THE IKHANOSPHERE Q308

September 19, 2008
Crow's Nest

It was much like I remember it, and I pulled off at the same turnout on the same flat shoulder between two steep parts of the same road within the same towering forest, the same world of green.  Across the road, the clay bank rose, red and slick, just like all those years ago, and I had to grab onto saplings to pull myself up, much as I remember.  The trail was long returned to forest but the contour of the mountain was the same, and I stayed just high enough to not lose too much elevation and have to hike back up, needlessly.  The rain fell lightly, working its way through the forest canopy, and I found a feather on the ground and put it into my hat.  It was a furry feather, as if from a nestling but fresh and white.  It was alone and there was no blood.  Inside the understory the forest seemed to breathe, and I felt eyes follow my advance.  Brambles reached out and touched me, much like in a Disney movie featuring deep menacing woods, and I shuddered at the eeriness of it as I walked through the time gate but try though it might, the forest was unable to unnerve me.  And a few minutes later, there it was, just like I walked away from it seven years ago, the first OWW installation, undetectable to the eye, the buried spring on one side, the rocked in drip gallery up the gorge and invisibly hewn from the wet conglomerate.  It has always reminded me of that EA Poe story, A Tell-Tale Heart.  Beyond the wall was the tunnel, the drip gallery, similar to the thing, I guess that they call a qanat in Iran, a tunnel where water accumulates and is conveyed.  I did not break into any pipes or dig anything up and at the tank there was about the same flow rate as the design rating entering the tank.  A tree as big around as I am tall had fallen across the road that once passed, and the forest had encroached and left it an avenue of briars and nest of snakes.  I placed my feet carefully and walked slowly across the slick terrain and climbed carefully across the mildewed debris, taking care to not twist an ankle break a leg, hit my head, tear my skin, nor to stumble across a fifteen foot bushmaster in uneasy repose beneath the brush.

Back at Embarcada, no water seemed to be flowing into the tank, so I headed off down the mountain.  I sneered at the mandarin lime tree and its load of fruit.  Last visit I got into one, hoping it was an orange.  It turned my mouth inside out, and the memory flushed my mouth with water.  I guess before I never paid attention, despite the fifteen or twenty trips I made, but below on a shoulder of the slope before the land plunges into the canyon, there was a grove of citrus, and these had every appearance of being legitimate oranges, a few of them appearing ripe.  I broke a long stick off a fallen branch as the rain lightly fell and knocked one of the fruits to the ground and peeled and devoured it.  The low-hanging fruit was mostly all gone, and after a bit of angling, I got a second one and ate it as well.  Below, Cuco and Marcos were standing around the pump waiting for the PVC cement to dry.  Cuco had already adjusted the stroke length and after we jawed a bit, he worked the valve a bit and fiddled with the waste valve and set the pump to working, this time to hopefully never stop.  It was filling the tank a half hour later as we loaded up and headed out.

Today, I saw a squirrel monkey, a coatimundi, a toucan, and an agouti.  Back in town one of my bank accounts had grown by $22,000, and my inbox was full of reservations requests, the phone jangling.  The rain pounded Jimenez, and I shaved and showered and tended to correspondence and phone messages and am now imagining a nice dinner for myself, even though I have had neither breakfast nor lunch today.

In 1984 Richard Brautigan, the author of a book I accidentally read this summer, put a .44 magnum to his head and ended the carnival while looking out over the Pacific Ocean from his California home.  He gets my award for the most original suicide note ever, which took on even additional meaning since his body was not discovered until nearly one month later.  "Messy, isn't it," he wrote.

September 18, 2008
Crow's Nest

Barack Obama may know a thing or two that we armchair campaign critics don't.  We all want to see the fire in his belly and to watch it escape from his lips to singe the eyebrows of his interviewer every once in awhile.  But maybe he got where he is as Mister Cool Cucumber and can leave the hot-headed repartees to his neuron-challenged competitor, who is TOO OLD to be president.

My how the mighty have fallen.  I remember thinking that the whole suppressed interest business seemed to go on way longer after 9/11 than economic market protections would seem warranted.  But who am I next to the vaunted Alan Greenspan.  What an appropriate comeuppance for such a massive ego to be defrocked as a garden-variety economic nincompoop after all.  Andrea, if your are reading this, I hope you will consider closing down the sex valve to let your old man stew a bit and contemplate at length the enormity of his disservice to this nation.  In fact, I am imagining a re-make of Sartre's No Exit, featuring Alan Greenspan, Henry Kissinger, and Katherine Harris in a circular firing squad as they debate the merits of post-political, post-racial, post-American, post-gender Republicanism under the grinning arbitration of a self-satisfied and endlessly amused Mephistopheles.

September 16, 2008
Crow's Nest

You can't make this stuff up:  his name is He Pingping, and her name is Svetlana.  He's a Mongol, she a Russian.  He says her legs are beautiful.  Guinness 2008 hits the shelf this week. But in Puravidaville, mountains rise from valleys and orogens carpez the dium, and I am left with no alternative but to do laps among the lint of my navel and ignore the sums invoked and the potential implicit.  These things come in cycles, I told Emiliano tonight, and it's simply our turn for it to come around, I told him.  We have worked hard, he seemed to agree.  The line is taut, moving in the water. We'll see, but the real estate inquiries have been resuming lately, the whole mortgage bust that started months ago somewhere else seeming to wear thin as a reason for withholding overseas investment, anymore.  Suddenly there is motion on several fronts, and my meeting today in Matapalo was promising toward the negotiated execution of a solar-power contract there, and there is a Carate deal verbally settled upon, a final meeting scheduled for tomorrow in the nest.

Why have I never heard of this writer that wacked himself on Saturday, this David Foster Wallace?  They portray him as red-eye gravy, overtopping with nearly Haitian juju, a transcendent literary cognoscentum, a dues-paying literatum, a fricking genius for crying out loud.  And he was only a year or so younger than me.  I will have to ask Dan.  Dan will know about him.  They speak of him as if he were the new coming, and I have heard of neither him, nor ANY of his books, and with their titles, there can really be no mistaking whether or not you have heard of them:  Infinite Jest. . . Girl with Curious Hair. . . Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. . . Broom of the System. . . ?  What is it that I must do to learn of things that I should read or at least know that I should read?  Does an artist's suicide detract from the relevance of his life's body of work, or from individual pieces?  I have always thought so.  I have always imagined the works of Hemingway tainted.  The name Silvia Plath upends my apple-cart and makes me a little dismissive of cold bakers.  If I were Socrates I would have had them all pound sand, over crossed arms.  Pirsig's whole Motorcycle maintenance gig to me was a manual on how to avoid committing suicide.  And then what did he go and do?  It makes me question whether the book should be read.  I was made to read it in college and remember it fondly.  Phaedrus.  That was the dude's name.  What kind of a name is Phaedrus?  If I had a name like that I would surely wack myself as well.  So should I go and read this Wallace guy's stuff?  At least the Broom novel?  I wish I had somebody to just tell me what to do instead of having to make my own choices.  It would make things so much easier.

Just kidding, of course.

September 15, 2008
Crow's Nest, Port Jim

September 14, 2008
Crow's Nest, Port Jim

The streets filled after dark with the well-dressed faithful parading miniature houses or symbolic facsimiles mounted on posts, illuminated with candles, the curious thing that they do here the day before Independence Day.  The procession filed down the recently paved main street as the rain dogs slept in their home in the clouds.  The mood was festive, despite the blaring of techno-reggaeton from Juanita's, the defilement of which would appear nearly complete.  I laugh at how much I hate this place and cry at how much I love it.  Hopefully, this new sonic abomination emanating from downstairs is a passing wraith, a zombie with bigger brains to fry.  I figure it's a hangover of the deejay thing and will keep my council and count the days till I begin a reality check aboard a big old jet airliner taking me to my home.  I should just break with it all by renting out the Crow's Nest and retreating to a fringe somewhere that I can pretend to be like other people and break the mold as this reality stuff firms up around me like plaster of paris that someone is going to pour a molten metal into to displace me and this illusion in gold or something equally permanent.

I got summary email reports off to two of the hydro clients today and spent hours puzzling over maps on the third one, finally managing to puzzle together the topographic quadrangle, the plano, and my GPS field track all overlain on the same image and for it to make sense.  Reviewing the correspondence I see that I missed one whole building site and tagged only two out of the total of three, though in my defense the onsite manager indicated that only the two sites tha we visited were relevant.  It is a case mandating a return in the dry season, anyway, since the water is all so high on the mountain that it might not be a perennial or may have a tenth of the flow in March.  Perhaps we can pick up that third site then. As recently as 2006 the things going on in the United States grated me and filled me with a vast indignation and sense of outrage.  Anymore it is too expensive an emotion to contemplate on regular and frequent cycles, that outrage business.  As supposedly fiscal conservative Republicans bail out investment banks and create a welfare state to nurture rapacious capitalists that have milked all the juice out of the system and salted it away already in their Swiss bank accounts, I am no longer surprised that the apparent electorate seems to prefer the titillation of misleading attack ads to a serious assessment of our nation's needs.  How a Republican candidate can even be within throwing distance of a Democratic candidate on the heels of the most disastrous eight years in the history of the nation is testimony to a cancer within my compatriots.  Whether self-awareness will blossom as I feel it must to suppress and attack and reduce and eventually annihilate this cancer, I am no longer quite the optimist to believe is imminent, or even in the cards at all.

I think I still think that the nation is self-righting, but I am no longer sure of it, not even sure enough of it to invest much of myself in the necessity for it to be true.  I will say this much.  I still hope it is true.  And hope is an indisputably vital component of the human condition.  Without hope there would be no ambition and without ambition no advancement, no comfort.  If necessity is the mother of invention, then hope must surely be the foundation of progress.  That said, why can it not be that it is me that is deluded and on the declining side of history and blind to the great national broad sail unfurling before global trades blowing America back in the direction of national greatness?  Whatever the answer, I relish this moment, where the jury is out, and I am on that jury, in seclusion, waiting to return my verdict with the rest of us, however poorly informed my fellow electorate may or may not be.

That's what this election is, a verdict on the sitting president.  And if he is acquitted and McCain handed the mantle, it will probably be better for the division of government that seems to favor America's greatest impulses.  If he is correctly convicted and Obama is coronated, it is as likely to be a catastrophic drift to a shaky and irresponsible collectivism that will be worse for America in the long run as it is to open an avenue to the institutional and transcendental change so needed by my country.  Such delicious ironies. . .

September 13, 2008
Crow's Nest, Port Jim

It's like karaoke night downstairs, only it is not karaoke.  And it is not live music.  It is deejay night--a first for Juanita's--and the selection is loud and shallow.  It is an Eminem fetishist apparently dishing the discs, but he punctuates the aryan anti-rapper's hip-hop with that stuff they call reggaeton that is just south of intolerable.  Mickey-mouse salsa of a few years ago thankfully went the way of the pterodactyl, and I was sure reggaeton would do the same, but it did not and seems to have become an institutional pop genre.  I guess I should be proud, its roots including Central America.  I could not believe it that techno made the cut, and by this advanced date, I actually like a lot of hip-hop, particularly Wyclef Jean, this despite a day in which I reviled hip-hop as much as I did techno.  But reggaeton?  They used to call it Pana down here, and the way you dance to it is x-rated, with syncopated sex acts simulated through clothing as the deejay cues up, amps up, snorts up, feels up, and ramps up sweating youth with sculpted bodies to swill beer and grind their bumps, hormones bum-rushing the dance floor beneath impacted tympana and smeared makeup, everyone crowded in ugly dance halls on Saturday nights from Los Chiles to Paso Canoa, Tortuguero to Carate, from Santa Elena to Manzanillo, and likely across all the remainder of Central America as well.  At least the ravers were all high on ecstasy, which makes you understand how they could do that rave thing and enjoy it.  But the reggaetoners aren't even stoners, and beer is about as hard as they seem to hit it on a regular basis, maybe like Obama, a little blow when they can afford it.

Now I have a full day of office work to get the three field days ordered, the work advanced.  But I also have to go out and follow up on Gorgeous George's request for a site survey.  Gorgeous George was OWW's first paying customer back in 2000, back in the day of the A-team with Rice and Clift.  We put in a drip gallery in the conglomerate, an eight cubic meter, sealed, tunnel in an indurated conglomerate that collects water at a rate of 2 gallons per minute to feed a water storage tank for the potable water supply of Casa Tres Palmas in Upper Matapalo.  A landslide wiped something out and they jury-rigged something from the stream with the onsite crew.  George says everybody there got the trots, and he wants OWW to the rescue.  Cuco did not make it out to La Embarcada again today, and it was telling that here on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in front of Juanita's, he was quick to tell me that tomorrow they would go take care of it, seemingly oblivious despite the arrival and setup of the deejay inside that he had contracted that tomorrow is Sunday.  Honest mistake, perhaps, hopefully by Monday, as I have a grand of my money invested in that Pandora's pump up there.  Embarcada means "jumping-off point," as in a step too far, and it describes my agreement to install that pump and accede to the owner's instructions rather than insist that my advice be followed.  Mistakes are the most valuable of life experiences and so valuable that they should come at tremendous cost.  They are so beneficial to one that they are nearly to be courted for the wisdom they impart.  Yet we all seem to avoid them like the plague and view them negatively.  Error is the only path to betterment.  Success can never conduce to improvement, merely safety and familiarity (and perhaps wealth).  True success, however, must be in a perennial dance with failure in order to seek its apical reach.

September 12, 2008
Hotel Las Gaviotas, Golfito, Costa Rica

Pablo's rules of light appear to not apply in San Isidro.  I awakened to a streaming ten a.m. quality of light shortyly after six a.m., the periwinkle chiffon curtains dancing in the morning breeze, the sky impossibly bluer than yesterday's, the purity of the morning perhaps suggestive of my geographically greater proximity to God here in the Big Valley than over there in the sordid coastlands where the prurient and corrupt dance in and out of wormholes and wear the label progress.  Even cloaking my eyes, further sleep was a fantasy, and I figured I could have made my original timeline after all, had I not left a message that I would be two hours late.  I patronized the MacDonald's for an egg Macmuffin breakfast and filled the equally hungry Ruby Racer, and as the morning's brilliance deliquesced into standard daytime routine I found myself winding up into the highlands on the western side of the valley.  A world of cloud and fog was yet impinged by the Tinamastes ridgeline, which is a nearly vertical escarpment formed from a thrust fault and boasting Costa Rica's tallest waterfall, Cascada El Diamante, and just beyond the pass, the world was an ethereal white soup blanketing the lowlands and occluding the edge of the world out there over the Pacific.  I marveled anew at boulder alley and link the video that I shot there a couple weeks ago since I only tonight uploaded the vid and edited in the link, buried back on some earlier day in this weblog.

Sure enough, Steve's hydro was like Kobe's game:  they both got.  I was a half hour early and enjoyed a bit of When the Rivers Run Dry and a delicious Coca-cola on ice--about my favorite thing to drink in the whole entire world--before he showed up to escort me into the mountains to show me da wattuh.  I was out by two p.m. and thumbed my proverbial nose at two police orificers on the road south that I passed by, fully papered up.  Mamones are in season, and there is a stand every 500 meters between Chacarita and Rio Claro, it seems, and after about the fiftieth one, I figured I was in Rome and not being sufficiently Roman and pulled over and plunked down my five hundred baloneys for a bag.  In English this fruit is known as a lychee, and it has the curious distinction of providing the slang term for a homosexual in both El Salvador and Puerto Rico.  In the latter, the people call the fruit quenepa, but that didn't stop me twenty years ago from pulling over and asking a mystified fruit salesman on the side of the road in Yabucoa for a bag of faggots way back in the day after a long day of collecting water samples for the US Geological Survey / Water Resources Division.

I settled into Hotel Las Gaviotas in the decayed port town of Golfito by three in the afternoon, and even though the wireless did not reach the rooms and had to be accessed in the lobby and restaurant area undergoing renovations with grinders and welding and loud-mouthed workers, and even though the air conditioner seemed a bit taxed, and even if CNN was a snowstorm from the cable connection--a decidedly mixed metaphor in the hours preceding Hurricane Ike's advance upon the Texas shoreline--I was determined to be happy and worked quite well and pleasantly, happily noting that the anticipated uptick in reservations requests for the new year gave every indication of having burst over the tipping point.  Unable to find the channel with Seinfeld re-runs until it was credits time, I was unbowed in my happiness as it is followed by Scrubs, and that show is gut-busting funny.  Last night it was followed by Ugly Betty, a show I have heard about since its debut in Colombia and followed tangentially as for once the primetime cultural dispersion has penetrated the United States from abroad rather than the other way around.  It was a bit of a bummer when it was not on but in its place an idiotic men-are-stupid genre sit-com, According to Jim, was instead.  I did not sit all the way through and will probably channel-surf mindlessly after putting this away for uploading tomorrow upon my return to the Cradle of Western Civilization.  I have work in the morning, and an eight a.m. appointment, and you know how I get about morning obligations. . .

What have I come to that I would be disappointed in not being able to see a television show?  Perhaps it is simply a passing thing, like kidney stones, bell-bottom jeans, and rat tails.

Tomorrow it is La Gamba and a 400-acre finca in full on hydro country, and I have a blister on my right heel that is going to kick my behind.  It has not rained in two days, and I can imagine it dawning like the tin underbelly of a mackerel, all swollen with water and waiting for me to step out of my truck to fall all over me as I slip and slide around the mountains, trying to keep my electronics alive and struggling to take notes on wet paper with ballpoint pens that refuse to cooperate under conditional inclemency. 

September 11, 2008
Hotel Villa Bekuo, San Isidro, Costa Rica

After a vigorous rigorous round two in the Hatillo mountains, it took me three test runs of hotels and 100 miles of driving to find one that would work.  The Tucan's wireless was again down, and across town at the Apartahotel at first it was up then it was down, and it was a gorgeous suite and only $40, but the guy there didn't know how to make the television work, and when the Internet failed, I had not yet settled in, nor had money exchanged hands, no dirtying of the bathroom or shower or rumpling of the bed, the place free of my fingerprints if not perhaps a strand or two of obligatory DNA, and I pulled the plug on the joint.  Regretfully:  as I say it was nice.  With Palmar closer to tomorrow's job site than Perez, I turned my wheels south, but the hotel that I have happily stayed in there before no longer had Internet, and the hotel that now did was a matchbox that smelled like it might have just been cleaned after the demise of its last occupant and was the kind of hot and still that makes you break a sweat just being there, and the AC did not seem to work and after paying up and standing stunned a bit to balance the inner diva's sensitivity with the beer-warrior's impervious exoskeleton, I just couldn't pull it off and got my money back and hit the road an hour before dark, an hour and a half away Perez, where I am now, flirting with that rule of mine about not driving at night.  But here I am, safe and sound, none the less for prolixity nor intelligibility, road-worn, mountain-weary, more the speed of Scrubs than CNN.   On this famous date I wonder at Ron in Houston as the mother of all Hurricanes prepares a tribute for Galveston and on television they are saying the words "certain death" for stragglers.  I wonder if he got his boat out of the water.  I am not sure if it is good or bad or indifferent but I wanted a pair of old socks, clean and  familiar, faded jeans that conform to the contours of my southern hemisphere, the same old meal that is tried and true in each of its specific habitats, won ton soup at the Agua Luna, Ceviche at the ceviche place, chicken fingers with tartar sauce at Carolina's, penne a la gorgonzola at Giardino's, the deceased salads at the memory of Jade Luna, nothing new, no frills, no experiments, something tried and true, and that is what I have at Villa Bekuo, where cable television has CNN in English, the Internet works, the rooms are clean and private, the parking is secure, and it is somehow familiar.  I was in this very room with one son and his posse on the way to pick up the other son when we got the news of the lost passport that wound up under the dryer months later and the cancellation of Dino's trip.  The memory is unhappy, and Dino cried, and it was the thing that propelled me on the East Coast Road Trip of 2007 and into the tornado in Brooklyn to get a memory that perhaps was supposed to be the spaces and letters in the run-on sentence of real living and not the punctuation marks.  My seven-thirty acquiesced to a ten a.m. so tomorrow we take the Hatillo Mountains into Ojochal for the second survey of this trip.  It's a favor and not a paying job but like always, I hope he's got it, just on principal..

September 10, 2008
Tucan Hotel, Uvita, Costa Rica

The live music is hideous, and the mood is strange here at the Toucan.  Hurricane Rob flew away and left the Internet lunged and the web site of the hotel down, perhaps in a murmur of malevolence, a pinch of pique, or a volcanic vent of vengeance, though it is hard to imagine why.  Tra is a class act as a hotelier and local entrepreneur, deftly juggling the massive egos of his many local clients (to wit your humble correspondent) as well as the passage of the hordes of backpackers and the next-step-up crowd here in the expanding universe of Uvita, Southern Pacific Costa Rica.  I paced and frowned and studied my options and glared at a bottle of cabernet already happily decanting, but it was raining and dark and really too late to get back on the road in search of another place, farther afield from my field destination tomorrow and its unseemly hour of 7:30 a.m. outside of Hatillo.  So, I put on my best face and took a long, dyspeptic gulp of the pricey elixir and planted myself at a table, determined to be nice about it, grandiloquent and all, and tough it out.  At least I had Henry Miller to remind me that things could be a lot worse, that is until the bozo on the guitar started twanging and sanging from one half to one and a half notes above or below pitch and a beat and a half behind or ahead, the voice in grating discordance with his incompletely tuned guitar.  You know you've got a wing-nut amateur hour in full swing when your balding fifty-something troubadour keeps trying to pop off harmonics and misses the sweet spot on the strings to produce muted dissonance on his way to San Jose among bows and flows of fricking angel hair.  So, imagine my pleasurable surprise when Tra passes by to tell me that a guest, a wayward techie Spaniard off the Wayward Bus (long live Steinbeck!) has reset and reconfigured the wireless and brought the Internet back down to Earth through the drizzling rain after the storm's strident passage.  Then, as if that were not enough, Tra brings me my lost book, When the Rivers Run Dry, and I am suddenly in karmic rhapsody once again, all back in synch with the greater rhythms of the karmic granfalloon and wayfaring wampeter (rest in peace, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.), happy as a pig in mud, cozy as a tick on a sow's ear, as tickled as a tapeworm tippling in a rising tide of Johnny Walker black label dribbling down the pink walls of a nervous stomach.

At eleven a.m. I did something dumb in my truck and got it stuck for the second time since I have owned it about a million miles from the nearest assistance.  The first time I got it stuck, I was similarly doing something dumb, but I will not elaborate on my errors in judgment at this moment.  I was checking out the weed-whacking up in the Agujas highlands, and my two groundsmen and I could not liberate Ruby from her plight.  It was a plucky little patch of mud, nothing to defeat me, but it was in a corner of the road and I had to back through it, and somehow I got out of the tracks and the next thing I knew there was only one tire getting good traction, two others sunk to their hubs in mud, the fourth hanging over a bit of a slope that descended through the trees farther than I could see.  I hiked back to the highway under a brilliant sun blaring down and hitch-hiked into town and returned with a truck.  It began to rain the moment we arrived, and had the rain come fifteen minutes earlier, the truck would still be mired in the muck, my salvation deferred to a hopeful tomorrow.  It was between trees with a steep slope on one side, no room to maneuver, but we nursed her back and forth first from the back, then the front, and my bumper grazed the 200-year old tree on the way out, just a little kiss, and I felt the rise out of the pit and knew that it would be okay after all.  It was three-thirty, and I was up to my knees in mud.  I paid him off $30 and stopped in the river below and washed the car and myself and changed clothes under a spitting drizzle as caimans leered at me curiously and once I strayed into cell coverage in Chacarita called to cancel in Hatillo for this afternoon to reschedule for tomorrow and cruised off the Osa beneath a torrential rain that besotted the gulf, blackening the land and watering down the sea, reducing everything to a liquid element, the windshield wipers an accidental metronome as the Ruby Racer's tires sang sweetly through the gritted teeth of a leering radiator, the headlights staring down the horizon to beat it to the draw.

September 9, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

Dawn cleaved an erotic dreamscape with the weight of an ordained schedule, gathering light quickly.  I can tell by the degree of lightness the hour of the morning up until about ten o'clock to within a few minutes of what the clock might say.  From about ten to about three in the afternoon the light remains indecipherable, and after that, again, it allows itself to be read like the faceplate of one of those cheap clock radios that they make in Korea, which can be picked up for under ten bucks in any self-respecting Wal Mart.  So, I knew when I struggled through the warm bath of the near awakening into a pellucid dawn that I was three hours from my scheduled appointment.  I made sure that my obligation in the mountains of the cape would not be until ten just precisely in order to breathe easier and escape my bane, an early rising.  And sure, I would need to get up by eight to get an hour of emails and coffee in advance to be able to get in the truck by nine to make it by ten to that place in the the mountains I was unhappily headed, that place with all the water and rain and forest and mud and challenge.  But the anticipation was a plague every bit as much as a seven a.m. international flight itinerary or a five a.m. bus schedule or the anticipated arrival of a colleague or client around eight a.m.  Awakening is to me a form of divine punishment, torture on a Kafkaesque dimension, water dripping on my forehead, a succulent broth forever withdrawn from my reaching lips.

The southern skyscape might well have been the inversion of a Chelsea chimney, blackness smudging the horizon, the upper atmosphere set off in brush-strokes of charcoal and umber, a bleak greyness permeating all the rest that did not appear besieged by water, storm, the wrath of God, or the day's Caesarly surrender unto the season.  I shuddered as I tossed my boots in the back and imagined the first feel of the bracing rain piercing the canopy and drizzling all over me.  I could not like what I was in the middle of, trouble-shooting a ram pump out in the middle of the woods at the height of the rainy season on a job that was only marginally my deal.  Yes, I put in the pipeline, but the owner brought in the pump, and a year later the thing still not right, the pump suckles the great goat and nurtures the cadavers of failed efforts to rise from their graves and line the horizon, ducking behind trees, causing branches to fall and summoning the elements in an exalted symphony.

But the sky weakened beneath the sun's joist and those showers en route yielded to a still morning in the deep forest.  It looked like maybe the hidden check valve inside the air well of the hydraulic pump was surely the problem, but we adjusted the stroke length for form, and in so doing, the water hammer reached back three lengths up the driveline and blew a hole right out of a plastic union.  Stunned at the colossal downturn in the hopefulness of our ministrations, we shut it all down and were able to discern no backflow--positively--from the delivery line, meaning that hidden check was tight after all, and that it was that confounded stroke length after all and its elusive sweet spot that we had been unable to gently tickle before prematurely blowing our line on the mountain, curses, oaths and sailorly deprecations!  I don't know why it is that hydraulic engineering discussions invariably bare the imprimatur of soft-core pornography, but some things just inhabit their own little perverted cosmos and affect a wicked kind of obscene yet elegant stateliness. 

The many rattles and bangs and squeaks and rubbing sounds that rise from the Ruby Racer reminds me of a bitch in heat inside a pen and the sounds that result from her and the ten males trying to sniff out a way to break in.  And tomorrow I have to go to Hatillo for a hydro job, followed on Friday by a hydro job in Ojochal, followed by a hydro job in La Gamba on Saturday, and a return to the Cradle of Western Civilization that night and vehicular hospitalization in intensive care to start on Monday next.  I am pushing it to urge her out into service now in her great clamoring for succor and relief.  But sometimes, even the hardworking must knuckle down and reach inside to come up with just a bit more.  Let us hope that the inanimate object of my truck is able to do so and rise to my expectations on this trip without rebelling half way through to leave me hamstrung and floating amid the swirling debris of excessive ambitions and the coalescent blossom of foolhardiness.

September 8, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

It took over ten billion units of currency to build the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory spanning the border between France and Switzerland and administered by the latter.  Now it sits as a subterranean Cheshire cat, caressing the God Particle forsaken by parsimonious Americans preferring sexual abstinence to scientific advance in the nineties, grinning now across the Atlantic and ready to turn contemporaneity on its nose.  But not only does the LHC make news today, but also we learn that the Boss of Baghdad, the Imam of Iraq, the Shah of the Surge, General David Petraeus, leaves the field of battle to return to the rigor of his new and heightened responsibility as the Chief of the US Central Command, rising to a heightened nerve complex in the whole American war apparatus, the positive envy of warring nations everywhere.  The ascension of men like David Petraeus and Robert Gates to positions of policy relevance in the sphere of American violence, neither of which betray symptoms of being unhinged, neuters the whole argument about administrative--and Republican Party--incompetence and the overreach of neoconservative ambitions within the contemporary governing clique, to which John McCain pledges allegiance from at least one side of his mouth.  As polar bears register increasing musculature in their newly vital life-style of swimming and the Russians rein in their imperially smarmy smile at rubbing the west's nose in dung of some provenance or another over in the Caucasus and the Russian Navy dances the cha-cha-cha off Venezuelan  shores and Raul politely declines US emergency aid for Cuban victims of Gustav and New Orleans scoffs at bracing for Ike and Federer wins and no rain falls all day long in the Cradle of Western Civilization, all of today's news is outré, and we the uncertain, the mild and humble, the unbeautiful in our temperate lives, wonder at the fall of the other shoe, the one lurking up there just out of sight but looming nevertheless.  As Fannie and Freddy are wedded under a federally officiated ceremony and San Andreas cleaves inland along chromatic lines of separation, America burbles and yearns, a hungry infant squealing on a world stage, its bottle half empty, its diaper half full.

September 7, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

My political engine seems to have lost a cylinder or three back with Obama's early June victory over Hillary Clinton, leaving me limping along beneath the barrage of sameness from the political punditry at www.realclearpolitics.com.  I think that his campaign has been in an analogous and very dangerous coasting period as well leading to the conventions and that the Democrats have lost valuable time in demonizing their adversary, which turns out to be an essential ingredient to a winning campaign in American presidential politics.  His opponent, meanwhile, has not been idle and has proven with his choice of a running mate that he cannot be predicted and is not really your grandmother's Republican.  From a near certainty in Obama's November victory that I felt upon his defeat of Clinton in the primaries, lately a nausea rises at one or another bit of news along the way, or commentary, gusts of portent in the political air, a sudden wave of the momentous magnitude of the unthinkable:  what if he loses?  I look forward to returning to the States and to exercising my civic duty and concluding the contract that I made with the man, and even enjoying the wind-up and final month, but I am not willing to be crushed by a defeat.  I was stunned that the American nation could re-elect George W. Bush, and Dad and I, awakening to the news in Idaho, were unable to muster words until somewhere near Salt Lake City, and we drove on through the blood-red heartland all the way to Wichita, Kansas, before pulling it over to get some sleep.  Every time I hear McCain speak there is some new evidence of either being out of touch, senescent, hot-headed, or again exercising poor judgment.  Today he suggested appointing people that have already "made enough money" to his cabinet and paying them $1 per year.  I mean, if you can get them for that cheap, why not just talk them into working for nothing?  But seriously, the idea is fiscal economy, and it is this sort of populist bunk that goes side by side with the rush to drill as a solution to America's energy problem and oil-tax holidays as a triumvirate of pandering to the least common denominator of American sensibility.  And the candidate that can capture this base demographic, if he can do so without alienating other swaths of the electorate, is sure to have a lock on the office.  And the choice of Palin still strikes me as a mistake and the strongest evidence to date of bad judgment.  But underestimate racism and bigotry in America at your own peril, and I feel like my eternal optimism may be growing a bit cumbersome knowing that for a non-trivial percentage of America, Obama is not an option.  The Democratic narrative is incredibly strong and should persevere.  Maybe even getting this close will propel America in a favorable direction even if McCain does win, perish the thought.  I will be relieved when the Carvilles and Begalas and their rhetorical and political heirs unsheathe the filet knives and get to work in that target-rich environment over there in the America First crowd.  Everybody seems to be standing around tying up one another's gloves, taping them carefully so nobody gets poked in the eye by any loose laces.  These guys don't seem to get it; they were not paying attention during the whole Kerry debacle.  But that is surely about to change.  And I am intent on enjoying myself for this next month and a half of wild ride, and Dad even spoke of the need for another road trip, and it looks like whichever way it goes, it will be razor thin leading up to the big dance, a field of battle in which the least international flare-up takes on outsized dimensions and in which otherwise trivial and insignificant events can snowball rapidly into the make or break of one or the other camp.  It should be if nothing else entertaining, and I can try all I want not to be but will still be crushed if somehow if Obama loses this thing.

September 6, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

It is retro-juju and anti-gravity to lose a book that you are reading and enjoying.  I mean how can you possibly lose a book?  I ask this of myself, because I often do.  It makes it worse if you paid for the book, but even if you didn't it's still bad.  The book I most recently lost I was just one fifth away from the end, and it was a decent hydrology alarmism non-fiction piece:  When the Rivers Run Dry, perfect for me, now, and suddenly it is gone.  Karen bought it online as a present for me from www.amazon.com.  I am such a reprobate for losing the book, though believe me, it was the last thing from my intentions.  And it kicks me back down to Tropic of Cancer as my current meal-time reading material, a novel I have tried through the years to read, ever since my first effort in 1996, and have never been completely able to read all the way through.  Still, I hate it less each time I pick it up and can imagine an unlikely future in which I don't hate it at all, but let's not bet money on this for the moment.  Honestly, Miller's 1930's era grifter-persona is not that far removed from the Khanster, circa double ought eight, honestly, swimming the viscous rip tides of the toothy Osa Peninsula--as opposed to pre-Nazi gay paree--where men come to meet their liberation and doom and from which women walk away blushing, defiant, pregnant, or all of the above. 

Of the two lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century I have read 31% of the first and 41% of the second.  It is crazy to see the number of novels that wind up on both lists, and makes my heart beat a little faster imagining a library in which these unread books are actually resident, in hardback, all protected in plastic and there for people like me to touch, to taste, to devour at will.  Makes you wonder on the list if they were collaborating a bit to cover their tooshes.  List two is a bit circumspect to have the Rand masterpieces placed one and two, though I, of all people would be inclined to be willing to consider the possibility, being Randy myself from time to time.  The Fountainhead, at a minimum, must be one of the greatest of the 20th century novels, up there with Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, and One Hundred Years of Solitude while Atlas Shrugged was more of a Grapes of Wrath half of a bi-pole of social commentary.  But from what I can see the coincidence and the exaltedness is not particularly out of place, and it will give me a great reading list for my Arkansas retreat, now slightly more than three weeks distant.  I crave the library, to feel again its embrace of anointment and its intemperate spark of relevance.  A library is where boundaries collide and transcendence motors silently through the carrels and corridors, through the shelves and stairwells, both a linchpin and lubricant of scholarship.  There was an era when the marginal publications were microfiche-ed for permanence.  Has it all now been digitized?  And when can all the publications be fully expected to be accessible online? 

I know it's coming.  What an amazing and incredible world!  I love it and caress it here from my backwater parapet, from my downtown overlook upon the Cradle of Western Civilization, from my Crow's Nest where dreams ferment and the fires of experience distil a spirit newly unique to the pallet nearly every false start from the gate. 

September 5, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

Where have the Walter Cronkites, David Brinkleys, and Peter Jennings of the world gone?  I remember taking for granted impartiality in the news.  It was presumed.  In retrospect, everyone has an affiliation of some sort, a base line bias at some inner core of self, and perhaps this political animal residing at some level in the people whose job it has always been to report on politics cannot be kept muzzled and cannot be kept all of the time out of the kibbles and bits dribbled from the nation's capital.  Dan Rather was the first of the old-style anchors to shed the illusion of impartiality when he walked into George H.W. Bush's buzz-saw live on national television and had his liver handed to him all purple and gleaming right in front of God and everyone.  You'd think that after ten years of laying for revenge he could have managed something better than the phony documents on Bush Junior that banished the liberal lynx to the outhouse of cable television to stand in the corner with the dunce hat on.  Bryan Williams embodies the business of it all in its orbit about image and perception, and it is easy to imagine him soul-less, moved only by the weave of his trousers, the silk in his ties, perhaps the smell of the product used to keep his coif in conformance with his mirror's severe expectations, and the way his nose hangs a bit to the left.  If he even steps into the ballot box, I imagine him in his strident voice pondering over the offerings:  "Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a president by the toe. . . "  The Katie Couric punching bag is great for bringing out the lurking chauvinist in all of us, and Charles Gibson has none of the gravitas that Williams so effectively manages as a bit-actor to convey.  The theoretically retired Tom Brokaw's paternalism in his frequent cameos and reprisals reminds me of cheap cologne even if I kind of like him.  Over on the cable end of the spectrum somebody did the math and rode the trend to its logical conclusion, and so CNN reports the news like the left prefers to hear it while Fox provides fair and balanced coverage in synch with the ear of the right, pealing off the network viewership year after year until it will soon be stripped to the nib, as passé as contestant game shows in a reality-television paradigm.  All of those columnists that seem so clever in non-leap years just meld into conglomerate aggregates of pre-fabbed positions, so the Noonans, Krauthammers, and Kristols all form a pole of the magnet that is balanced by the Olbermans, Altermans, and Robinsons.  It is only a few from the right, like John Dickerson, George Will, and David Brooks that are able to abstract themselves from the party line sufficiently--or are at least intellectually honest like the late William Buckley to whom they would all certainly profess great admiration--to present commentary that is arguably fair, and from the left the handful of pundits that are anything more than screeds in the tradition of Moore, Huffington, and Moulitsas  could arguably be counted with the fingers of a single hand.  While Coulter and Limbaugh whisper naughty little nothings into one another's ears and Dick Morris drools jealously in the corner, I am having trouble coming up with an example of the cerebral and fair left-leaning editorialist.  Surely there are some . . .  okay:  Dick Meyer and Bill Moyers:  there are two for you.  Point is that there is no balance, there is no objectivity.  The news is either entertainment, infomercial, or in the most effective high-stakes, big-money, multi-tasking Fifth Avenue gambit, both.  In today's world of tightly woven links and labile ethical and moral constraints, it is all opinion, all of the time, where facts are checked at the door, and the microphone is actuated not for actual experts but instead for political purists that can be counted on to poke the opposition firmly in the eye.  Sadly, the opinions that prevail and the view that emerges depends little on the intellectual firmament of the argument's foundations and a dismayingly large amount on the volubility, intensity, and aggression of its proponents and detractors.  For those seeking to form an honest opinion, it's a minefield out there, ringed by snipers in towers for those that are able to crawl through the morass in one piece.  Today it is the incurious and robotic that are valued and allowed to pass, while the head-scratchers and hand-raisers are sent back to the end of the line to ruminate some more on the temerity of thinking in a manner that does not conform to one of the two great poles of intolerance forever tugging at war.

September 4, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

I was so mad at not being able to watch John McCain accept his party's nomination that I donated another hundred bucks to the campaign of Barack Obama.  I am now bought in for $375 total in five separate online donations.  You may sneer at the news, but you were likely not wakened by drums and the discordant ring of clashing cymbals, the tintinnabulation a bit off-beat and muffled through the patter of the remorseless and unforgiving rain.  If the Ticos had any idea that liberation was afoot and what the implications would be for posterity, they would surely have urged a contingent north to petition for a February date for emancipation to coincide with nice weather for future generations that would be forever appreciative of the forethought and consideration.  But this nation learned of its independence one month after the fact by foreign couriers at the very height of the rainy season.  So Independence Day is not all apple  pie and hot dogs like back home but more like umbrellas and cough syrup as well-practiced marchers parade up main street in full symphony, splashing water with each trenchant step, the passion of their acoustic tempest competing but only with the mountain-joisting lords of the sky, the giant sponges squeezing themselves over a saturated and drowned land.  Electron capture warms to the facultative route as aerobic avenues close down in the country-wide saturation of the soil with the pluvial assault.  Anaerobic spores blossom with the world on their shoulders and shudder at the septic horizon levitating higher, the planet's metabolism kicking kinetically into the next gear down in the separation of oxygen from the reactions that most crave its free trade.   Independence nevertheless overrides subjugation, and liberty--even at the cost of something so dramatic as a decline in shares at the shackle corporation--is nearly worth personal discomfort and can accommodate a lot of hits before being pitted.  And while the pros and the cons sort themselves out, the youth practices its drums and xylophones and cymbals and readies itself for that vital September 15th date when beneath a driving rain everything really must be nevertheless dominated to properly inaugurate the dawning of a new day of democracy and freedom here in the Switzerland of Central America. 

September 2, 2008
Awapa, Dunn Inn, San Jose

Like watching a train wreck try to tip-toe across the living room of America without actually happening.  That's what it's like watching the Republican National Convention.  Last night the karmic resurrection of Katrina set Dubya's sphincter to quiver and reduced St. Paul to a collusive nihilism.  Today it is all discombobulated.  What were these people thinking to have the prime slot of the first day delivered by a turncoat Democrat?  I used to think I was a Democrat and once mused about being a Republican and then liked the Libertarian party and gravitated toward the Independent party, where I have found a home for the past decade.  But, now I realize that all along I have simply been a member of the Opposition Party.  And for years I have been a McCain fan, absent anyone better on the national circuit.  So, there is no sour grapes in the revulsion I felt at Joe Lieberman's halting, patronizing, and utterly boring address tonight.  Whatever Lieberman's petty motivations, the decision to invite him to speak in the first place, just like the impetuous and poorly considered VP choice, goes directly at the question of judgment.  Zell Miller was if nothing else at least entertaining.  Hat's off to Fred Thompson for his rousing bird-dog, coon-skinning, cigar-smoking, ham pounding, but still he's just a rich privileged white guy like all the rest of those gene-pool impacted Republicans casting around in the deviation of their ideology and the foundering of their movement on the rocky shoals of corruption, malfeasance, and greed.  What a terrible second day of the National Republican Convention, on the heels of an absent first one.  What a great night for Barack Obama and America!

September 1, 2008
Urén, Dunn Inn San Jose

The two streams that carried perhaps 120 gallons per minute between them when I first visited the property in May today carried ten times as much water, but the morning was nice, the sun filtering through parts of the canopy along ridgelines, denied everywhere else by the towering trees, the temperature nice and cool a thousand feet above the whale's tail.  The forest floor was saturated and slick, water-logged humus on top of red clay, everything wet.  In places mist rose from the ground, even late in the morning, and there were peccary tracks along the trail.  We hiked a new ridge, closer to where the homes are to go and found a place for the photovoltaic farm 150 meters closer to the home site, closer to the hydro site, closer to the nearest access, and wider than the ridgeline across the gorge that was in the plans till today, saving untold thousands of dollars in materials and installation costs.  It was a good morning in all the permutations of good and morning.  I was able to grab a coke and a shower and only slightly pushed the eleven a.m. checkout time and powered up the GPS at Dominical on the turnoff to Perez.  I am secretly documenting the highways of Costa Rica.  Well, I guess it's not a secret anymore.  It feels pretty silly doing it, but maybe it will wind up being a good idea.  Jury's out on that one.  It stayed nice till San Isidro.  From the pass over the Tinamastes range looking out over the big valley it was clear what the rest of the trip would be like.  The mountains were curtains of water, walls of clouds climbing higher and higher in the early afternoon sky reaching all the way to the top of the atmosphere, where it must have been practically night time, and sure enough it began to rain as soon as I hit the Pan-American and did not stop the whole way into the Hose.  I harrumphed back in May at the report of "sixty" landslides closing down the Pan American, but on my first trip through since, it would seem that if anything that was an underestimate.  From San Isidro to Division, where the cloud forest begins, it might as well have been one giant continuous landslide.  They were every half kilometer it seemed, many of them connected, rubble and debris everywhere, splintered trunks, giant rocks, new streams, barren wet earth, bedding planes exposed, sheets of saprolite cleaved along fracture traces, the mountainside reduced from very big pieces to very little pieces and strewn from the base clear out no telling how far by now into the Pacific ocean, forming new sedimentary rocks out there for tomorrow's wayfarers to happen across in some mind-bendingly distant future.  The road was missing altogether in places, and in others mangled guard rails stood in mute rusting testimony to the river of rock that had swept past, scooping up everything in its path.  As they are reminded every few years in New Orleans, nature has an awesome brush-stroke and is capable of any blend of color on its fearsome pallet.  Dad speculates that McCain and company are dancing in the streets over this storm giving President Bush and the Dark Lord an excuse to miss the convention.  But this sword has all kinds of edges.  The more politically sketchy things emerging about the Mack's Veep choice, the more I tend to like her and sympathized with here and hope that the electorate is less sympathetic, though they never are.  Still, I keep wondering with delight with the crass misstep and do a little jig as I wonder what he could possibly have been thinking when he made his fateful call.

August 31, 2008
Tucan Hotel, Uvita

The Tucan Hotel hums with the brush of well-toned thighs being set in motion by the team of callypigous sirens that are in full swarm as Gustav drools in anticipation of beignettes and chicoried coffee at the Cafe du Monde, and the kitchen courses with a rising estrogen tide as Carmen orchestrates Asian night and the Uvita ex-pat luminaries huddle to harness the heat of her curry.  She is Singaporean, Lindsay is American, Betsa is Italian, and they have some pretty potent tica power in their as well, one of them so skinny she probably has to do a jig in the shower just to get the soap off.  Dad claims the sweetest meat is closest to the bone, and maybe it's true, but the kitchen ranges from the rail to jolie-esque voluptuousness, so there is a taste for all testers, flavors from all cultures, all of them like our new Republican vice-presidential nod:  pageant worthy.  I first sought Carmen out months ago when I heard of a Singaporean living here and working at the Maracuya Cafe down the road.  It was easy to justify, given the haute cuisine reputedly proffered by the French proprietorship.  I noticed last time through that the Maracuya was closed, battened down, a bit surprising given the quality of the fare and the overpopulation of the Uvita corridor with eager immigrants swimming in money and always on the lookout  for new options in fine dining.  "Word is cocaine played a role in the downfall," my anonymous source confides to me here at the Tucan, and I think twice before reporting the unconfirmed rumor right here in front of God and everyone.  You can make this stuff up, but I have thought it out and figure I'll just stick to the facts, ma'am, and let the color bloom in their deflowering.  I thought I was so clever stopping at Palmar to tuck into a steaming bowl of wan-tan soup, get that food thing out of the way to leave me free to tap the keyboard and tease the thoughts out of the recessed cavity of a reluctant mind to splat onto the pages of the wider world, and now I find that I was not so clever by half after all.  Live and learn; I guess I will just have to have a second dinner tonight.

August 30, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

The Republicans wring their hands at the latest bad news.  Not only did their begrudged Grand Poobah just turn 72 years of age and name a young provincial governess as his running mate; not only is the Republican brand tarnished from years of big government, cronyism and corruption, a war of choice, fiscal malfeasance, and willful violation of international law; not only is Barack Obama, the opposition nominee, the most polished orator and visionary contender since the Republican's own modern-day standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan; not only does 82% of the electorate agree that this country is on the wrong track and 70% disapprove of the job President Bush is doing; not only is John McCain a maverick that many of his party's faithful can just barely stand due to his positions on freedom of speech, immigration, the War in Iraq, and even on the environment . . .on top of all that weighty baggage, God has seen fit to pile on a biblical reminder of the current President's legacy in the form of a Cat III hurricane headed toward the Gulf Coast and the general vicinity of beleaguered New Orleans, where George Bush fulfilled his abdication from the Republican Revolution and his own minted paradigm of "compassionate conservatism" three short years ago.

The spin is legion in St. Paul, kicking into and out of overdrive in concert with the news-cycle, despite the velocity of the fast-moving storm that to this point appears oblivious to convention and even contemptuous of its forecasters.  The yet un-coronated John McCain argues that a hurricane's advance is no time for joyous celebration.  Perhaps.  But you can't just re-schedule an event of this magnitude because of a little weather on the other side not only of the country but of the Mississippi itself, the murky ribbon of water connecting St. Paul and New Orleans that the Ojibway called the Great River.  In fact, Gustav seems to be the perfect vehicle for a little straight talk up there in the Twin Cities.  Ron Paul, not granted a convention role in standing with his campaign performance, will be speaking straight across the conservative headwaters from the bastion of Americana that we call Minneapolis.  I wonder if Cindy will take offense at the Ron-ster roaring at the gates of power.  There are no pre-nups but the quiet ones on the campaign trail--none of them implicit.  As an admirer of pulchritude, allured by luminosity, let me be among the first to congratulate the Mack for his knack of surrounding himself with beauty queens in this era increasingly grey and insipid to the expanding demographics bum-rushing the boundaries of the political food chain.  There sure is an awful lot to talk straight about these days.

Here in Paradise, the promises of people wanting our money and votes reverberate in an echo chamber straight out of a Sartre play, where the cycles and vicissitudes are requisite linchpins, the sound bytes are in a desperate spin cycle, and the capped teeth and crimped smiles cannot stop beads of perspiration from popping upon the brows of those stewing in their own notions of sincerity, steeping in the populist tea already clouding the American faculties like drops of water in a tumbler of ouzo. 

A friend and client of mine, a veterinarian by trade, recently confided that he did not "believe" in global warming.  It was a lead-in comment to provide context to what he was about to say next, but for me the record began to skip at that point and is skipping still.  I did not realize that there were portions of the literati that still doubted what to me is settled science.  It leaves me doubting the very existence of a cognoscenti to whom to pledge commonality.  The best question so far posed to either of the candidates was surely Rick Warren's challenge to Barack Obama as to when did a fetus become a person entitled to human rights.  I never paid for an abortion nor accompanied a girlfriend to a clinic for the procedure, though in the early eighties I imagine that I would have done it as if that was just one of the more cumbersome forms of birth control--back then--whereas today it would be a considerably more weighty measure, a bit nuanced, though I am arguably straying from the subject.  I'm not sure what changed, whether it was the times, the measure, or me, but I figure the times and measures tend to be constants more than variables.  I don't know about the pay-grade thing and can't imagine what I might have said better, nor really even how I personally in my heart of heart weighs this issue.  There is no elysian field anywhere in range of the end-game of the abortion debate.  It is a moral landmine, no matter how you re-visit it.  But there is a reason it remains settled law.

The existence of New Orleans, on the other hand, is no given, and its laws decidedly unsettled.  Even outside the reality of global warming, the notion of a coastal city mostly below sea level is something of a stretch, even for active imaginations.  With arctic and continental ice melting in record amounts through positive warming feedback loops on a planetary scale, the rise in sea level points to nostalgic farewells to literary and cultural paragons like Venice and New Orleans.  In today's geopolitical reality, there are certain to remain large numbers of people eager to occupy marginal lands subject to natural disaster because they are more affordable.  And so the demise of New Orleans, even if it takes another devastating full-force blow by Gustav, is sure to be a protracted attrition rather than a sudden settling of accounts.  It was the same way in ancient Mesopotamian capitals and other fabled lands when the Earth rebelled against the civilization of the day in sudden biblical-scale obfuscation.  And as global atmospheric instability promotes storms of greater potential violence, it is imperative that residents of storm-prone regions like the Gulf Coast and Florida in the United States and the whole southeast Asian monsoon swath, do so of their own volition and without claim to governmental compensation of homes and investment knowingly made, nothing beyond a government's obligation to respond to natural emergencies, certainly no economic reparations over the simple exhalations of Gaia.

August 1, 2008
Crow's Nest, Jim-Town, Osa-Way, Puravidaville

Today the news is big:  the suspected anthrax terrorist offs himself on prescription drugs and NASA announces proof of the existence of water on Mars.

But in the Cradle of Western Civilization, the new management of Juanita's plays the same Juice Newton and The Bangles hits of the '80's at top volume at eleven o'clock in the morning, and finally we have a bit of a draw-down over it.  Till now they have lowered the volume, but today they are feeling their oats a bit and pushing back at me.  Why should we turn it down?  This is a bar.  If we turn the music down, outside people can't even tell what's going on inside.  Meanwhile there are more employees than clients, three of the former, two of the latter, music blaring, and nobody with any self-interest would walk into the joint for a bite to eat to the jarring retro acoustic accompanied assault of bad eighties tunes.

Cuco swells up and scowls, trying to seem so anyway without his heart really into it, buoyed by a blackness that the season of vacuity brings to his normally girding and ascendant coffers.  It's the second time today that I have been down to complain about the racket.  He says maybe we can just settle up and he can surrender the business lease and we can all move on and do something else, and I can really tell without any doubt that I have now officially overstayed my welcome as the resident raven of the Crow's Nest, as the Epicentric epicurean, as the Port Jiminy Cricket, the warlock of wonderland, and I am propelled to a place where I cannot possibly reside happily, to that place where a politic word launches the tirade of the limp-wristed but emerges nevertheless from my mouth.

"What?  You mean you reserve the right to crank the knob off the stereo at any time of the day?"

His threat is sufficiently vapid and insouciant that I am tempted to call him on it.  Hours later, just before nine p.m., prime time bar hours, and I can hardly even hear the music, it's so low, and I want it to be louder and obnoxious so that the assault on my senses from this afternoon can somehow seem to conform to a meta-fictional storyline to comprise a logical and rational whole, however illusory, however laden with mendacity and deceit.  But it won't be, and it's clear that I was right the first time, that my never very bulky welcome has dissipated into dust motes and bands of the failing memory of former energy circuits and mass that once occupied a space defined and is now loosed upon the universe and unaccounted in the grand scheme of things and the source of spiritual drought.  I am living an illusion, inhabiting a dream, occupying an occlusion, and it's a leering raise from across a green felt, where the eyes are familiar, steady, and evoke friendliness and court love while craving my crucifixion.  At the end of the day sometimes who you are is all you have left to ante up to the game that goes ever on around, and you wonder why you are so called.  But we all are, and no matter how little of us remains, it's only the losers that can't see their way to push themselves into the middle of the table in a game where the cards are held by larger forces, not all of them human.

OWW and OPR float upon the ether of a substance beyond the material.  They exist as karmic threads and trace the lines of my intellect and desire and mercilessly wiggle feather boas at my medula oblongata while throwing darts between controlled breaths at the dartboard of my cerebral cortex, snorting human growth serum and titrating the distillate of achievement with the sap of nostalgia to evoke an awkward and elephantine whole both self-aware and gargantuan, naked and lumbering before the merciless molasses of mayhem.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that a real-time journal, however couched in the x-gen vernacular, however dissipated in the miasma of 21st century techo-mysticism, however justified through the pap and smear of self subsumption and withdrawal, that anything honest and genuine would be a kind of poison that you would never want to release. 

Still, I have gamed the system somehow.  Impossibly, I am something that is almost, nearly, somewhat of an accomplishment, even if probably all people reach this point anyway, independent of any measure of success.  Still, look at how hard it is to bust me and make it stick:

1)  My kids are over eighteen, and my period of subjugation to the American standards of custodial law is over.  I am an alumnus.  I am clear with society, and my lingering debt is little more than $20,000, and I am current on my payments.

2)  I am unemployable for reasons having nothing to do with any lapses in my resume or any salacious revelations that might emerge through journalistic shamelessness.

3)  My businesses, however modest in their individual scope, all arise from my capacities and are organic to me and neither beneath me nor beyond me and are grounded in solid foundations but with scale-able roofs that seem to expand under even casual glances upward.

4)  I am adrift in the globalized world, a resident of where I reside, the Native of the Return, and prepared with a ready sail for trades as well as a set of long oars for managing the doldrums as needed.

My return from the Central American Road Trip was an anaphylactic and linear regression to a stable of peninsular constants that gallop across the nocturnal torrents of my ex-pat existence like rip tides in the tortured admission of an honest and unlikely love.  That thing that the trip did for me through the medium of the web log went suddenly missing in my life, and my return to paradise became pinioned by the octopedalian reaches of a merciless imagination.

Two weeks later, I am owning up to the execrable intransigence and haunting resilience of this thing that scrapes me out of bed in the morning and compacts me beneath the sheet in its vibratory nightly passage beneath the senescent vampire's hunting grounds and the fell banshee's shrill domain.   

For so long I have been so sure, and now I realize that not only am I clueless and adrift but that I have always been so and shall always be.  I am not sure what it means.  In a way innocence is better in its avenue toward assurance, however illusory that is.  But in the other way sophistication is better even if its reward than uncertainty and diminution.  Since the end's dust is punctuated by the ignominy of the worm, then it would seem that there can be no excess of imagination that does not hurt anyone that would be out of bounds in reining in and gloating over the things that can be reined in and gloated over.

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