San Marcos Sierras

Glob

Jamie, my perfect published sister, says it’s time to glob. The way of the fucking future. Jamie, who’s my only reader so far, will hate that first line (she’s usually such a fan of my first lines) but she will be relieved to know that at least:

I’m globbing.


This is the glob about my life in San Marcos Sierras, Argentina.

I’m writing this from underneath the mosquito net that my travelling friends left me. Three months in South America and they didn’t use it once. How many travellers buy mosquito nets before leaving home, only to never take it out of their pack? It’s too hot right now to be fully dressed, even though the sun is setting and Autumn has begun (Opposite Land, where fall is spring and the south winds are the cold ones). And this Off shit doesn’t work a damn. So I’m spending more and more time lately in my bed, under this blessed net. The fuckers hover just outside and they land on the soft white tela. Here, and only in here, I am superior to them.

I did it with a guy on this same bed last week. I felt wholly superior while it lasted, blessedly womanly and free. Nobody had touched like that in years. I floated around for two days afterwards on the memory of it, then I saw him in the street and he didn’t say hi. Sick. I almost puked on the spot. I rode off reeling, and am still reeling. It’s me that disgusts me. Not him. In two weeks I will be forty years old and despite all the healing and the growth, despite all the forward fucking movement, I still haven’t managed to progress from attracting the truest, lowest, shit scrapings type of man. No wonder I’ve been single most of my life. I’ve made my motherfucking bed. And I lie in it. Alone.

Worse, I have at least one (actual) glob somewhere in my throat that I can’t get out. Dislodge. This has been happening for a while, this trapping and rotting of little food balls in the folds of the back of my throat. I can see them and smell them, these little former chunks of oatmeal or salami, and I have to carry mints around, especially for Tango—partners are hard to come by and respect is key. When the glob finally does come out, I squish it between my fingers and it smells exactly like vomit. I have one chunk in there that’s been trapped since the night I fucked Buddy. And every morning I aim a chopstick at my tonsils and try to pry it loose, and all I do is gag, and tears stream from my eyes, but I can’t for the life of me choke it out.

Two guys ride by on horses, as real as Gauchos get, with their red berets and their unsmiling eyes. And the dogs, as they must have done for millenia now, go absolutely crazy.

I don’t want to live where I can’t hear the horses.

As for the dogs, I’ve got earplugs.

Coming soon: The 23 Dogs
Coming later: Tango in Converse