From a City-sponsored flyer available at the local Tourist Information Bureau and translated, lovingly and very unpunkly, by me:
“So you want to adapt quickly to San Marcos Sierras?
• Say hello to everyone you come across in the street
• Give the right-of-way to pedestrians, bicycles and horses
• Smile, even for no reason
• Throw trash in the provided bins
• Never drive faster than 30km/hr
• Walk a lot, and at some point in the day, go barefoot
• Enjoy the silence of the Sierra
• Be kind, simple, and understanding
• Take the time to share maté with friends
• Play in the sand, the river, and with the children
• Always direct your attitude and your thoughts towards positive things
• Look up at the night sky and discover how many more stars there are than you’d ever imagined
• From the moment you wake up, breathe deeply
• Discover new paths in the hills
• Only camp in indicated spots
• Eat bread, honey and homemade sweets, all with the faint aroma of nature and campfire
• Try and distinguish the smell of the tree from its fruits and flowers
• Don’t write on the walls or on the rocks of the river
• Love things the way Mother Nature made them
• Do a tour of the plaza “to see what’s new”
MOST IMPORTANTLY: BE HAPPY”
Seventeen-year-old me reads this (she’s been nagging at me lately) and I can hear her now. She’s ranting, “This is bullshit! You can’t expect me to read a fucking flyer and then suddenly follow all your rules on how to be happy. I’ll smile when I want and breathe how I want and camp where I want. You pretend to enjoy silence and sniff the trees and you walk barefoot, you fucking hippy.” And I would have punkly crumpled up the flyer and tossed it right in your face. In my face. Into my own face, because now I like this flyer. I love it actually. It’s obviously directed at a certain kind of S.U.V.-roaring tourist who needs to be brought down a notch and I love that I live in a town where the municipality funds pointed hippy drivel like it. But seventeen-year-old me is still indignant. She wants to headbutt me in the face and break my nose. She wants to paint the cross on the hill black and urinate publically on the mayor and move the fuck out of this hippy bubble to somewhere that’s really real. Fortunately, forty-year-old me is still one tough cookie and she backhands seventeen-year-old me and tells her to shut the fuck up, or else. This leaves us both rather quiet for now.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
I APO-LO-GIZE
When I was a fourteen-year-old punky pube of a kid, I started working at Harvey’s fast-food restaurant on Great Northern Road in Sault Ste. Marie. My mother got me the gig so I could help out with my outrageous hairspray bills and it seemed like a pretty harmless idea at the time. So I dawned the brown polyester overalls and the oversized pin that read Extra Pickles With That?? and I hid my six-inch mohawk under the provided orange gingham cap and within two shifts, I was promoted from fryers to grill and then to cash. Who would have thought, WHO???, that twenty-five shitwhoring years later I would still be plowing away in the service industry, fetching extra ketchup and saying with that fake, snide smile, just like I learned at Harvey’s, “Enjoy your meal and have a great day!”? Not my poor mother, that’s for sure, the woman who took me travelling and bought me books and fed my mind with words like “international lawyer” and “romance language expert” so that I would never have to spend my life working in the Steel Plant like she did. She lived—the happiest day of her life was the day I got into McGill—and died for me to move beyond her. What would she have thought of her girl, her only girl, the one she pinned all her dreams and hopes to, the one that was supposed to “amount to something,” spending the next quarter of a century reading the day’s specials or getting another pitcher of beer or providing a new fork please—“there’s something wrong with this one!”—to an endless stream of rude and needy ingrates the world over?
Twenty-five years of “service,” despite the dreams, despite the education, despite all the other opportunities. Twenty-five years of servitude. I went from Harvey’s to the Omellette Factory to the Royal Hotel. Then I started to travel and worked the Press Klub in Prague and the Quiebra Canto in Cartagena, Las Hamacas in Coroico and all of the better restaurants on the north shore of Lake Atitlán. I did a stint at Porter’s Café in the French Quarter of New Orleans, rocked two funk-filled years at the world-famous Montreal Bistro jazz club, and I ended my career on a high note working three-to-four-and-a-half-star weddings at the fancy-pantsy Palais Royale Ballroom on the shores of Lake Ontario. Yes, I did end it, once and for all times, on August 22nd, 2010, the night I dropped my last plate, threw my serving cloths in the air and at thirty-nine years old, swore on my mother’s grave that I was not going to be a forty-year-old waitress.
This is what it means to NOT be forty-year-old waitress:
It means that I am no longer a well-paid, snidely underhanded half-cunt for eight to twelve hours a day, pretending that it’s my pleasure to fetch your fourth basket of complementary bread, or to bring you a tenth round of tequila shots even though you’ve just vomited under the table, or to send your pasta back to the kitchen and remove the basil from the pesto because you’re suddenly allergic to herbs.
It means that I no longer have to APO-LO-GIZE because you are an obnoxious, impossible-to-please, natural-born complainer who lives to complicate the lives of waitstaff the world over and all I really want from you is a decent tip.
It means that I no longer have to listen to the self-important natterings-on of angry, drug-addled, schizophrenic chefs who view servers as inferior beings and treat them worse than most customers do.
It means that I no longer have to work twice as hard running behind and picking up after the veritable army of authentically inferior servers who are only working until they finally get that breakthrough call-back and who don’t give two shits about the quality of their work or the actual service they provide.
It means that I no longer (never again!) have to defer to everyone else’s always being right—the customer, the chef, the manager, the owner. Everyone is the boss of the server. But not anymore! I am the only boss of me now.
I have to admit, though, it wasn’t all that easy at first not being a forty-year-old waitress. When high season hit here in San Marcos Sierras, with all the restaurants full and me completely broke, it would have been so natural, so simple, to fall back into the business, despite the sacred promise I made to myself and to my dead mother. I had to fight my urge to serve, like a newly clean junkie tries to steer clear of trigger situations and not return to her old destructive habits. All the local chefs, like mean-eyed dealers, would stare me down—they knew who I was and what I could do. They wanted me and it took all that I had to not give in and take “just one night a week,” just as a favour, just to help out. That twenty-five-year habit was still alive in me, just like the addict who, no matter how long she’s spent in rehab, still battles the overwhelming urge to jab the needle into her vein, at whatever cost. But then I’d see a waiter get reamed out by a chef or a waitress fend off the advances of a sleazy, obnoxious tourist and I knew, deep in my cunt, that I’d rather die than serve another plate again.
So I took to cleaning hotel rooms instead, picking up after the gross tourists where they shat and slept as opposed to where they ate, all for a whopping three dollars an hour. I also taught Spanish to a lonely, hard-headed, near-illiterate Yankee for five dollars a class. (He learned 32 words in four months.) And I started taking care of an old lady a few days a week, keeping her company and wiping her bum and making sure she and her walker didn’t tip over and break any joints. (This was slightly better paid.) I’d have done anything, ANYTHING, not to waitress again. I’d have given handjobs behind the bankmachine if that’s what it had come to. But fate was on my side and I stuck to my guns and luckily, everything worked out in the end. Now, I am no longer known as “Hey Get Me Another Glass Of Wine,” or as “I Sweep Up Pubes For Cash,” but as Miss Eva, the village’s new profesora de inglés. Teaching English, for most of my life, was the absolute last thing that I ever wanted to do. Now, it’s merely the second-to-last.
Very important note:
I am not ashamed IN ANY WAY of having been a waitress for all those years (though it does feel tremendously good to say “those years” and not “these”). Maybe my mother would have been disappointed in me, but I have no regrets about the way I earned a living from 1985 till 2010. I do not feel like I wasted any of my professional potential nor would I have traded in my waitressing career for any high-fallutin, over-stressed profession that my university edumacation may have provided me. As a server, I met more cool people, saw more amazing places and had loads more money and freedom and fun than most people could ever dream of. I do feel slightly bad though, I have to admit, for those poor customers in my final embittered years of waitressing who just came out for a good time and a nice meal and got sarcastically abused by a burned out, smart-mouthed, attitudinal half-cunt of a server. To all of you, with my fakest, most sarcastic smile, I do absolutely and most insincerely APO-LO-GIZE.
Twenty-five years of “service,” despite the dreams, despite the education, despite all the other opportunities. Twenty-five years of servitude. I went from Harvey’s to the Omellette Factory to the Royal Hotel. Then I started to travel and worked the Press Klub in Prague and the Quiebra Canto in Cartagena, Las Hamacas in Coroico and all of the better restaurants on the north shore of Lake Atitlán. I did a stint at Porter’s Café in the French Quarter of New Orleans, rocked two funk-filled years at the world-famous Montreal Bistro jazz club, and I ended my career on a high note working three-to-four-and-a-half-star weddings at the fancy-pantsy Palais Royale Ballroom on the shores of Lake Ontario. Yes, I did end it, once and for all times, on August 22nd, 2010, the night I dropped my last plate, threw my serving cloths in the air and at thirty-nine years old, swore on my mother’s grave that I was not going to be a forty-year-old waitress.
This is what it means to NOT be forty-year-old waitress:
It means that I am no longer a well-paid, snidely underhanded half-cunt for eight to twelve hours a day, pretending that it’s my pleasure to fetch your fourth basket of complementary bread, or to bring you a tenth round of tequila shots even though you’ve just vomited under the table, or to send your pasta back to the kitchen and remove the basil from the pesto because you’re suddenly allergic to herbs.
It means that I no longer have to APO-LO-GIZE because you are an obnoxious, impossible-to-please, natural-born complainer who lives to complicate the lives of waitstaff the world over and all I really want from you is a decent tip.
It means that I no longer have to listen to the self-important natterings-on of angry, drug-addled, schizophrenic chefs who view servers as inferior beings and treat them worse than most customers do.
It means that I no longer have to work twice as hard running behind and picking up after the veritable army of authentically inferior servers who are only working until they finally get that breakthrough call-back and who don’t give two shits about the quality of their work or the actual service they provide.
It means that I no longer (never again!) have to defer to everyone else’s always being right—the customer, the chef, the manager, the owner. Everyone is the boss of the server. But not anymore! I am the only boss of me now.
I have to admit, though, it wasn’t all that easy at first not being a forty-year-old waitress. When high season hit here in San Marcos Sierras, with all the restaurants full and me completely broke, it would have been so natural, so simple, to fall back into the business, despite the sacred promise I made to myself and to my dead mother. I had to fight my urge to serve, like a newly clean junkie tries to steer clear of trigger situations and not return to her old destructive habits. All the local chefs, like mean-eyed dealers, would stare me down—they knew who I was and what I could do. They wanted me and it took all that I had to not give in and take “just one night a week,” just as a favour, just to help out. That twenty-five-year habit was still alive in me, just like the addict who, no matter how long she’s spent in rehab, still battles the overwhelming urge to jab the needle into her vein, at whatever cost. But then I’d see a waiter get reamed out by a chef or a waitress fend off the advances of a sleazy, obnoxious tourist and I knew, deep in my cunt, that I’d rather die than serve another plate again.
So I took to cleaning hotel rooms instead, picking up after the gross tourists where they shat and slept as opposed to where they ate, all for a whopping three dollars an hour. I also taught Spanish to a lonely, hard-headed, near-illiterate Yankee for five dollars a class. (He learned 32 words in four months.) And I started taking care of an old lady a few days a week, keeping her company and wiping her bum and making sure she and her walker didn’t tip over and break any joints. (This was slightly better paid.) I’d have done anything, ANYTHING, not to waitress again. I’d have given handjobs behind the bankmachine if that’s what it had come to. But fate was on my side and I stuck to my guns and luckily, everything worked out in the end. Now, I am no longer known as “Hey Get Me Another Glass Of Wine,” or as “I Sweep Up Pubes For Cash,” but as Miss Eva, the village’s new profesora de inglés. Teaching English, for most of my life, was the absolute last thing that I ever wanted to do. Now, it’s merely the second-to-last.
Very important note:
I am not ashamed IN ANY WAY of having been a waitress for all those years (though it does feel tremendously good to say “those years” and not “these”). Maybe my mother would have been disappointed in me, but I have no regrets about the way I earned a living from 1985 till 2010. I do not feel like I wasted any of my professional potential nor would I have traded in my waitressing career for any high-fallutin, over-stressed profession that my university edumacation may have provided me. As a server, I met more cool people, saw more amazing places and had loads more money and freedom and fun than most people could ever dream of. I do feel slightly bad though, I have to admit, for those poor customers in my final embittered years of waitressing who just came out for a good time and a nice meal and got sarcastically abused by a burned out, smart-mouthed, attitudinal half-cunt of a server. To all of you, with my fakest, most sarcastic smile, I do absolutely and most insincerely APO-LO-GIZE.
Monday, May 16, 2011
No Deal
It’s been fifteen years since we made the pact, the Tarantula and I.
From the hammock’s rope she looked down at me accusingly. It’s possible that at first she was afraid, but that didn’t seem likely. She was a giant motherfucking Tarantula, after all. I was in the hammock, prone and most likely stoned, and I was definitely afraid. But what could I do? There was no calling out for help—I was in an isolated cabin in the Colombian mountains and the closest person to me was a French base head in the main house, a good half-kilometer away. And if I moved at all from the hammock I risked pissing the spider off or shaking her loose or bringing her closer to me somehow. So I breathed in once and froze. And she froze. And we stayed like that eyeing each other up from a few feet away for a long time. A very long time.
She was an enormous hairy, scary mother of a spider, but she was extremely beautiful too. The more I looked at her, the more I was sure that she was pregnant, she was so gorda. Her legs, covered in long, black, velvety fur with orange markings around something like her knees, were almost as long and as thick as my fingers. There was no question that she was elegant, downright stunningly so, but I’d seen enough nature shows to know that, more importantly, she was nothing less than deadly—Look out, Peter Brady!—and I played my own horrific death scene out in my mind on eternal repeat. One wrong move and she’d be on top of me in a second and a half, sucking out my poor gringa blood with those inverted vampire teeth of hers. Even if I didn’t move (which I couldn’t do anyway as I was paralyzed, too scared shitless to even shit my pants), the Evil Queen could still have me for lunch.
Time thickened around us. The Tarantula’s shiny dead eyes remained fixed on me and my unblinking eyes never left her. A thousand years later, I eventually managed to start to breathe again. Shallow, but at least in and out, for the most part. Was she breathing? Did she even have lungs? What was going through her mind? Did she have a mind? Or just an instinct to kill me? In all the eternity we sat there staring at each other, she didn’t twitch once, not even move a muscle. (Did she have muscles?)
I went over the situation in my head: Colombian Monster Tarantula Spider in her natural element versus stoned little dinky Canadian tourist paralyzed in a hammock. I was fucked, que sí o sí. But my instinct for survival wasn’t that thin. I continued (what else could I do?) with my mind-racking, heart-wrenching calculations and after many, many more minutes, I came to the conclusion that there was still one thing I could try. If I wanted to get out of this situation alive, I had to get over it. My Fear. If I could do that one thing, if I could conquer my plain and basic terror of the Tarantula, I’d no longer be her prey. We’d become equals and she’d respect me and have no reason to eat me alive. Desperate stoner gringa logic, yes, weak and almost laughable, but I had no other.
So that was it then. The time was now to GET OVER MY FUCKING FEAR. I breathed in as deep as my lungs would allow and began. With the punkest eyes I could conjure up, and with all my intents and purposes, I stared at that goddamned spider for the next forever-many minutes, calling on my dead mother and on all the Saints to help me face that basic genetic fear, the most common of all human phobias, of being bitten by (and dying painfully) at the “hands” of this God-awful creature. After an immeasurably long chunk of time, I managed, drop by drop, to gather the courage to embrace my terror, and, in turn, to break it down, iota by iota. Then I started to push it out of me in increments, like it was a giant zit, or like I was squeezing a sausage out of its skin into a pan. But not for one instant did I stop staring at the Tarantula, and all the while she watched me—she knew exactly what I was doing.
Eventually, something nameless in the room clicked. My breathing went back to normal, my heart returned to its natural rate, and my collosal fear dissipated almost entirely. I was calm and so was she, by the looks of it. Her eyes no longer shone pure evil and her posture no longer read Pounce and Kill. We were just two of God’s creatures kicking back in a Colombian cabin in the woods. Everything was cool and we both knew it and at that point, in complete wordless confidence, we made a pact. The Tarantula promised that she wouldn’t fuck with me—I could sleep that night in complete safety—and in turn I wouldn’t fuck with her, or any of her kind, from then on. It was a good deal all round and in no time, I closed my eyes and slept peacefully through the night.
And for the next fifteen years, I held up my end of the bargain. I never once, not deliberately anyway, killed or injured any spider of any kind under any circumstances. I habitually and gently rescued them from sinks with spoons, I apologized out loud before brushing away their webs, their homes, from the corners of my room and I always gave them the chance to run out from the broom when I swept. And for me, of all the basements and attics I’ve known since then, of all of the campsites and tropics and infested hotel rooms, never once has a spider fucked with me or given me cause for retaliation. But all this changed a few weeks back and now the Arachnid Pact is off.
At first I thought it was a particularly itchy mosquito bite just below my shoulder. But by nightfall it had swollen up and turned hard and burgundy. By the next morning it was a big round hot welt and for the next six days, it continued to grow and spread and harden. My entire upper right arm had been transformed into a fiery, mottled, painfully itchy piece of taut flesh, as if an alergen-giant’s burning hand had grabbed me and dragged me along forcibly all the way down histamine lane. My muscles felt bruised and achy and the arm itself felt heavy, almost too heavy to lift. Not the bee stings or the two scorpion bites, not even that nasty worm that nested itself in my belly button, none of the insect malevolence that I’d ever suffered could compare to this (besides the scabies, of course, but scabies aren’t insects, they’re mites, satanic microscopic mites).
I showed my alarming arm to everyone who would take the time to look. “What the fuck is this?” I demanded. Tourists were frightened and grossed out but the locals were sure. “Spider bite,” they all said. But...but we had a pact, I thought, and remembered for the first time in a long time the Colombian Tarantula and my night of terror. I was sure that I had never once shirked my promise to her and to the arachnid world. But when I thought about it, she hadn’t betrayed me at all either—her only promise to me was to not kill me that one night. Since then, I’d just sort of taken for granted that overcoming my fear and not fucking with spiders at all meant that they’d never fuck with me either. Fifteen bite-free years, by coincidence or cosmic deal, was without doubt a good run, but now my arm was rotting hotly from the inside out and I was pissed. So out loud and with the universe as my witness, I withdrew my participation and revoked any part I may have had in the original arachnid deal.
I began to look at all eight-legged creatures with a new and violent distrust and in the coming week I started washing all lost spiders down the drain, helping them reach their demise with the vengeful part of the spoon. I swept them and sprayed them and flicked them off tables with my nail and I even stepped on one on purpose and only felt a tiny bit sorry.
But after about a week, the bite’s swelling went down and the itchiness and the feverish pain all went away, leaving only an odd discolouration, like a rosacea patch or an old sunburn, along my whole upper right arm, which is bound to disappear eventually. I also got over the “betrayal” and managed to let go of my vengeful bronca against the eight-legged world in general.
But what about the pact? I wanted to renew its terms, I wanted to live in relative arachnid peace again. So the other day, when a goofy-looking Daddy Long Legs—the perfect eight-legged representative to negotiate with—came crawling down the curtain, I grabbed him by one of his squirming string-legs and said, “New deal, buddy. It’s time.” He flailed about and I continued. “You and your people, YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH ME,” I said, shaking my finger at him to show him how serious I was. “Capisce?” I wanted to look into his eyes to see if he was listening but he tore free and ran away with only seven legs now. I followed him along the floor. “Wait. Don’t worry!” I called out. “Really, I won’t fuck with you either. That’s the deal. The new deal!” He was at the wall now, climbing for his life. I blew on him and he stopped and I picked him up and he died in my hand. I’d killed him. That was not part of the deal.
I sighed and the imaginary Werner Herzog that I sometimes play host to in my mind piped up and grunted sharply. “The common denominator in the universe is not harmony,” he said high-germanly, “but chaos, hostility and murder.” I took the dead spider and his eighth leg which I still held between my fingers and dropped them into the compost bucket with a silent sorry. Just then the Daddy Long Legs twitched—he was alive!—and I reached in to rescue him. But he was covered in wet oatmeal now and for the second time that minute, died in my hands. Herzog grunted again and concluded, “You were the loser. Now you are the winner. You will be the loser again.”
From the hammock’s rope she looked down at me accusingly. It’s possible that at first she was afraid, but that didn’t seem likely. She was a giant motherfucking Tarantula, after all. I was in the hammock, prone and most likely stoned, and I was definitely afraid. But what could I do? There was no calling out for help—I was in an isolated cabin in the Colombian mountains and the closest person to me was a French base head in the main house, a good half-kilometer away. And if I moved at all from the hammock I risked pissing the spider off or shaking her loose or bringing her closer to me somehow. So I breathed in once and froze. And she froze. And we stayed like that eyeing each other up from a few feet away for a long time. A very long time.
She was an enormous hairy, scary mother of a spider, but she was extremely beautiful too. The more I looked at her, the more I was sure that she was pregnant, she was so gorda. Her legs, covered in long, black, velvety fur with orange markings around something like her knees, were almost as long and as thick as my fingers. There was no question that she was elegant, downright stunningly so, but I’d seen enough nature shows to know that, more importantly, she was nothing less than deadly—Look out, Peter Brady!—and I played my own horrific death scene out in my mind on eternal repeat. One wrong move and she’d be on top of me in a second and a half, sucking out my poor gringa blood with those inverted vampire teeth of hers. Even if I didn’t move (which I couldn’t do anyway as I was paralyzed, too scared shitless to even shit my pants), the Evil Queen could still have me for lunch.
Time thickened around us. The Tarantula’s shiny dead eyes remained fixed on me and my unblinking eyes never left her. A thousand years later, I eventually managed to start to breathe again. Shallow, but at least in and out, for the most part. Was she breathing? Did she even have lungs? What was going through her mind? Did she have a mind? Or just an instinct to kill me? In all the eternity we sat there staring at each other, she didn’t twitch once, not even move a muscle. (Did she have muscles?)
I went over the situation in my head: Colombian Monster Tarantula Spider in her natural element versus stoned little dinky Canadian tourist paralyzed in a hammock. I was fucked, que sí o sí. But my instinct for survival wasn’t that thin. I continued (what else could I do?) with my mind-racking, heart-wrenching calculations and after many, many more minutes, I came to the conclusion that there was still one thing I could try. If I wanted to get out of this situation alive, I had to get over it. My Fear. If I could do that one thing, if I could conquer my plain and basic terror of the Tarantula, I’d no longer be her prey. We’d become equals and she’d respect me and have no reason to eat me alive. Desperate stoner gringa logic, yes, weak and almost laughable, but I had no other.
So that was it then. The time was now to GET OVER MY FUCKING FEAR. I breathed in as deep as my lungs would allow and began. With the punkest eyes I could conjure up, and with all my intents and purposes, I stared at that goddamned spider for the next forever-many minutes, calling on my dead mother and on all the Saints to help me face that basic genetic fear, the most common of all human phobias, of being bitten by (and dying painfully) at the “hands” of this God-awful creature. After an immeasurably long chunk of time, I managed, drop by drop, to gather the courage to embrace my terror, and, in turn, to break it down, iota by iota. Then I started to push it out of me in increments, like it was a giant zit, or like I was squeezing a sausage out of its skin into a pan. But not for one instant did I stop staring at the Tarantula, and all the while she watched me—she knew exactly what I was doing.
Eventually, something nameless in the room clicked. My breathing went back to normal, my heart returned to its natural rate, and my collosal fear dissipated almost entirely. I was calm and so was she, by the looks of it. Her eyes no longer shone pure evil and her posture no longer read Pounce and Kill. We were just two of God’s creatures kicking back in a Colombian cabin in the woods. Everything was cool and we both knew it and at that point, in complete wordless confidence, we made a pact. The Tarantula promised that she wouldn’t fuck with me—I could sleep that night in complete safety—and in turn I wouldn’t fuck with her, or any of her kind, from then on. It was a good deal all round and in no time, I closed my eyes and slept peacefully through the night.
And for the next fifteen years, I held up my end of the bargain. I never once, not deliberately anyway, killed or injured any spider of any kind under any circumstances. I habitually and gently rescued them from sinks with spoons, I apologized out loud before brushing away their webs, their homes, from the corners of my room and I always gave them the chance to run out from the broom when I swept. And for me, of all the basements and attics I’ve known since then, of all of the campsites and tropics and infested hotel rooms, never once has a spider fucked with me or given me cause for retaliation. But all this changed a few weeks back and now the Arachnid Pact is off.
At first I thought it was a particularly itchy mosquito bite just below my shoulder. But by nightfall it had swollen up and turned hard and burgundy. By the next morning it was a big round hot welt and for the next six days, it continued to grow and spread and harden. My entire upper right arm had been transformed into a fiery, mottled, painfully itchy piece of taut flesh, as if an alergen-giant’s burning hand had grabbed me and dragged me along forcibly all the way down histamine lane. My muscles felt bruised and achy and the arm itself felt heavy, almost too heavy to lift. Not the bee stings or the two scorpion bites, not even that nasty worm that nested itself in my belly button, none of the insect malevolence that I’d ever suffered could compare to this (besides the scabies, of course, but scabies aren’t insects, they’re mites, satanic microscopic mites).
I showed my alarming arm to everyone who would take the time to look. “What the fuck is this?” I demanded. Tourists were frightened and grossed out but the locals were sure. “Spider bite,” they all said. But...but we had a pact, I thought, and remembered for the first time in a long time the Colombian Tarantula and my night of terror. I was sure that I had never once shirked my promise to her and to the arachnid world. But when I thought about it, she hadn’t betrayed me at all either—her only promise to me was to not kill me that one night. Since then, I’d just sort of taken for granted that overcoming my fear and not fucking with spiders at all meant that they’d never fuck with me either. Fifteen bite-free years, by coincidence or cosmic deal, was without doubt a good run, but now my arm was rotting hotly from the inside out and I was pissed. So out loud and with the universe as my witness, I withdrew my participation and revoked any part I may have had in the original arachnid deal.
I began to look at all eight-legged creatures with a new and violent distrust and in the coming week I started washing all lost spiders down the drain, helping them reach their demise with the vengeful part of the spoon. I swept them and sprayed them and flicked them off tables with my nail and I even stepped on one on purpose and only felt a tiny bit sorry.
But after about a week, the bite’s swelling went down and the itchiness and the feverish pain all went away, leaving only an odd discolouration, like a rosacea patch or an old sunburn, along my whole upper right arm, which is bound to disappear eventually. I also got over the “betrayal” and managed to let go of my vengeful bronca against the eight-legged world in general.
But what about the pact? I wanted to renew its terms, I wanted to live in relative arachnid peace again. So the other day, when a goofy-looking Daddy Long Legs—the perfect eight-legged representative to negotiate with—came crawling down the curtain, I grabbed him by one of his squirming string-legs and said, “New deal, buddy. It’s time.” He flailed about and I continued. “You and your people, YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH ME,” I said, shaking my finger at him to show him how serious I was. “Capisce?” I wanted to look into his eyes to see if he was listening but he tore free and ran away with only seven legs now. I followed him along the floor. “Wait. Don’t worry!” I called out. “Really, I won’t fuck with you either. That’s the deal. The new deal!” He was at the wall now, climbing for his life. I blew on him and he stopped and I picked him up and he died in my hand. I’d killed him. That was not part of the deal.
I sighed and the imaginary Werner Herzog that I sometimes play host to in my mind piped up and grunted sharply. “The common denominator in the universe is not harmony,” he said high-germanly, “but chaos, hostility and murder.” I took the dead spider and his eighth leg which I still held between my fingers and dropped them into the compost bucket with a silent sorry. Just then the Daddy Long Legs twitched—he was alive!—and I reached in to rescue him. But he was covered in wet oatmeal now and for the second time that minute, died in my hands. Herzog grunted again and concluded, “You were the loser. Now you are the winner. You will be the loser again.”
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Back to Bidet
When I first got to Argentina, I thought the little porcelain apparatus sitting beside almost every toilet in almost every bathroom (even some public ones) was a pissoir for men to use to not dribble up the toilet seat when peeing. My friend from Spain said she and her people used it mainly to wash their feet. And Fritz the Swiss assumed, naturally, that it was for women to wash their pussies before (and, if necessary, after) sex. (Yes, the same Fritz who forced me to break up with him in Thailand after repeatedly calling me a “hobby writer,” and who then showed up here three years later and pranced around my yard wearing nothing but his euro man-panties, like an exhibitionist Doctor Oetker, for eleven straight mornings.)
But this foreshortened co-toilet of which I speak is neither urinal nor foot bath nor pussy washer (though it can be easily used for all those things). It is a bidet! A bidet! A post-poop ass-washer! In South-East Asia, you use the little tube coming out of the wall to spray your crack clean. In India, beside the hole in the ground you do your business in, there’s usually a tap or a bucket of water to wash yourself with afterwards. Here, and in big parts of Europe, you see the more elaborate and decorative bidet. Most of the world, in fact, insists on washing their asses after shitting. So how do we North Americans get by with only a wipe or two? Why have none of us two-ply-paper-wadding Gringos ever once dreamed of installing a bidet (or a tube or a bucket of water) snug beside the toilet, and using it every day (or at least every day we take a shit) as part of our normal business. Do we really think that a few squares of flimsy Cottonelle can get us clean?
[This topic of “business”, I’m sure, makes many Gringuitos very uncomfortable. Farts and puke are generally okay topics for humour, but shit, sheizer, stools, and excrement, especially our own, is pretty much out-of-bounds for civilized discussion. But after so many years of living in the tropics with bacteria and amoebas and year-long bouts of diarrhea, for me, talking about my shit-life is completely natural. (Talking about my love-life would probably make me more uncomfortable.) When I was in Ethiopia with the Giullari, for example, we all knew the state of each others’ shits—the consistency, the frequency, the urgency with which we went. It was just a natural part of the trip. Living in Guatemala, one’s shit was usually a top-three topic for discussion on any given day, with any given person, even relative strangers, especially between May and October when the rains would wash the toiletless locals’ shit down the mountains and into the water sources, causing mass cases of regional runs.]
But back to the bidet. Once I discovered it—it took me a couple weeks to really get comfortable with it—this beautiful bathroom implement became an essential thing for me. The height of bathroom civilization. I mean, how did I think I could ever wipe off all the bad with just a couple swipes of paper? You don’t wipe dishes clean with a bit of Scott Towel, do you? No, you need water and soap to get your plates, and your ass, really clean. The bidet makes this easy (for the ass, though I suppose you could also wash the dishes in it) with its hot and cold taps and its little spray nozzle, allowing you to lather up then adjust the perfect stream of water to shoot up and wash your butthole to a squeakily spotless state. (I had a Welsh boyfriend once who said he always washed after shitting and he claimed, at fifty years old, to have an anus “as pink as a little baby’s.”)
The last house I lived in didn’t have a bidet, so for four months, I called a two-liter bottle of water a bidet. Make-shift and much more awkward, but it worked. Here in the new place, the bidet is right where it’s supposed to be, a foot away from the toilet, so that when my loaf is squeezed out (is that the expression? Or do I pinch out a puppy?) I just transfer my cheeks directly over, set the stream to high, and wash that dirty, dark part of me clean clean clean!
Yes, I believe clean cracks are a mark of true civilization.
You know what they say...Once bidet, never back.
But this foreshortened co-toilet of which I speak is neither urinal nor foot bath nor pussy washer (though it can be easily used for all those things). It is a bidet! A bidet! A post-poop ass-washer! In South-East Asia, you use the little tube coming out of the wall to spray your crack clean. In India, beside the hole in the ground you do your business in, there’s usually a tap or a bucket of water to wash yourself with afterwards. Here, and in big parts of Europe, you see the more elaborate and decorative bidet. Most of the world, in fact, insists on washing their asses after shitting. So how do we North Americans get by with only a wipe or two? Why have none of us two-ply-paper-wadding Gringos ever once dreamed of installing a bidet (or a tube or a bucket of water) snug beside the toilet, and using it every day (or at least every day we take a shit) as part of our normal business. Do we really think that a few squares of flimsy Cottonelle can get us clean?
[This topic of “business”, I’m sure, makes many Gringuitos very uncomfortable. Farts and puke are generally okay topics for humour, but shit, sheizer, stools, and excrement, especially our own, is pretty much out-of-bounds for civilized discussion. But after so many years of living in the tropics with bacteria and amoebas and year-long bouts of diarrhea, for me, talking about my shit-life is completely natural. (Talking about my love-life would probably make me more uncomfortable.) When I was in Ethiopia with the Giullari, for example, we all knew the state of each others’ shits—the consistency, the frequency, the urgency with which we went. It was just a natural part of the trip. Living in Guatemala, one’s shit was usually a top-three topic for discussion on any given day, with any given person, even relative strangers, especially between May and October when the rains would wash the toiletless locals’ shit down the mountains and into the water sources, causing mass cases of regional runs.]
But back to the bidet. Once I discovered it—it took me a couple weeks to really get comfortable with it—this beautiful bathroom implement became an essential thing for me. The height of bathroom civilization. I mean, how did I think I could ever wipe off all the bad with just a couple swipes of paper? You don’t wipe dishes clean with a bit of Scott Towel, do you? No, you need water and soap to get your plates, and your ass, really clean. The bidet makes this easy (for the ass, though I suppose you could also wash the dishes in it) with its hot and cold taps and its little spray nozzle, allowing you to lather up then adjust the perfect stream of water to shoot up and wash your butthole to a squeakily spotless state. (I had a Welsh boyfriend once who said he always washed after shitting and he claimed, at fifty years old, to have an anus “as pink as a little baby’s.”)
The last house I lived in didn’t have a bidet, so for four months, I called a two-liter bottle of water a bidet. Make-shift and much more awkward, but it worked. Here in the new place, the bidet is right where it’s supposed to be, a foot away from the toilet, so that when my loaf is squeezed out (is that the expression? Or do I pinch out a puppy?) I just transfer my cheeks directly over, set the stream to high, and wash that dirty, dark part of me clean clean clean!
Yes, I believe clean cracks are a mark of true civilization.
You know what they say...Once bidet, never back.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Guilt is for beginners
No Glob entries in two weeks. Major guilt because I haven’t written more than ten words in that time. That’s an exaggeration—I’m working on something that sucks and I’ve spent at least three hours on it, meaning more like thirty or fifty sucky words, filling me with even more guilt for not producing something, at least something, of some quality.
During this time, as a partial excuse (and increaser of guilt), I moved. Into the loveliest house in La Banda. It’s called La Kalimera (Good Morning in Greek) and it has indoor heating (in one room) and trees of all kinds: mandarin, orange, grapefruit, lemon, peach, apricot, avocado, guava, walnut, almond, and of course, my favorite, the Pink Peppercorn tree called the Awarivay. There are also eight olive trees, fully loaded and ready for harvesting. Scoring this place was a stroke of beyond-luck and I’m doing everything in my power to accept it graciously and guiltlessly. Very difficult. Despite years of specific battling of the big G, it seems to be, in many ways, my natural state of being. D. says that guilt is for beginners and that I am at least a semi-professional by now so-get-the-fuck-over-it-already.
More guilt (combined with love and shining pride) in the form of my sister’s new book, recently released EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE. It took me about a day and a half to read, every minute of it an odd, relativistic delicacy. The story is loosely (not that loosely, actually) based on her/our family history and never before have I encountered a “me-character” in a story that wasn’t my own. Luckily, “Amy” was just a child and so I had little reason to hate or resent her. As for my sister, an immature part of me wishes I could hate or resent her for having published two books to my NONE books published. (They think Jamie “puts Sault Ste. Marie onto the map with her latest book, EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE?” Just wait till they read my perfectly unpublished SKID!) But I support my sister and instead, hate and deeply resent myself in equal, alternating parts. My lazy self. My more-fearful-of-success-than-of-failure self. My absolutely not talentless self who seems to be waiting for some magical publishing elf to find the novel, the screenplay, the graphic story, and the twenty odd essays and short stories stashed secretly in my computer and send them off to the perfect agent who is DYING to find a writer like me to represent and usher into literary history.
I am such a freak.
I am, almost schizophrenically, my own highly critical, perfect readership of one, and at the very same time, a lazy-assed, addicted-to-guilt-and-literary-self-flaggelation semi-writer who feels an almost desperate need at this exact moment to turn off the computer and go out and collect the nuts and fruits that have fallen to the ground. Or hand wash my scarf collection. Or maybe make a black bean soup. Or play with Rita Ciccarelli the dog. Or polish my Tango shoes. Or maniacally cut my bangs again. Something. Anything to avoid this guilt-if-I-do-and-guilt-if-I-don’t feeling I have about writing. My writing.
Jesus cunt fuck.
I have to get over this.
(Here, the Anti-Guilt Fairy, bless her heart, comes down and says, “Lighten up—at least you managed to write these 573 words. It could be worse.” So I do lighten up and take some momentary solace in imagining a handsome sculptor engraving those exact words onto my tombstone: IT COULD’VE BEEN WORSE.)
And now I guess it's time to mop the floor.
During this time, as a partial excuse (and increaser of guilt), I moved. Into the loveliest house in La Banda. It’s called La Kalimera (Good Morning in Greek) and it has indoor heating (in one room) and trees of all kinds: mandarin, orange, grapefruit, lemon, peach, apricot, avocado, guava, walnut, almond, and of course, my favorite, the Pink Peppercorn tree called the Awarivay. There are also eight olive trees, fully loaded and ready for harvesting. Scoring this place was a stroke of beyond-luck and I’m doing everything in my power to accept it graciously and guiltlessly. Very difficult. Despite years of specific battling of the big G, it seems to be, in many ways, my natural state of being. D. says that guilt is for beginners and that I am at least a semi-professional by now so-get-the-fuck-over-it-already.
More guilt (combined with love and shining pride) in the form of my sister’s new book, recently released EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE. It took me about a day and a half to read, every minute of it an odd, relativistic delicacy. The story is loosely (not that loosely, actually) based on her/our family history and never before have I encountered a “me-character” in a story that wasn’t my own. Luckily, “Amy” was just a child and so I had little reason to hate or resent her. As for my sister, an immature part of me wishes I could hate or resent her for having published two books to my NONE books published. (They think Jamie “puts Sault Ste. Marie onto the map with her latest book, EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE?” Just wait till they read my perfectly unpublished SKID!) But I support my sister and instead, hate and deeply resent myself in equal, alternating parts. My lazy self. My more-fearful-of-success-than-of-failure self. My absolutely not talentless self who seems to be waiting for some magical publishing elf to find the novel, the screenplay, the graphic story, and the twenty odd essays and short stories stashed secretly in my computer and send them off to the perfect agent who is DYING to find a writer like me to represent and usher into literary history.
I am such a freak.
I am, almost schizophrenically, my own highly critical, perfect readership of one, and at the very same time, a lazy-assed, addicted-to-guilt-and-literary-self-flaggelation semi-writer who feels an almost desperate need at this exact moment to turn off the computer and go out and collect the nuts and fruits that have fallen to the ground. Or hand wash my scarf collection. Or maybe make a black bean soup. Or play with Rita Ciccarelli the dog. Or polish my Tango shoes. Or maniacally cut my bangs again. Something. Anything to avoid this guilt-if-I-do-and-guilt-if-I-don’t feeling I have about writing. My writing.
Jesus cunt fuck.
I have to get over this.
(Here, the Anti-Guilt Fairy, bless her heart, comes down and says, “Lighten up—at least you managed to write these 573 words. It could be worse.” So I do lighten up and take some momentary solace in imagining a handsome sculptor engraving those exact words onto my tombstone: IT COULD’VE BEEN WORSE.)
And now I guess it's time to mop the floor.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Go Lotus Go
It’s been one year and a day since I left Africa. No turning back. Step away from old self, from old expectations, from old needs and desires and move only forward now, on the quest for more. All this (all of it!) thanks to Ethiopia’s ten thousand orphans and those particular seven smiling Italian clowns. What magical god (Karma? Krsna? Lady Luck?) arranged for the jaded and so very tired waitress to meet up with and join that volunteer circus troupe on her, and their, very first day in Ethiopia? Who do I have to thank for this? For the opportunity? For the joy? For one unforgettable, life-altering moment after another? Three whole months worth. Three short months that overtook all of my years, and when they were over, they led, more or less directly, to this. To Argentina. To the dropping of everything I thought I’d built, que ca s’écroule, je m’en fous!, and to my own personal reformation.
But one year and a day later I continue to flail dryly in the grand wake of such a perfect tsunami. How to live up to such an extraordinary experience? How, really, to live it down? It was Once In A Lifetime, obviously. But there’s no turning back now—I know what I know. So if I can’t reproduce it (and I can’t), I must at least create some circumstances where the general fantasticness of it all can be matched, or neared, or something close. Thus, Argentina. Still, every single thing since, even the most beautiful and profound, has rung of anticlimax, as I knew it would. On my way back from Africa, I actually hoped that the plane would crash before it landed in Toronto. That way, I could shirk the responsibility of living out the rest of my life knowing that nothing would ever be that good again.
Even more challenging (¡dificilísima!) after having lived the absolute time of your life is writing about it. No one wants to read about pure beauty and joy and discovery. No matter how well it’s done, it invariably ends up sounding shmaltzy and dull. D. tells me: “Write it like it was!” But it was like that—all fucking beautiful. Non-stop, time and again, moment after moment, even the three and a half bad minutes, all fucking beautiful. How do you make “all fucking beautiful” into interesting reading? With what vocabulary? And into what structure? I suppose I could contrast it all with the shite, the formerly eternal shite. But I’m sick of the shite. I want to grow out of it. I want to be the lotus that emerges from the swamp, rises above it, and flowers. See how lame that sounds: I want to be the lotus!? I can write scabies and cancer and crack babies into interesting reading until the anal tears stop pussing and finally scar over. But love? Truth? Generosity of the soul? Blah!
But, still, whether I like it or not, the bar’s been set. And the plane didn’t crash.
There’s no turning back now.
So just go, you fucking lotus! Go!
But one year and a day later I continue to flail dryly in the grand wake of such a perfect tsunami. How to live up to such an extraordinary experience? How, really, to live it down? It was Once In A Lifetime, obviously. But there’s no turning back now—I know what I know. So if I can’t reproduce it (and I can’t), I must at least create some circumstances where the general fantasticness of it all can be matched, or neared, or something close. Thus, Argentina. Still, every single thing since, even the most beautiful and profound, has rung of anticlimax, as I knew it would. On my way back from Africa, I actually hoped that the plane would crash before it landed in Toronto. That way, I could shirk the responsibility of living out the rest of my life knowing that nothing would ever be that good again.
Even more challenging (¡dificilísima!) after having lived the absolute time of your life is writing about it. No one wants to read about pure beauty and joy and discovery. No matter how well it’s done, it invariably ends up sounding shmaltzy and dull. D. tells me: “Write it like it was!” But it was like that—all fucking beautiful. Non-stop, time and again, moment after moment, even the three and a half bad minutes, all fucking beautiful. How do you make “all fucking beautiful” into interesting reading? With what vocabulary? And into what structure? I suppose I could contrast it all with the shite, the formerly eternal shite. But I’m sick of the shite. I want to grow out of it. I want to be the lotus that emerges from the swamp, rises above it, and flowers. See how lame that sounds: I want to be the lotus!? I can write scabies and cancer and crack babies into interesting reading until the anal tears stop pussing and finally scar over. But love? Truth? Generosity of the soul? Blah!
But, still, whether I like it or not, the bar’s been set. And the plane didn’t crash.
There’s no turning back now.
So just go, you fucking lotus! Go!
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
April 25th
Today would have been my great-grandmother Eva’s 125th birthday.
On a more contemporary note, today is San Marcos Day, all over the realm. Here in this San Marcos (Sierras), the stores are all closed and most of the people kick back digesting yesterday’s Easter steaks and cheap waxy chocolate eggs. But the Gauchos, both pseudo- and neo-, are out in full force. They’ve dawned their boots and their berets and their fancy chaps and they ride their handsome steeds around, looking completely out of time, until their cell-phones goes off with an Eminem ring tone. Or maybe Chakira. In the afternoon, they gather in the lot beside the church, along with the most celebratory of the town’s paisanos, and fire up a ten-foot-long grill to sell barbecued chicken by the half or the whole. There’s also wine available and Fernet and Coke served in former one-liter plastic water bottles halved down the middle. A hammered old man sings to a back up CD and a dozen couples dance chacarera and paso doble, kicking up enough dust to block out the sun and make me choke on my chicken. It’s a typically criollo sight, earthy and without pretense, and I wipe my dry, priveleged eyes and fall even deeper in love with this place.
But a part of me can’t help myself. A undoable slice of my mind keeps flying back towards The Other San Marcos, La Laguna, Guatemala, my former Home and the seat of the bulk of my nostalgia. There, an entire town, an entire Lake of Mayans, and a bunch of motley ex-pats too, are coming out to celebrate Saint Mark the Evangelist. But ironically, this is the one day San Marcos’s incessant evangelizing will cease. Today is a party day and even if the irritating religiosos wanted to keep preaching the word of their angry god, no culto’s loudspeakers are powerful enough to compete with the turn-it-up-to-eleven sounds of marimba and human merriment.
Days, weeks even, before the 25th, bombs and firecrackers start going off at all hours of the day and night. The locals, some of the poorest in the Americas, love to spend their microscopic sums of money on explosives—not visually pleasing fireworks, no Roman Candles, no Horsetails, nothing sparkly, just earth-shaking, eardrum-popping bombs, driving the dogs and the meditators to seek some peaceful shelter. (Futilely, of course.) Then there’s the marimba. The fucking marimba. From the Muni on the hill or from the basketball court in the middle of town, sometimes at the same time, Metallica-sized stacks of speakers stream live these ten-piece, xylophone-centred bands from about six am until three or four in the morning. And there is no escape for anyone unless it starts to rain or the electricity goes out. (Both very likely at some point, but neither will last long.) The only real cure for Feria is to bite the sound bullet, embrace the insanity, and join in the fun.
When I lived there, I loved San Marcos Feria like a child loves to be wrapped in her mother’s arms. This is what I wrote the last time I was there:
“I felt summoned by the Feria. I could tell the rain was just about to begin but I set out anyway. I had to hear the music up close, see the musicians in their tired matching suits and their funny little almost-in-sync moves. I caught a glimpse of the Big Act’s sexy dancers running out the back of Suzy’s restaurant. I saw Bartolo trying to hold up Isaías’s father (or maybe it was José’s uncle) and I saw another dozen late-stage drunks obliterated by cush. But my heart swelled and my eyes filled and I found it ALL SO BEAUTIFUL. I smiled as I passed the fetal alcohol family and I found them BEAUTIFUL too. The pile of pink-tinged dog shit that a bit of rain revealed to be a plastic bag that some hungry mutt couldn’t help but ingest, then expel. BEAUTIFUL. The half-tree all marked up by ritualized machete slashes. BEAUTIFUL. The bald-necked chicken running wildly through the feet of the passersby. BEAUTIFUL. The cheap Chinese chachkas, the trash and the bombs, the hand-powered Ferris wheel and all the drunken human destitution. All so beautiful today, or as beautiful as ugly can get. It expands in my chest and I feel like I’m going to choke on it. The rain falls at perfect angles and the sun is almost out and a part of me will surely die when I leave this place.”
In the end, I left and that part of me did not die, but just crystalized into a slice of blissful, purgatorial nostalgia.
What more is Home, anyway?
On a more contemporary note, today is San Marcos Day, all over the realm. Here in this San Marcos (Sierras), the stores are all closed and most of the people kick back digesting yesterday’s Easter steaks and cheap waxy chocolate eggs. But the Gauchos, both pseudo- and neo-, are out in full force. They’ve dawned their boots and their berets and their fancy chaps and they ride their handsome steeds around, looking completely out of time, until their cell-phones goes off with an Eminem ring tone. Or maybe Chakira. In the afternoon, they gather in the lot beside the church, along with the most celebratory of the town’s paisanos, and fire up a ten-foot-long grill to sell barbecued chicken by the half or the whole. There’s also wine available and Fernet and Coke served in former one-liter plastic water bottles halved down the middle. A hammered old man sings to a back up CD and a dozen couples dance chacarera and paso doble, kicking up enough dust to block out the sun and make me choke on my chicken. It’s a typically criollo sight, earthy and without pretense, and I wipe my dry, priveleged eyes and fall even deeper in love with this place.
But a part of me can’t help myself. A undoable slice of my mind keeps flying back towards The Other San Marcos, La Laguna, Guatemala, my former Home and the seat of the bulk of my nostalgia. There, an entire town, an entire Lake of Mayans, and a bunch of motley ex-pats too, are coming out to celebrate Saint Mark the Evangelist. But ironically, this is the one day San Marcos’s incessant evangelizing will cease. Today is a party day and even if the irritating religiosos wanted to keep preaching the word of their angry god, no culto’s loudspeakers are powerful enough to compete with the turn-it-up-to-eleven sounds of marimba and human merriment.
Days, weeks even, before the 25th, bombs and firecrackers start going off at all hours of the day and night. The locals, some of the poorest in the Americas, love to spend their microscopic sums of money on explosives—not visually pleasing fireworks, no Roman Candles, no Horsetails, nothing sparkly, just earth-shaking, eardrum-popping bombs, driving the dogs and the meditators to seek some peaceful shelter. (Futilely, of course.) Then there’s the marimba. The fucking marimba. From the Muni on the hill or from the basketball court in the middle of town, sometimes at the same time, Metallica-sized stacks of speakers stream live these ten-piece, xylophone-centred bands from about six am until three or four in the morning. And there is no escape for anyone unless it starts to rain or the electricity goes out. (Both very likely at some point, but neither will last long.) The only real cure for Feria is to bite the sound bullet, embrace the insanity, and join in the fun.
When I lived there, I loved San Marcos Feria like a child loves to be wrapped in her mother’s arms. This is what I wrote the last time I was there:
“I felt summoned by the Feria. I could tell the rain was just about to begin but I set out anyway. I had to hear the music up close, see the musicians in their tired matching suits and their funny little almost-in-sync moves. I caught a glimpse of the Big Act’s sexy dancers running out the back of Suzy’s restaurant. I saw Bartolo trying to hold up Isaías’s father (or maybe it was José’s uncle) and I saw another dozen late-stage drunks obliterated by cush. But my heart swelled and my eyes filled and I found it ALL SO BEAUTIFUL. I smiled as I passed the fetal alcohol family and I found them BEAUTIFUL too. The pile of pink-tinged dog shit that a bit of rain revealed to be a plastic bag that some hungry mutt couldn’t help but ingest, then expel. BEAUTIFUL. The half-tree all marked up by ritualized machete slashes. BEAUTIFUL. The bald-necked chicken running wildly through the feet of the passersby. BEAUTIFUL. The cheap Chinese chachkas, the trash and the bombs, the hand-powered Ferris wheel and all the drunken human destitution. All so beautiful today, or as beautiful as ugly can get. It expands in my chest and I feel like I’m going to choke on it. The rain falls at perfect angles and the sun is almost out and a part of me will surely die when I leave this place.”
In the end, I left and that part of me did not die, but just crystalized into a slice of blissful, purgatorial nostalgia.
What more is Home, anyway?
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