Tropical Malady

A couple weeks back I woke up with this hideous blister pair on the inside of my arm. Our jungle guide for the day explained to me that sometime during the previous night's sleep I had accidentally crooked my elbow around a creeping chincha, to our mutual dismay: "He get scared, then he make pee."

(The guy's English was great so this is an unfair sentence to pick out but that's what he said.)

What Luis knows familiarly as a chincha, I can only identify, clinically, as a coreid, or leaf-footed bug, member of the class of "true bugs" or hemipterans, etc. You would sort of know one of these if you saw it but unless you were an entomologist you wouldn't have a ready name for it. Luis just looked at these pearly blisters and said, "Ah, chincha." Since noticing them I had been entertaining everything from splashed coffee to leprosy.

Here's a different variety of chincha that we found later that morning in the jungle:

Lie down with chinchas, wake up with little blisters.
Here is a cool picture of a tree that was clawed by a jaguar:

Travel

Some nice stuff:

• There are a lot of Office Depots here, in case we need office supplies. I read somewhere that paper is expensive, haven´t tried to buy any yet
• Fruit bats!
• Locals have a fun accent. It´s kind of lilting and sing-song. Carribean influence?
• The ¨frente frio¨ has arrived, making our transition a little easier and producing all these beautiful clouds

Some fears:

• tropical diseases
• the police with machine guns

Metaphor for a Gnostic

The right speck of dust falls in just the right spot on the open page and makes a period appear as a colon: that is a metaphor for the gnostic disturbance (also for the impulse to communicate a meaningless crypto-event in one's illegible life, eg via blogging).

The Most Real Thing

The roadscapes of 4-lane commercial drag: they seem to go on forever, the way life seems to go on forever, to Canada, to Latin America: nothing more real than these Dunkin Donuts and Staples and all that furniture and fast food and roadside detritus, yes, it's an experience of the sublime, the polluted sublime of post-modernity, of failure to build anything 'modern'. Cities being just obstacles to the steady expansion of the 4-LANE COMMERCIAL DRAG, one hopes it will wrap both magnetic poles under one bustling belt, unify everybody under the sign of shitty jobs and junk for sale. Wonderful. They tell you not to dwell on it, but--there it is--and you have so much LOVE to give, that you have to love it. What else would you do? IF you could not love it (if it will not speak back your love) perhaps you can go on loving it anyway, to yourself, tragically- that would be a kind of modernity.

Expertise

I'm not a boy; I'm not a girl:
I'm an expert.

Digester Egg #1

THIS KNIFING LOVE I CANNOT FACE
IS FOR THE PAST -- A TIME & PLACE

"Preserving the Merritt Parkway's Bridges to the Past" -- LA Times, Oct 27 2009

Dateline: Stratford, Conn