Trail of a Lonesome Gringo (VII: Lost and Found and Lost and…)

Dull days of isolation and interaction and inner and outer and interior y exterior, so on and forth and around and around.  A massive bike ride found me sweaty and in an artisan market, not before being chased by an angry dog barking at my heels and I’m all like fuck, how am I going to go back past it? Which turned out to be a more pertinent question than I’d imagined at first because I overshot the turn-off to the market and the angry fucker was standing on the road, waiting, watching, his territory now at peace until the next wayward stranger swings by.  And I failed to think there and then and stopped a few metres down the road so he could clearly still see me.  So I ride as fast as I can at the bastard, knowing I have little other choice and that he doesn’t really look like he has rabies, or she for that matter, so shooting past I cringe and pedal like a maniac, expecting the worst, but it just sits there, watches me pass like I’m a moron and I fly way down the hill, wandering how these situations work then.  A crusty old crumbly old road, fun riding, locals watch me as they do everywhere, strange long-haired white dude (they’re light, but not quite as white as I compared to the night); and finally I get to the market, like seven kilometres of uphill-downhill riding, where I dump the bike and wonder round for all of half an hour, but it was worth it because the ride was awesome and on the way back I’ll see two little kids and have a little chat with them, very basic, because my vocabulary and abilities in Spanish are still less than that of a child…!  At the market there are some interesting folk and I attempt to play an African instrument with a nice Chilean girl who owns the store and plays guitar; she says she is learning to sing and when I go back inside the shop to check out other instruments I hear her singing to herself and think wow, if she’s learning, then where am I at?  Beautiful sound, odd stabby rhythms I’d love to be able to play.  I buy some hierbas, pretty cheap and a lovely smell, then wander aimlessly some more and finally hit the road again, simultaneously dreading and looking forward to the ride (which turns out to be far easier, mostly down-hill somehow, which I don’t get because it seemed evenly up and down on the way here…).  Previously, I’d had too much coffee with Rodrigo, getting carried away reading some beautiful poems by Walt Whitman and chatting away about music and literature.  So I was wired when I left and pretty much the whole time, heart beating rapidly, unhealthily fast; stomach turned inside out with anxiety, it’s like coffee brings out the beast in me it’s that god damn evident, but the riding is nonetheless enjoyable and I see locals picking up other locals in little pickup trucks as if it’s no thing, wondering why, back at home, I’d fear death asking a stranger in the outback for a ride.  Some John Jarat motherfucker looking to do some serious physical and psychological damage.  Shiet.  But I feel safer seeing it, knowing that I’ll probably have to thumb a ride to Cochiguaz because no public transport exists to get there (I see now why everyone says the people there are weird and isolated).  I look forward to that journey.  So getting back and after having decided a few more days here is a good idea, I drink beer and mourn my dying confidence in the Spanish language, but then remember that it’s early days and that I have a history of pessimism, like some weird criminal record but associated with my attitude rather than the many crimes I’ve committed.  Moving on then.  Beer, walking; I have made  it a fairly regular thing to just walk around town.  I’m convinced that the people have dubbed me ‘the gringo around town’, though I have no evidence for that at all, save for the many pairs of eyes that gaze as I walk; but I think the idea is funny anyway, so I continue imagining that that’s what I am to them.   The old gringo around town.  What is that guy even doing here?  On my night-walks I also gawk at the stars for extended periods of time because…no, I need no reason.  Next day I decided to climb a mountain without realising that I’m really going to climb a big old fucking mountain.  It seems like some allegorical story as I begin by walking past people who seem to be from a congregation—it is Sunday after all.  The first group include a kindly looking pair of women, one older one younger, who approach me gleefully with pamphlets about Christ reading ‘Who Really Rules the World?’ and they even have them in English so I kindly take one in each language, planning to use them to further my Spanish.  Next two young gentlemen, very well-groomed, who I thought were of the same congregation but apparently their pamphlet is different and I see that old familiar word ‘Jehova’ on one of them, and the more confident of the two points to the pamphlets I have shown him from the ladies and lo and behold he speaks a word of English and says ‘Wrong!’ and I laugh saying, ‘Ahhh diferent, es diferente!’ before moving along, but not before shaking their hands politely.  Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but I’m off to climb this mountain to check things out for myself; thank you for the invitations though.  And so up and up I go not really knowing what I’m doing and in skate shoes, sliding all over this beasty mountain; but it’s a friendly mountain, I can tell, it seems to speak to me in ways that are actually quite simple.  Thinking I’m in isolation, about a quarter of the way up (it’s hard to tell because these mountains overlap and go on forever), I bump into a horse-riding group.  Well, further up I must go.  I say hello and continue up, up, up and the town looks beautiful from here, I can see a lot: the entirety of Pisco Elqui, the endless mountains surrounding it, the snow-peaked ones in the distance, the meandering valley itself continuing around a bend.  It’s like nothing else.  And the silence between the mountains is something I’ve always found other-worldly; there is nothing like it.  Just the sound of silence.  A gentle hum which is no hum.  The frequency of the mountains.  Hovering birds keep me company just as I think of my loneliness again and they seem to follow me up and up and then I see a tent, some climbers have camped here; I bump into one, the another, the latter being the more sociable as he shakes my hand immediately and asks about where I’m from.  Despite my explicit lack of understanding he talks and talks and I nod and nod and it doesn’t seem to matter because he’s so friendly that the communication is had anyhow.  He wants a photo of me so I grab his mountaineering stick and smile like a fucking mountaineer.  He’s happy and I ask him how much further you can go and he babbles on and on and I heard pinto blanco which I think is white point; this is then confirmed when I see…a white point.  We shake hands again and he goes down and I go up to the white point, slipping and sliding all over this beast of a mountain; when I get there I fumble about, eat some cookies and eventually come to rest in some shade, with no one else about, and meditate for a while.  It’s utterly peaceful here.  Time passes.  Nothingness.  A few trails of thought and cloud.  Birds.  Rock.  Vibrations.  A low hum and breathing, breathing.  Sigh of relief.  Nothing.  I make a pile of rocks and place it next to the white point.  A man on a horse comes but I don’t try to speak with him here.  He goes.  I sit a while more and eventually descend.  One injury on the way down as a big rock is dislodged by my miscalculations and lands on my heel.  Not too bad though.  Slide all the way down in my skate shoes and sit at the bottom, regaining something.  Back into town, back into the room.  Another night, where my confidence will yet again be pummelled by the locals when I fail to even buy a beer with clarity.  Nonetheless, I know it’s a test of a kind and there will be rest in knowing it’s fine and that learning as such is not done in dust it is done in the light of night, far distant times, with many new signs and without that feeling of being resigned.  On time.  I also met a nice shaman lady with whom I had a great conversation, making amends for the other failed ones; we spoke about plants and healing and interconnection and many things, in increments; but most importantly about how much can be said without words.  So that’s why I have been smiling at everyone.  North in a few days.  Signal diminishing; over, and, out.

La Gran Depresión

Chapter One: La Purga

 

A group of locals are crowded into the back of a pickup truck and it flies through the mountainous country, almost floating along roads as smooth as marble.  It floats up a hill, down, across gorges and through the empty valley, the latter grumbling disconcertedly as it does so.  The driver and passenger are native, too; a strange air hovers about the place, inside the vehicle, outside of it and beyond into the endless mountains.  Grim faces exchange grim expressions in a grimly-toned atmosphere.  A Newcomer is amongst them, but adapts herself to the dynamic in order to avoid standing out.  She is, however, quite different from them.  Pueblos dot the valley, though the truck is presently between two of them.  The rubber on the road hums, the sound fluctuating, falling and rising like waves, though less consistent.  The infinite acoustics of the valley.  Suddenly a change in feeling—a boy on the side of the road.  Physically, he looks older than a boy, but the locals know this is just a boy; his expression betrays youth, indecision.  Naivety.  The boy is leaning on a rail, convulsing.  The rail runs along a ridge beyond which is a vast drop into a black abyss where, for as long as anyone here remembers, all that can be seen are things spinning about in a vacuous whirl, rotating slowly into nothingness; there are all sorts of things there, slowly being sucked down, into the Other Place.  It has been there, again, for as long as anyone can remember; there is not much worth noting about it anymore, for them.  It is what it is.  The boy is vomiting relentlessly, violently, down into this abyss.  He looks almost crippled, barely standing as the truck approaches his withered soul-body.  The released energy drips down his chin, onto his clothes, the ground, the rail—but all of it, eventually, goes into the abyss.  It is pulled, naturally, down into it.  Not quite by gravity, but some other force that has not been named.  The streams evacuating the boy’s being are many-coloured and have many dimensions and he is crying deeply as this occurs.  The truck slows down and the people stare out and the Newcomer carefully scrutinises the situation; she cannot see over the edge and knows nothing of its significance.  Normally, people purge at home and dump the residue in private; it is a secretive but accepted affair, concealed only explicitly like sex or passing bodily waste.  This is the faux pas aspect of the scene before these people.  It’s rare and no one really knows what to do but gawk.  And so when the truck comes to a complete stop the situation grows slightly awkward.  No one does anything for some time while the boy spills himself out everywhere, violently purging from his mouth, nose and anus.  For the Newcomer, this is a shock, a disgusting and baffling mess; not knowing exactly what’s going on, she eventually breaks the motionlessness of the crowd in the truck and jumps out, something like maternal instinct kicking in, and holds the boy tightly as the process unfolds.  No one in the truck moves.  A few eyebrows raise, but this is all.  The valley releases a soft howl, though no one in the truck knows why; there is always meaning in the way it expresses itself, but none can explain this signal.  They know the purging will continue for some time.  They see the boy’s colour, his skin, hair, eyes and the shades of what’s coming from inside of him, and they know it will be some time before he is done; he is very ill, more-so than most.  Many trucks pass through this place and so they leave without concern for the pair.  The Newcomer, still comforting the boy, watches as the pairs of eyes ogle back from the truck, at her and the boy, judging, questioning, for as long as she can still see them.  The hum of the engine grows softer and softer and finally fades, the only sound now the howl of the valley and the slight movements of the boy’s palpitating body.  There is no noise from the process itself.  Long ago, the people here began to push it into silence and a slow evolution occurred leading up to the present, in which not a single sound emits during the process.  The woman has come from a faraway place; she knows nothing of anything here and sighs softly, as if for the boy, holds him and watches the splashing residue fall onto her arms and dress and then slowly slither away, like a serpent, into the great crater.  She will be there for hours, but will not move; she will grow hungry, with no food; weary, embracing the boy; more confused, not knowing a thing about what is going on, but that her care is needed.  She was called and so, she came.  Several vehicles will approach, slow down, stare and then move on without compassion.  The sky will transition many times and when finally the boy, who she will learn is an orphan of some kind, abandoned in some sense, will be drawn to her as though she were his own mother, and she to him as if he were her own son, because of course they are Mother and Child.

Trail of a Lonesome Gringo (VI): Valle de Paz y Growing Dark

Sun beats blue sky heart, sun beats not a cloud, not a distant night; heart beats fast below the mountain pass, below the crater made of paz (peace).  Quiero sufrir.  I re-realised it, today, cycling my legs around and around, wind in face, growing red under the sun.  Becoming dark-skinned; just red now, like them injuns up north.  Heart and soul feeds my prayers through the music box in the lounge—people smile as they go by, a deeply-coloured smile.  Subtle, but like it tells a whole bunch of stories.  Through and over hills, up and down (ariba y bajo), and back again.  Can they see me breathing deeper now?  Do they smile because they are amused, or because they know something?  People of the mountains have different souls; or maybe their souls are just fed different food.  Seems more satisfying to me.  I scoot up and back growing siredder and redder, return the bike and wish I’d rented it for hours—maybe I will.  A senorita was singing in the street as I went by, walking with a friend and I smiled so loudly instead of saying hola! because her beautiful voice was resonating throughout this quiet town, singing aloud to no one in particular, to everyone, to me even and I thought about back home and people don’t do that much, if at all, certainly not in the same way and I keep realising again and again that I am quite enchanted with this holy place.  Walking this morning with two inglaterras (Ruth from the north, Jocelyn from the south) up a mountain, like the desert sort of, burning more and more and talking and seeing the valley from way up high, rural properties and a guy from the night before, a little worse for wear, who invited us to look at his place which was a beautifully, simply constructed mud-house (you get the gist) with wine bottles cemented into the walls and chimes everywhere—there are chimes everywhere here and they echo the beauty around them, of the little wind that blows below the often empty skies; and in his home he was growing some meriwana in little hot-house which was sort of impressive.  Up there we stopped and looked around and breathed and went back down again.  The day before I met Rodrigo, a Chilean who ran a little café out of a caravan-type thing (it was on wheels); I’d just arrived and was wondering the town in search of food and there he was, a simple menu, so I went in and worked my Spanish as best I could.  He made me a quiche with fresh tomatoes that tasted better than any I’ve had, some pumpkin soup out of this world and a fresh, cold orange juice, nice and sour just like I like it, though of course he didn’t know that (he probably did actually).  After a while we figured out that English would be easier: I hadn’t known and he had apparently been talking to an English family for a while that morning and had switched back to Spanish without thinking, though there I was impressed with myself for having such a fluent and believable Spanish accent.  Lovely man, interesting man; a journalist-turned-wanderer, in his forties with a very deep and resonant voice, like it should be on a revoilutionary radio channel.  And he looked like Che Guavara so much it was uncanny, big dark beard, a little militant-looking cap.  Amazing.  Leant to the left too.  He sang along to Broadway-sounding songs beautifully (I don’t really know exactly what Broadway is, es verdad) and had some great songs going around on his stereo.  Chilean folk, which keeps drawing me nearer; full of complex political emotions to do with a history of great complexity and hardship.  Later that night he would explain to me that when Pinochet was in power, they hunted down anyone with any literature about the art movement Cubism.  This was, he said, because “Cubism” sounds a lot like “Cuba”, and Cuba was a communist country and thus said literature could not be tolerated.  I thought this was funny, but it gets better.  Ironically, the people who tended to own books on Cubism were quite arty and generally leant to the left anyway, so the government was killing the right people in its eyes after all!  Fantastic, yet horrifying.  These countries have seen a few things.  Back at the café I thanked him for the meal and he recommended me a bar where he and his friends hung out, sometimes played guitar and sang, as well as some other tips on what to see.  But before we finish with Rodrigo, there’s a little piece of our chat that almost slipped me by, well salient…!  A town near here called Cochiguaz is quite isolated and known for weirdness: UFOs, strange folk that have come here for spiritual reasons, or to find aliens, or to feel the magnetic power of the earth here.  Lots of whacky stuff.  So I asked him about it and up to this point—and even after, really—he had been quite ‘rational’ (a tough word to use, but I hope you get the gist).  Spoke very well, was well-informed, but didn’t say anything too off-the-wall.  So I asked him about the town and he kind of shrugged and said it was a strange place where things might happen to me, if I go; kind of “psychological” he says, because it’s isolated there and there’s nothing much to do but wait for yourself to pop up, or for someone else to find you; something bad might happen to you there, he says, and I look at him kind of eyebrow-raised like okay…and he goes on and says,  or something good like he genuinely couldn’t say.  The specificity of the whole thing was pretty notable.  So I guess, well I’m pretty sure (positive actually) that Cochiguaz is my next stop, because I’m pretty sure I’m after either of the things he mentioned.  Quiero sufrir.  I forgot, but it’s a little true because I mean to suffer is to grow and to grow is to be, be being, be onwards and upwards mi amigos back home.  I swear the vine keeps tugging me from way up north too, but I have a few things to do, especialidid si mi espanol va a esta fluido (especially if my Spanish is going to be fluent).  God knows.  Under and up.

Trail of a Lonesome Gringo (III): Cards

I keep telling the fucking guy, the dude in the mirror, that holy shit, he looks exactly how I feel!  It’s uncanny.  Just un-fucking canny really.  Every time I go there, be it crying or snoring, he looks exactly as how I feel.  Anyhow, the night of the card game started off like no other night, a few very different people crammed into a small room in some small town in Chile.  I kept thinking how funny it was that certain traits existed.  For example, people from California seem to have a very distinct vibe.  They use words and contexts in such a cool and funny way.   It’s almost ultra-personal, so that despite no one else understanding exactly what the words mean, the ideas get across quite easily, as well as the vibe of the whole deal.  It’s quite excellent and pretty entertaining in the right contexts, the right chemistries.  So as night fell, the game began, without my even really realising it, and uncannily everyone fell into place to make a comedic situation which I could write about, especially because English people are so fucking funny when they’re drunk.  Like what’s-his-face out of Black Books.  Anyway, I’d never played the game before (I’ve always played the game), but everyone was all like, shit, where are we and what are we doing, and where in gods’ names did our inhibitions go?  So it was funny of course.  Si, claro.  I was outnumbered a hundred to one, but I played anyhow.  Bitches everywhere, in the most conventionally respectful way possible; it’s just funny to refer to them that way sometimes, especially if you’re a spot of testosterone (if that) in a cloud of oestrogen, struggling to rise for air but pleasantly accepting of the extensive moonlight shining all around you.  The night was so young the whole time, like a night that never got out of the house.  Those are generally the best nights too!  An Australian dude, an English girl, two Californian Americans, an Austrian and a German, as well as a Chilean host.  I mean, fuck…it just makes the best juice.  For one, how funny is it how English people get drunk as fuck and tend not to pronounce the ends of words, so they’re all like leaning on their shoulders and mumbling shit that sounds again like it’s from Black Books: “No-, but-, I fough- ‘at ‘a ‘og ‘as ‘arin’ a’ me!”  Honestly.  It’s so hard to write, but so easy to laugh at.  Well, you’ve been traveling almost a year, so maybe it’s no surprise that you’re lonely and drunk, and quite possibly out for something hard and stiff, like a drink.  Nonetheless, much humour, and quite frankly I admire the card tricks you perform.  She once left for the night, said goodbye to the lot, then reappeared to play a card game, as if nothing had happened.  With a bowl of cereal.  After walking into a wall.  It seems like some English trait, for a drunken English-person, to not really be phased by the fact that they’ve said anything at all; they just leave, come back and join back in, as though their departure were dreamt up by those around them.  Completely irrelevant; and rightly so.  Excellent.  Also, the chemistry with the Californian people is something from another planet.   Like, yo, wassup bitch, damn girl, and all this mad lingo shit, up against this like ey, ‘asup ma’e, ne’a knew you was li’e, drinkin’ an shi’, li’e, do’n worry ‘bout i’, ai’?  And so on and so forth.  Then she bends her eyelids around looking like a fucking zombie and everyone freaks but fuck, for a person as drunk as that I’m terribly impressed.  Poor lonely soul.  Maybe.  Or am I that?  I judge only because I can’t trust the man in the mirror—thanks MJ, I thought I knew you.  Anyhow, what if it touches me in the night?  It’s not at all funny like you might think.  We make fun of a lot of things that are actually, plainly, quite sad.  But yes, onwards and upwards, so on shall we go until the soul is reached and is SOLD, two for a dollar.  I suppose it was a pretty fun night, left alone for a minute or two.  See the English girl kept trying to leave and bumping into walls and what not, showing us pictures of her and a giant turtle, attempting to convey something, and we all laughed but I did feel for her, because she was a lovely lass, with lots of things to say and a great sense of being, but crikey, they could all drink a bit.  I mean, I planned not to, but from the get-go everyone had a drink and I didn’t quite realise it’d be an all-or-nothing -type thing, so I inadvertently joined in and tried not to be the strange, quite, “Aussie” guy with not as much to say as the next Aussie guy who seems to know everything about everything and also want to tell everyone about it.  Big old Callie girls, good for a laugh and a chat when you twisted the conversation to something remotely serious; and also, when they found something really obscurely humorous about the English thing, I could see it clearly and thus was very, very amused when they couldn’t stop laughing at say, her bumping into the wall when she said goodnight, or her getting utterly confused at the card game we were playing, or even more impressively, her card trick which defeated us all when we all thought she was too fucked out of her brains to do much like anything at all.  Or when she asked me out of nowhere whether I’d like thirty gigabytes of media from her computer.  Crikey, what a thing.  Where did all my food go?  Big Cali girls; they know what the fucks goin’on.  I knew it, as soon as I brought those brownies out, or those Pringes, or the nuts—all gone within seconds.  Mere crumbs remained of that one brownie I spared.  Crumbs on a table of festivities.  Christ.  I knew it.  So why complain?  Onwards and upwards.  The night ends with a subtle twist to the left, see, an older German lady was hanging with a teenage Austrian girl and of course the pull of conversation wins when I turn the corner and chat away to the Austrian first about a comic kids’ show she’s watching on TV, then literature and then politics and all sorts of shit, because it’s awesome and easy to talk about for me, and who cares, and what not.  I think she’s some kind of genius, about ten years ahead of her age and shrewd as a shrew.  I keep thinking now about how as I ‘grow’, as they say, all I do is become more like a kid, enjoying more infantile things like getting dizzy; and all I do is become more drawn to kids and teenagers that still have innocence—not in a sexual way—but because they’re less heavy with shit than the others, less burdened with some weird sexuality, some petty adult concern that needs a feed like the guinea pigs in the back-yard, less drawn to “grown-up” things which I find myself less and less drawn to (but more and more drawn to at the same time, like a bad magnet); and I guess, most of all, that lack of pressure which conversation with a clever European teenager takes for granted.  Really, I mean, really, is it not that we get more and more messed up as we age?  That the more we are engulfed by the systemic world, the more we are drawn away from it, given that we have natural urges?  Christ, let us free.  We are, after all; there’s no turning that about.  Anyway, the beer was free and the game is long over.  Pesos are all yours, ladies.  Keep it real on the west side.  Cali forever, poesia para siempre.  Eternal like the flame.  Until tomorrow…

Trail of a Lonesome Gringo (IV): Coming off it at El Hostal

Ugh.  Ugh, ugh, ugh.  Pulling away in turmoil, through turmoil and from it, hopefully not to it.  Physical causal reasoning, whispering like a devil; taught so well, while fresh, like a language—not easily forgotten.  So easily learnt.  Pulling away.  Loss of everything.  There are distinct moments, lasting often longer than just one moment, where I feel insanity.  I know exactly what it is.  It’s simple and not foreign at all.  It’s where we come from.  It could even be quite tasty, like cheese with wine.  Which addictions am I pulling away from?  Doesn’t matter much, unless they were blockages in some form; how the fuck can that be ascertained, though?  It can’t.  Back to Go again.  Two hundred pesos.  Not much.  The Tree, in which I lodge, with the Velvet Underground, somehow comforting me, though I’d never have picked that one, despite my long, never-lost love for them.  Waitin’ for my man…that’s pretty much it.  Hey white boy, whatchu doin’ uptown?  Good question, Lou.  Not sussing out my heroin dealer, but something that could be related.  What if I died alone here?  Ah well, there’s two two litre beers I’ll likely have finished before it happens.  Christ, who’d he actually thought that these cat claws would start scratching after things again.  Phasic organisms, we are; well, this one can only speak for itself, I suppose.  Nah, we’re pretty phasic ey.  Absolute.  Scared to speak because now all you hear is, ‘You can’t be right or wrong.’  Isn’t that a muddled philosophy when applied blindly?  Alright.  Who cares?  Nothing happens, nothing matters.  No right, no wrong.  Simple as that.  I don’t think that’s what the Zen Buddhists mean though fellas.  Again, not so simple.  Take it and run but don’t go too fucking far.  The baton must be passed to an other; another.  Living.  Organism.  Have I been pulled completely out of my introversion?  Because of course that would not feel right.  Ugh.  Unlikely.  More like a scab picked and picked and picked, infected.  Lovely to pick though.  A real god damn pleasure.  Yum.  THE FOLK HAVE GATHERED IN THE HALL, THE FEAST AND TALK HAVE BEGUN; RELEASE US.  Donde esta mi guitarra y mi amigos?  Singing never sounded so prosaic.  But I love them all still.  Todavia.  This was a blog once.  What did I do today?  Well, regular words would be like a long showing of holiday photos, terribly boring.  So I woke up.  Got out of bed—after fucking ages tossing and turning and wondering if my dorm-mate had choked on her vomit in the night (alas, she had not) —did not drag a comb across my head, my hair would simply engulf it; then I ate breakfast.  Gracias, senora!  I got all my own shit out to eat only to see that fuck it’s provided, felt like a weirdo foreigner guy that didn’t know what was going on, ‘cos I was.  What of it?  Ate it, told her I was a vegetarian and that’s why the jamon was still on the plate, and the adjoining cheese because it was touching the ham, a weird phenomenon, because I don’t really know whether I’m cool eating something that’s touching meat, I mean, the other half was probably fine, but fuck, do we get particle-ular?  Particle…particular.  Party cooler?  Jesus, I’m losing it.  Went walking around with the ladies, what a vibe, said goodbye to English and visited a magical beach with some street dogs too, biting and running and chasing things—not without purpose, I think.  Without purpose seems to be a thing we might project onto animals.  Dumbness.  Cute dumbness.  Endearing.  It’s great though, seeing in them so much of us.  Their beauty not withstanding.  The beach was grey and muddy and wavy, a giant cannon pointed toward the ocean and I thought maybe pirates were coming and I was right, there were pirates.  I manned the cannon, the girls searched for shells.  When they finally arrived I’d actually left the cannon, which sat below the lighthouse, which I was now in.  But it was broken so I couldn’t guide the pirates into the rocks; and it was also daylight and there were no pirates.  So after that we went back, coursing through some dirty streets, idly chatting (or chatting idly).  Next thing I knew my stomach had been turned inside out, like a godforsaken ghoul.  That voice: what are you doing?  Over and over.  Like a bastard, it was.  I knew once that the answer to that question doesn’t exist; it is a void question that makes no sense and eats its own tail.  Somewhere along the line my mind returned and began defecating on my soul again.  Not for long.  Finally got some great food but mi estomago seems to have shrunk and I eat like an infant now.  Going to try to stretch it out, give it an iron, maybe clear all the shit bits out and then put it back.  Rough and tumble, my friend named a dishevelled bird once.  The name was spot on.  The language has begun to take to me, cheeky beast that it is.  It’s been giving me tips, letting me in on a little more; I think now that if I want to, I can befriend it fully, allowing me to contact its people more easily.  They’re a lovely folk and their words reflect their beings, their take on this big gnarly beast called life; more practical, but also more soulful; more living and human than, say, those of us raised on Friends.  Why can’t I stop watching it though?  I’m learning Spanish from the subtitles.  Killer excuse.  So: do I see Eduardo in the mountains, solo-gringo it way out to the indigenous foothills; or do I waltz down tourist valley and sleep amid new age folk and grapes?  Or both.  Or should I consider having money to go anywhere else?  See what tomorrow morning says.  Haven’t showered in a bit again.  Dirty as a slime.  Over and out.