Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Flies
I now know what is meant by the expression “flies as big as dogs”. It sounds like hyperbole but it’s a poetic truth. Just as there are stray dogs that prowl idly in the open streets, there are stray flies, chrome green and the size of Christmas tree bulbs, that prowl the open surfaces in enclosed and sunny spaces like my garden and sniff their way around, heads down, one paw at a time, dragging their brilliant bulk along with every expectation of courteous treatment as fellow idlers.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
The World's Game
The bar is stone and worn to a dull shine. The air is still but not unpleasant. The doors around the corner stay open. You get the sounds of the cars, mixed with the clinks of stacked bottles and glasses and the rustle of ice and relaxed conversation and friendly profanity and occasional cell-phone melodies that linger in your head. There is usually no music but occasionally there is shouting. In the corner of the ceiling across the room from the bar, there is a single color television bolted which broadcasts soccer and soccer only, and the soccer stretches out so that pre-soccer lasts fully as long as post-soccer, while the soccer itself, the playing of it, seems to embrace the natural life of a man in its compass, a journey of generations, like space travel, during which a file of scrubbed and smiling boy heroes degenerates into a roving band of filthy old bloody-minded cripples, driven insane by the blast of airhorns and the logorrheic drift of all the hieroglyphics everywhere enclosing the field of play. As in the game of life itself, there are well-dressed men calling the shots from the sidelines, and also as in the game of life it is impossible to be sure where any one competitor stands or what the stakes are in the final accounting. One of the artists I know is a soccer fan and he once tried to illustrate a match structure for me, but the napkin he was drawing on ripped and we gave up. He was contemplative for a while but eventually was back to shouting again. Someone else tried to explain to me how the game of soccer developed organically from an ancient and proud ritual involving voluntary human sacrifice, which seemed to me to go without saying.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Zoological Correlative
I miss the insects of the north: the praying mantis, the delicate diamond-needle, the spotted ladybug. There are ladybugs here but they have no spots, like the ghostly plastic action figures, sold loose in the market, run off as mold testers by Chinese fabricators and left unpainted. If you know what you’re looking at you can identity Batman (the ears) or the Terminator (sunglasses, the ragged flesh around the hydraulic arm) in these smooth blue or green or gray simulacra, like Platonic forms of Hollywood properties. The bugs here are larger and hungrier and while there are some truly beautiful specimens, like the butterfly as big and bright as a tennis ball, they are mostly skulking beasties. There are invasive nightgoing scorpions, serpentine centipedes, heavy-duty grasshoppers a little too eager to become locusts. These kick so powerfully at the touch that I was reminded out of the blue one day of that ‘field goal’ sequence in the classroom-desk game of paper football. There are also the amazing little herps that prey on them. The geckos run the gamut from little-finger length to about six inches and eat their young. They will crawl under doors and behind picture frames. Their cardinal virtues are secrecy and patience. The skinks in the garden are territorial and only come together to mate (I understand). Caught by the tail they cut their losses and leave it thrashing like a cool special effect. Then there are the bats, who skim the plunge pool at dusk for drowning bugs, dropping from palm fronds and describing figure-eights. They are as big as pigeons and fly as low. As with the sign-painters I get an unrequited thrill being near them.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
Elote
From my desk I can hear gentle honking, birdsong, and the passage of buses and automobiles down the through road that crosses the city at its center, a mile to the east. The different engine types sound various chords and harmonies together as these vehicles brake and shift and speed off outside my front door. The sidewalk is narrow. Many times I have gone for a walk and taken an unfamiliar path and wound up where the sidewalk was too narrow to ignore the side mirrors of the oncoming cars, or where sidewalks disappear altogether and give way to trickles of wastewater or tracks of bleached garbage demarcating pedestrian passages alongside elevated dirt roads. The dust outside the city limits is unbelievable: in the days of carriage transport there used to be a team of horse-drawn sprinkler buggies who would wet down the streets in the morning and afternoon, which kept the dust manageable but muddied the wheel ruts, deepening and hardening the narrow troughs of the carriageway so that today automobiles with low suspension get caught and ground against the dirt until they can accelerate, which gives the traffic on the old carriageways an upsettingly violent herky-jerky rhythm and renders lethal any transverse passage on foot.
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Tropical Malady
(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:
Friday, February 4, 2011
Travel
Some nice stuff:
Some fears:
- 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
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