August 30, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Jack Straw?  He's lying.

Dick Cheney?  Should be in jail for war crimes.

Garrido?  He makes vigilantism look civilized and decent. 

Ted Kennedy?  It's complicated.  But what a life !

"The unexamined life,"  Socrates is reputed to have said, "is not worth living."  Of course, there is corollary.  "Doritos good, Bud good.  Go Cowboys, kick them Steeler's asses!"  Which of these is a better truth?  Both are equally valid.  Socrates was found guilty of disrespecting the gods and corrupting the youth by a vote of 280 to 220 and was assigned a cup of hemlock, which he dutifully drank, becoming in effect his own executioner.  Of course at 70 years of age in 399 BC, that would be equivalent to about 104 today, probably, and the proponents of the Doritos, Bud, Cowboys triumvirate probably is not favored beyond about sixty or so on average. 

A series of things took me off my game this morning for a couple hours.  I cut it short by turning my entire focus to catching up on correspondence and overdue basic administration chores, which, several hours later it proved a great therapy and highly productive.  My inbox is itself a revenue stream.  The things that arrive there are crazy wild and variegated.  Every day is curiouser than the one before. 

Am making a big advertising push tomorrow with advertising commitments in three print phonebooks.  I have to redo the web sites.  They are unfinished and amateurish.  I have to make a giant push this month.  Now.  It will be fun.

No fiction today.  Too bad, lose a day, lose a cog in the gear of discipline.

August 29, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Finally it came together for me, a day without so many immediate obligations that I could not dispense with them early enough to allow excuses to creep in.  I have been failing to write the scene for several days.  I took a real stab at it three days ago and wrote a scene fine for an essay on the Osa but wildly out of place for this story, which now has a new working title:  A Swine's Snout.  I wrote pretty steadily from ten a.m. to eight tonight, interspersing with a bit of reservations and OWW correspondence and a break to go shopping and then to cook dinner.  I am content with the scene.  The opening three paragraphs are pasted below.  With this, the novella's opening scene, out of the way--or at least drafted--I am hoping that it will be like a bottleneck overcome and that the flow of the climax, which is the remaining scene that I have yet to start from scratch (though it is plotted), will come naturally and easily. 

I made spaghetti carbonara tonight, adding in grated parmesan and copious cilantro to my regular set of ingredients.  It was very good, delicious.  I was disappointed the night I made it in Camden, when Orpheus was there, the night Henry had a dementia-inducing stroke.  Orpheus made a surprising comment about not eating white sauce because it was bad for his arteries, something that surprised me at the time.  It does have bacon as an ingredient, so he has a point, but other than that olive oil, no butter, and other than that just the little bit of cholesterol in the small amount of milk used.  But irrespective of his comment, it just didn't work out the way I wanted it to that night, and I was unhappy with the result.  Tonight it could not have been more delicious.  I want still to make it with less sauce, and more garlic and parmesan and oil, and next time I will ease closer to that, but for now, I can't say anything despective about tonight's fare.  Last night I made a pot brimming with chicken stew (with a whole chicken) and after two bowls last night, one bowl this morning, and one for Katiana for lunch, I still have over half the pot remaining.  So tomorrow it's chicken stew and spaghetti carbonara for me.

Got a bid out for an intake for the spring at Hatillo today.  Last night's karaoke was very popular and lucrative after two previous weekends with dismal results.  Kati sold a fishing trip and La Leona lodging yesterday to two different groups and sold a stay at Luna Lodge today.  She is happy to be beyond the accounting audit and the endless review of receipts and expense reports and the unending litany of numbers and copies and deadlines and frayed nerves.  Me too.  Our charter booking from San Jose landed there two hours late, but made it to the hangar in time, and the rains today were chilly and inspiring, lightning livening the air above the gulf east of town.

The reservations requests pour in.  My sites have turned into little gardens of opportunity, for my clients as well as myself and my staff and the local businesses.  It is a crazy place where all parties stand to emerge winners in every contact and transaction.  Human failures along the way keep that from happening, but human failures downstairs and from me are fewer and fewer.  We seem to have the drill down pretty well.

It looks like in coming days I will be booking a one way ticket to Arkansas for late September and returning overland, repeating the trip I took in January, 1994, with some probable route changes this time around, and to this time have a traveling partner to share the thrills.  It looks like this is going to happen.

Radcliff Finke

His already ruddy features redder still from his fast-paced hike down the river trail, Radcliff Finke followed the rising noise until stepping through a small grove of volunteer bananas onto the periphery of the exploration plot to find his new boss making do quite well without a translator, orchestrating a ballet of heavy equipment from a perch atop the day’s accumulation of grizzly buckings.  It was one of those early July veranillo days that was nearly summerlike in the Rio Tigre watershed, the sun streaming obliquely through the western sky at even this late hour, the evening breeze just now kicking up a reticent caravan of clouds from the river’s Golfo Dulce delta a few miles downstream.  He surveyed the layout from the edge of the clearing where the flood plain growth was razed in a fifteen meter radius to allow space to work.  The wash plant was set up between the production hole and the river.  The excavator was situated at the head of the pit on the wash plant side so that it could reach both the extraction zone and the hopper with its extended arm.  A front-end loader and bulldozer bucked tailings.  A ten horsepower diesel pump emptied the muddy water from the production pit into the Tigre River, and a smaller gasoline pump fed the plant’s wash hose.  A single operator washed the ore to pass it evenly through separators, screens, and onto a sluice box outfitted underneath the hopper.  From his perch on top of the grizzly pile, the sun shining upon his intent face, Klondike Sutter seemed in his composure to command the very elements.  Finke swung himself up onto the wash platform and shook hands with the ever-grinning operator, Kaliman, and leaned back against the steel railing to drink in the cool rise of the afternoon’s breeze as the workings of another day wound closer to quitting time.

Finke lit a cigarette and figured it must be the same in Kazakhstan where they had pulled Sutter from an exploration production testing operation to assign him to pick up the pieces at the troubled Dos Brazos mine.  Gold was gold, and these types like Sutter, Kaliman, Paco Sanchez, the Gold Walker, Elizondo Sandoval, a few of the other independent hand miners upriver—even the two Samoans that had provided contract security for Bright Mines for years all around the world—who had the precious metal in their veins, they were a breed apart and spoke a common language in which words were superfluous.  Radcliff Finke was not of that world, and looking down upon the scene, he felt both wistfully and with some relief like dead weight.  It was a big contrast from his role in the tenures of Sutter’s three predecessors, each unable for varying personal deficiencies to stick it out and make it work. 

Klondike Sutter mimicked the hoe’s bite, pulling his fingers downward as if into the rock toward his palm to guide the steel teeth into the bedrock being scraped.  The operator’s eyes focused on Sutter’s hand rather than his own hoe, and Sutter’s eyes followed the teeth scraping the sloping black basalt bedrock and the tufts of blue-ish white rock powder that rose from the scraped rock unearthed for the first time in tens of millennia.  The three points of action, Sutter, the operator, and the scraping bucket were linked in a primal conquest of nature, with Radcliff Finke comprising the fourth element, the observer, God-like from the wash plant platform, savoring his cigarette, all things subjective relative to his unique frame of reference, everything outside of it irrelevant and arguably non-existent.  Finke watched mesmerized as the brawny arm—tanned from the Gobi Desert—arced through the air and the closed fist unwound slowly to extend fingers splayed downward and felt the shaking of the wash plant he stood on as the deafening cascade of gravel and rock roared against the naked steel of the hopper like a terrible and lethal rain just a few feet from where he leaned against the railing and cupped his cigarette against the first hesitant traces of moisture riding in on the wings of the valley’s rising wind.  He felt the long hair of his mullet clinging with sweat to the back of his neck begin to tickle as it moved in the swelling breeze and was happy in the cool deliverance that it brought.  Beside him, the habitually grinning Kaliman splashed the ore methodically with torrents of river water, moving the two-inch hose back and forth to wash the ore down the sloping hopper and into the classifier.  The water churned with a busy fertile rich grinding noise that sounded not unlike the whir of a money counter going through a stack of C-notes in a Colombian safe house in Miami’s little Havana and contrasted sharply to the empty tinny splash of the same water against the steel of the ore hopper empty.  As Canseco swung the loader through at Sutter’s gesture to ferry another pile of boulders from the accumulation beneath the grizzly chute to add to the base of the pile Sutter stood upon, Quique followed his gestures to ease the arm over one bucket-width to repeat the bedrock scraping.  Johnny Mendoza, cued up on the periphery, lay on the throttle of the D-8 nearly simultaneous to Sutter’s gestured glance and swept in behind the receding loader to bite into the fines and deliver a fresh mounded load dripping with water over to the accumulating tailings pile on the side of the wash plant opposite from the grizzly buckings.  Mendoza was a talented—if over-eager—operator, a young buck from Rio Claro with a booming laugh and narrow European features carved into a golden bronze complexion that might have impelled him into modeling had he been born into another world.  He felt the massive steel under his fingers respond to his wishes, the hydraulics converting the slightest pressure of his palms into thousands of pounds of force, and he relished this opportunity to showboat in front of the new boss.  Ahead of him Canseco scooped into a pile of boulders with the three-yard shovel and tilted it back to shake it and settle the load, bit in for a bit more, then backed out and around with a puff of grey exhaust to jack the machine in half at its articulated middle with two complete turns of the steering wheel to then lumber muscularly forward to dump the load into the backfill end of the production pit.  The wash plant trembled under Radcliff’s feet as ore rained down from the extended hand of the excavator’s arm to feed the hopper, Mendoza taking his turn at the fines building up at the foot of the sluice box, and the cycle began anew. 

August 27, 2009 / Crow's Nest

We the living are entitled to a little reality check every now and again, and the wave of decorous eulogies that gloss over the bad to shine a light on the good does the public a disservice.  Senator Edward Kennedy is ultimately a tragic figure.  Yet the nature of his tragedy is doubly great in that the fatal flaw that emerged in his most urgent moment was that of cowardice.

While his imprimatur may be on important legislation of his era (and mine; he served in the senate for all but one year of my entire life), and while many are lionizing him for talents of partisan mediation, liberal vision, conviction, and tireless public service, Ted Kennedy is no role model and the politically correct should examine the shadows of their own souls before getting ahead of themselves in their eulogies.  I realize that it is bad form to speak ill of the dead, and while that may be true for some, this standard should be shelved for personages that rise nearly to the level of myth and run the risk of being cast by default as role models. .

The sanitation of the scene and events, the time lags between its occurrence and its reporting, and the clear suggestion of collusion at all the necessary levels of local and national government make it so that we will certainly now never know exactly how it happened and finer details of the surrounding circumstances, but what is not in dispute is the following:

1)  Mary Jo Kopeckne died in a vehicle driven by Ted Kennedy late in the night on July 18, 1969, when the vehicle ran off a small bridge and into a tidal sound.
2)  No autopsy was performed on the body, and no foul was suspected.  The death was attributed to drowning inside the overturned car.
2)  Ted Kennedy did not report the accident for ten hours, not in fact until the overturned vehicle was found by authorities and found to contain a body..
3)  Ted Kennedy told two men in his circle that knew of the accident and were brought there a couple hours after the accident to help not to not inform others about the incident and that he would take care of filing the police report.
4)  Ted Kennedy was not indicted for manslaughter, negligent homicide, but had his license suspended for twelve months.

Discounting that alcohol is widely considered to have played a role in the accident, perhaps hanky panky as well, the Senator's response in the hours following the moment he ran off the bridge and left a young woman to drown, trapped in the car does not exactly a profile in courage make.  The fact that deep failings are easily laundered by wealth and political power in the United States of that age and perhaps today is hardly a source of pride and inspiration, though it has not kept his constituency from returning him to his senate seat ever since.  He beat a rap in the most convenient way available to him and never took responsibility publicly (after all he was a public figure)  for his actions.  This character gap was revisited on the American nation in another manner ten years later as the hubris of his dynastic credentials impelled him to take on the incumbent president of his own party--Jimmy Carter--in a bruising presidential primary than many conclude may have tipped the scales in favor of the reactionary upstart from California, Ronald Reagan.  How Kennedy could have ever thought that the American people would elect him after his performance at Chappaquiddick suggests substantial mental deficiencies, something that the public had seen before.

I remember watching his concession speech in 1980 on television and feeling conflicted.  Despite the reverential awe in which I held his dead brother, the slain President Kennedy, his speech struck me as mean-spirited and petty, and the two notions were not easy to reconcile.  I didn't have any political concept at the time and never even voted until 1988 for the first time (for that guy in the tank) but think that I was not far off the mark in my impressions of old Teddy Boy from his national stage as he begrudged the nomination to the sitting American president.  What hubris!  In many ways it was only at that point that his life's work began, for it seems to have been at that time that he realized that Senator was as good as it was going to get for him.  I will allow the ensuing three decades of tireless dedication as personal redemption and celebrate his accomplishments and the man himself for those efforts.  But that does not change who he revealed himself to be at Chappaquiddick in the Vietnam era and ten years later in Madison Square Garden, on the eve of the Reagan Revolution.

August 26,2009 / Manuel Antonio,

Erick called in with a delay and did not show today and had his cell turned off and is missing in action.  --- [ REDACTED ] --- It was something that has never happened in the two years since I installed the well.  But it happened today, and It was really pretty funny in a Holden Caulfield kind of way.

And the lady for whom I have been compiling a $2000 travel package pulled the plug on me with it all set up because I can't accept American Express, this after putting me through a substantial number of paces in getting lodging in two places, airfare, tours, a bunch of things lined out in accord with instructions from her that were anal retentive in their fastidious concerns with detail and pricing down to the penny.  I was strongly inclined to explain to her the nature of her personality defects and personal shortcomings and to copy her traveling-partner mother on that correspondence and direct another letter to Human Resources at Dell Computer Company, copied to Michael Dell himself detailing the whole experience, since her correspondence seems to have originated from company computers on company time and with company letterhead, but stood down instead and sent her a nice little letter without a single snarky comment, and put her in touch directly with the suppliers so that she could book direct and get them to take her American Express card.  It was hard to suppress my temptation to flame her till her eyebrows smoked, but I did it, and I am going to be proud of myself for the duration of as long as it takes complete this paragraph and dispel the episode from my head to not return again to it except from the safe distance of a few days to congratulate myself for not having reacted the way I wanted to.

When I was in undergraduate school I had an affair with the married mother of one of the boys on the 8-10 year-old soccer team that I coached in the Fayetteville youth soccer league.  She was an "older woman" of about 35, and that was pretty exciting, and I did not realize at the time that the itch in my crotch was due to non-native fauna dwelling there, and so it was funny--again in a Caulfieldian way--when she asked me one day how it came to be that I had given her crabs.  I doubt that she believed my protestations of ignorance, though at that moment a lot of things fell into place, and it was all I could do to not rush immediately to the clinic that very second.  It was one of the few times in my life that I went to a doctor, and was one of the easiest medical treatments ever, a bit of hygiene with Lindane bearing shampoo over a couple days, and a clean machine without ever looking at a needle or swallowing a pill.  But that is just a funny sideline story completely beside the point I am circumnavigating.  Betty was her name, and she said something to me once that was disturbing at the time.  I dismissed it as a byproduct of insufficient imagination, but all these years later, and I guess she would be around sixty today, I get a sense of what she was getting at, and it impels me to a place where I must undertake some sort of action as a result.

She claimed that by the time she hit 30 she had already done everything in life there was to do and that at that point it was just doing things over again, nothing new, everything from there on out like a dreary repetition.

That could be looked at as a bleak outlook, though she was neither morbid, depressed, nor angry about it, more like resigned but willing to see if she could put some sort of spin to give something that made it interesting. 

And I think that a lot of people don't like new things and are happy for the patterns of familiar repetition and that all that change stuff and new experiences can be challenges and sources of uncertainty, trepidation, and fear that they are willing to dispense in favor of pedestrian middle-aged ennui.  I am not of that personality type, and I see a glimmer of what she was referring to and feel the repetitive commonality of my own daily tasks and scenery as stubborn bricks of a wall to constrain the contents of a garden that I have cobbled together.  If I am not careful, my sense tells me that routine acceptance of quotidian normalcy will constitute the continued mortaring of those bricks until one day that wall is complete, my garden finished, with all that is left to do being to enjoy whatever grows there and to strive not to think about what I was not able to plant before the walls were completed.  The only defense against this is to throw the trowel over my shoulder, hose down the wet mortar to wash it away, and to set the bricks in the front yard and sell them to passers-by like glasses of lemonade.

Along these lines I struggle with the next thing.  I am not ready to sell out and move on, at least not willing to put a price on that alternative.  But events of the past month have pushed me ever more toward fleshing out options for something new and different for me, a game changer.  I still have not figured out what my life's work is, much less gotten busy with it, and at 48 years of age (as of two days ago) it is safe to say that my days of spring-chickenhood are safely behind me.  With Steve Thompson coincidentally asking today if I have ever been to Chile on the heels of this past two weeks of rediscovering through Facebook the Bolivian world of my youth left behind for the silly exigencies of a youth's mission to get on with his life and university and career and the mind-numbing distances that separated me from that distant land where I graduated High School, I can't get this idea out of my head to return thirty years later.  In my mind I outfit the Ruby Racer and head in through the Darien for several months of driving all around the continent.  It is a CRAZY notion, one I cannot put away, and one I certainly cannot capitalize without a conscious effort to do so. 

By doing so, I would be able to know that Betty was not right about that thing she said about everything being just a repeat of things already done.  That would be something altogether unique and different and might even knock a Ruby-sized hole in whatever parts of my garden might be partially walled in.

It's a melancholy feeling, and I am not sure just how to channel it.  And it is an elusive feeling, one day welling up like loneliness inside of me to fall the next beneath the momentary excitement of an unexpected success in my business or some combination of news that reminds me that things are worthwhile, so I am not sure if I even understand it well enough in its fickleness to talk about it.  Yet it is the 800-pound gorilla in my otherwise clean and well-lighted place.

August 25, 2009 / Manuel Antonio,

Well, just past midnight it is actually the 26th, but it still feels like tonight rather than tomorrow, so I figure I will pretend it still is.

But the task is bigger than the allocated time. 

I have never been given this room before.  It is a suite.  It is really cool.

August 22, 2009 / Crow's Nest,

I am reminded in how I feel of that wonderful title of the Milos Kundera novel:  The Incredible Lightness of Being.  Two days ago the walls seemed to be encroaching, moving in, rumbling.  And today they have receded and inside my space the room is vast, the air thick with oxygen, the world suitably stable, its keel vertical and even.  I suppose it is just like that all of the time for everyone and for those that are busy everyday doing specific tasks that while away the hours and distract the mind, it just becomes like the tides, cycles of existence.  But in my peculiar universe, where every passing second is pregnant with possibilities both wondrous and fearsome, the steady breath of life has no punctuation and stretches interminably and with dramatic consequence. 

Today I celebrate a verbal agreement to a negotiated settlement on the final payment of a recent job, not specified here out of discretionary restraint.  The negotiation was civil and rational, no emotions, no windups, neither side guilty of exaggeration for the sake of a better position toward a final conclusion.  I made an offer, they countered, I accepted, and the terms outlined by them included the order given to make the payment on Monday contingent upon my acceptance.  We shall see if the eagle lands, but I think today marked the end of the uncertainty.  And we have done the final accounting tasks asked of us and send Martin back up to Perez on Tuesday with everything just as the auditor requested, expecting a resolution there to coincide with what he has already agreed to do.  All good news.

With the Amapola purchase option backed by $2900 of earnest money, I have only a quick trip to Hatillo and Manuel Antonio to deliver goodies, a date on the option on September 8 and another $1000 payday then, then nothing until the end of September when my party of real estate lookers are scheduled for a peninsular dog and pony.  I am waiting only on news from Dan to know whether to make my October ticket one way or round trip, looking increasingly like the former, and I am nudged by my recent Facebook discoveries toward the planning of a South American road trip, though if that is financially too ambitious perhaps just a visit, a flight to Cochabamba and stretch my legs across the passage of three decades to see if the air is fresh and clear and if the Prado remains a clean and well-lighted place.

August 21, 2009 / Crow's Nest,

The mid-day sun is scattered in the blanket of clouds over the peninsula, and the light is opalescent, the temperature tolerable.  Earnest money for the property sale option landed in my account this morning, nice how expected things sometimes actually happen.  Still reeling from my Facebook discoveries of old friends last night.  This morning discovered that my own father is on Facebook and friended him.  I will sequester the jury over several months to reach final conclusions, but tentatively, FB is a GOOD thing.  All this too much information online business seems to apply only to those wretches that have something to hide.  Me, what do I care?  I wear my life on my sleeve and can't be bothered to roll it up.  Too much information, perhaps, but probably not too much useful tactical information, even to any conniving plotting aspiring enemies out there.  Tee hee.  The joke would be on them anyway, torturing themselves going through all this prodigious amount of two-bit words and strange sentence structures looking for ammunition.  If you can shoot pearls through your pea shooter, then by all means, load 'em up and start spitting. 

Here under a flopped mackerel sky, a crew is across the water on Saladero repairs, the Laguna Vista inverter was delivered and paid, and I sent off a final proposal to negotiate payment settlement for the one job pending final payment and with the good news on the option I have to lean back and smile as I work on the Gold Walker's opening scene.  I can't resist having him cut bot-fly larvae from his knee while he waits for coffee to make and lazy Daniela to get up out of bed.  It would seem fair in the name of character development.  There is no power during the day in 1980 vintage Porno Jiminy, and even before seven o'clock, I imagine the native of Yugoslavia breaking an uncomfortable sweat and wishing he could have a fan.  In the end, as hard as the Sandoval/Sanchez scene was to write last night, I kind of like the way the dialog flows.  It feels real.  It feels gritty.  We'll see if it sets a stage.

Pleased with that out of the way, he polished off the cup and went for another one and deposited the bagged up remains in the trash bag, but Dani was awake and motioned him back to bed.  He sat down beside her and kissed her forehead but would not lay with her.  “Surgery,” he pointed.  “I’ll just open it up and bleed if I let you rough me up,” he smiled.  “Let me get you some coffee.”

She smiled and let him.

“How many sugars,” he asked.

“Surprise me,” she smiled, feeling not unlike Nately’s whore waking up after finally getting a good night’s sleep to find herself in love.

“Tell me again,” she said, slurping the hot coffee contentedly, “how it is going to be for us.”

“We will have a block house with a concrete floor and teak ceiling with an indoor bathroom and a generator for the television and stereo.  I will build it on a hill not so high above the plain that it is hard to get to, but high enough that we will have a view of the Gulf that stretches all the way from Puntarenitas Point to the Burica Peninsula, a high spot where we can see the alluvial plain for miles around and where the breeze will keep us cool.”

“But you won’t really buy a truck,” she advised.  “You will invest that capital in cattle instead to make that money grow. . . ?”

Tojanescu smiled.  “You don’t get it baby.  I’m not going to run cattle.  We’re going to subdivide that land and sell off parcels to rich foreigners looking for beach front properties in paradise.”

She frowned doubtfully.  “This does not sound like a sure bet, Iani.  Where will these rich foreigners come from and when?  And how will we live until they come?”

“Like a king and queen,” my sovereign,” he kissed her on the forehead.  “I will walk gold twice a month, and we will grow a vegetable garden and have a few dairy cows, some chickens, and will rehabilitate the cacao orchards that are just overgrown and plant vanilla among them, and you will be the envy of the peninsula, and on Sundays we shall drive into town in our shiny red Land Cruiser to buy produce, fish, coffee and sugar, a little guaro, and until we have a little Gold Crawler we will while away the days making love and welcoming guests to our farm, eating healthy food, rising at dawn and in bed by nine.”

“And it does not matter to you that I am not a virgin, my Prince?”

Tojanescu smiled.  “I love you just the way that you are, my Sweet.”

She frowned distantly and bathed in the limpid waters of his deep blue eyes, seeing that it was not an invention, that it was true, and she felt sad for Lupita, that she would be abandoning her sister to a difficult fate.  “And what if Paco Sánchez changes his mind,” she challenged him.  “Or what if it is all just lies and the land is not his to sell after all?  What then?”

“I’ve checked it out,” he repeated for the third time.  “With lawyers and everything.  In the National Registry, with the neighbors, with the Municipality . . . it is 680 hectares of prime land extending from the beach to the mountains just behind Miramar.  Paco Sánchez is the only one named in his uncle’s will.”

“But how can that be, if Don Calixto has grown children living right here in Jimenez?”

“I don’t know.  They must have pissed him off.  There is no error in this.  This is going to happen, Daniela.  Today.”

“It is so much money,” she sighed.  “I can hardly imagine four hundred thousand colones.  It must be a pile as tall as a house.”

“In twenty years, it will be worth a hundred times more,” he promised.  “I will sell five hectares here and there in the next few years and get my investment back and build capital and buy other fincas.  You wait and see; we will be rich.  This peninsula is changing.  The gold will be gone shortly, and once they expel the hand miners from the park, everything here will change.”

“And that is when the foreigners will come in flocks and droves?”

“Yes, my hibiscus blossom.”

August 20, 2009 / Crow's Nest,

Awakened to a fold in the time-space continuum, to a vague discomfiture, a nagging indisposition toward the routines of my day.  I wonder at all the people in the world that don't have the cost-free liberty to just switch gears and go with it.  I suppose that I pay for that privilege one way or another.  Pushed myself to follow up on three packages in progress.  One of them, get this, is my largest offer ever, a ten day fishing package for six people at Crocodile Bay for $17,000.  Those kinds of clients always wind up booking direct rather than going through me, but that's okay.  I moped through other obligations and got a call that my Amapola buyer is depositing earnest money tomorrow to proceed with the six month option, raising the specter of three pay days for me, the one in February a nice pieces of change so long as he is able to execute.  But I never really lifted off today and floated through and then struggled with the scene between Sandoval and Sanchez to set up their little relationship to flesh out the climax.  It does not feel organic enough and so it is hard.  Then got FB friend confirmations in rapid succession from Linda Giesecke and Sonia Pathmadevan.  Chatted with Sonia for an hour, catching up on the spreading ripples from that transcendental year, 1979.  It left me clutching a reminder about myself that is awkward, my social isolation and inability or unwillingness to sustain long-term human bonds and relationships.  I guess there are worse things in life.  A melancholy day in all, but I guess you can't understand elation without having tasted desolation. 

Paco Sanchez tapped the counter twice beside his empty shot glass.  “And pour one for yourself,” he growled.  “On me.”

Ramon did as he was told.  “What’s the matter, Paco.  Drop in grade today?”

“You and me we are like family,” Paco replied.

Sandoval studied over the odd statement.  “Brothers-in-law,” he finally realized.

Paco raised his glass and Ramon obediently lifted his own, and they tapped rims and drank.

“When are you and Daniela tying the knot,” the big man grinned.

Ramon Sandoval’s melancholy eyes livened at the question, and he chuckled a bit. “I don’t know about marriage,” he replied.  “I would settle for a free lay.”

“It’s never free, Ramon,” Paco replied sardonically, tapping the counter and waving with his finger at both shot glasses.

“I can’t drink on duty,” Ramon protested.  “That one was to not be impolite.”

“Oh nonsense,” the big man frowned, circling the glasses in the air with a meaty index finger.

Ramon poured two.  “And you, when are you and Lupita tying the knot,” Ramon asked, sensing it was expected of him.

“Maybe sooner than you think.”

“Any time would be sooner than I think,” the musician replied.

Paco Sanchez ignored the barb and relaxed into a far-seeing contemplation.  “I have a certain bit of business to do, tomorrow,” he explained, looking at Ramon to mysteriously lift his eyebrows.  “This time tomorrow I may not be the same man as stands before you,” he prophesied.

“What, you bought a lottery ticket this week?”

“Baaah,” Paco dismissed.  “It’s more solid than that.”

 “Let us hope,” Ramon replied, lifting his glass to Paco.  “Sex change operation?”

“Ramón,” Paco looked him in the eye, dispensing with self-referential seriousness all further joking around.  “I want you and your boys to play at the wedding.  Tell your old man I want to rent this place out for the reception.  I want to kill a pig and bring in ice and a real cake from Jimenez.  And I think we’ll need a case of Johnny Walker.  Doesn’t have to be black, the red is fine.”

“What about champagne, Paco?  You gotta have champagne.”

Paco studied this over.  “You got any loose ones?”

Ramon brought a tin can from beneath the bar with four loose Deltas, and Paco withdrew one and examined it for moisture and tapped the butt against the bar top.  Ramon lifted a Zippo, and Paco luxuriated in the smell of the butane as he drew on the strong tobacco and felt his head spread in all directions from the dizzy rush after the first wave of pulmonary repulsion.

“We may have to just stick with beer,” Paco replied at length.  “Champagne may be a bit too refined for us.”

“Too refined even for Lupita?”

“Well . . . “ Paco thought on this.  “Maybe we could go for a few bottles, but not enough for everyone.”

“Six Toes was a preacher with the evangelists in Jimenez, right?  A deacon, reverend something like that, wasn’t he?” Ramon frowned. 

“Something like that, I guess.”

“You gonna have him officiate?”

“Hardly,” Paco guffawed, wondering whether he should consider that a sleight or not.  “I think I’ll have that new priest marry us.”

August 19, 2009 / Crow's Nest

In the Rio Tigre watershed, the light progresses hourly through different hues and colors the restless land with its evolving and ever-changing tonal flavor.  The happiest of the day’s light occurs most mornings between eight and ten o’clock.  This light is by no means a blessing wasted exclusively on the world of men, and during the mornings when the sun is not hidden behind clouds the entire watershed quickens, the animals becoming more active, the air more restless, the water more sparkling, and the forest under-story darker and its contrast with the dappled sunlight of clearings that much more menacing.  If you were to watch very closely, you might be able to detect the pace of the growth of grass itself during such a sun-splashed morning.  And were the air not already a vibrating cacophony of sound, you would almost certainly be able to hear the stretch of vascular plant tissue as the trees of the forest and the vines and epiphytes grow.

It was under the warm clarity of just such light while Daniela Sanchez stepped outside her home two days after her late-night serenade to begin a trip to town that a trio of hand miners worked in the Pizota Stream just above its confluence with the right fork of the Tigre River, ten minutes downstream from Daniela as she stepped in rubber boots across the boundary formed where the streaming sunlight touches the canopy’s shade.  Any observer would immediately have associated the man in the middle of the crew, the one singing, a native of Cañaza by the name of Paco Sanchez, as a worker cast in the mold of the heroic ideals propagandized by the communists that were in those days trying to organize the hand miners that had not yet been expelled by the Costa Rican national police force from Corcovado National Park, the boundary of which was located a scant two kilometers up the Pizota Creek from where the men were at that very moment hard at work.  This center of our momentary narrative attention was strong and hearty, noble and dignified, uncomplaining and just, broad-chested and thin-waisted, void of intellectual pretension but filled with common sense.  He was even-keeled and no stranger to a good time but fair in his treatment of other men, never abusive despite his physical superiority to nearly all men whose paths he crossed.  No matter how forgiving our hypothetical observer’s judgment might have been on that morning in which an awkward intersection with fate was strangely imminent, Paco Sanchez’s two companions were like radio static next to a Willie Colon song, like jaguarondis beside a jaguar, mere hood ornaments beside the roaring 12-cylinder engine in constant motion that was their magnificent standard bearer.

The muscles of Paco Sanchez’s back swelled under the strain of his labor to resemble bundles of corded piano wire barely contained by a coppery brown skin upon which the river’s cool water beaded and gathered to diffract the sun’s light like a scattering of rhinestones.  The men were hard at work on the extension of the concentration channel that they had been extending downstream in a new section of the river for the past three weeks.  By removing the large rocks in the stream bottom and channelizing the flow across a bed of the right slope, they would convert that stretch of the stream into the giant low-budget in situ sluice box needed to then wash the alluvial ore they uncovered moving downward through the river channel.  It was the way all the hand miners worked to concentrate and extract the gold in the absence of heavy equipment, fuel, wash plants, and pumps.  The only energy invested beyond the kinetic energy of rushing water was the power of the men themselves.  For each glistening rock that one of his partners dislodged from its slumber in the river bed to place amid grunts and deprecations atop the rock curtain that lined the workings, Paco Sanchez removed two such rocks while channeling his grunts and deprecations into the song that he belted from lungs capable of sucking the oxygen out of an entire room in which a pretty girl happened to be seated.  For every shovel-full of ore that each of his partners slung into the concentration channel, Paco Sanchez emptied two shovels full and distributed the ore evenly for the optimal winnowing of the lights from the heavies, every movement of his body an unlikely intersection between an unbroken white stallion and a Pablo Neruda poem.  The line of the channel they worked was so straight that it might well have been guided by a chalk-line twanged upon the ground, and it was clear that the skill and pride invested in the workings re-taking form in this new location were inconceivable outside the husbandry and guidance of their taurine exemplar, Paco Sanchez.  The wall of rock left behind was so perfect in its integration with the terrace face as to resemble the intended product of their labor rather than the waste stream that it actually was.  The curtain that rose from the channel might have been something that the Indians had left, had the Indians left such things, and while the next middling flood would erase all trace of the workings, to all but the trained eye the rock curtain they lifted from the river had on that sun-splashed morning every suggestion of permanence.

Due to the flood of hate mails, a denial-of-service attack apparently originating from North Korea in apparent retaliation, and threats from the military of several small African nations, I have been forced to reconsider my plans to remove the ever-shifting contents of my navel from the public realm.  So, for those of you that quit watching American Idol when Paula Abdul pulled the plug, on her involvement, you can still get your semi-daily fix of egocentric silliness right here in the Ikhanosphere.

Forgot to say bad things about Out of Sight, the Elmore Leonard novel I finished yesterday.  He takes a good picture, and he has snappy dialogue, but there was no story to this novel, and none of the characters were particularly interesting nor sympathetic.  The bad guys were uni-dimensional, and the good guys were . . . well, I don't think there were any.  The whole content was smarmy and subterranean, the presumed conflicts some bizarre kind of "what-if" a professional bank robber were to fall in love with a kidnapped US Federal marshal.  Genius content, the two of them in a trunk of a car following his prison break and her kidnapping, asking if perhaps had they met under different circumstances, like at a bar, if he might have had a chance with her . . . total inanity.

Curiously, news reaches me that the police are investigating Juanita's.  I am told that it has become a place to score drugs.  I did notice one of the local pushers in there the other night, but I figured it was once-off.  I guess I have been out of the loop too long.  When Kati started listing the names of all the locals involved in that trade, I could barely pick my jaw up off the floor.  I will refrain from embarrassing anybody so publicly, but suffice it to say they include a number of young locals from respected families.  The way I figure it, it's a public place, and since I am not getting a cut or in any way involved, Juanita's itself has no criminal or other liability if this rumor should turn out to have legs.  It is against the law for me to deny service to anyone without paying a special tax in Golfito and going through a special process that gives me that authority, so under the law I am forbidden from interfering with the movement of people in my business anyway, an odd law that makes it difficult to manage indigents that used to come to beg.  Since re-opening, the indigent community has pretty much stayed away, happily.  Back in the old days, hookers holed up (forgive the pun) at the bar to snag gringos and score a few rojos for a flop, and I don't see that going on these days.  I'm not sure what to make of the news, whether it is bad, good or indifferent.

Delivered the generator to Casa La Luz and Erick is replacing the burnt boards on the inverters for Laguna Vista and Saladero and in a couple day's time will have those jobs finished and billed, leaving me with a run up the road to Hatillo and Manuel Antonio on Monday or so to wrap up at Villas Manu and Hotel Verdemar and clean my plate of outstanding OWW obligations.  Even now am beginning to feel the loosening of ligatures, a sense of an expanding universe, a light and breezy sensation, birdlike. 

Our word of the day comes from my mother:  homonym.  Which I am as likely as not to spell homanym.  Get it?  I bet Mom does.

August 18, 2009 / Crow's Nest,

Whirlwind trip to Chepe and back in the Nest at 9:20 p.m., all out of things to say.  Tonight we mourn the death of Robert Novak, inveterate right-wing pit bull.  If William F. Buckley, Jr. was the neo-conservative movement's Vladimir Lenin, then the pugnacious and occasionally vile Prince of Darkness was surely its Leon Trotsky.  I wonder if something didn't happen to soften him up a bit with the brain tumor, but probably not.  On the local front the original Juanita's burglar, Pastilla has gone on to that great lockdown in the sky.  Returned to the news that he fell out of a car and hit his head and died.  He was skinny, the prototype of the local burglar, but in recent years, he turned a new leaf, staying out of the burglary business.  He shoveled gravel from the storm sewers on Main Street and did odd jobs like that.  He is the one that Beau and his buddy tortured so famously for stiffing them on a contract to run and score them blow.  Amazingly, the police caught the two men in the act of torturing the tico, and he spent some time in the stir and is now exiled from this country, a fugitive from Costa Rica.  Isn't that a curious reversal of rolls?  I bet this means that he can come back now.  Nobody to testify.  No living victim.

I am still vibrating a bit from the long day of driving.  Reached a conclusion while pondering it on the final stretch that the Ikhanosphere is struggling with content.  The drivel of quotidian existence is losing its luster even to me, its star, and I think that it may be time to allow the words to age and the ideas to mature, and the compulsion to expel channeled into something else, perhaps something with more defined and direct benefits. 

August 16, 2009 / Porno Jiminy, LaLa Land,

19:30

A larva about one half inch long has emerged from the sore on my knee.  I have been picking at the spot for weeks, mystified at the itchy lump and my inability to get any pus out.  Only a clear fluid would emerge from a yellow-ish sore, the whole surrounding puffy and red.  Well, it was a bot-fly infection, looks like.  Still remember the day it came on, the first night we spent in the Le Priss hotel in Quepos in June.  I awoke the next morning with the knee painful, like it was infected.  But the sore does not feel empty yet.  Could there be more of these ugly creatures under my skin, or is that just inflamed tissue?  I'm going to have to figure this one out.  It is freaky having the larvae of presumably an insect inside my flesh. 

After a bit of online research, sure enough, bot fly larva:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatobia_hominis.  It says the gestation is eight weeks.  I first noticed a sore on my knee five weeks ago.

16:30

Yeah, well, I did that and five hours later I am sitting in the Crow's Nest, the gulf salt washed off, the AC on.  I caught a bus this time at the border.  Cost me C1,000 instead of C20,000 taxi and the whole transit was four hours travel time.  Arrived home to learn that my little thief broke in next door and stole twelve bags of rice and a few portions of meat cut for plates, all we can tell for the moment, a pittance, but this is getting ridiculous.  He can't break into Juanita's anymore, apparently.  It makes me mad.  I will refrain in such a public format to say how mad.  I guess I have to remember that no matter what it seems like this is still not my country.  The joke is that the thief is a Panamanian, so it's not his country either.

Means I have to put together a security upgrade tomorrow before heading off to San Jose to get the goods and port them down on Tuesday.  And a visit to Palmichal in the mountains to see what's up with my final pay.

10:00 a.m.

Yesterday was fun, a nice clean full-day sweep off duty.  Had a pastrami sandwich for lunch and a New York strip for supper and re-wrote two scenes somewhat fruitfully.  Today as the sun lights up the Boquete morning with colors of springtime, I am delaying the inevitable and better go out and find me a cab.

August 14, 2009 / Boquete, Panama

21:33

Oops!  He's a pretty good dialogue writer.  It's all fun and good thirty pages into Out of Sight.  Guess we'll see how it holds.  Lots of thoughts, no time.  Chef salad with bleu cheese, tenderloin shish-ka-bob with reduced balsamic sauce, garlic and mozzarella bread with olive oil.  The owner came to my table unbidden.  She remembered me.  I would never have recognized her, though I remembered presenting myself back in '02 or '03.  Haven't seen her since.  It was kind of odd.  I told her that I came to Boquete almost only because of her restaurant, and she got to realize that it was not hot air, that it was the truth.  The salad was wonderful, the tenderloin not quite tender enough for the cut, though it is possible, but the sauce was good and the onions and peppers caramelized, wonderful.  The mojito in Dan's honor was clogged with spearmint and slurpy sweet and tangy.  Very good.  The cabernet entirely adequate.  An hour or so later, here we are with CNN, Atlas beer, the odd party favor, wireless Internet, cool night air, blankets, no phone, no alarm clock, no agenda beyond the coffee maker and the gentle quickening of the Boquete morning here in this primal valley..

19:00

Record time on this trip.  Three hours and ten minutes all the way to Boquete.  Usually takes me four to David.  I am installed in my familiar Suite 6 here at Kalima Suites, where the wireless password has not changed since my March stay here.  Then a storm blew for the whole two days, horizontal driving rain and contant wind speeds above forty miles an hour, gust probably around 60.  Today it is overcast and still.  No time to expound.  Of to Bistro Boquete for a culinary spread.  I have Lord of the Flies and an Elmore Leonard novel.  I think I will spare myself the tedium of Piggy's myopic travails and try Leonard.  Last time I tried to read one of his books, I was stunned at how bad of a writer he was, but surely that was a one-off observation.  He's gotta have something.  Finished another Kimchee and Leapfrom novel on the way in.  Terrible as usual, but like fried grits and turnip greens to an old southern boy, comfort reading under red-eye gravy.

August 13, 2009 / San Isidro

Tonight we celebrate arguably the most towering figure of modern music today, Les Paul, inventor of the hard-body electric guitar, and pioneer of multi-track recording, visionary say many that made inevitable the digital revolution through its invocation as indispensable in the technology of music.  Our hat's off and hands on our hearts.  Died of complications today in White Plains, New York, a few miles from Dino's new haunts.

While not exactly first class, Villa Bekuo is at least familiar.  They know me, I know them.  I can put a chair from the landing into my room and with the night stand pushed into the lane between the two beds, I have an office facing the televisions screen.  The wireless signal is dependable, and the AC works.  I imagined holing up and doing a few hours of writing and a bit of work, but it didn't work out that way.  At Tributacion, I had only to take a short run up the street to a copy shop and did not have to wait on people in line.  The form took only a few minutes to fill out.  The clerical errands were brief, a few things on the computer, looking me up in the system, seals on the different copies, then handing me over my paperwork to take away and be able to print legal taxed receipts. 

I completed the work by one thirty, had lunch, and set up shop here at my momentary headquarters.  It rained heavily, and the sound and cool feel of the air and the darkening of the sky were like a sleeping potion, and I slept a couple hours lightly, letting the storm inside the busy near-waking dreamscape.  I had a wonderful rib-eye at Bazooka's, a miraculously perfect dinner, medium-rare turning out to be medium-rare, and the meat aged and wonderful.  The salad was crisp, the tomatoes so perfectly crimson and sweet, everything living with water, just so.  It was a very pleasant supper.  Back at momentary headquarters, I find returning to scenes written before awkward to edit, even though parts of them I like very much the way they are.  But they need to be re-written from the top down, it is clear, and trying to avoid reaching that conclusion is hopefully what has knocked me a  bit off my game in the last couple days.

Tomorrow is a long day to do it the way I have it planned and would put me in David or Boquete this time tomorrow night.  I guess we'll see, now won't we?

August 12, 2009 / Crow's Nest

The auditor was purportedly swayed by the orderliness and formality of the reports and the organization.  I had hoped and angled for that to be the case.  Which makes it that much more improbable. . . yet that's the report.  I have to present a few payment proofs not with receipts but banking records, no problem, to exist stage left with a nominal payment and token fine for not filing an itemized return in the first place.  Not that costly for a lesson.  It has been interesting.  There is a bizarre banking angle at work, and I left a letter today as requested to get me to the bottom of it.  Observe.  Below are the numbers.  On the right is what the tax man said the bank says I earned in credit card receipts.  The middle column is the net credit card receipts paid to me by the bank by the bank's own report for the same time period.  The bank is the source of both record sets.  However, the record set for the tax-man is 8 million more than the actual credit card revenues.  Unless these phantom numbers can be offset with real expense records, this suggests a phantom revenue stream taxable at 30%.  It is a big deal, and the error is either at the bank or at Hacienda.  From my daily records, it is clear that the Hacienda's records are inflated.  I guess we'll see where the con originates, whether it's at the bank or at Hacienda.  I can't imagine a government taxation office fudging numbers.  Well, the request for clarification is in the bank's hands  

Headed north tomorrow, fleeing a gnawing restlessness.  I can make it useful in Perez, inscribing Juanita's with the sales tax office, something that needs to be done soon

 anyway.  And I'll book to Panama on Friday, surely, plan a Sunday return to head up to the hose as early as Sunday afternoon, Monday more realistically, to pick up the shipment from Miami and cart it down.  No movement today on the Amapola option, left all bundled and cuddly yesterday, so a quick piece of business before a morning departure.  I will enjoy the insulated space in the cab, the streaming sun, the passage of miles of countryside and green to stew on the characters in Crossroads, to forge the transition to its new morality and ethos, and to prepare for that exhilerating moment when I sit down with all else prepared to write the Potemkin scene. 

“Sssst.  Gato, come here a minute.”

It was Lupita, and in her seriousness, she resembled her sister more than she did herself.  But for Gato there was no doubt.  Daniela despised him and would not speak with him, would not even look at him.  Anyway, Lupi always hissed to get his attention; it was just her way.  She was good for five grams a week on her own plus twice that much for her sad clientele, for which Gato paid her a modest commission.  There was no doubt in Gato Mazantas’s mind which of the sisters had stopped him.

“I am not carrying, Lupi,” Gato replied gently from the path.

“It’s not that,” Lupi replied.  “It is the boy.  Little Nico.”

Gato turned toward her and stepped quickly to where she stood.  “What about him?”

“Come in and see for yourself.  I can’t get him to speak.”

Inside, the boy was perched on one of the beds, his back to the wall, his arms hugging his legs near to his body, his eyes wide and vacant, his face empty of any curiosity or joy, replaced by a marble stillness, an emotional vacuum like a black hole sucking all moral light toward its vortex.  A plate of rice and beans sat beside Nico on the bed, the spoon readied with a small bite, and Gato could re-create the choreography of Lupi not knowing what to do trying to at least get the boy to eat.  He turned to study her face and glanced upon an old woman’s soul confined within.

“How long has he been like this?”

The sound of Gato’s voice stirred something inside the boy, and a flicker of recognition passed over his face though he did not turn from his blank stare into the wall and did not relax his fierce grip upon himself. 

“He came stumbling up the path like this an hour ago, right after night fall.”

Gato kneeled in front of the bed and put his face directly into little Nico’s line of sight.  “Nico, little brother, what happened?  Who did this to you?”

“You know this is your doing, Gato,” Lupi observed quietly.

“Perhaps,” he acknowledged.  “Where is your sister?”  He kept his eyes locked into those of his little buddy, on whose behalf he felt a nascent compulsion for retribution.  The boy’s eyes were focused on an infinite point light years beyond the other side of Gato Mazantas’s insistent gaze.  Inside the boy’s distant stare was a stirring of consciousness.

“In Puerto Jimenez,” Lupi replied.  “Banking and shopping.”

“It is kind of you to concern yourself with the boy.”  Gato said this in an observational monotone free of emotion or any psychic investment.  Lupita  snorted at his sanctimony.  Gato Mazantas figured he was deemed unqualified for any commentary related to kindness or perhaps anything at all related to human decency.  But wasn’t he wired to think of her the same way?  The person beside him was a woman, not a whore, yet there was no doubt that she was a whore, and it was the first time it ever occurred to him that the two were not by definition mutually exclusive. 

 “Nico is my family,” she observed wryly.  “Our family.  We feed him.  He brings us flowers and small gifts.  When he was younger and was afraid of the forest after his Papaw was killed he would sleep here nights."  She looked up as Gato turned to take her in.  "He has no one else,” she concluded.

Gato reached gently behind the boy’s neck and cupped it and his head with both hands, continuing to look into little Nico’s unfocused and vacant stare.  The recognition flashed again in a deep recess in which the boy was crouched in the safety of his inner world where he could not be reached.  “Nico,” Gato called to him, caressing and massaging the tensed muscles of the boy’s slender neck.  “Nico, come home to me.  Come out.”

The boy’s lips parted slowly and after several seconds a low wail built from his young lungs and emerged from his mouth, a sound so low it was like in a dream when you scream but nothing comes out of your mouth, and when his breath was completely expelled, the low moan ceased and a perfect silence enveloped the flickering light of the cabin for several seconds.  When the boy suddenly inhaled sharply, the focal length of his gaze sprang back into the room and he started sharply.  His eyes flared with a terror that shocked Gato and caused Lupi to recoil in fright and to rush to the sink to fill a glass of water to return and push it on the little boy, who  shoved it away down the shirt of Gato Mazantas, who held the boy and forced their eyes to meet to show him he was safe and under protection.  Finally, little Nico collapsed and threw his arms around Gato and began to sob violently and uncontrollably while Gato hugged him tightly and rubbed his back and Lupita cried gently at their side and tightly clutched the little boy’s hand.

August 11, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Tuesday is a wonderful day in which there is no bustle at 6:30, no scraping of chairs downstairs, no clanging of iron grates being opened, no murmur of happy cleaning music filtering up through the building.  This morning I awakened at about that time and thought of my staff, how they must feel about getting to sleep in and not having to be on the job so early.  With Lalo on an enforced gold-mining sabbatical and no meetings or business scheduled, I lay slumbering in the early morning as the sounds of the street's coming to life filtered in through the open windows.  By eight I could not suppress the reality of the day's progress, however, and put on coffee.  I am at least one week into the au naturel approach to crow's nest climate control  Here at one forty in the afternoon, with the sun punishing us, it is a bit warm, but shirtless and with a fan it is not so bad.  Anyway, the air conditioner cannot keep this kind of heat at bay.  The sacrifice is mostly the chill of the evening and morning artificially cooled, and that should not be enough to warrant the $250 or so per month that the power costs me.

Am scrambling to put foreign travel together to get it in before my visa expires and to time it so that I can pick up the equipment coming into San Jose and distribute that and coordinate the work to finish the jobs and bill.  San Andres departures are Thursdays and Sundays only, and it turns out you have to have a yellow fever vaccination to enter Colombia.  So, that makes the day after tomorrow untenable, and since I have to be in San Jose on Monday-Tuesday to pick up the goods coming in from Miami, that would leave only two days till Thursday week, and that's the day my visa expires.  So, like always, I am looking again toward Panama.  Kalima Suites in Boquete. . . ?  The Boquete Bistro for daily gastronomic entertainment, wi-fi, Direct TV, a chance to spend two days solid just writing.  Or I could fly to Bocas from David and troll the Caribbean haunts and indulge myself with mojitos and lobster and let the Atlantic air and light dapple the action developing inside the novella that took dramatic shape last night. 

I am using the working title Crossroads, and after days of struggling over the story and the things that were not right, it all gelled suddenly, a number of changes to preserve thematic consistency, and with that the whole plot challenges that I was having trouble integrating and having make sense were suddenly inescapable.  Now I have a kind of grand effect, a surprise ending and contradictions eliminated or turned on their ear to become corroborations of character rather than divergences.  It all makes perfect sense now, even if the world of the story is not a particularly nice world or uplifting world..

Daniela Sanchez occupied a box seat high above the commoners and looked down upon the La Scala stage through the opera glasses she used mostly to monitor those members of the audience close to her own social stratum that warranted such scrutiny.  Her musical idol, Luciano Pavarotti, stood on the magnificent stage as an orchestra tuned up in a recessed periphery that highlighted the greatness of the man himself.  Daniela’s gown was crimson silk, her Gucci handbag black, her hair an orderly beehive, a style that seemed natural even if it was a first for her.  The tiny black stilettos shone beneath her thin ankles, and the slit in her gown rode up and over the stocking-ed knee crossed demurely over the other one.  The perfume that she wore had a floral bouquet of head notes that intoxicated and resinous piney base notes that adequately secured the will of her intended to her whim.  The recipe, of her own design, included actual ambergris and was prepared and sold by the gram from a parfumerie tucked into a commercial block of the Champs d’Elysee within sight of the Arc de Triomphe. The necklace of Tahitian white pearls revealed her sensibility about fashion, underscoring her fundamental conservatism; she considered diamonds pretentious against silk.  The emerald bracelet was a gentle reminder that even sensibility has its limits, and had she chosen an emerald gown, she would have opted for her ruby bracelet instead.  Beside her in the baroque box seat on his own plush red velvet cushion between the gilded baroque privacy panels and heavy drapery to either side of them, alone with her, sat her Gold Walker, Iani Tojanescu, consort and husband, immaculate in his white tuxedo, his normally wild graying beard trimmed and youthfully orange.  He held a champagne flute, his eyes smiling and shifting between the stage and Daniela, the two of them, husband and wife, utterly at home in their world of high society.  Under his provocative glance, she felt the tugs of an unwelcome arousal and fanned herself more vigorously with a mai ogi folding fan dating to a forgotten medieval Han dynast, a family heirloom.  While allowing Iani’s thick and callused hand to rest possessively on the thick part of her thigh just above where her garter held her stocking beneath the sheer fabric separating his touch from her skin, she discovered with sudden discomfiture that the only finger on her left hand without a ring was her ring finger.  On that unadorned digit was neither a marriage band nor an engagement ring, and it was at that moment that she frowned awkwardly and wondered if this were not after all some sort of cruel dream.  When the famed tenor’s lips parted to release the doleful opening verse to the Costa Rican standard, Puerto Limon, rather than the expected Genovese aria, she was sure of it and opened her eyes onto the dull glimmer of candle light illuminating the ugly undulations of the corroded zinc roof above her bed.  The light flickered and the rough-hewn wood of the walls and the packed dirt floor drank it in, and the world into which she awakened was quite different from the one she awakened from.

August 10, 2009 / Crow's Nest

There is a restless ennui to the business of aggressively waiting.  Every few minutes encompass odd opportunities, from the mundane and pedestrian to the transcendental.  My Israelis showed up today and I put their Corcovado package together in five minutes, and they had a couple German girls in toe.  Rather than make $20 and charge them $95 apiece, they got the full day tour for $75 per person, and I netted $80.  Three park reservations, wham bam maam, $90.  I got all my accounting stuff into the hands of my accountant who is headed off in the morning to a meeting with Hacienda, and my property buyer called me to confirm his wish to proceed with the option, a deal that will net me a little bit soon and ten times more in six months, presuming nothing goes south.  And there was a solar hot water heater inquiry on the poderosa hotline.  In between I price-shopped the difference between San Andres and Cartagena for my upcoming visa trip out of the country, broke the sad job news to Lalo that I did not have the work to keep him steadily working, washed the dishes, and ate the last slice of pizza.  It's all in a day's work.

Waiting of course does not cut it.  It is of course not enough.  Yet it is not just me that feels the approach of winter and the slide into economic hibernation.  The chill settles in all around, everybody looking around to see what the Jones's are doing and how they are faring.  They do not seem to be going out to eat quite as often.  It makes me smile at the continuing rest of my costly air conditioner.

August 09, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Our fourth or fifth day of conventional rainy season, today has been particularly wet, and it is raining now.  I turned off the AC and opened the windows and doors several days ago, and have not turned the AC back on since.  I spent all today writing.  I am more and more certain of the need to finish this one.  It is so black and sordid that it will be good to get all of that out and be able to move on to something less gritty and morally ambiguous.  With the forty year retrospective on the Manson murders as a kind of apical closure of the sixties revolution, or the point at which the decadence throttled the remaining life of a movement to enforce a segue to the next thing, it reminds me that every year forms part of major periods of cosmic significance.  The difference between this current Obama era and the paranoic all-war all the time of the Bush years is legerdemain.  The ripping and shredding underway is all healthy I figure.  A vital democracy and all that.  Too often I think I take for granted the place in time I inhabit.  Not anymore, not since moving down here.  All times are special.

When Nico did not show up by twilight, Gato realized something was wrong and figured Blake Stone must be behind it.  Mazantas lived in a black-plastic rancho below the twin forks on the northern bank.  He kept orderly quarters and had wood furnishings including a bed, a table and two chairs, a coffee table, and kitchen shelving.  He had a hearth where he cooked with coals he prepared in a fire pit just beyond the kitchen area.  His water was conveyed from a spring a hundred meters up the side of the mountain to the makeshift kitchen sink fashioned from rough planks of form wood by black plastic pipe.  His trade was no secret to anyone in the valley, and he made sure it was known by all that he did not keep cash nor product in the rancho, and that he was well-armed and had no compunctions against vigorous self-defense.  The Arias widow upriver washed his clothes for ten colones a week, and he paid for a meal every other day that he took with the Villalobos family in town.  He frequented the cantina on Saturday afternoon to indulge his fondness for the pork rinds they fried up from the hog slaughtered weekly.  Gato Mazantas drank a few beers on those occasions, but he never got drunk.  People speculated that he drank those token beers to appear normal, like one of the boys.  But there was nothing normal about the Panamanian that lived among them, quietly supplying the desperadoes with coke and pot, and none of the valley’s residents had any illusions to the contrary.  He released his pent-up stresses in brothels in Golfito or Neilly or Canoas, though never while working, and had no emotional ties to anyone in the valley other than the boy and imagined that the people had no idea that he loved little Nico and considered him family.  Emotional ties were an occupational hazard in his line of work, but he allowed himself the convenient fiction that it was okay in this case, that nobody would notice, that nobody would use the boy to somehow get to him.  He closed the pearly-handled, newly-sharpened pocket knife and shifted his weight forward to bring the front legs of the chair down upon the gravel floor of his dwelling.  He raised the cup to swallow the cold remains of the coffee he had made a couple hours ago to wait by and switched off the transistor radio that was channeling a Ruben Blades tune from a David radio station not far from his birthplace in Volcan.  He opened his footlocker to drop the pocketknife into and studied the twin automatic pistols waiting on him, freshly oiled and glistening in their slumbering repose, but decided whatever it was he wasn’t going to have to shoot anyone and locked the box, grabbed his flashlight, and stepped back into his boots and outside his tent into the world where twilight had insects in a sudden flurry of last minute activity and the birds of dusk swooping on them eagerly, feeding in flight.

August 08, 2009 / Crow's Nest

It is kind of an ugly little story, dark and sordid.  Am working out structural relationships now--taking a break from that more like it--but I like the short crispness of it.  It is like a novel that can be done in 75 pages or so.  I imagine the climax as an Odessa-staircase massacre a la Potemkin, not in the orchestration of violence, so much as the orchestration of the underpinnings of the violence.  I imagine the choreography of it to be like that of the baby carriage bouncing down the steps.  That is perhaps a tall order, a bit presumptuous of me.  I have little to no ambition that this reach an audience but feel instead that it is so whole in my mind and so simple that I must do it as an exercise in finishing rather than as some effort to make some sort of artistic statement.  Here is a token paragraph from today.  It is very unlikely to make it into the final version as it does not really relate, except tangentially, but it at least :

When Rogelio Suarez reached between the heavy track and one of the massive gears to get some leverage on the bar to dislodge the rock that was wedged there, he thought no more of it than of other times the cat-skinner had done the same thing in the fifteen years he had been operating heavy equipment.  Only this time, the rumbling unmanned D-8 somehow engaged.  It was slow motion to Rogelio as he watched his arm become locked between the gear and giant steel track, and his eyes widened in the sudden realization of what was about to happen.  Busy in his mind with its impossibility, he never felt anything more than a sudden shock, and he never uttered a whimper.  As the cat began to walk forward unpiloted he felt himself first dragged along the ground and then into the machinery itself.  When the gear drew him in up to his shoulder, the giant steel parts inches from his face, he passed out.  His body was shredded by the giant gear and split lengthwise down the middle, his head and thorax and abdomen converted to pulp and smeared into the gravel.   A shout rose from the excavator driver who slammed his hoe onto the ground and leapt from his machine and ran to intersect the runaway dozer.  He jumped on and shut the machine down twenty feet from the lip of the production pit.  Workers boiled out of their positions and gears were disengaged and men ran from all directions and stood around the bisected cat-skinner.  A wash-plant operator turned from the grisly sight to disgorge his lunch.  A crew chief pulled his radio and raised headquarters.  In minutes Stone and Stentam leapt from the company Jeep and rushed over to the murmuring crowd of blanched faces.  Some of the men were crying.

My sense that the year is winding down is one that I cannot dispel.  All cards seem to line out with that feeling.  I have no jobs scheduled.  The rains are coming on.  Juanita's has firmed into a yield beyond my expectations and beyond concerns about fiscal self-sufficiency.  The reservations season is on the doorstep.  To brighten the prospects, I am juggling an option on one property and have a couple coming down to look at the end of November.  I will leave the country for a visa renewal in coming days and still have October in sights for Brodey Bend.  Next week the tax-man meeting resolves the stress buildup that I have never felt and suggests its own sequel, and in this lull nothing seems more reasonable than to enforce upon myself the discipline to do something that other moments do not allow and which common sense frowns upon:  write fiction.

Today we celebrate the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud in a gunfight with fellow Taliban militants in a power struggle in the replacement of Baitullah Mehsud (I assumed they were brothers, but no confirmation or discussion of the coincidence in the world press) as head of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, global caliphate foot-soldiers in league with the radical Islamofascists over at al Qaeda.  While the US deludes itself that its Afghan poppy planting suppression plan is going to be aided by the troop build-up, the nation edges nearer to the ultimate solution in its increasingly frank acceptance of medical marijuana.  As if that were not enough, news just in:  tonight we hopefully celebrate the killing of Nordin Top, the terror-master of Jemaa Islamiyah and assumed mastermind of a litany of lethal terrorist acts in Indonesia, starting with the October 12 2002 mass-murder in Bali.

August 07, 2009 / Crow's Nest

A cursory glance, a nod to the looking glass.  All fiction today.  Brief non-representative sample follows:

In the gentle savage Rio Tigre valley, a band of troubadours took their positions outside the shack where the Chavez sisters lived.  As he withdrew his violin from its case, Ramon Sandoval realized that the night had beaten him and was already in full serenade with its mighty symphony.  The thought made him shudder as the members of its orchestra were—as he and his two buddies prepared the tools of their festive trade—piping full-throated melodies into the night, their own instruments finely tuned.  The burble of the river down the slope from the sisters’ house, lost like radio static into the rain’s onslaught, now rose from the nightscape to murmur a bass line lyrically anchoring the chorus to the land.  The chirps of different types of frogs sounded from all directions and distances to form both percussive and melodic elements of the symphony rising from the world around.  The waist high grasses within which the musicians stood. rustled against one another, a muffled snare to capture a rhythm of life.  And walls of strings and entire sections of brass came stereophonically from both sides of the valley, itself an overgrown open-air concert hall.  From the forested slopes of the northern and southern ranges the cicadas sang in full-throated omnipotence, two armies arrayed against one another, the Matajambre militia to the north and the Piedras Blancas battalion to the south, dueling from their mountain redoubts, jousting in song above the valley in contention, each of the cicada clans vying for an unattainable acoustic dominance, neither gaining nor ceding ground in an unrelenting and ceaseless war of choral assaults and hymnal posturing.

August 06, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Tonight we celebrate (possibly prematurely) the killing of Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's Public Enemy Number One.  May he find himself in the warm embrace of Beelzebub, henceforth and forevermore.  Live by C-4, die by hellfire.  And if that is too morbid a thing to celebrate, then I will celebrate with you the ascension of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice in the history of the United States. 

Anjali Rao's breasts make the Grand Tetons look like the Bonneville flats.  For those of you that are not similarly CNN-addicted, she is the Hong-Kong born and based bombshell news presenter and hostess of Talk Asia.  She is heavily pregnant, clearly within days of giving birth, and her breasts have swollen so large that it is just barely decent to show her fully clothed at the anchor desk, and I just can't imagine that she's not leaking all the time. 

August 05, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Today dawned full winter, steely grey, windy, rainy, cold.  It has remained grey and wintry all day long.  I turned off the AC and opened the windows and with a fan it is almost too chilly to sit here without long sleeves.  It's probably down somewhere around eighty-five degrees.  I did not get out this morning in the car, however, so at least I did not have to scrape the ice off the windshield.  By the time I went out to the store around eleven, it had all melted away.

Facebook is like a garden of forking paths, a community anastomosis.  With each new friend, two more suggest themselves.  It is six degrees of separation in practice and somewhat of a compulsion.  But it also has the capacity to serve as a tool.  One thing is abundantly clear, however, something that should not come to me as any surprise:  there are a huge number of superfluous throw-away comments and a lot of people out there with way too much time on their hands and far too little of substance in their minds.  I guess the jury is still out for the time being, but like all things, it has the potential, I guess to be whatever someone makes of it.

August 04, 2009 / Crow's Nest

19:42

Tonight we celebrate the birthday of US President Barack Obama, happy 48th.  Twenty days older than me..  Thanks Tao Watts for the Facebook cue.  And if you did not know it, John Waters is fricking horror-show freak central.  I had no idea he was a semi-apologist for Charles Manson. 

Having cleaned the Nest stem to stern, I hopped into the Ruby Racer as soon as the announced power outage began and headed north.  I touched the soil, drank the water, imagined the feel of the sun on my shoulder, and watered the Agujas forest with perspiration wiped from my brow.  And I returned to a world that has shifted on its axis in ways not all that subtle. 

As Bubba (remember that he does not like to be called "Slick Willy") is likely at this very minute imagining a ménage a trois in the mile-high club above the Pacific Ocean with his new Asian-American charges, Obama gets to add a curious new chevron on his foreign policy shoulder.  It is a marvelous counter-point to the resolution of the Somali pirate situation a couple months back.  And the whole world releases its held breath and the conjured winds of nuclear winter recede for the moment back into the steamy distraction of a warming planet, the cantankerous djinn of Pyongyang stuffed back inside his thick-glassed little perfume bottle.  The markets accumulate indices of fortune, and their foundation, we are repeatedly reminded, is not so much a physical one but a psychological one, so the advance of indicators beyond any semblance of a fluke are like self-fulfilling prophecies, and I am left to wonder if this could actually be all there really is to this economic downturn.  To be fair, I have been stirring the tea leaves trying to reach the definitive conclusion, and it must be that the sparseness of my inbox is, finally, an echo of the economy and nothing personal.  I can only hope this is true.  To the contrary, I would have to turn my furrowed brow onto the questionable wisdom of the Khanosphere itself, and it is become as one with me. 

The reservations began to uptick dramatically a month or so ago, but that I passed off as the July bump, the real summer rush, and to a degree this is true.  But many of my inquiries are for next year, big inquiries, week long house rentals, things like that.  With a piddling five thousand dollars in discretionary capital right now and no scheduled major work, it has been a period of introspection.  Today a step closer toward the next job.  A tentative confirmation on Hatillo.  Plus an independent hydroelectric inquiry from Ojochal and two follow-up real estate inquiries.  I think it was drinking the water that brought it on.  Next time I may take a lighter and create a spark, perhaps as early as Thursday, in Carate.  I wish I had another poisonous snake to release to the environment.  Must do juju.  Durst juju do.

08:25

On this date, Dom Perignon invented champagne in 1693 and Jimmy Carter founded the Department of Energy in 1977, and a supernova lit the constellation Cassiopeia in 1181.  In 2009, Bill Clinton huddles with the "reclusive North Korean leader" in that country to negotiate the release of American journalists imprisoned by the rogue nation.  It is the second time that a former American president has touched North Korean soil.  In the Cradle of Western Civilization, the sky dawned diaphanous, clouds smeared like pearl dust across the heavens, and in the soiled gutters of the gentling streets, the drunks slept in this morning on the outdoor Juanita's tables, happy that we're closed so that they can.  Nothing has changed in the Crow's Nest from last night, and like a cat my imagination paces the floor and looks over the options.  A bit restless, I must get out in the truck onto the restless peninsula, into the forest.  I must touch the soil, drink the water, feel the sunshine on my shoulder and water the ground with wiped off beads of sweat.  This morning, any minute now, I must order the Nest, wash the dishes, rake the refuse from my desk surface, sweep the floor, carry out the trash, shave and shower, and pony up to a sprawling breakfast at the Colectivo soda to mull the best way to step firmly back into the buzz-saw of the moment.

August 03, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Tonight we celebrate the birthday of my first cousin Vicky.  I have not seen her nor spoken to her since 1993, and by all rights I should not know that this is her birthday.  I have no idea what Mike's birthday is.  For that matter, I don't know the birthdays of any of my cousins on the Collar side.  But I know hers, and today is it.  I actually reflect on this oddity of humanity and intellect every year on the third of August, accidentally but surely, and perhaps it is this anomaly of today being the third of August that makes me feel odd tonight, like in the locker room taping up before a fight, but I don't think that's it, and anyway, let me not get ahead of myself . . .   There are things that happen in life that at the time have no apparent significance but which forever more comprise an indelible bandwidth on the old hard drive in my hat rack.  I think other times hugely significant things happen and they fade away into a kind of inconsequence because of the momentary rhythms of the brain that gave it all less weight at one moment than another.  Vicky's birthday is one of those occasions in which all the neurons fired at the same time in a way that is indelible, as permanent as I am, invariant, and a constant right up there with Avogadro's, mysteriously permanent, like our phone number in Torreon in 1973, 2-12-92, something that is like your shadow:  familiar but a little mystical.

I am reminded strangely and uncomfortably of the scene in Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen's character gets blind drunk by himself in a hotel room over a two-day stretch before setting off up the Mekong into his heart of darkness.  It feels a bit like that, like a strained lull before a driving storm.  How amazing is it that in my life, out of all the many that have come and gone before, I did not have to get out on a front line in a uniform and muse at the fickle fortune of having what it takes to survive a war as one of its soldiers.  I wonder the degree to which I truly love liberty and the degree to which it is more of a garment and affectation to me than it is skeletal and foundational.  Liberty made me possible, not the other way around, and I begin to wonder if by this time I have neither forged nor discovered what it is that I am here to do, then it may be time to re-think and re-calibrate. 

How many times has that re-calibration been abrupt and harsh, of the scorched-earth family of start-overs?  I have started over more times than I have stuck it out, whatever "it" was.  Starting over from scratch is familiar terrain.  Home turf.  Nobody should ever have to suffer it, but there's lots of things worse, and it is less hard on me than it would be on others.  This time there are things with value in CafeNet, and even Juanita's, beyond my personal industry, and this ninth anniversary in Paradise marks by two years the longest I have ever lived anywhere.  However muddled the patterns are now that will one day emerge to clear up why it had to be this way, there is little doubt but that I have now Port Jiminy is integral to me.  I have after all spent over one fifth of my life here in this dusty sinful abandoned cow-town on the frontier of society and culture and have not done so out of necessity but out of pure choice all along. 

There has to be a reason why that is.  I wish I knew what it was.

August 02, 2009 / Crow's Nest

The town swells happily with visitors in 2009's final vacation push.  Here in the Cradle we have our freshly mended webs extended across the sidewalks to ensnare the wanderers and the idle into our fiscal redistribution centers, less cynically known as local businesses.  Even the bums surely find their pockets somewhat less empty when the money rolls in off the highways and airways and gulf through wallets blossoming in the searing sun, bank-notes dewy with freshness to the region.  I grossed $650 last night in Juanita's and had a group of sixteen today for lunch, and here as the dinner bells peal, tables are filling with dining folks.  I have quit pinching myself.  This is real.  Juanita's has hit the ground running and has not lost any money.  It is stable and durable and fully ready for now, moving, even, the bar.  We have in the space of two and a half months resumed the leadership of the Puerto Jimenez evening,, and I am about now to surrender it to neither struggling mainstays nor brash upstarts. 

The formula works.  The pie is equal to some emcees squared while varying as a non-linear function of the cubic root of the square knots of Gord, all predicated upon Templar abasement to arithmetic regression under the constraints of geometric progression, all fusing, impossibly, predictably, to chaos. 

And therein lies the rub.

August 01, 2009 / Crow's Nest

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Ikhanosphere, the weblog section of this ikhanic web site.  Tonight we celebrate at Juanita's with a karaoke.  Eleven minutes past the close of happy hour the bar is rocking, the dinner crowd angling in to snag a meal in advance of the festivities.  Last night we rocked up just under $1000 in gross revenues, paying out $160 to the band.  Their music was wonderful, standards, some rock, some salsa, some cumbia.  It was moving to me, as if after these two months of being uptight and demanding and unforgiving of divergences from laboral expectations, it all came together in a kind of eruptive order of honest good high class fun.  And tonight promises more of the same--as much as you might hope for from low-brow karaoke.  I am going to lock the band up for Mother's Day in two week's time.  It is on the 15th, which of course is payday, and this year it falls on a Saturday.  We'll rock the local cosmos.  With karaoke set now for every Friday, a band once a month, and perhaps Rasta-Reggie Thursdays, we are lining ourselves out for quite a spirited run.  The deal is to just keep it steady and keep it hopping and keep it honest and the staff honest.  I have a good crew.

Kati is shaken with the never ending loop of receipt review.  She was pale when she left, clearly spent, and was on the verge of tears more than once today.  She said she nearly vomited at one point this afternoon.  The valuable lesson to be learned out of this, I suppose, is that if you do it right the first time you don't have to spend all this time on it the next time around.  It is all a welcome learning curve, in the Nietzchean sense, and our tools have improved considerably from this experience, so I have every expectation of transitioning toward systems of increasing efficiency and power.  .

The state of today's world leaves me ashen with a numb bemusement and absent any kind of meaningful commentary, a state I do not recall having indulged, perhaps ever.  I am particularly unimpressed with such notable yawn-fests as this week's beer summit, the razor-edged interpretations of shifting polls of presidential popularity, economic indicators of all stripes, the usual news-worthy extremes of criminal derring-do, the naming of Jackson's doctor as a "target" of manslaughter charges, the three-ring circus underway at the border of Nicaragua and Honduras, and the shifting definitions of all the things that once seemed pretty safely pinned, things like capitalism, democracy, freedom, wealth, independence, and liberty, little things like that that have meanings that turn out to be like all other meanings:  they change with the tides of history.

Hey nineteen, no we got nothing in common.  No we can't talk at all.  Just take me along when you slide on down.

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