrophe, I had been spared.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> The doctors and nurses in the clinic couldn't understand the story I tried to relate to them. They had seen a hundred motorcycle accidents that looked something like I did, maybe if the rider had been catapulted into the bushes, but when I drew very ridiculous and childish drawings of clams, accompanied by probably culturally inappropriate hand motions of clams opening and closing, their eyes just went wider. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-30pDmA5OFE4/T4en58LyuUI/AAAAAAAAARw/_kqox9NRoIM/s1600/Drawing,-Clam-Beach-2007-co.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="198" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-30pDmA5OFE4/T4en58LyuUI/AAAAAAAAARw/_kqox9NRoIM/s200/Drawing,-Clam-Beach-2007-co.gif" width="200" /></a></div> Further drawings of mangroves and their nasty knees produced more confusion, but finally when a nurse with slightly better English came in, the word 'clam' at least got translated into something they could understand, and, unable to make any more sense of the issue, they gave up...in fact, in the following days when I returned there to change the bandages, I sensed that I had some kind of 'celebrity status', the man with the mystery accident.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><o:p> To be continued....</o:p></div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-7104395900244880212011-07-01T18:53:00.000-07:002011-07-01T18:53:19.236-07:00A Gothic Tale of Feral Cats...My neighborhood is plagued with feral cats; many neighborhoods of this country are, as pet abandonment is as prevalent as rice over here. My house is sort of a magnet for the roving cat gangs, since I have nice balcony ledges which make nice launching/landing pads for inter-house leaps.<br />
The other night I came home, actually it was just pre-dusk, but a little bit darkish, and while climbing the steep stairs that lead out of the darkened garden up to my top-floor of the 3 story house, when out of the corner of my eye I spy what seems to be a squashed rat. Not wanting to directly 'see' this horror, I kept moving, but as I entered my house, my brain continued to churn the image over and over; it seemed like there had definately been squiggly guts all over, and the creature was splayed out like a dead dog.<br />
Now all I could think about was that, how I was looking at a major cleanup job, and that I had no shovel, only a one-foot midget broom, that would probably need itself to be cleaned or thrown away. Plus there would be gore and the smell, depending on how long I procrastinated.<br />
I decided to put it out of my mind. I would find a way, somehow. Maybe the neighbors whose door it was closer to would man up and do the job. But no, I'd seen dogshit right in front of their door and they did nothing. They were hopeless. But maybe a rapacious cat, not necessarily the mother, would eat the damn thing...it was meat, after all. Don't cats eat weird shit like dogs do?<br />
So after just letting all these thoughts fester in my mind for a while, and trying to busy myself to keep those images out, I had to go out again for shopping. This time I assiduously avoided any direct gaze, but again, in order to avoid stepping on the thing, I had to catch at least a part of it out of the corner of my eye.<br />
Hurrying out of my house, my mind began reprocessing the eyecorner image, like Nasa scientists poring over the latest shots of Mars...actually my incessantly morbid mind was now coming to a new conclusion; those squiggly bits were not guts splayed, but actually it was a stillborn cat fetus, and the squiggly thing was umbilical cord, and the non squiggly bit must have been a placenta. I'm not sure the idea of a stillborn fetus was any less unsettling than a squashed rat, but somehow at least the idea of cleanup began to appear more cheerful.<br />
I stayed out shopping an unusually long time, not wanting to have to go home and deal with the fetal removal by cruelly short broom implement....Somehow in the back of my mind I kept clinging to the 'roving scavenger' theory- although in all my time in Seoul I had never witnessed an eagle or a hawk, I was never more ready to witness a raptor swooping in than now, sort of like people in North Dakota waiting to see the UFO's....<br />
So on the way back in my house it was dark, and I had to get my little red keychain light out, had to be very careful not to squash the fetus, or I would be back to square one on the cleanup nightmare. So I stepped gingerly through the garden, and this time it was almost impossible not to look directly at the pile of meat on my step, if I wanted to be sure to avoid stepping on it, plus the spotlight effect of the light in the dark, and then i shit my pants.....<br />
<br />
THE THING WAS MOVING! A little head reared in the red light like a demon from hell....<br />
<br />
I rushed back upstairs to pour myself a whiskey. Now I really had a mess- I have to 'put it out of its misery AND clean it up! I sat there for an hour, thinking hard about how NOT to think about this...maybe a nighttime scavenger would still come and eat the thing, but I really hoped it didn't make a mess or even a horrorific sound as it did so....<br />
<br />
About an hour later, I stumbled down the stairs to re-assess the situation, prepared for the worst, and the kitten was gone! Apparently the mother had just chosen the WORLD'S WORST NEWBORN PARKING spot while she recovered from partum- I remembered that cats are always doing that, moving their babies all over Shit-dom.<br />
<br />
Later after the second whiskey back in my house, I realized I had missed my chance....now there was one more feral cat in my neighborhood....El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-43480077746886718852011-06-03T20:18:00.000-07:002011-06-03T20:25:24.361-07:00NAKED Breakfast Experiment.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wjiAe6Ht_xg/TemljOsf1YI/AAAAAAAAAMk/H8NzuMsOATo/s1600/naked+brekkie+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="191" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wjiAe6Ht_xg/TemljOsf1YI/AAAAAAAAAMk/H8NzuMsOATo/s320/naked+brekkie+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>I remember learning, a long time ago in school of some sort, that the difference between Naked and Nude was that Nude meant you had <i>intended</i> to be seen naked, as in Nude beaches, Nude art, etc. Naked was a synonym of unprotected where the viewer's gaze was unwelcome and even uninvited. <br />
I found little evidence of this distinction remaining in my breakfast experiment this morning, where a <a href="http://www.mysuncoast.com/s/YXW7Ayy8SUumrrrzng0WYw.cspx">recent news blurb from wacky Florida </a>got me thinking: Is there a gender distinction when we say Naked Man/Naked Woman or Nude Man/Nude Woman?<br />
As is often the case with Breakfast Experiments, asking the question simply opened up deeper questions :<br />
Experimental Proceedure:<br />
Coffee: 100 g. of Panama 'Boquete' green beans was open flame-roasted in a skillet three days prior to the experiment and set aside. On the morning of the experiment, an aliquot of the same beans were ground and extracted with boiling H2O using a crude beaker/filter arrangement. Milk and sugar were titrated generously in preparation for the next phase.<br />
Data: A web portal-search engine service known as "Google" was consulted for the four combinations of phrases, both with and without quotation marks to act as controls. <br />
Perusal of the headlines often led to some amusing/ironic examples such as<br />
"<b>Man Caught Making Coffee Naked in His Home</b>." (wait, can they see me through internet?), as well as some disturbing examples, such as: <br />
"<b>Naked Sultan Woman Waving Severed Dog's Head Arrested and...</b>" -in such instances as the latter, coffee was diluted with single-malt whiskey to help assimilate the information. The author will leave it to the reader to fill in the ellipsis.<br />
<br />
The results are shown in Table 3, below:<br />
<br />
<table border="1" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0"><colgroup><col width="64*"></col> <col width="64*"></col> <col width="64*"></col> <col width="64*"></col> </colgroup><tbody>
<tr valign="TOP"> <td width="25%">Gender</td> <td width="25%">“Man”</td> <td width="25%">“Woman”</td> <td width="25%">Ratio</td> </tr>
<tr valign="TOP"> <td width="25%">Naked X arrested</td> <td width="25%">4,600,000</td> <td width="25%">1,800,000</td> <td width="25%">39%</td> </tr>
<tr valign="TOP"> <td width="25%">Nude X arrested</td> <td width="25%">6,320,000</td> <td width="25%">1,630,000</td> <td width="25%">25%</td> </tr>
<tr valign="TOP"> <td width="25%">“Naked X arrested” (with quotes)</td> <td width="25%">1,410,000</td> <td width="25%">416,000</td> <td width="25%">29.5%</td> </tr>
<tr valign="TOP"> <td width="25%">“Nude X arrested”(with quotes)</td> <td width="25%">268,000</td> <td width="25%">93,400</td> <td width="25%">34%</td> </tr>
</tbody></table><br />
What is interesting is that, consistently, there are about 3 to 4 Naked or Nude Men for every Naked/Nude woman. Curiously, this confirms the author's casual observations on nude beaches at various locations around the world. The question that it arouses, however, is whether this gender differential is more of a language, cultural, social, or biological function. That is, are there actually more Nude/Naked men arrested <i>because</i> they are <i>naked</i>, or <i>because</i> they are <i>men</i>? Another way of phrasing this is, Do more men than women <i>get naked</i> in public in the first place, or is it more illegal for a man to be naked in public?<br />
<br />
<br />
Any thoughts on the reasons behind this phenom? or is it just an artifact?El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-34727742171221065272010-11-27T21:27:00.000-08:002010-11-27T21:29:59.343-08:00another WTF moment from Google maps....swimming pools IN the DMZ?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/TPHnY6LY78I/AAAAAAAAAMQ/JD75oKLxYvI/s1600/swimmin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="181" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/TPHnY6LY78I/AAAAAAAAAMQ/JD75oKLxYvI/s320/swimmin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>recently while looking at North Korea on Google, I found what appears to be not one, but two giant swimming pools on the South Korean side of the DMZ....they look nicer (e.g. emptier) than anything else in the republic....maybe I should sign up for the army so I don't have to bump elbows in the pool all the time...<br />
Google gave the address as San 168 Jajak-ri, Jangnam-myeon, Yeoncheon-gun, Gyeonggi-do but I think you'll have better luck with the coordinates. (37.991794,126.840302 ) The two pools are literally 'across the street' from the DMZ (that denuded border running along the north of them is the southern limit of the 'strip' aka The No Man Zone, which also allegedly has deer and other mammalian fauna pretty much extinct in the two Koreas...El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-86169667503412024142010-11-26T00:05:00.000-08:002010-11-26T00:21:21.163-08:00Non zero sum games, Relativity, and other ramblings....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/TO9sioeRdoI/AAAAAAAAAMM/rAc2yGeGR5Q/s1600/homefront+screencap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/TO9sioeRdoI/AAAAAAAAAMM/rAc2yGeGR5Q/s320/homefront+screencap.jpg" width="204" /></a></div>I haven't posted in some time, but the recent rumblings of warmongering in the north (Yong Pyeong Island, 2 minutes by artillery shell from my house) have given me some <i>momenti mori</i>, and reminded me that it might be my last chance to blog (I know, it's a waste of one's last moments)....<br />
Recently in class we were covering a chapter about the environment (titled "Carbon Footprint"), which was actually a lot of fun to do with Chemistry and Engineering majors, since they actually are studying Thermodynamics and Entropy <i>in English</i> and actually 'understand' that our options are severely limited as we pass into the period of Peak Oil...it boils down to that the best battery we've ever known, millions of years of solar energy built into Carbon single and double bonds in the form of dead flora/dinosaurs trapped under the earth, is running out.<br />
If the age of Industrialism and Post Modernism could be said to be limited only by imagination, increasingly we must concede that we are being limited by resources; space, energy, water, etc. These sorts of limitations naturally lend themselves to the stringent qualities of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma">Prisoner's dilemma</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_war_game">The Peace-War game</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_commons">dilemma of the Commons</a>, and so forth. While I don't want to go into the nitty gritty of the P. dilemma here, what interests me is that precisely it becomes more relevant as we run into resource limitations here on this planet.<br />
How does Relativity come into all of this? Well, it seemed to me that just as two people cannot observe the same phenomenon in exactly the same way unless they are in the same reference frame, so we humans seem unable to observe the world from another person's viewpoint, or more importantly, from the external viewpoint of what is best for the human race, namely to avert a self-created climate change disaster scenario. This larger dilemma is repeated in so many micro dilemmas, such as the one which confronts this country and their more aggressive brothers to the north.<br />
<br />
<b>Best case scenario 1</b>: nothing significant will happen. North Korea will achieve its mysterious goals of either garnering the West's attention, achieving greater internal solidarity, or the successful coronation of a new prince (Kim Jong Eun)in the dynasty. Or, they will attack in a similar manner a few weeks or months down the road. (I give this one more than 80% probability)<br />
<b>Best case scenario 2</b> (from a Hollywood film, actually <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095654/">Moon Over Parador</a>):<br />
Kim Jong Eun will take the helm and lead the country in an unexpected direction of openness to the West and democracy. (I give this about 1% probability, like most Hollywood plots)<br />
<br />
<b>Worst case scenario 1</b>: nothing significant will happen....minor escalation in the form of iterated, isolated attacks and counter attacks from North and South, or in the form of increased sanctioning. I give this one about 18% <br />
<b>Worst case scenario 2</b>: (from a <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/homefront/news.html?sid=6210629&mode=previews">Video Game</a> <a href="http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s3i87009">plotline</a>): North Korea goes balls-out for invasion and ultimately their own extermination, including a possible scene involving the first-since 1945 use of nuclear devices on a battlefield. (this one gets the other 1% probability). I also find this one interesting considering the most recent history of sneak attacks:<br />
<br />
1. <b>Serb separatist assasinates Archduke Ferdinand</b>- (Semi-Fail!) Greater Serbia did become a reality (e.g. Yugoslavia) only forty years later, but look at it now....still messed up...)<br />
2. <b>Hitler invades Russia</b> (Uber-Fail!)<br />
3. <b>Pearl Harbor</b> (won the battle, lost the war) <br />
4. <b>9-11</b> (garnered enormous sympathy for the US in Europe and elsewhere, goodwill soon squandered by George W.) - but ultimately too soon to decide if this sneak attack was successful - far more successful than the actual attack has been the reaction of the US to label <i>a priori</i> all of its own citizens as terrorists (AQ FTW so far).<br />
<br />
So if Kim Jeong Eun decides to start lobbing shells at us in the wee hours when I'm watching Boardwalk Empire, well, then, I have to say, you got me there...but it seems rather improbable statistically, so I'll stick to the big killers here, and by way of comparison:<br />
<br />
<b>Traffic</b>: (2 friends killed in last ten years)<br />
<b>North Korea</b>: (1 cousin once removed killed in the last sixty years)<br />
<b>Pollution</b>: (ongoing, statistics murky)El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-45798565863413897482010-04-16T06:18:00.000-07:002010-04-16T06:42:48.675-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/S8hncpniNWI/AAAAAAAAALY/WO4SDGDzKl4/s1600/IMG_1614.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/S8hncpniNWI/AAAAAAAAALY/WO4SDGDzKl4/s400/IMG_1614.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5460728290092397922" border="0" /></a>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-23872664160994915902009-07-21T20:15:00.001-07:002009-07-21T20:16:29.067-07:00aint she beautiful?<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SmaEc1qS3vI/AAAAAAAAALI/DciNaD-oFd4/s1600-h/eclipse.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 400px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 376px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361118037406834418" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SmaEc1qS3vI/AAAAAAAAALI/DciNaD-oFd4/s400/eclipse.jpg" /></a><br /><div></div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-54185493182818410702009-07-21T00:52:00.000-07:002009-07-21T00:53:38.734-07:00happening in our town....<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SmVz8R_Aa_I/AAAAAAAAALA/sFtZYShrQF8/s1600-h/patial+eclipse.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360818410911460338" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 262px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SmVz8R_Aa_I/AAAAAAAAALA/sFtZYShrQF8/s400/patial+eclipse.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-26357269486745402362008-08-03T06:15:00.000-07:002008-12-11T11:43:21.631-08:00Would you ride this?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SJadFTlxpzI/AAAAAAAAAIU/6pM9yGRuXzs/s1600-h/P1050355.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SJadFTlxpzI/AAAAAAAAAIU/6pM9yGRuXzs/s400/P1050355.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5230540731721033522" border="0" /></a><br />So far, Ive had nothing but positive experiences riding the low- cost carriers. But when I saw this Pegasus Airlines plane I had a few....hesitations shall we say?El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-35854594971115055492008-07-23T19:14:00.000-07:002016-10-20T20:13:25.848-07:00Sunset over the Golden Horn<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIiQ3lbbv0I/AAAAAAAAAH0/b9HHuNXK4RQ/s1600-h/sunset.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226586652177841986" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIiQ3lbbv0I/AAAAAAAAAH0/b9HHuNXK4RQ/s400/sunset.jpg" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a><br />
<div>
Sunset with, fittingly, a mosque minaret and a modern light fixture (unless you chose to see the resemblance to the monsters in <em>War of The Worlds</em>) with the seagulls massing overhead (or <em>The Birds</em>, if you prefer to see that movie)</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Taken from the North side of the bridge linking the two sides of the Golden Horn, the river that divides the European side of Istanbul in two *(Istanbul is further divided into Europe and Asia by the Bosporus)<br />
(Dedicated to Mutlu, that gentlest of geniuses)</div>
El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-86414782607151370002008-07-22T23:03:00.000-07:002008-12-11T11:43:22.055-08:00Yın Yang Converted<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SJab4P6OpkI/AAAAAAAAAIM/LOPcGV7XJJY/s1600-h/yinyang+pattern.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SJab4P6OpkI/AAAAAAAAAIM/LOPcGV7XJJY/s400/yinyang+pattern.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5230539407883150914" border="0" /></a><br />A unique pattern on a Ming (or was it earlier?) dynasty pottery at Topkapi Palace, IstanbulEl Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-20905489119363248962008-07-15T16:56:00.000-07:002008-12-11T11:43:22.314-08:00Istanbul, Crossroads between east and west<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIh7PiRAHWI/AAAAAAAAAHU/5af3nFk2WtY/s1600-h/han+bok+influence.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226562874389831010" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIh7PiRAHWI/AAAAAAAAAHU/5af3nFk2WtY/s400/han+bok+influence.jpg" border="0" /></a>This Turkish girl is wearing a half-length jean jacket, cut with a high midriff. Since I often proofread for people involved with Korean traditional clothing, I couldn't help but notice the striking similarity of this style with Koreas 'hanbok' jackets, which are also cut with a high midriff.El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-55193906076218642882008-07-15T16:41:00.000-07:002008-12-11T11:43:22.668-08:00Stuffed Bell Pepper (Paprika)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIhtDok2tkI/AAAAAAAAAHM/WeHkFu5bVZI/s1600-h/paprika.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5226547276762494530" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SIhtDok2tkI/AAAAAAAAAHM/WeHkFu5bVZI/s400/paprika.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>A Turkish chef greets customers at a 'See Your Food' type cafeteria establishment on Istiklal Street, in the Manhattanesque Taxmin Square district of Istanbul. These bell peppers are stuffed with meat and rice, and topped with cheese and tomato....they taste as good as they look; but eating in a cafeteria is by no means cheap....a typical meal here costs about 7 euros, or about 10 dollars.</div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7377581.post-27753066221786291842008-07-14T22:32:00.000-07:002008-08-15T22:36:31.337-07:00<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SKZnCwsM6fI/AAAAAAAAAIk/ey4rnH3AQhg/s1600-h/greek+angel.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5234984913992477170" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_X3_Wy7PJ35A/SKZnCwsM6fI/AAAAAAAAAIk/ey4rnH3AQhg/s400/greek+angel.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>an angel, not sure which one, from the left side of the altar inside of the Greek Ortho church, which was full of images of St. Theodisius</div>El Gringo Perdidohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13580432420746196166noreply@blogger.com0